In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (59 page)

Suddenly I remembered the fair girl with the sad expression whom I had seen at Rivebelle and who had looked at me for a moment. Many others, in the course of the evening, had seemed to me attractive; now she alone arose from the depths of my memory. I felt that she had noticed me, and expected one of the Rivebelle waiters to come to me with a whispered message from her. Saint-Loup did not know her and believed that she was respectable. It would be very difficult to see her, to see her constantly. But I was prepared to make any sacrifice: I thought now only of her. Philosophy distinguishes often between free and necessary acts. Perhaps there is none to the necessity of which we are more completely subjected than that which, by virtue of a climbing power held in check during the act itself, brings back (once our mind is at rest) a memory until then levelled down with all the rest by the oppressive force of bemusement and makes it spring to the surface because unknown to us it contained more than any of the others a charm of which we do not become aware until the following day. And perhaps, too, there is no act so free, for it is still unprompted by habit, by that sort of mental obsession which, in matters of love, encourages the invariable reappearance of the image of one particular person.

That day, as it happened, was the day after the one on which I had seen the beautiful procession of young girls advancing along the sea-front. I questioned a number of the visitors in the hotel about them, people who came almost every year to Balbec. They could tell me nothing. Later on, a photograph showed me why. Who could now have recognised in them, scarcely and yet quite definitely beyond the age at which one changes so completely, an amorphous, delicious mass, still utterly childish, of little girls who, only a few years back, might have been seen sitting in a ring on the sand round a tent: a sort of vague, white constellation in which one would have distinguished a pair of eyes that sparkled more than the rest, a mischievous face, flaxen hair, only to lose them again and to confound them almost at once in the indistinct and milky nebula.

No doubt, in those earlier years that were still so comparatively recent, it was not, as it had been yesterday when they appeared for the first time before me, the impression of the group but the group itself that had been lacking in clearness. Then those children, still mere babies, had been at that elementary stage in their development when personality has not yet stamped its seal on each face. Like those primitive organisms in which the individual barely exists by itself, is constituted by the polypary rather than by each of the polyps that compose it, they were still pressed one against another. Sometimes one pushed her neighbour over, and then a giggle, which seemed the sole manifestation of their personal life, convulsed them all together, obliterating, merging those imprecise and grinning faces in the congealment of a single cluster, scintillating and tremulous. In an old photograph of themselves, which they were one day to give me, and which I have kept ever since, their childish troupe already presents the same number of participants as, later, their feminine procession; one can sense from it that their presence must even then have made on the beach an unusual impression which forced itself on the attention, but one cannot recognise them individually save by a process of reasoning, making allowances for all the transformations possible during girlhood, up to the point at which these reconstituted forms would begin to encroach upon another individuality which must be identified also, and whose handsome face, owing to the concomitance of a tall build and curly hair, may quite possibly have been, long ago, that wizened and impish little grin which the photograph album presents to us; and the distance traversed in a short interval of time by the physical characteristics of each of these girls making of them a criterion too vague to be of any use, and moreover what they had in common and, so to speak, collectively, being therefore very pronounced, it sometimes happened that even their most intimate friends mistook one for another in this photograph, so much so that the question could in the last resort be settled only by some detail of costume which one of them was certain to have worn to the exclusion of the others. Since those days, so different from the day on which I had just seen them strolling along the front, so different and yet so close in time, they still gave way to fits of laughter, as I had observed the previous afternoon, but to laughter of a kind that was no longer the intermittent and almost automatic laughter of childhood, a spasmodic explosion which, in those days, had continually sent their heads dipping out of the circle, as the clusters of minnows in the Vivonne used to scatter and vanish only to gather again a moment later; each of their physiognomies was now mistress of itself, their eyes were fixed on the goal they were pursuing; and it had taken, yesterday, the tremulous uncertainty of my first impression to make me confuse vaguely (as their childish hilarity and the old photograph had confused) the spores, now individualised and disjoined, of the pale madrepore.

Doubtless often enough before, when pretty girls went by, I had promised myself that I would see them again. As a rule, people thus seen do not appear a second time; moreover our memory, which speedily forgets their existence, would find it difficult to recall their features; our eyes would not recognise them, perhaps, and in the meantime we have seen others go by, whom we shall not see again either. But at other times, and this was what was to happen with the pert little band at Balbec, chance brings them back insistently before our eyes. Chance seems to us then a good and useful thing, for we discern in it as it were the rudiments of organisation, of an attempt to arrange our lives; and it makes it easy, inevitable, and sometimes—after interruptions that have made us hope that we may cease to remember—painful for us to retain in our minds images for the possession of which we shall come in time to believe that we were predestined, and which but for chance we should from the very first have managed to forget, like so many others, so easily.

Presently Saint-Loup’s visit drew to an end. I had not seen those girls again on the beach. He was too little at Balbec in the afternoons to have time to pay attention to them and attempt, in my interest, to make their acquaintance. In the evenings he was freer, and continued to take me regularly to Rivebelle. There are, in such restaurants, as there are in public gardens and railway trains, people enclosed in a quite ordinary appearance, whose names astonish us when, having happened to ask, we discover that they are not the mere inoffensive strangers whom we supposed but no less than the Minister or the Duke of whom we have so often heard. Two or three times already, in the Rivebelle restaurant, when everyone else was getting ready to leave, Saint-Loup and I had seen a man of large stature, very muscular, with regular features and a grizzled beard, come in and sit down at a table, where his pensive gaze remained fixed with concentrated attention upon the void. One evening, on our asking the landlord who this obscure, solitary and belated diner was, “What!” he exclaimed, “do you mean to say you don’t know the famous painter Elstir?” Swann had once mentioned his name to me, I had entirely forgotten in what connexion; but the omission of a particular memory, like that of part of a sentence when we are reading, leads sometimes not to uncertainty but to the birth of a premature certainty. “He’s a friend of Swann’s, and a very well-known artist, extremely good,” I told Saint-Loup. Immediately the thought swept through us both like a thrill of emotion, that Elstir was a great artist, a celebrated man, and that, confounding us with the rest of the diners, he had no suspicion of the excitement into which we were plunged by the idea of his talent. Doubtless, his unconsciousness of our admiration and of our acquaintance with Swann would not have troubled us had we not been at the seaside. But since we were still at an age when enthusiasm cannot keep silence, and had been transported into a life where anonymity is suffocating, we wrote a letter, signed with both our names, in which we revealed to Elstir in the two diners seated within a few feet of him two passionate admirers of his talent, two friends of his great friend Swann, and asked to be allowed to pay our homage to him in person. A waiter undertook to convey this missive to the celebrity.

A celebrity Elstir was perhaps not yet at this period quite to the extent claimed by the landlord, though he was to reach the height of his fame within a very few years. But he had been one of the first to frequent this restaurant when it was still only a sort of farmhouse, and had brought to it a whole colony of artists (who had all, as it happened, migrated elsewhere as soon as the farm, where they used to feed in the open air under a lean-to roof, had become a fashionable centre; Elstir himself had returned to Rivebelle this evening on account of the temporary absence of his wife, with whom he lived not far away). But great talent, even when its existence is not yet recognised, will inevitably provoke a few quirks of admiration, such as the landlord had managed to detect in the questions asked by more than one English lady visitor, athirst for information as to the life led by Elstir, or in the number of letters that he received from abroad. Then the landlord had further remarked that Elstir did not like to be disturbed when he was working, that he would rise in the middle of the night and take a young model down to the sea-shore to pose for him, nude, if the moon was shining, and had told himself that so much labour was not in vain, nor the admiration of the tourist unjustified, when he had recognised in one of Elstir’s pictures a wooden cross which stood by the roadside on the way into Rivebelle.

“That’s it all right,” he would repeat with stupefaction, “there are all the four beams! Oh, he does take a lot of trouble!”

And he did not know whether a little
Sunrise over the
Sea
which Elstir had given him might not be worth a fortune.

We watched him read our letter, put it in his pocket, finish his dinner, begin to ask for his things, get up to go; and we were so convinced that we had offended him by our overture that we would now have hoped (as keenly as at first we had dreaded) to make our escape without his noticing us. What did not cross our minds for a single instant was a consideration which should have seemed to us of cardinal importance, namely that our enthusiasm for Elstir, on the sincerity of which we would not have allowed the least doubt to be cast, which we could indeed have confirmed with the evidence of our bated breath, our desire to do no matter what that was difficult or heroic for the great man, was not, as we imagined it to be, admiration, since neither of us had ever seen anything that he had painted; our feeling might have as its object the hollow idea of a “great artist,” but not a body of work which was unknown to us. It was, at most, admiration in the abstract, the nervous envelope, the sentimental framework of an admiration without content, that is to say a thing as indissolubly attached to boyhood as are certain organs which no longer exist in the adult man; we were still boys. Elstir meanwhile was approaching the door when suddenly he turned and came towards us. I was overcome by a delicious thrill of terror such as I could not have felt a few years later, because, as age diminishes the capacity, familiarity with the world meanwhile destroys in us any inclination to provoke such strange encounters, to feel that kind of emotion.

In the course of the few words that Elstir came to say to us, sitting down at our table, he never replied to me on the several occasions on which I spoke to him of Swann. I began to think that he did not know him. He nevertheless asked me to come and see him at his Balbec studio, an invitation which he did not extend to Saint-Loup, and which I had earned, as I might not, perhaps, from Swann’s recommendation had Elstir been a friend of his (for the part played by disinterested motives is greater than we are inclined to think in people’s lives), by a few words which made him think that I was devoted to the arts. He lavished on me a friendliness which was as far above that of Saint-Loup as the latter’s was above the affability of a shopkeeper. Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness of a great nobleman, however charming it may be, seems like play-acting, like simulation. Saint-Loup sought to please; Elstir loved to give, to give himself. Everything that he possessed, ideas, works, and the rest which he counted for far less, he would have given gladly to anyone who understood him. But, for lack of congenial company, he lived in an unsociable isolation which fashionable people called pose and ill-breeding, the authorities a recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride.

And no doubt at first he had thought with pleasure, even in his solitude, that, thanks to his work, he was addressing from a distance, was imbuing with a loftier idea of himself, those who had misunderstood or offended him. Perhaps, in those days, he lived alone not from indifference but from love of his fellows, and, just as I had renounced Gilberte in order to appear to her again one day in more attractive colours, dedicated his work to certain people as a sort of new approach to them whereby, without actually seeing him, they would be brought to love him, admire him, talk about him; a renunciation is not always total from the start, when we decide upon it in our original frame of mind and before it has reacted upon us, whether it be the renunciation of an invalid, a monk, an artist or a hero. But if he had wished to produce with certain people in his mind, in producing he had lived for himself, remote from society, to which he had become indifferent; the practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as happens with every big thing which we have begun by fearing, because we know it to be incompatible with smaller things which we prize and which it does not so much deprive us of as detach us from. Before we experience it, our whole preoccupation is to know to what extent we can reconcile it with certain pleasures which cease to be pleasures as soon as we have experienced it.

Elstir did not stay talking to us for long. I made up my mind that I would go to his studio during the next few days, but on the following afternoon, after I had accompanied my grandmother to the far end of the seafront, near the cliffs of Canapville, on the way back, at the corner of one of the little streets which ran down at right angles to the beach, we passed a girl who, hanging her head like an animal that is being driven reluctant to its stall, and carrying golf-clubs, was walking in front of an authoritarian-looking person, in all probability her or one of her friends’ “Miss,” who suggested a portrait of Jeffreys by Hogarth, with a face as red as if her favourite beverage were gin rather than tea, on which a dried smear of tobacco at the corner of her mouth prolonged the curve of a moustache that was grizzled but abundant. The girl who preceded her resembled the member of the little band who, beneath a black polo-cap, had shown in an in
expressive chubby face a pair of laughing eyes. However, though this one had also a black polo-cap, she struck me as being even prettier than the other; the line of her nose was straighter, the curve of the nostrils fuller and more fleshy. Besides, the other had seemed a proud, pale girl, this one a child well-disciplined and of rosy complexion. And yet, since she was pushing a bicycle just like the other’s, and was wearing the same kid gloves, I concluded that the differences arose perhaps from the angle and the circumstances in which I now saw her, for it was hardly likely that there could be at Balbec a second girl with a face that was on the whole so similar and combining the same details in her accoutrement. She flung a rapid glance in my direction. During the next few days, when I saw the little band again on the beach, and indeed long afterwards when I knew all the girls who composed it, I could never be absolutely certain that any of them—even the one who resembled her most, the girl with the bicycle—was indeed the one that I had seen that evening at the corner of the street at the end of the esplanade, a girl who was scarcely but still just perceptibly different from the one I had noticed in the procession.