In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (39 page)

But next morning!—after a servant had come to call me, and had
brought me hot water, and while I was washing and dressing myself and
trying in vain to find the things that I wanted in my trunk, from
which I extracted, pell–mell, only a lot of things that were of no use
whatever, what a joy it was to me, thinking already of the delights of
luncheon and of a walk along the shore, to see in the window, and in
all the glass fronts of the bookcases as in the portholes of a ship's
cabin, the open sea, naked, unshadowed, and yet with half of its
expanse in shadow, bounded by a thin and fluctuant line, and to follow
with my eyes the waves that came leaping towards me, one behind
another, like divers along a springboard. Every other moment, holding
in one hand the starched, unyielding towel, with the name of the hotel
printed upon it, with which I was making futile efforts to dry myself,
I returned to the window to gaze once more upon that vast
amphitheatre, dazzling, mountainous, and upon the snowy crests of its
emerald waves, here and there polished and translucent, which with a
placid violence, a leonine bending of the brows, let their steep
fronts, to which the sun now added a smile without face or features,
run forward to their goal, totter and melt and be no more. Window in
which I was, henceforward, to plant myself every morning, as at the
pane of a mail coach in which one has slept, to see whether, in the
night, a long sought mountain–chain has come nearer or withdrawn—only
here it was those hills of the sea which, before they come dancing
back towards us, are apt to retire so far that often it was only at
the end of a long and sandy plain that I would distinguish, miles it
seemed away, their first undulations upon a background transparent,
vaporous, bluish, like the glaciers that one sees in the backgrounds
of the Tuscan Primitives. On other mornings it was quite close at hand
that the sun was smiling upon those waters of a green as tender as
that preserved in Alpine pastures (among mountains on which the sun
spreads himself here and there like a lazy giant who may at any moment
come leaping gaily down their craggy sides) less by the moisture of
their soil than by the liquid mobility of their light. Anyhow, in that
breach which shore and water between them drive through all the rest
of the world, for the passage, the accumulation there of light, it is
light above all, according to the direction from which it comes and
along which our eyes follow it, it is light that shifts and fixes the
undulations of the sea. Difference of lighting modifies no less the
orientation of a place, constructs no less before our eyes new goals
which it inspires in us the yearning to attain, than would a distance
in space actually traversed in the course of a long journey. When, in
the morning, the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to me the
sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it
seemed to be shewing me another side of the picture, and to be
engaging me in the pursuit, along the winding path of its rays, of a
journey motionless but ever varied amid all the fairest scenes of the
diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning the sun
pointed out to me far off with a jovial finger those blue peaks of the
sea, which bear no name upon any geographer's chart, until, dizzy with
its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their
crests and avalanches, it came back to take shelter from the wind in
my bedroom, swaggering across the unmade bed and scattering its riches
over the splashed surface of the basin–stand, and into my open trunk,
where by its very splendour and ill–matched luxury it added still
further to the general effect of disorder. Alas, that wind from the
sea; an hour later, in the great dining–room—while we were having our
luncheon, and from the leathern gourd of a lemon were sprinkling a few
golden drops on to a pair of soles which presently left on our plates
the plumes of their picked skeletons, curled like stiff feathers and
resonant as citherns,—it seemed to my grandmother a cruel deprivation
not to be able to feel its life–giving breath on her cheek, on account
of the window, transparent but closed, which like the front of a glass
case in a museum divided us from the beach while allowing us to look
out upon its whole extent, and into which the sky entered so
completely that its azure had the effect of being the colour of the
windows and its white clouds only so many flaws in the glass.
Imagining that I was 'seated upon the mole' or at rest in the
'boudoir' of which Baudelaire speaks I asked myself whether his 'Sun's
rays upon the sea' were not—a very different thing from the evening
ray, simple and superficial as the wavering stroke of a golden
pencil—just what at that moment was scorching the sea topaz–brown,
fermenting it, turning it pale and milky like foaming beer, like milk,
while now and then there hovered over it great blue shadows which some
god seemed, for his pastime, to be shifting to and fro by moving a
mirror in the sky. Unfortunately, it was not only in its outlook that
it differed from our room at Combray, giving upon the houses over the
way, this dining–room at Balbec, bare–walled, filled with a sunlight
green as the water in a marble font, while a few feet away the full
tide and broad daylight erected as though before the gates of the
heavenly city an indestructible and moving rampart of emerald and
gold. At Combray, since we were known to everyone, I took heed of no
one. In life at the seaside one knows only one's own party. I was not
yet old enough, I was still too sensitive to have outgrown the desire
to find favour in the sight of other people and to possess their
hearts. Nor had I acquired the more noble indifference which a man of
the world would have felt, with regard to the people who were eating
their luncheon in the room, nor to the boys and girls who strolled
past the window, with whom I was pained by the thought that I should
never be allowed to go on expeditions, though not so much pained as if
my grandmother, contemptuous of social formalities and concerned about
nothing but my health, had gone to them with the request, humiliating
for me to overhear, that they would consent to let me accompany them.
Whether they were returning to some villa beyond my ken, or had
emerged from it, racquet in hand, on their way to some lawn–tennis
court, or were mounted on horses whose hooves trampled and tore my
heart, I gazed at them with a passionate curiosity, in that blinding
light of the beach by which social distinctions are altered, I
followed all their movements through the transparency of that great
bay of glass which allowed so much light to flood the room. But it
intercepted the wind, and this seemed wrong to my grandmother, who,
unable to endure the thought that I was losing the benefit of an hour
in the open air, surreptitiously unlatched a pane and at once set
flying, with the bills of fare, the newspapers, veils and hats of all
the people at the other tables; she herself, fortified by the breath
of heaven, remained calm and smiling like Saint Blandina, amid the
torrent of invective which, increasing my sense of isolation and
misery, those scornful, dishevelled, furious visitors combined to pour
on us.

To a certain extent—and this, at Balbec, gave to the population, as a
rule monotonously rich and cosmopolitan, of that sort of smart and
'exclusive' hotel, a quite distinctive local character—they were
composed of eminent persons from the departmental capitals of that
region of France, a chief magistrate from Caen, a leader of the
Cherbourg bar, a big solicitor from Le Mans, who annually, when the
holidays came round, starting from the various points over which,
throughout the working year, they were scattered like snipers in a
battle or draughtsmen upon a board, concentrated their forces upon
this hotel. They always reserved the same rooms, and with their wives,
who had pretensions to aristocracy, formed a little group, which was
joined by a leading barrister and a leading doctor from Paris, who on
the day of their departure would say to the others:

"Oh, yes, of course; you don't go by our train. You are fortunate, you
will be home in time for luncheon."

"Fortunate, do you say? You, who live in the Capital, in 'Paris, the
great town,' while I have to live in a wretched county town of a
hundred thousand souls (it is true, we managed to muster a hundred and
two thousand at the last census, but what is that compared to your two
and a half millions?) going back, too, to asphalt streets and all the
bustle and gaiety of Paris life?"

They said this with a rustic burring of their 'r's, but without
bitterness, for they were leading lights each in his own province, who
could like other people have gone to Paris had they chosen—the chief
magistrate of Caen had several times been offered a judgeship in the
Court of Appeal—but had preferred to stay where they were, from love
of their native towns or of obscurity or of fame, or because they were
reactionaries, and enjoyed being on friendly terms with the country
houses of the neighbourhood. Besides several of them were not going
back at once to their county towns.

For—inasmuch as the Bay of Balbec was a little world apart in the
midst of a great world, a basketful of the seasons in which were
clustered in a ring good days and bad, and the months in their order,
so that not only, on days when one could make out Rivebelle, which was
in itself a sign of coming storms, could one see the sunlight on the
houses there while Balbec was plunged in darkness, but later on, when
the cold weather had reached Balbec, one could be certain of finding
on that opposite shore two or three supplementary months of
warmth—those of the regular visitors to the Grand Hotel whose
holidays began late or lasted long, gave orders, when rain and fog
came and Autumn was in the air, for their boxes to be packed and
embarked, and set sail across the Bay to find summer again at
Rivebelle or Costedor. This little group in the Balbec hotel looked
with distrust upon each new arrival, and while affecting to take not
the least interest in him, hastened, all of them, to ply with
questions their friend the head waiter. For it was the same head
waiter—Aimé—who returned every year for the season, and kept their
tables for them; and their good ladies, having heard that his wife was
'expecting,' would sit after meals working each at one of the 'little
things,' stopping only to put up their glasses and stare at us, my
grandmother and myself, because we were eating hard–boiled eggs in
salad, which was considered common, and was, in fact, 'not done' in
the best society of Alençon. They affected an attitude of contemptuous
irony with regard to a Frenchman who was called 'His Majesty' and had
indeed proclaimed himself King of a small island in the South Seas,
inhabited by a few savages. He was staying in the hotel with his
pretty mistress, whom, as she crossed the beach to bathe, the little
boys would greet with "Three cheers for the Queen!" because she would
reward them with a shower of small silver. The chief magistrate and
the barrister went so far as to pretend not to see her, and if any of
their friends happened to look at her, felt bound to warn him that she
was only a little shop–girl.

"But I was told that at Ostend they used the royal bathing machine."

"Well, and why not? It's on hire for twenty francs. You can take it
yourself, if you care for that sort of thing. Anyhow, I know for a
fact that the fellow asked for an audience, when he was there, with
the King, who sent back word that he took no cognisance of any
Pantomime Princes." "Really, that's interesting! What queer people
there are in the world, to be sure!"

And I dare say it was all quite true: but it was also from resentment
of the thought that, to many of their fellow–visitors, they were
themselves simply respectable but rather common people who did not
know this King and Queen so prodigal with their small change, that the
solicitor, the magistrate, the barrister, when what they were pleased
to call the 'Carnival' went by, felt so much annoyance, and expressed
aloud an indignation that was quite understood by their friend the
head waiter who, obliged to shew proper civility to these generous if
not authentic Sovereigns, still, while he took their orders, would
dart from afar at his old patrons a covert but speaking glance.
Perhaps there was also something of the same resentment at being
erroneously supposed to be less and unable to explain that they were
more smart, underlining the 'fine specimen' with which they qualified
a young 'blood,' the consumptive and dissipated son of an industrial
magnate, who appeared every day in a new suit of clothes with an
orchid in his buttonhole, drank champagne at luncheon, and then
strolled out of the hotel, pale, impassive, a smile of complete
indifference on his lips, to the casino to throw away at the baccarat
table enormous sums, 'which he could ill afford to lose,' as the
solicitor said with a resigned air to the chief magistrate, whose wife
had it 'on good authority' that this 'detrimental' young man was
bringing his parents' grey hair in sorrow to the grave.

On the other hand, the barrister and his friends could not exhaust
their flow of sarcasm on the subject of a wealthy old lady of title,
because she never moved anywhere without taking her whole household
with her. Whenever the wives of the solicitor and the magistrate saw
her in the dining–room at meal–times they put up their glasses and
gave her an insolent scrutiny, as minute and distrustful as if she had
been some dish with a pretentious name but a suspicious appearance
which, after the negative result of a systematic study, must be sent
away with a lofty wave of the hand and a grimace of disgust.

No doubt by this behaviour they meant only to shew that, if there were
things in the world which they themselves lacked—in this instance,
certain prerogatives which the old lady enjoyed, and the privilege of
her acquaintance—it was not because they could not, but because they
did not choose to acquire them. But they had succeeded in convincing
themselves that this really was what they felt; and it was the
suppression of all desire for, of all curiosity as to forms of life
which were unfamiliar, of all hope of pleasing new people (for which,
in the women, had been substituted a feigned contempt, an artificial
brightness) that had the awkward result of obliging them to label
their discontent satisfaction, and lie everlastingly to themselves,
for which they were greatly to be pitied. But everyone else in the
hotel was no doubt behaving in a similar fashion, though his behaviour
might take a different form, and sacrificing, if not to
self–importance, at any rate to certain inculcated principles and
mental habits the thrilling delight of mixing in a strange kind of
life. Of course, the atmosphere of the microcosm in which the old lady
isolated herself was not poisoned with virulent bitterness, as was
that of the group in which the wives of the solicitor and magistrate
sat chattering with impotent rage. It was indeed embalmed with a
delicate and old–world fragrance which, however, was none the less
artificial. For at heart the old lady would probably have found in
attracting, in attaching to herself (and, with that object, recreating
herself), the mysterious sympathy of new friends a charm which is
altogether lacking from the pleasure that is to be derived from mixing
only with the people of one's own world, and reminding oneself that,
one's own being the best of all possible worlds, the ill–informed
contempt of 'outsiders' may be disregarded. Perhaps she felt
that—were she to arrive
incognito
at the Grand Hotel, Balbec, she
would, in her black stuff gown and old–fashioned bonnet, bring a smile
to the lips of some old reprobate, who from the depths of his rocking
chair would glance up and murmur, "What a scarecrow!" or, still worse,
to those of some man of repute who bad, like the magistrate, kept
between his pepper–and–salt whiskers a rosy complexion and a pair of
sparkling eyes such as she liked to see, and would at once bring the
magnifying lens of the conjugal glasses to bear upon so quaint a
phenomenon; and perhaps it was in unconfessed dread of those first few
minutes, which, though one knows that they will be but a few minutes,
are none the less terrifying, like the first plunge of one's head
under water, that this old lady sent down in advance a servant, who
would inform the hotel of the personality and habits of his mistress,
and, cutting short the manager's greetings, made, with an abruptness
in which there was more timidity than pride, for her room, where her
own curtains, substituted for those that draped the hotel windows, her
own screens and photographs, set up so effectively between her and the
outside world, to which otherwise she would have had to adapt herself,
the barrier of her private life that it was her home (in which she had
comfortably stayed) that travelled rather than herself.