In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (56 page)

This dramatic period of their connexion, which had now reached its
most acute stage, the most cruel for Saint–Loup, for she had forbidden
him to remain in Paris, where his presence exasperated her, and had
forced him to spend his leave at Balbec, within easy reach of his
regiment—had begun one evening at the house of one of Saint–Loup's
aunts, on whom he had prevailed to allow his friend to come there,
before a large party, to recite some of the speeches from a symbolical
play in which she had once appeared in an 'advanced' theatre, and for
which she had made him share the admiration that she herself
professed.

But when she appeared in the room, with a large lily in her hand, and
wearing a costume copied from the
Ancilla Domini
, which she had
persuaded Saint–Loup was an absolute 'vision of beauty,' her entrance
had been greeted, in that assemblage of club men and duchesses, with
smiles which the monotonous tone of her chantings, the oddity of
certain words and their frequent recurrence had changed into fits of
laughter, stifled at first but presently so uncontrollable that the
wretched reciter had been unable to go on. Next day Saint–Loup's aunt
had been universally censured for having allowed so grotesque an
actress to appear in her drawing–room. A well–known duke made no
bones about telling her that she had only herself to blame if she
found herself criticised. "Damn it all, people really don't come to
see 'turns' like that! If the woman had talent, even; but she has none
and never will have any. 'Pon my soul, Paris is not such a fool as
people make out. Society does not consist exclusively of imbeciles.
This little lady evidently believed that she was going to take Paris
by surprise. But Paris is not so easily surprised as all that, and
there are still some things that they can't make us swallow."

As for the actress, she left the house with Saint–Loup, exclaiming:
"What do you mean by letting me in for those geese, those uneducated
bitches, those dirty corner–boys? I don't mind telling you, there
wasn't a man in the room who didn't make eyes at me or squeeze my
foot, and it was because I wouldn't look at them that they were out
for revenge."

Words which had changed Robert's antipathy for people in society into
a horror that was at once deep and distressing, and was provoked in
him most of all by those who least deserved it, devoted kinsmen who,
on behalf of the family, had sought to persuade Saint–Loup's lady to
break with him, a move which she represented to him as inspired by
their passion for her. Robert, although he had at once ceased to see
them, used to imagine when he was parted from his mistress as he was
now, that they or others like them were profiting by his absence to
return to the charge and had possibly prevailed over her. And when he
spoke of the sensualists who were disloyal to their friends, who
sought to seduce their friends' wives, tried to make them come to
houses of assignation, his whole face would glow with suffering and
hatred.

"I would kill them with less compunction than I would kill a dog,
which is at least a well–behaved beast, and loyal and faithful. There
are men who deserve the guillotine if you like, far more than poor
wretches who have been led into crime by poverty and by the cruelty of
the rich."

He spent the greater part of his time in sending letters and telegrams
to his mistress. Every time that, while still preventing him from
returning to Paris, she found an excuse to quarrel with him by post, I
read the news at once in his evident discomposure. Inasmuch as his
mistress never told him what fault she found with him, suspecting that
possibly if she did not tell him it was because she did not know
herself, and simply had had enough of him, he would still have liked
an explanation and used to write to her: "Tell me what I have done
wrong. I am quite ready to acknowledge my faults," the grief that
overpowered him having the effect of persuading him that he had
behaved badly.

But she kept him waiting indefinitely for her answers which, when they
did come, were meaningless. And so it was almost always with a
furrowed brow, and often with empty hands that I would see Saint–Loup
returning from the post office, where, alone in all the hotel, he and
Françoise went to fetch or to hand in letters, he from a lover's
impatience, she with a servant's mistrust of others. (His telegrams
obliged him to take a much longer journey.)

When, some days after our dinner with the Blochs, my grandmother told
me with a joyful air that Saint–Loup had just been asking her whether,
before he left Balbec, she would not like him to take a photograph of
her, and when I saw that she had put on her nicest dress on purpose,
and was hesitating between several of her best hats, I felt a little
annoyed by this childishness, which surprised me coming from her. I
even went the length of asking myself whether I had not been mistaken
in my grandmother, whether I did not esteem her too highly, whether
she was as unconcerned as I had always supposed in the adornment of
her person, whether she had not indeed the very weakness that I
believed most alien to her temperament, namely coquetry.

Unfortunately, this displeasure that I derived from the prospect of a
photographic 'sitting,' and more particularly from the satisfaction
with which my grandmother appeared to be looking forward to it, I made
so apparent that Françoise remarked it and did her best,
unintentionally, to increase it by making me a sentimental, gushing
speech, by which I refused to appear moved.

"Oh, Master; my poor Madame will be so pleased at having her likeness
taken, she is going to wear the hat that her old Françoise has trimmed
for her, you must allow her, Master."

I acquired the conviction that I was not cruel in laughing at
Françoise's sensibility, by reminding myself that my mother and
grandmother, my models in all things, often did the same. But my
grandmother, noticing that I seemed cross, said that if this plan of
her sitting for her photograph offended me in any way she would give
it up. I would not let her; I assured her that I saw no harm in it,
and left her to adorn herself, but, thinking that I shewed my
penetration and strength of mind, I added a few stinging words of
sarcasm, intended to neutralise the pleasure which she seemed to find
in being photographed, so that if I was obliged to see my
grandmother's magnificent hat, I succeeded at least in driving from
her face that joyful expression which ought to have made me glad; but
alas, it too often happens, while the people we love best are still
alive, that such expressions appear to us as the exasperating
manifestation of some unworthy freak of fancy rather than as the
precious form of the happiness which we should dearly like to procure
for them. My ill–humour arose more particularly from the fact that,
during the last week, my grandmother had appeared to be avoiding me,
and I had not been able to have her to myself for a moment, either by
night or day. When I came back in the afternoon to be alone with her
for a little I was told that she was not in the hotel; or else she
would shut herself up with Françoise for endless confabulations which
I was not permitted to interrupt. And when, after being out all
evening with Saint–Loup, I had been thinking on the way home of the
moment at which I should be able to go to my grandmother and to kiss
her, in vain might I wait for her to knock on the partition between us
the three little taps which would tell me to go in and say good night
to her; I heard nothing; at length I would go to bed, a little
resentful of her for depriving me, with an indifference so new and
strange in her, of a joy on which I had so much counted, I would lie
still for a while, my heart throbbing as in my childhood, listening to
the wall which remained silent, until I cried myself to sleep.

That day, as for some days past, Saint–Loup had been obliged to go to
Doncières, where, until his leave finally expired, he would be on duty
now until late every afternoon. I was sorry that he was not at Balbec.
I had seen alight from carriages and pass, some into the ball–room of
the Casino, others into the ice–cream shop, young women who at a
distance had seemed to me lovely. I was passing through one of those
periods of our youth, unprovided with any one definite love, vacant,
in which at all times and in all places—as a lover the woman by whose
charms he is smitten—we desire, we seek, we see Beauty. Let but a
single real feature—the little that one distinguishes of a woman seen
from afar or from behind—enable us to project the form of beauty
before our eyes, we imagine that we have seen her before, our heart
beats, we hasten in pursuit, and will always remain half–persuaded
that it was she, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if
we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.

Besides, as I grew more and more delicate, I was inclined to overrate
the simplest pleasures because of the difficulties that sprang up in
the way of my attaining them. Charming women I seemed to see all round
me, because I was too tired, if it was on the beach, too shy if it was
in the Casino or at a pastry–cook's, to go anywhere near them. And yet
if I was soon to die I should have liked first to know the appearance
at close quarters, in reality of the prettiest girls that life had to
offer, even although it should be another than myself or no one at all
who was to take advantage of the offer. (I did not, in fact,
appreciate the desire for possession that underlay my curiosity.) I
should have had the courage to enter the ballroom if Saint–Loup had
been with me. Left by myself, I was simply hanging about in front of
the Grand Hotel until it was time for me to join my grandmother, when,
still almost at the far end of the paved 'front' along which they
projected in a discordant spot of colour, I saw coming towards me five
or six young girls, as different in appearance and manner from all the
people whom one was accustomed to see at Balbec as could have been,
landed there none knew whence, a flight of gulls which performed with
measured steps upon the sands—the dawdlers using their wings to
overtake the rest—a movement the purpose of which seems as obscure to
the human bathers, whom they do not appear to see, as it is clearly
determined in their own birdish minds.

One of these strangers was pushing as she came, with one hand, her
bicycle; two others carried golf–clubs; and their attire generally was
in contrast to that of the other girls at Balbec, some of whom, it was
true, went in for games, but without adopting any special outfit.

It was the hour at which ladies and gentlemen came out every day for a
turn on the 'front,' exposed to the merciless fire of the long glasses
fastened upon them, as if they had each borne some disfigurement which
she felt it her duty to inspect in its minutest details, by the chief
magistrate's wife, proudly seated there with her back to the
band–stand, in the middle of that dread line of chairs on which
presently they too, actors turned critics, would come and establish
themselves, to scrutinise in their turn those others who would then be
filing past them. All these people who paced up and down the 'front,'
tacking as violently as if it had been the deck of a ship (for they
could not lift a leg without at the same time waving their arms,
turning their heads and eyes, settling their shoulders, compensating
by a balancing movement on one side for the movement they had just
made on the other, and puffing out their faces), and who, pretending
not to see so as to let it be thought that they were not interested,
but covertly watching, for fear of running against the people who were
walking beside or coming towards them, did, in fact, butt into them,
became entangled with them, because each was mutually the object of
the same secret attention veiled beneath the same apparent disdain;
their love—and consequently their fear—of the crowd being one of the
most powerful motives in all men, whether they seek to please other
people or to astonish them, or to shew them that they despise them. In
the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and
ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a
disordered love of the crowd, which so far overrules every other
feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration
of his hall–porter, of the passers–by, of the cabman whom he hails, he
prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons
every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.

Among all these people, some of whom were pursuing a train of thought,
but if so betrayed its instability by spasmodic gestures, a roving
gaze as little in keeping as the circumspect titubation of their
neighbours, the girls whom I had noticed, with that mastery over their
limbs which comes from perfect bodily condition and a sincere contempt
for the rest of humanity, were advancing straight ahead, without
hesitation or stiffness, performing exactly the movements that they
wished to perform, each of their members in full independence of all
the rest, the greater part of their bodies preserving that immobility
which is so noticeable in a good waltzer. They were now quite near me.
Although each was a type absolutely different from the others, they
all had beauty; but to tell the truth I had seen them for so short a
time, and without venturing to look them straight in the face, that I
had not yet individualised any of them. Save one, whom her straight
nose, her dark complexion pointed in contrast among the rest, like (in
a renaissance picture of the Epiphany) a king of Arab cast, they were
known to me only, one by a pair of eyes, hard, set and mocking;
another by cheeks in which the pink had that coppery tint which makes
one think of geraniums; and even of these points I had not yet
indissolubly attached any one to one of these girls rather than to
another; and when (according to the order in which their series met
the eye, marvellous because the most different aspects came next one
another, because all scales of colours were combined in it, but
confused as a piece of music in which I should not have been able to
isolate and identify at the moment of their passage the successive
phrases, no sooner distinguished than forgotten) I saw emerge a pallid
oval, black eyes, green eyes, I knew not if these were the same that
had already charmed me a moment ago, I could not bring them home to
any one girl whom I might thereby have set apart from the rest and so
identified. And this want, in my vision, of the demarcations which I
should presently establish between them sent flooding over the group a
wave of harmony, the continuous transfusion of a beauty fluid,
collective and mobile.

It was not perhaps, in this life of ours, mere chance that had, in
forming this group of friends, chosen them all of such beauty; perhaps
these girls (whose attitude was enough to reveal their nature, bold,
frivolous and hard), extremely sensitive to everything that was
ludicrous or ugly, incapable of yielding to an intellectual or moral
attraction, had naturally felt themselves, among companions of their
own age, repelled by all those in whom a pensive or sensitive
disposition was betrayed by shyness, awkwardness, constraint, by what,
they would say,'didn't appeal' to them, and from such had held aloof;
while they attached themselves, on the other hand, to others to whom
they were drawn by a certain blend of grace, suppleness, and physical
neatness, the only form in which they were able to picture the
frankness of a seductive character and the promise of pleasant hours
in one another's company. Perhaps, too, the class to which they
belonged, a class which I should not have found it easy to define, was
at that point in its evolution at which, whether thanks to its growing
wealth and leisure, or thanks to new athletic habits, extended now
even to certain plebeian elements, and a habit of physical culture to
which had not yet been added the culture of the mind, a social
atmosphere, comparable to that of smooth and prolific schools of
sculpture, which have not yet gone in for tortured expressions,
produces naturally and in abundance fine bodies with fine legs, fine
hips, wholesome and reposeful faces, with an air of agility and guile.
And were they not noble and calm models of human beauty that I beheld
there, outlined against the sea, like statues exposed to the sunlight
upon a Grecian shore?

Just as if, in the heart of their band, which progressed along the
'front' like a luminous comet, they had decided that the surrounding
crowd was composed of creatures of another race whose sufferings even
could not awaken in them any sense of fellowship, they appeared not to
see them, forced those who had stopped to talk to step aside, as
though from the path of a machine that had been set going by itself,
so that it was no good waiting for it to get out of their way, their
utmost sign of consciousness being when, if some old gentleman of whom
they did not admit the existence and thrust from them the contact, had
fled with a frightened or furious, but a headlong or ludicrous motion,
they looked at one another and smiled. They had, for whatever did not
form part of their group, no affectation of contempt; their genuine
contempt was sufficient. But they could not set eyes on an obstacle
without amusing themselves by crossing it, either in a running jump or
with both feet together, because they were all filled to the brim,
exuberant with that youth which we need so urgently to spend that even
when we are unhappy or unwell, obedient rather to the necessities of
our age than to the mood of the day, we can never pass anything that
can be jumped over or slid down without indulging ourselves
conscientiously, interrupting, interspersing our slow progress—as
Chopin his most melancholy phrase—with graceful deviations in which
caprice is blended with virtuosity. The wife of an elderly banker,
after hesitating between various possible exposures for her husband,
had settled him on a folding chair, facing the 'front,' sheltered from
wind and sun by the band–stand. Having seen him comfortably installed
there, she had gone to buy a newspaper which she would read aloud to
him, to distract him—one of her little absences which she never
prolonged for more than five minutes, which seemed long enough to him
but which she repeated at frequent intervals so that this old husband
on whom she lavished an attention that she took care to conceal,
should have the impression that he was still quite alive and like
other people and was in no need of protection. The platform of the
band–stand provided, above his head, a natural and tempting
springboard, across which, without a moment's hesitation, the eldest
of the little band began to run; she jumped over the terrified old
man, whose yachting cap was brushed by the nimble feet, to the great
delight of the other girls, especially of a pair of green eyes in
a 'dashing' face, which expressed, for that bold act, an admiration and
a merriment in which I seemed to discern a trace of timidity, a
shamefaced and blustering timidity which did not exist in the others.
"Oh, the poor old man; he makes me sick; he looks half dead;" said a
girl with a croaking voice, but with more sarcasm than sympathy. They
walked on a little way, then stopped for a moment in the middle of the
road, with no thought whether they were impeding the passage of other
people, and held a council, a solid body of irregular shape, compact,
unusual and shrill, like birds that gather on the ground at the moment
of flight; then they resumed their leisurely stroll along the 'front,'
against a background of sea.

By this time their charming features had ceased to be indistinct and
impersonal. I had dealt them like cards into so many heaps to compose
(failing their names, of which I was still ignorant) the big one who
had jumped over the old banker; the little one who stood out against
the horizon of sea with her plump and rosy cheeks, her green eyes; the
one with the straight nose and dark complexion, in such contrast to
all the rest; another, with a white face like an egg on which a tiny
nose described an arc of a circle like a chicken's beak; yet another,
wearing a hooded cape (which gave her so poverty–stricken an
appearance, and so contradicted the smartness of the figure beneath
that the explanation which suggested itself was that this girl must
have parents of high position who valued their self–esteem so far
above the visitors to Balbec and the sartorial elegance of their own
children that it was a matter of the utmost indifference to them that
their daughter should stroll on the 'front' dressed in a way which
humbler people would have considered too modest); a girl with
brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, colourless cheeks, a black
polo–cap pulled down over her face, who was pushing a bicycle with so
exaggerated a movement of her hips, with an air borne out by her
language, which was so typically of the gutter and was being shouted
so loud, when I passed her (although among her expressions I caught
that irritating 'live my own life') that, abandoning the hypothesis
which her friend's hooded cape had made me construct, I concluded
instead that all these girls belonged to the population which
frequents the racing–tracks, and must be the very juvenile
mistresses of professional bicyclists. In any event, in none of my
suppositions was there any possibility of their being virtuous. At
first sight—in the way in which they looked at one another and
smiled, in the insistent stare of the one with the dull cheeks—I had
grasped that they were not. Besides, my grandmother had always
watched over me with a delicacy too timorous for me not to believe
that the sum total of the things one ought not to do was indivisible
or that girls who were lacking in respect for their elders would
suddenly be stopped short by scruples when there were pleasures at
stake more tempting than that of jumping over an octogenarian.