In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (59 page)

There was a knock at my door; it was Aimé who had come upstairs in
person with the latest lists of visitors.

Aimé could not go away without telling me that Dreyfus was guilty a
thousand times over. "It will all come out," he assured me, "not this
year, but next. It was a gentleman who's very thick with the General
Staff, told me. I asked him if they wouldn't decide to bring it all to
light at once, before the year is out. He laid down his cigarette,"
Aimé went on, acting the scene for my benefit, and, shaking his head
and his forefinger as his informant had done, as much as to say: "We
mustn't expect too much!"—"'Not this year, Aimé,' those were his very
words, putting his hand on my shoulder, 'It isn't possible. But next
Easter, yes!'" And Aimé tapped me gently on my shoulder, saying, "You
see, I'm letting you have it exactly as he told me," whether because
he was flattered at this act of familiarity by a distinguished person
or so that I might better appreciate, with a full knowledge of the
facts, the worth of the arguments and our grounds for hope.

It was not without a slight throb of the heart that on the first page
of the list I caught sight of the words 'Simonet and family.' I had in
me a store of old dream–memories which dated from my childhood, and in
which all the tenderness (tenderness that existed in my heart, but,
when my heart felt it, was not distinguishable from anything else) was
wafted to me by a person as different as possible from myself. This
person, once again I fashioned her, utilising for the purpose the name
Simonet and the memory of the harmony that had reigned between the
young bodies which I had seen displaying themselves on the beach, in a
sportive procession worthy of Greek art or of Giotto. I knew not which
of these girls was Mlle. Simonet, if indeed any of them were so
named, but I did know that I was loved by Mlle. Simonet and that I was
going, with Saint–Loup's help, to attempt to know her. Unfortunately,
having on that condition only obtained an extension of his leave, he
was obliged to report for duty every day at Doncières: but to make him
forsake his military duty I had felt that I might count, more even
than on his friendship for myself, on that same curiosity, as a human
naturalist, which I myself had so often felt—even without having seen
the person mentioned, and simply on hearing some one say that there
was a pretty cashier at a fruiterer's—to acquaint myself with a new
variety of feminine beauty. But that curiosity I had been wrong in
hoping to excite in Saint–Loup by speaking to him of my band of girls.
For it had been and would long remain paralysed in him by his love for
that actress whose lover he was. And even if he had felt it lightly
stirring him he would have repressed it, from an almost superstitious
belief that on his own fidelity might depend that of his mistress. And
so it was without any promise from him that he would take an active
interest in my girls that we started out to dine at Rivebelle.

At first, when we arrived there, the sun used just to have set, but it
was light still; in the garden outside the restaurant, where the lamps
had not yet been lighted, the heat of the day fell and settled, as
though in a vase along the sides of which the transparent, dusky jelly
of the air seemed of such consistency that a tall rose–tree fastened
against the dim wall which it streaked with pink veins, looked like
the arborescence that one sees at the heart of an onyx. Presently
night had always fallen when we left the carriage, often indeed before
we started from Balbec if the evening was wet and we had put off
sending for the carriage in the hope of the weather's improving. But
on those days it was without any sadness that I listened to the wind
howling, I knew that it did not mean the abandonment of my plans,
imprisonment in my bedroom; I knew that in the great dining–room of
the restaurant, which we would enter to the sound of the music of the
gypsy band, the innumerable lamps would triumph easily over darkness
and chill, by applying to them their broad cauteries of molten gold,
and I jumped light–heartedly after Saint–Loup into the closed carriage
which stood waiting for us in the rain. For some time past the words
of Bergotte, when he pronounced himself positive that, in spite of all
I might say, I had been created to enjoy, pre–eminently, the pleasures
of the mind, had restored to me, with regard to what I might succeed
in achieving later on, a hope that was disappointed afresh every day
by the boredom that I felt on setting myself down before a
writing–table to start work on a critical essay or a novel. "After
all," I said to myself, "possibly the pleasure that its author has
found in writing it is not the infallible test of the literary value
of a page; it may be only an accessory, one that is often to be found
superadded to that value, but the want of which can have no
prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces
were written yawning." My grandmother set my doubts at rest by telling
me that I should be able to work and should enjoy working as soon as
my health improved. And, our doctor having thought it only prudent to
warn me of the grave risks to which my state of health might expose
me, and having outlined all the hygienic precaution that I ought to
take to avoid any accident—I subordinated all my pleasures to an
object which I judged to be infinitely more important than them, that
of becoming strong enough to be able to bring into being the work
which I had, possibly, within me; I had been exercising over myself,
ever since I had come to Balbec, a scrupulous and constant control.
Nothing would have induced me, there, to touch the cup of coffee which
would have robbed me of the night's sleep that was necessary if I was
not to be tired next day. But as soon as we reached Rivebelle,
immediately, what with the excitement of a new pleasure, and finding
myself in that different zone into which the exception to our rule of
life takes us after it has cut the thread, patiently spun throughout
so many days, that was guiding us towards wisdom—as though there were
never to be any such thing as to–morrow, nor any lofty aims to be
realised, vanished all that exact machinery of prudent hygienic
measures which had been working to safeguard them. A waiter was
offering to take my coat, whereupon Saint–Loup asked: "You're sure you
won't be cold? Perhaps you'd better keep it: it's not very warm in
here."

"No, no," I assured him; and perhaps I did not feel the cold; but
however that might be, I no longer knew the fear of falling ill, the
necessity of not dying, the importance of work. I gave up my coat; we
entered the dining–room to the sound of some warlike march played by
the gipsies, we advanced between two rows of tables laid for dinner as
along an easy path of glory, and, feeling a happy glow imparted to our
bodies by the rhythms of the orchestra which rendered us its military
honours, gave us this unmerited triumph, we concealed it beneath a
grave and frozen mien, beneath a languid, casual gait, so as not to be
like those music–hall 'mashers' who, having wedded a ribald verse to a
patriotic air, come running on to the stage with the martial
countenance of a victorious general.

From that moment I was a new man, who was no longer my grandmother's
grandson and would remember her only when it was time to get
up and go, but the brother, for the time being, of the waiters who
were going to bring us our dinner.

The dose of beer—all the more, that of champagne—which at Balbec I
should not have ventured to take in a week, albeit to my calm and
lucid consciousness the flavour of those beverages represented a
pleasure clearly appreciable, since it was also one that could easily
be sacrificed, I now imbibed at a sitting, adding to it a few drops of
port wine, too much distracted to be able to taste it, and I gave the
violinist who had just been playing the two louis which I had been
saving up for the last month with a view to buying something, I could
not remember what. Several of the waiters, set going among the tables,
were flying along at full speed, each carrying on his outstretched
palms a dish which it seemed to be the object of this kind of race not
to let fall. And in fact the chocolate
soufflés
arrived at their
destination unspilled, the potatoes
à l'anglaise
, in spite of the
pace which ought to have sent them flying, came arranged as at the
start round the Pauilhac lamb. I noticed one of these servants, very
tall, plumed with superb black locks, his face dyed in a tint that
suggested rather certain species of rare birds than a human being,
who, running without pause (and, one would have said, without purpose)
from one end of the room to the other, made me think of one of those
macaws which fill the big aviaries in zoological gardens with their
gorgeous colouring and incomprehensible agitation. Presently the
spectacle assumed an order, in my eyes at least, growing at once more
noble and more calm. All this dizzy activity became fixed in a quiet
harmony. I looked at the round tables whose innumerable assemblage
filled the restaurant like so many planets as planets are represented
in old allegorical pictures. Moreover, there seemed to be some
irresistibly attractive force at work among these divers stars, and at
each table the diners had eyes only for the tables at which they were
not sitting, except perhaps some wealthy amphitryon who, having
managed to secure a famous author, was endeavouring to extract from
him, thanks to the magic properties of the turning table, a few
unimportant remarks at which the ladies marvelled. The harmony of
these astral tables did not prevent the incessant revolution of the
countless servants who, because instead of being seated like the
diners they were on their feet, performed their evolutions in a more
exalted sphere. No doubt they were running, one to fetch the
hors
d'œuvre
, another to change the wine or with clean glasses. But
despite these special reasons, their perpetual course among the round
tables yielded, after a time, to the observer the law of its dizzy but
ordered circulation. Seated behind a bank of flowers, two horrible
cashiers, busy with endless calculations, seemed two witches occupied
in forecasting by astrological signs the disasters that might from
time to time occur in this celestial vault fashioned according to the
scientific conceptions of the middle ages.

And I rather pitied all the diners because I felt that for them the
round tables were not planets and that they had not cut through the
scheme of things one of those sections which deliver us from the
bondage of appearances and enable us to perceive analogies. They
thought that they were dining with this or that person, that the
dinner would cost roughly so much, and that to–morrow they would begin
all over again. And they appeared absolutely unmoved by the progress
through their midst of a train of young assistants who, having
probably at that moment no urgent duty, advanced processionally
bearing rolls of bread in baskets. Some of them, the youngest, stunned
by the cuffs which the head waiters administered to them as they
passed, fixed melancholy eyes upon a distant dream and were consoled
only if some visitor from the Balbec hotel in which they had once been
employed, recognising them, said a few words to them, telling them in
person to take away the champagne which was not fit to drink, an order
that filled them with pride.

I could hear the twinging of my nerves, in which there was a sense of
comfort independent of the external objects that might have produced
it, a comfort which the least shifting of my body or of my attention
was enough to make me feel, just as to a shut eye a slight pressure
gives the sensation of colour. I had already drunk a good deal of
port wine, and if I now asked for more it was not so much with a view
to the comfort which the additional glasses would bring me as an
effect of the comfort produced by the glasses that had gone before. I
allowed the music itself to guide to each of its notes my pleasure
which, meekly following, rested on each in turn. If, like one of those
chemical industries by means of which are prepared in large quantities
bodies which in a state of nature come together only by accident and
very rarely, this restaurant at Rivebelle united at one and the same
moment more women to tempt me with beckoning vistas of happiness than
the hazard of walks and drives would have made me encounter in a year;
on the other hand, this music that greeted our ears,—arrangements of
waltzes, of German operettas, of music–hall songs, all of them quite
new to me—was itself like an ethereal resort of pleasure superimposed
upon the other and more intoxicating still. For these tunes, each as
individual as a woman, were not keeping, as she would have kept, for
some privileged person, the voluptuous secret which they contained:
they offered me their secrets, ogled me, came up to me with affected
or vulgar movements, accosted me, caressed me as if I had suddenly
become more seductive, more powerful and more rich; I indeed found in
these tunes an element of cruelty; because any such thing as a
disinterested feeling for beauty, a gleam of intelligence was unknown
to them; for them physical pleasures alone existed. And they are the
most merciless of hells, the most gateless and imprisoning for the
jealous wretch to whom they present that pleasure—that pleasure which
the woman he loves is enjoying with another—as the only thing that
exists in the world for her who is all the world to him. But while I
was humming softly to myself the notes of this tune, and returning its
kiss, the pleasure peculiar to itself which it made me feel became so
dear to me that I would have left my father and mother, to follow it
through the singular world which it constructed in the invisible, in
lines instinct with alternate languor and vivacity. Although such a
pleasure as this is not calculated to enhance the value of the person
to whom it comes, for it is perceived by him alone, and although
whenever, in the course of our life, we have failed to attract a woman
who has caught sight of us, she could not tell whether at that moment
we possessed this inward and subjective felicity which, consequently,
could in no way have altered the judgment that she passed on us, I
felt myself more powerful, almost irresistible. It seemed to me that
my love was no longer something unattractive, at which people might
smile, but had precisely the touching beauty, the seductiveness of
this music, itself comparable to a friendly atmosphere in which she
whom I loved and I were to meet, suddenly grown intimate.