In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (60 page)

This restaurant was the resort not only of light women; it was
frequented also by people in the very best society, who came there for
afternoon tea or gave big dinner–parties. The tea–parties were held in
a long gallery, glazed and narrow, shaped like a funnel, which led
from the entrance hall to the dining–room and was bounded on one side
by the garden, from which it was separated (save for a few stone
pillars) only by its wall of glass, in which panes would be opened
here and there. The result of which, apart from ubiquitous draughts,
was sudden and intermittent bursts of sunshine, a dazzling light that
made it almost impossible to see the tea–drinkers, so that when they
were installed there, at tables crowded pair after pair the whole way
along the narrow gully, as they were shot with colours at every
movement they made in drinking their tea or in greeting one another,
you would have called it a reservoir, a stewpond in which the
fisherman has collected all his glittering catch, and the fish, half
out of water and bathed in sunlight, dazzle the eye as they mirror an
ever–changing iridescence.

A few hours later, during dinner, which, naturally, was served in the
dining–room, the lights would be turned on, although it was still
quite light out of doors, so that one saw before one's eyes, in the
garden, among summer–houses glimmering in the twilight, like pale
spectres of evening, alleys whose greyish verdure was pierced by the
last rays of the setting sun and, from the lamp–lit room in which we
were dining, appeared through the glass—no longer, as one would have
said of the ladies who had been drinking tea there in the afternoon,
along the blue and gold corridor, caught in a glittering and dripping
net—but like the vegetation of a pale and green aquarium of gigantic
size seen by a supernatural light. People began to rise from table;
and if each party while their dinner lasted, albeit they spent the
whole time examining, recognising, naming the party at the next table,
had been held in perfect cohesion about their own, the attractive
force that had kept them gravitating round their host of the evening
lost its power at the moment when, for coffee, they repaired to the
same corridor that had been used for the tea–parties; it often
happened that in its passage from place to place some party on the
march dropped one or more of its human corpuscles who, having come
under the irresistible attraction of the rival party, detached
themselves for a moment from their own, in which their places were
taken by ladies or gentlemen who had come across to speak to friends
before hurrying off with an "I really must fly: I'm dining with M.
So–and–So." And for the moment you would have been reminded, looking
at them, of two separate nosegays that had exchanged a few of their
flowers. Then the corridor too began to empty. Often, since even after
dinner there was still a little light left outside, they left this
long corridor unlighted, and, skirted by the trees that overhung it on
the other side of the glass, it suggested a pleached alley in a wooded
and shady garden. Here and there, in the gloom, a fair diner lingered.
As I passed through this corridor one evening on my way out I saw,
sitting among a group of strangers, the beautiful Princesse de
Luxembourg. I raised my hat without stopping. She remembered me, and
bowed her head with a smile; in the air, far above her bowed head, but
emanating from the movement, rose melodiously a few words addressed to
myself, which must have been a somewhat amplified good–evening,
intended not to stop me but simply to complete the gesture, to make it
a spoken greeting. But her words remained so indistinct and the sound
which was all that I caught was prolonged so sweetly and seemed to me
so musical that it seemed as if among the dim branches of the trees a
nightingale had begun to sing. If it so happened that, to finish the
evening with a party of his friends whom we had met, Saint–Loup
decided to go on to the Casino of a neighbouring village, and, taking
them with him, put me in a carriage by myself, I would urge the driver
to go as fast as he possibly could, so that the minutes might pass
less slowly which I must spend without having anyone at hand to
dispense me from the obligation myself to provide my
sensibility—reversing the engine, so to speak, and emerging from the
passivity in which I was caught and held as in the teeth of a
machine—with those modifications which, since my arrival at
Rivebelle, I had been receiving from other people. The risk of
collision with a carriage coming the other way along those lanes where
there was barely room for one and it was dark as pitch, the insecurity
of the soil, crumbling in many places, at the cliff's edge, the
proximity of its vertical drop to the sea, none of these things
exerted on me the slight stimulus that would have been required to
bring the vision and the fear of danger within the scope of my
reasoning. For just as it is not the desire to become famous but the
habit of being laborious that enables us to produce a finished work,
so it is not the activity of the present moment but wise reflexions
from the past that help us to safeguard the future. But if already,
before this point, on my arrival at Rivebelle, I had flung
irretrievably away from me those crutches of reason and self–control
which help our infirmity to follow the right road, if I now found
myself the victim of a sort of moral ataxy, the alcohol that I had
drunk, by unduly straining my nerves, gave to the minutes as they came
a quality, a charm which did not have the result of leaving me more
ready, or indeed more resolute to inhibit them, prevent their coming;
for while it made me prefer them a thousand times to anything else in
my life, my exaltation made me isolate them from everything else; I
was confined to the present, as heroes are or drunkards; eclipsed for
the moment, my past no longer projected before me that shadow of
itself which we call our future; placing the goal of my life no longer
in the realisation of the dreams of that past, but in the felicity of
the present moment, I could see nothing now of what lay beyond it. So
that, by a contradiction which, however, was only apparent, it was at
the very moment in which I was tasting an unfamiliar pleasure, feeling
that my life might yet be happy, in which it should have become more
precious in my sight; it was at this very moment that, delivered from
the anxieties which my life had hitherto contrived to suggest to me, I
unhesitatingly abandoned it to the chance of an accident. After all, I
was doing no more than concentrate in a single evening the
carelessness that, for most men, is diluted throughout their whole
existence, in which every day they face, unnecessarily, the dangers of
a sea–voyage, of a trip in an aeroplane or motor–car, when there is
waiting for them at home the creature whose life their death would
shatter, or when there is still stored in the fragile receptacle of
their brain that book the approaching publication of which is their
one object, now, in life. And so too in the Rivebelle restaurant, on
evenings when we just stayed there after dinner, if anyone had come in
with the intention of killing me, as I no longer saw, save in a
distant prospect too remote to have any reality, my grandmother, my
life to come, the books that I was going to write, as I clung now,
body and mind, wholly to the scent of the lady at the next table, the
politeness of the waiters, the outline of the waltz that the band was
playing, as I was glued to my immediate sensation, with no extension
beyond its limits, nor any object other than not to be separated from
it, I should have died in and with that sensation, I should have let
myself be strangled without offering any resistance, without a
movement, a bee drugged with tobacco smoke that had ceased to take any
thought for preserving the accumulation of its labours and the hopes
of its hive.

I ought here to add that this insignificance into which the most
serious matters subsided, by contrast with the violence of my
exaltation, came in the end to include Mlle. Simonet and her friends.
The enterprise of knowing them seemed to me easy now but hardly worth
the trouble, for my immediate sensation alone, thanks to its
extraordinary intensity, to the joy that its slightest modifications,
its mere continuity provoked, had any importance for me; all the
rest—parents, work, pleasures, girls at Balbec weighed with me no
more than does a flake of foam in a strong wind that will not let it
find a resting place, existed no longer save in relation to this
internal power: intoxication makes real for an hour or two a
subjective idealism, pure phenomenism; nothing is left now but
appearances, nothing exists save as a function of our sublime self.
This is not to say that a genuine love, if we have one, cannot survive
in such conditions. But we feel so unmistakably, as though in a new
atmosphere, that unknown pressures have altered the dimensions of that
sentiment that we can no longer consider it in the old way. It is
indeed still there and we shall find it, but in a different place, no
longer weighing upon us, satisfied by the sensation which the present
affords it, a sensation that is sufficient for us, since for what is
not actually present we take no thought. Unfortunately the coefficient
which thus alters our values alters them only in the hour of
intoxication. The people who had lost all their importance, whom we
scattered with our breath like soap–bubbles, will to–morrow resume
their density; we shall have to try afresh to settle down to work
which this evening had ceased to have any significance. A more serious
matter still, these mathematics of the morrow, the same as those of
yesterday, in whose problems we shall find ourselves inexorably
involved, it is they that govern us even in these hours, and we alone
are unconscious of their rule. If there should happen to be, near us,
a woman, virtuous or inimical, that question so difficult an hour
ago—to know whether we should succeed in finding favour with
her—seems to us now a million times easier of solution without having
become easier in any respect, for it is only in our own sight, in our
own inward sight, that we have altered. And she is as much annoyed
with us at this moment as we shall be next day at the thought of our
having given a hundred francs to the messenger, and for the same
reason which in our case has merely been delayed in its operation,
namely the absence of intoxication.

I knew none of the women who were at Rivebelle and, because they
formed a part of my intoxication just as its reflexions form part of a
mirror, appeared to me now a thousand times more to be desired than
the less and less existent Mlle. Simonet. One of them, young, fair, by
herself, with a sad expression on a face framed in a straw hat trimmed
with field–flowers, gazed at me for a moment with a dreamy air and
struck me as being attractive. Then it was the turn of another, and
of a third; finally of a dark one with glowing cheeks. Almost all of
them were known, if not to myself, to Saint–Loup.

He had, in fact, before he made the acquaintance of his present
mistress, lived so much in the restricted world of amorous adventure
that all the women who would be dining on these evenings at Rivebelle,
where many of them had appeared quite by chance, having come to the
coast some to join their lovers, others in the hope of finding fresh
lovers there, there was scarcely one that he did not know from having
spent—or if not he, one or other of his friends—at least one night
in their company. He did not bow to them if they were with men, and
they, albeit they looked more at him than at anyone else, for the
indifference which he was known to feel towards every woman who was
not his mistress gave him in their eyes an exceptional interest,
appeared not to know him. But you could hear them whispering: "That's
young Saint–Loup. It seems he's still quite gone on that girl of his.
Got it bad, he has. What a dear boy! I think he's just wonderful; and
what style! Some girls do have all the luck, don't they? And he's so
nice in every way. I saw a lot of him when I was with d'Orléans. They
were quite inseparable, those two. He was going the pace, that time.
But he's given it all up now, she can't complain. She's had a good run
of luck, that she can say. And I ask you, what in the world can he see
in her? He must be a bit of a chump, when all's said and done. She's
got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are
filthy. I can tell you, a little shop girl would be ashamed to be seen
in her knickers. Do just look at his eyes a moment; you would jump
into the fire for a man like that. Hush, don't say a word; he's seen
me; look, he's smiling. Oh, he remembers me all right. Just you
mention my name to him, and see what he says!" Between these girls and
him I surprised a glance of mutual understanding. I should have liked
him to introduce me to them, so that I might ask them for assignations
and they give them to me, even if I had been unable to keep them. For
otherwise their appearance would remain for all time devoid, in my
memory, of that part of itself—just as though it had been hidden by a
veil—which varies in every woman, which we cannot imagine in any
woman until we have actually seen it in her, and which is apparent
only in the glance that she directs at us, that acquiesces in our
desire and promises that it shall be satisfied. And yet, even when
thus reduced, their aspect was for me far more than that of women whom
I should have known to be virtuous, and it seemed to me not to be,
like theirs, flat, with nothing behind it, fashioned in one piece with
no solidity. It was not, of course, for me what it must be for
Saint–Loup who, by an act of memory, beneath the indifference,
transparent to him, of the motionless features which affected not to
know him, or beneath the dull formality of the greeting that might
equally well have been addressed to anyone else, could recall, could
see, through dishevelled locks, a swooning mouth, a pair of
half–closed eyes, a whole silent picture like those that painters, to
cheat their visitors' senses, drape with a decent covering.
Undoubtedly, for me who felt that nothing of my personality had
penetrated the surface of this woman or that, or would be borne by her
upon the unknown ways which she would tread through life, those faces
remained sealed. But it was quite enough to know that they did open,
for them to seem to me of a price which I should not have set on them
had they been but precious medals, instead of lockets within which
were hidden memories of love. As for Robert, scarcely able to keep in
his place at table, concealing beneath a courtier's smile his
warrior's thirst for action—when I examined him I could see how
closely the vigorous structure of his triangular face must have been
modelled on that of his ancestors' faces, a face devised rather for an
ardent bowman than for a delicate student. Beneath his fine skin the
bold construction, the feudal architecture were apparent. His head
made one think of those old dungeon keeps on which the disused
battlements are still to be seen, although inside they have been
converted into libraries.