In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (66 page)

At last he had applied the final brush–stroke to his flowers; I
sacrificed a minute to look at them; I acquired no merit by the act,
for I knew that there was no chance now of our finding the girls on
the beach; and yet, had I believed them to be still there, and that
these wasted moments would make me miss them, I should have stopped to
look none the less, for I should have told myself that Elstir was more
interested in his flowers than in my meeting with the girls. My
grandmother's nature, a nature that was the exact counterpart of my
complete egoism, was nevertheless reflected in certain aspects of my
own. In circumstances in which someone to whom I was indifferent, for
whom I had always made a show of affection or respect, ran the risk
merely of some unpleasantness whereas I was in real danger, I could
not have done otherwise than commiserate with him on his annoyance as
though it had been something important, and treat my own danger as
nothing, because I would feel that these were the proportions in which
he must see things. To be quite accurate, I would go even further, and
not only not complain of the danger in which I myself stood but go
half–way to meet it, and with that which involved other people try, on
the contrary, were I to increase the risk of my being caught myself,
to avert it from them. The reasons for this are several, none of which
does me the slightest credit. One is that if, while only my reason was
employed, I have always believed in self–preservation, whenever in the
course of my existence I have found myself obsessed by moral
anxieties, or merely by nervous scruples, so puerile often that I dare
not enumerate them here, if an unforeseen circumstance then arose,
involving for me the risk of being killed, this new preoccupation was
so trivial in comparison with the others that I welcomed it with a
sense of relief, almost of hilarity. Thus I find myself, albeit the
least courageous of men, to have known that feeling which has always
seemed to me, in my reasoning moods, so foreign to my nature, so
inconceivable, the intoxication of danger. But even although I were,
when any, even a deadly peril threatened me, passing through an
entirely calm and happy phase, I could not, were I with another
person, refrain from sheltering him behind me and choosing for myself
the post of danger. When a sufficient store of experience had taught
me that I invariably acted, and enjoyed acting, thus, I
discovered—and was deeply ashamed by the discovery—that it was
because, in contradiction of what I had always believed and asserted,
I was extremely sensitive to the opinions of others. Not that this
kind of unconfessed self–esteem is in any sense vanity or conceit. For
what might satisfy one or other of those failings would give me no
pleasure, and I have always refrained from indulging them. But with
the people in whose company I have succeeded in concealing most
effectively the slight advantages a knowledge of which might have
given them a less derogatory idea of myself, I have never been able to
deny myself the pleasure of shewing them that I take more trouble to
avert the risk of death from their path than from my own. As my motive
is then self–esteem and not valour, I find it quite natural that in
any crisis they should act differently. I am far from blaming them
for it, as I should perhaps if I had been moved by a sense of duty, a
duty which would seem to me, in that case, to be as incumbent upon
them as upon myself. On the contrary, I feel that it is eminently
sensible of them to safeguard their lives, though at the same time I
cannot prevent my own safety from receding into the background, which
is particularly silly and culpable of me since I have come to realise
that the lives of many of the people in front of whom I plant myself
when a bomb bursts are more valueless even than my own. However, on
the day of this first visit to Elstir, the time was still distant at
which I was to become conscious of this difference in value, and there
was no question of danger, but simply—a harbinger this of that
pernicious self–esteem—the question of my not appearing to attach to
the pleasure which I so ardently desired more importance than to the
work which the painter had still to finish. It was finished at last.
And, once we were out of doors, I discovered that—so long were the
days still at this season—it was not so late as I had supposed; we
strolled down to the 'front.' What stratagems I employed to keep
Elstir standing at the spot where I thought that the girls might still
come past. Pointing to the cliffs that towered beside us, I kept on
asking him to tell me about them, so as to make him forget the time
and stay there a little longer. I felt that we had a better chance of
waylaying the little band if we moved towards the end of the beach. "I
should like to look at those cliffs with you from a little nearer," I
said to him, having noticed that one of the girls was in the habit of
going in that direction. "And as we go, do tell me about Carquethuit.
I should so like to see Carquethuit," I went on, without thinking
that the so novel character which manifested itself with such force in
Elstir's
Carquethuit Harbour
, might belong perhaps rather to the
painter's vision than to any special quality in the place itself.
"Since I've seen your picture, I think that is where I should most
like to go, there and to the Pointe du Raz, but of course that would
be quite a journey from here." "Yes, and besides, even if it weren't
nearer, I should advise you perhaps all the same to visit
Carquethuit," he replied. "The Pointe du Raz is magnificent, but after
all it is simply the high cliff of Normandy or Brittany which you know
already. Carquethuit is quite different, with those rocks bursting
from a level shore. I know nothing in France like it, it reminds me
rather of what one sees in some parts of Florida. It is most
interesting, and for that matter extremely wild too. It is between
Clitourps and Nehomme; you know how desolate those parts are; the
sweep of the coast–line is delicious. Here, the coast–line is like
anywhere else; but along there I can't tell you what charm it has,
what softness."

Night was falling; it was time to be turning homewards; I was
escorting Elstir in the direction of his villa when suddenly, as it
were Mephistopheles springing up before Faust, there appeared at the
end of the avenue—like simply an objectification, unreal, diabolical,
of the temperament diametrically opposed to my own, of the
semi–barbarous and cruel vitality of which I, in my weakness, my
excess of tortured sensibility and intellectuality was so destitute—a
few spots of the essence impossible to mistake for anything else in
the world, a few spores of the zoophytic band of girls, who wore an
air of not having seen me but were unquestionably, for all that,
proceeding as they advanced to pass judgment on me in their ironic
vein. Feeling that a collision between them and us was now inevitable,
and that Elstir would be certain to call me, I turned my back, like a
bather preparing to meet the shock of a wave; I stopped dead and,
leaving my eminent companion to pursue his way, remained where I was,
stooping, as if I had suddenly become engrossed in it, towards the
window of the curiosity shop which we happened to be passing at the
moment. I was not sorry to give the appearance of being able to think
of something other than these girls, and I was already dimly aware
that when Elstir did call me up to introduce me to them I should wear
that sort of challenging expression which betokens not surprise but
the wish to appear as though one were surprised—so far is every one
of us a bad actor, or everyone else a good thought–reader;—that I
should even go so far as to point a finger to my breast, as who should
ask "It is me, really, that you want?" and then run to join him, my
head lowered in compliance and docility and my face coldly masking my
annoyance at being torn from the study of old pottery in order to be
introduced to people whom I had no wish to know. Meanwhile I explored
the window and waited for the moment in which my name, shouted by
Elstir, would come to strike me like an expected and innocuous bullet.
The certainty of being introduced to these girls had had the result of
making me not only feign complete indifference to them, but actually
to feel it. Inevitable from this point, the pleasure of knowing them
began at once to shrink, became less to me than the pleasure of
talking to Saint–Loup, of dining with my grandmother, of making, in
the neighbourhood of Balbec, excursions which I would regret the
probability, in consequence of my having to associate with people who
could scarcely be much interested in old buildings, of my being forced
to abandon. Moreover, what diminished the pleasure which I was about
to feel was not merely the imminence but the incoherence of its
realisation. Laws as precise as those of hydrostatics maintain the
relative position of the images which we form in a fixed order, which
the coming event at once upsets. Elstir was just about to call me.
This was not at all the fashion in which I had so often, on the beach,
in my bedroom, imagined myself making these girls' acquaintance. What
was about to happen was a different event, for which I was not
prepared. I recognised neither my desire nor its object; I regretted
almost that I had come out with Elstir. But, above all, the shrinking
of the pleasure that I expected to feel was due to the certainty that
nothing, now, could take that pleasure from me. And it resumed, as
though by some latent elasticity in itself, its whole extent when it
ceased to be subjected to the pressure of that certainty, at the
moment when, having decided to turn my head, I saw Elstir, standing
where he had stopped a few feet away with the girls, bidding them
good–bye. The face of the girl who stood nearest to him, round and
plump and glittering with the light in her eyes, reminded me of a cake
on the top of which a place has been kept for a morsel of blue sky.
Her eyes, even when fixed on an object, gave one the impression of
motion, just as on days of high wind the air, although invisible, lets
us perceive the speed with which it courses between us and the
unchanging azure. For a moment her gaze intersected mine, like those
travelling skies on stormy days which hurry after a rain–cloud that
moves less rapidly than they, overtake, touch, cover, pass it and are
gone; but they do not know one another, and are soon driven far apart.
So our eyes were for a moment confronted, neither pair knowing what
the celestial continent that lay before their gaze held of future
blessing or disaster. Only at the moment when her gaze was directly
coincident with mine, without slackening its movement it grew
perceptibly duller. So on a starry night the wind–swept moon passes
behind a cloud and veils her brightness for a moment, but soon will
shine again. But Elstir had already said goodbye to the girls, and had
never summoned me. They disappeared down a cross street; he came
towards me. My whole plan was spoiled.

I have said that Albertine had not seemed to me that day to be the
same as on previous days and that afterwards, each time I saw her, she
was to appear different. But I felt at that moment that certain
modifications in the appearance, the importance, the stature of a
person may also be due to the variability of certain states of
consciousness interposed between that person and us. One of those that
play an important part in such transformations is belief; that evening
my belief, then the vanishing of my belief, that I was about to know
Albertine had, with a few seconds' interval only, rendered her almost
insignificant, then infinitely precious in my sight; some years later,
the belief, then the disappearance of the belief, that Albertine was
faithful to me brought about similar changes.

Of course, long ago, at Combray, I had seen shrink or stretch,
according to the time of day, according as I was entering one or the
other of the two dominant moods that governed my sensibility in turn,
my grief at not having my mother with me, as imperceptible all
afternoon as is the moon's light when the sun is shining, and then,
when night had come, reigning alone in my anxious heart in the place
of recent memories now obliterated. But on that day at Balbec, when I
saw that Elstir was leaving the girls and had not called me, I learned
for the first time that the variations in the importance which a
pleasure or a pain has in our eyes may depend not merely on this
alternation of two moods, but on the displacement of invisible
beliefs, such, for example, as make death seem to us of no account
because they bathe it in a glow of unreality, and thus enable us to
attach importance to our attending an evening party, which would lose
much of its charm for if, on the announcement that we were sentenced
to die by the guillotine, the belief that had bathed the party in its
warm glow was instantly shattered; and this part that belief plays, it
is true that something in me was aware of it; this was my will; but
its knowledge is vain if the mind, the heart continue in ignorance;
these last act in good faith when they believe that we are anxious to
forsake a mistress to whom our will alone knows that we are still
attached. This is because they are clouded by the belief that we shall
see her again at any moment. But let this belief be shattered, let
them suddenly become aware that this mistress is gone from us for
ever, then the mind and heart, having lost their focus, are driven
like mad things, the meanest pleasure becomes infinitely great.

Variance of a belief, annulment also of love, which, pre–existent and
mobile, comes to rest at the image of any one woman simply because
that woman will be almost impossible of attainment. Thenceforward we
think not so much of the woman of whom we find difficult in forming an
exact picture, as of the means of getting to know her. A whole series
of agonies develops and is sufficient to fix our love definitely upon
her who is its almost unknown object. Our love becomes immense; we
never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies. And if
suddenly, as at the moment when I had seen Elstir stop to talk to the
girls, we cease to be uneasy, to suffer pain, since it is this pain
that is the whole of our love, it seems to us as though love had
abruptly vanished at the moment when at length we grasp the prey to
whose value we had not given enough thought before. What did I know of
Albertine? One or two glimpses of a profile against the sea, less
beautiful, assuredly, than those of Veronese's women whom I ought, had
I been guided by purely aesthetic reasons, to have preferred to her.
By what other reasons could I be guided, since, my anxiety having
subsided, I could recapture only those mute profiles; I possessed
nothing of her besides. Since my first sight of Albertine I had
meditated upon her daily, a thousandfold, I had carried on with what I
called by her name an interminable unspoken dialogue in which I made
her question me, answer me, think and act, and in the infinite series
of imaginary Albertines who followed one after the other in my fancy,
hour after hour, the real Albertine, a glimpse caught on the beach,
figured only at the head, just as the actress who creates a part, the
star, appears, out of a long series of performances, in the few first
alone. That Albertine was scarcely more than a silhouette, all that
was superimposed being of my own growth, so far when we are in love
does the contribution that we ourself make outweigh—even if we
consider quantity only—those that come to us from the beloved object.
And the same is true of love that is given its full effect. There are
loves that manage not only to be formed but to subsist around a very
little core—even among those whose prayer has been answered after the
flesh. An old drawing–master who had taught my grandmother had been
presented by some obscure mistress with a daughter. The mother died
shortly after the birth of her child, and the drawing–master was so
broken–hearted that he did not long survive her. In the last months of
his life my grandmother and some of the Combray ladies, who had never
liked to make any allusion in the drawing–master's presence to the
woman, with whom, for that matter, he had not officially 'lived' and
had had comparatively slight relations, took it into their heads to
ensure the little girl's future by combining to purchase an annuity
for her. It was my grandmother who suggested this; several of her
friends made difficulties; after all was the child really such a very
interesting case, was she even the child of her reputed father; with
women like that, it was never safe to say. Finally, everything was
settled. The child came to thank the ladies. She was plain, and so
absurdly like the old drawing–master as to remove every shadow of
doubt; her hair being the only nice thing about her, one of the ladies
said to her father, who had come with her: "What pretty hair she has."
And thinking that now, the woman who had sinned being dead and the old
man only half alive, a discreet allusion to that past of which they
had always pretended to know nothing could do no harm, my grandmother
added: "It runs in families. Did her mother have pretty hair like
that?" "I don't know," was the old man's quaint answer. "I never saw
her except with a hat on."