In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (69 page)

When Elstir asked me to come with him so that he might introduce me to
Albertine, who was sitting a little farther down the room, I first of
all finished eating a coffee
éclair
and, with a show of keen
interest, asked an old gentleman whose acquaintance I had just made
(and thought that I might, perhaps, offer him the rose in my
buttonhole which he had admired) to tell me more about the old Norman
fairs. This is not to say that the introduction which followed did not
give me any pleasure, nor assume a definite importance in my eyes. But
so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was not conscious of it,
naturally, until some time later, when, once more in the hotel, and in
my room alone, I had become myself again. Pleasure in this respect is
like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object,
is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home,
and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the
entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.

If my consciousness of the pleasure it had brought me was thus
retarded by a few hours, the importance of this introduction I felt
immediately. At such moments of introduction, for all that we feel
ourselves to have been suddenly enriched, to have been furnished with
a pass that will admit us henceforward to pleasures which we have been
pursuing for weeks past, but in vain, we realise only too clearly that
this acquisition puts an end for us not merely to hours of toilsome
search—a relief that could only fill us with joy—but also to the
very existence of a certain person, her whom our imagination had
wildly distorted, our anxious fear that we might never become known to
her enlarged. At the moment when our name sounds on the lips of the
person introducing us, especially if he amplifies it, as Elstir was
now doing, with a flattering account of us—in that sacramental
moment, as when in a fairy tale the magician commands a person
suddenly to become someone else, she to whose presence we have been
longing to attain vanishes; how could she remain the same when, for
one thing—owing to the attention which the stranger is obliged to pay
to the announcement of our name and the sight of our person—in the
eyes that only yesterday were situated at an infinite distance (where
we supposed that our eyes, wandering, uncontrolled, desperate,
divergent, would never succeed in meeting them) the conscious gaze,
the incommunicable thought which we have been seeking have been
miraculously and quite simply replaced by our own image, painted in
them as though behind the glass of a smiling mirror. If this
incarnation of ourself in the person who seems to differ most from us
is what does most to modify the appearance of the person to whom we
have just been introduced, the form of that person still remains quite
vague; and we are free to ask ourself whether she will turn out to be
a god, a table or a basin. But, as nimble as the wax–modellers who
will fashion a bust before our eyes in five minutes, the few words
which the stranger is now going to say to us will substantiate her
form, will give her something positive and final that will exclude all
the hypotheses by which, a moment ago, our desire, our imagination
were being tempted. Doubtless, even before her coming to this party,
Albertine had ceased to be to me simply that sole phantom worthy to
haunt our life which is what remains of a passing stranger, of whom we
know nothing and have caught but the barest glimpse. Her relation to
Mme. Bontemps had already restricted the scope of those marvellous
hypotheses, by stopping one of the channels along which they might
have spread. As I drew closer to the girl, and began to know her
better, my knowledge of her underwent a process of subtraction, all
the factors of imagination and desire giving place to a notion which
was worth infinitely less, a notion to which, it must be admitted,
there was added presently what was more or less the equivalent, in the
domain of real life, of what joint stock companies give one, after
paying interest on one's capital, and call a bonus. Her name, her
family connexions had been the original limit set to my suppositions.
Her friendly greeting while, standing close beside her, I saw once
again the tiny mole on her cheek, below her eye, marked another stage;
last of all, I was surprised to hear her use the adverb 'perfectly'
(in place of 'quite') of two people whom she mentioned, saying of one:
"She is perfectly mad, but very nice for all that," and of the other,
"He is a perfectly common man, a perfect bore." However little to be
commended this use of 'perfectly' may be, it indicates a degree of
civilisation and culture which I could never have imagined as having
been attained by the bacchante with the bicycle, the frenzied muse of
the golf–course. Nor did it mean that after this first transformation
Albertine was not to change again for me, many times. The good and bad
qualities which a person presents to us, exposed to view on the
surface of his or her face, rearrange themselves in a totally
different order if we approach them from another angle—just as, in a
town, buildings that appear strung irregularly along a single line,
from another aspect retire into a graduated distance, and their
relative heights are altered. To begin with, Albertine now struck me
as not implacable so much as almost frightened; she seemed to me
rather respectably than ill bred, judging by the description, 'bad
style,' 'a comic manner' which she applied to each in turn of the
girls of whom I spoke to her; finally, she presented as a target for
my line of sight a temple that was distinctly flushed and hardly
attractive to the eye, and no longer the curious gaze which I had
always connected with her until then. But this was merely a second
impression and there were doubtless others through which I was
successively to pass. Thus it can be only after one has recognised,
not without having had to feel one's way, the optical illusions of
one's first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of
another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible. But it
is not; for while our original impression of him undergoes correction,
the person himself, not being an inanimate object, changes in himself,
we think that we have caught him, he moves, and, when we imagine that
at last we are seeing him clearly, it is only the old impressions
which we had already formed of him that we have succeeded in making
clearer, when they no longer represent him.

And yet, whatever the inevitable disappointments that it must bring in
its train, this movement towards what we have only half seen, what we
have been free to dwell upon and imagine at our leisure, this movement
is the only one that is wholesome for the senses, that whets the
appetite. How dreary a monotony must pervade those people's lives
who, from indolence or timidity, drive in their carriages straight
to the doors of friends whom they have got to know without having
first dreamed of knowing them, without ever daring, on the way, to
stop and examine what arouses their desire.

I returned home, my mind full of the party, the coffee
éclair
which
I had finished eating before I let Elstir take me up to Albertine, the
rose which I had given the old gentleman, all the details selected
without our knowledge by the circumstances of the occasion, which
compose in a special and quite fortuitous order the picture that we
retain of a first meeting. But this picture, I had the impression that
I was seeing it from a fresh point of view, a long way remote from
myself, realising that it had not existed only for me, when some
months later, to my great surprise, on my speaking to Albertine on the
day on which I had first met her, she reminded me of the éclair, the
flower that I had given away, all those things which I had supposed to
have been—I will not say of importance only to myself but—perceived
only by myself, and which I now found thus transcribed, in a version
the existence of which I had never suspected, in the mind of
Albertine. On this first day itself, when, on my return to the hotel,
I was able to visualise the memory which I had brought away with me, I
realised the consummate adroitness with which the sleight of hand had
been performed, and how I had talked for a moment or two with a person
who, thanks to the skill of the conjurer, without actually embodying
anything of that other person whom I had for so long been following as
she paced beside the sea, had been effectively substituted for her. I
might, for that matter, have guessed as much in advance, since the
girl of the beach was a fabrication invented by myself. In spite of
which, as I had, in my conversations with Elstir, identified her with
this other girl, I felt myself in honour bound to fulfil to the real
the promises of love made to the imagined Albertine. We betroth
ourselves by proxy, and think ourselves obliged, in the sequel, to
marry the person who has intervened. Moreover, if there had
disappeared, provisionally at any rate, from my life, an anguish that
found adequate consolation in the memory of polite manners, of that
expression 'perfectly common' and of the glowing temple, that memory
awakened in me desire of another kind which, for all that it was
placid and not at all painful, resembling rather brotherly love, might
in the long run become fully as dangerous by making me feel at every
moment a compelling need to kiss this new person, whose charming ways,
shyness, unlooked–for accessibility, arrested the futile process of my
imagination but gave birth to a sentimental gratitude. And then, since
memory begins at once to record photographs independent of one
another, eliminates every link, any kind of sequence from between the
scenes portrayed in the collection which it exposes to our view, the
most recent does not necessarily destroy or cancel those that came
before. Confronted with the commonplace though appealing Albertine to
whom I had spoken that afternoon, I still saw the other, mysterious
Albertine outlined against the sea. These were now memories, that is
to say pictures neither of which now seemed to me any more true than
the other. But, to make an end of this first afternoon of my
introduction to Albertine, when trying to recapture that little mole
on her cheek, just under the eye, I remembered that, looking from
Elstir's window, when Albertine had gone by, I had seen the mole on
her chin. In fact, whenever I saw her I noticed that she had a mole,
but my inaccurate memory made it wander about the face of Albertine,
fixing it now in one place, now in another.

Whatever my disappointment in finding in Mlle. Simonet a girl so
little different from those that I knew already, just as my rude
awakening when I saw Balbec Church did not prevent me from wishing
still to go to Quimperlé, Pont–Aven and Venice, I comforted myself
with the thought that through Albertine at any rate, even if she
herself was not all that I had hoped, I might make the acquaintance of
her comrades of the little band.

I thought at first that I should fail. As she was to be staying (and I
too) for a long time still at Balbec, I had decided that the best
thing was not to make my efforts to meet her too apparent, but to wait
for an accidental encounter. But should this occur every day, even, it
was greatly to be feared that she would confine herself to
acknowledging my bow from a distance, and such meetings, repeated day
after day throughout the whole season, would benefit me not at all.

Shortly after this, one morning when it had been raining and was
almost cold, I was accosted on the 'front' by a girl wearing a
close–fitting toque and carrying a muff, so different from the girl
whom I had met at Elstir's party that to recognise in her the same
person seemed an operation beyond the power of the human mind; mine
was, nevertheless, successful in performing it, but after a momentary
surprise which did not, I think, escape Albertine's notice. On the
other hand, when I instinctively recalled the good breeding which had
so impressed me before, she filled me with a converse astonishment by
her rude tone and manners typical of the 'little band.' Apart from
these, her temple had ceased to be the optical centre, on which the
eye might comfortably rest, of her face, either because I was now on
her other side, or because her toque hid it, or else possibly because
its inflammation was not a constant thing. "What weather!" she began.
"Really the perpetual summer of Balbec is all stuff and nonsense. You
don't go in for anything special here, do you? We don't ever see you
playing golf, or dancing at the Casino. You don't ride, either. You
must be bored stiff. You don't find it too deadly, staying about on
the beach all day? I see, you just bask in the sun like a lizard; you
enjoy that. You must have plenty of time on your hands. I can see
you're not like me; I simply adore all sports. You weren't at the
Sogne races! We went in the 'tram,' and I can quite believe you don't
see the fun of going in an old 'tin–pot' like that. It took us two
whole hours! I could have gone there and back three times on my bike."
I, who had been lost in admiration of Saint–Loup when he, in the most
natural manner in the world, called the little local train the
'crawler,' because of the ceaseless windings of its line, was
positively alarmed by the glibness with which Albertine spoke of
the 'tram,' and called it a 'tin–pot.' I could feel her mastery of a
form of speech in which I was afraid of her detecting and scorning my
inferiority. And yet the full wealth of the synonyms that the little
band possessed to denote this railway had not yet been revealed to me.
In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless, her nostrils closed,
allowing only the corners of her lips to move. The result of this was
a drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered
perhaps a provincial descent, a juvenile affectation of British
phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive
hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose. This enunciation which, as it
happened, soon disappeared when she knew people better, giving place
to a natural girlish tone, might have been thought unpleasant. But it
was peculiar to herself, and delighted me. Whenever I had gone for
several days without seeing her, I would refresh my spirit by
repeating to myself: "We don't ever see you playing golf," with the
nasal intonation in which she had uttered the words, point blank,
without moving a muscle of her face. And I thought then that there
could be no one in the world so desirable.