In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (74 page)

Often we encountered Bloch's sisters, to whom I was obliged to bow
since I had dined with their father. My new friends did not know them.
"I am not allowed to play with Israelites," Albertine explained. Her
way of pronouncing the word—'Issraelites' instead of
'Izraelites'—would in itself have sufficed to shew, even if one had
not heard the rest of the sentence, that it was no feeling of
friendliness towards the chosen race that inspired these young
Frenchwomen, brought up in God–fearing homes, and quite ready to
believe that the Jews were in the habit of massacring Christian
children. "Besides, they're shocking bad form, your friends," said
Andrée with a smile which implied that she knew very well that they
were no friends of mine. "Like everything to do with the tribe," went
on Albertine, in the sententious tone of one who spoke from personal
experience. To tell the truth, Bloch's sisters, at once overdressed
and half naked, with their languishing, bold, blatant, sluttish air
did not create the best impression. And one of their cousins, who was
only fifteen, scandalised the Casino by her unconcealed admiration for
Mlle. Lea, whose talent as an actress M. Bloch senior rated very high,
but whose tastes were understood to lead her not exactly in the
direction of the gentlemen.

Some days we took our refreshment at one of the outlying farms which
catered to visitors. These were the farms known as Les Ecorres,
Marie–Thérèse, La Croix d'Heuland, Bagatelle, Californie and
Marie–Antoinette. It was the last that had been adopted by the little
band.

But at other times, instead of going to a farm, we would climb to the
highest point of the cliff, and, when we had reached it and were
seated on the grass, would undo our parcel of sandwiches and cakes. My
friends preferred the sandwiches, and were surprised to see me eat
only a single chocolate cake, sugared with gothic tracery, or an
apricot tart. This was because, with the sandwiches of cheese or of
green–stuff, a form of food that was novel to me and knew nothing of
the past, I had nothing in common. But the cakes understood, the tarts
were gossips. There were in the former an insipid taste of cream, in
the latter a fresh taste of fruit which knew all about Combray, and
about Gilberte, not only the Gilberte of Combray but her too of Paris,
at whose tea–parties I had found them again. They reminded me of those
cake–plates of the Arabian Nights pattern, the subjects on which were
such a distraction to my aunt Léonie when Françoise brought her up,
one day, Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp, another day Ali–Baba, or the
Sleeper Awakes, or Sinbad the Sailor embarking at Bassorah with all
his treasure. I should dearly have liked to see them again, but my
grandmother did not know what had become of them, and thought moreover
that they were just common plates that had been bought in the village.
No matter, in that grey, midland Combray scene they and their pictures
were set like many–coloured jewels, as in the dark church were the
windows with their shifting radiance, as in the dusk of my bedroom
were the projections cast by the magic–lantern, as in the foreground
of the view of the railway–station and the little local line the
buttercups from the Indies and the Persian lilacs, as were my
great–aunt's shelves of old porcelain in the sombre dwelling of an
elderly lady in a country town.

Stretched out on the cliff I would see before me nothing but grassy
meadows and beyond them not the seven heavens of the Christian
cosmogony but two stages only, one of a deeper blue, the sea, and over
it another more pale. We ate our food, and if I had brought with me
also some little keepsake which might appeal to one or other of my
friends, joy sprang with such sudden violence into her translucent
face, flushed in an instant, that her lips had not the strength to
hold it in, and to allow it to escape parted in a shout of laughter.
They had gathered close round me, and between their faces which were
almost touching one another the air that separated them traced azure
pathways such as might have been cut by a gardener wishing to clear
the ground a little so as to be able himself to move freely through a
thicket of roses.

When we had finished eating we would play games which until then I
should have thought boring, sometimes such childish games as King of
the Castle, or Who Laughs First; not for a kingdom would I have
renounced them now; the rosy dawn of adolescence, with which the faces
of these girls were still aglow, and from which I, young as I was, had
already emerged, shed its light on everything round about them and,
like the fluid painting of some of the Primitives, brought out the
most insignificant details of their daily lives in relief against a
golden background. Even the faces of the girls were, for the most
part, clouded with this misty effulgence of a dawn from which their
actual features had not yet emerged. One saw only a charming sheet of
colour beneath which what in a few years' time would be a profile was
not discernible. The profile of to–day had nothing definite about it,
and could be only a momentary resemblance to some deceased member of
the family to whom nature had paid this commemorative courtesy. It
comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for, when
the body is fixed in an immobility which holds no fresh surprise in
store, when one loses all hope on seeing—as on a tree in the height
of summer leaves already brown—round a face still young hair that is
growing thin or turning grey; it is so short, that radiant morning
time that one comes to like only the very youngest girls, those in
whom the flesh, like a precious leaven, is still at work. They are no
more yet than a stream of ductile matter, moulded ever afresh by the
fleeting impression of the moment. You would say that each of them was
in turn a little statuette of childish gaiety, of a child grown
earnest, coaxing, surprised, taking its pattern from an expression
frank and complete, but fugitive. This plasticity gives a wealth of
variety and charm to the pretty attentions which a little girl pays to
us. Of course, such attentions are indispensable in the woman also,
and she whom we do not attract, or who fails to let us see that we
have attracted her, tends to assume in our eyes a somewhat tedious
uniformity. But even these pretty attentions, after a certain age,
cease to send gentle ripples over a face which the struggle for
existence has hardened, has rendered unalterably militant or ecstatic.
One—owing to the prolonged strain of the obedience that subjects wife
to husband—will seem not so much a woman's face as a soldier's;
another, carved by the sacrifices which a mother has consented to
make, day after day, for her children, will be the face of an
apostle. A third is, after a stormy passage through the years, the
face of an ancient mariner, upon a body of which its garments alone
indicate the sex. Certainly the attentions that a woman pays us can
still, so long as we are in love with her, scatter fresh charms over
the hours that we spend in her company. But she is not then for us a
series of different women. Her gaiety remains external to an
unchanging face. Whereas adolescence is anterior to this complete
solidification; and from this it follows that we feel, in the company
of young girls, the refreshing sense that is afforded us by the
spectacle of forms undergoing an incessant process of change, a play
of unstable forces which makes us think of that perpetual re–creation
of the primordial elements of nature which we contemplate when we
stand by the sea.

It was not merely a social engagement, a drive with Mme. de
Villeparisis, that I would have sacrificed to the 'Ferret' or
'Guessing Games' of my friends. More than once, Robert de Saint–Loup
had sent word that, since I was not coming to see him at Doncières, he
had applied for twenty–four hours' leave, which he would spend at
Balbec. Each time I wrote back that he was on no account to come,
offering the excuse that I should be obliged to be away myself that
very day, when I had some duty call to pay with my grandmother on
family friends in the neighbourhood. No doubt I fell in his estimation
when he learned from his aunt in what the 'duty call' consisted, and
who the persons were who combined to play the part of my grandmother.
And yet I had not been wrong, perhaps, after all, in sacrificing not
only the vain pleasures of the world but the real pleasure of
friendship to that of spending the whole day in this green garden.
People who enjoy the capacity—it is true that such people are
artists, and I had long been convinced that I should never be
that—are also under an obligation to live for themselves. And
friendship is a dispensation from this duty, an abdication of self.
Even conversation, which is the mode of expression of friendship, is a
superficial digression which gives us no new acquisition. We may talk
for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity
of a minute, whereas the march of thought in the solitary travail of
artistic creation proceeds downwards, into the depths, in the only
direction that is not closed to us, along which we are free to
advance—though with more effort, it is true—towards a goal of truth.
And friendship is not merely devoid of virtue, like conversation, it
is fatal to us as well. For the sense of boredom which it is
impossible not to feel in a friend's company (when, that is to say, we
must remain exposed on the surface of our consciousness, instead of
pursuing our voyage of discovery into the depths) for those of us in
whom the law of development is purely internal—that first impression
of boredom our friendship impels us to correct when we are alone
again, to recall with emotion the words uttered by our friend, to look
upon them as a valuable addition to our substance, albeit we are not
like buildings to which stones can be added from without, but like
trees which draw from their own sap the knot that duly appears on
their trunks, the spreading roof of their foliage. I was lying to
myself, I was interrupting the process of growth in that direction in
which I could indeed really be enlarged and made happy, when I
congratulated myself on being liked, admired, by so good, so clever,
so rare a creature as Saint–Loup, when I focussed my mind, not upon my
own obscure impressions which duty bade me unravel, but on the words
uttered by my friend, in which, when I repeated them to myself—when I
had them repeated to me by that other self who dwells in us and on to
whom we are always so ready to transfer the burden of taking
thought,—I strove to make myself find a beauty very different from
that which I used to pursue in silence when I was really alone, but
one that would enhance the merit of Robert, of myself, of my life. In
the life which a friend like this provided for me, I seemed to myself
to be comfortably preserved from solitude, nobly desirous of
sacrificing myself for him, in fact quite incapable of realising
myself. Among the girls, on the other hand, if the pleasure which I
enjoyed was selfish, at least it was not based on the lie which seeks
to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone, and which, when
we talk to another person, prevents us from admitting that it is no
longer we who speak, that we are fashioning ourselves in the likeness
of strangers and not of our own ego, which is quite different from
them. The words that passed between the girls of the little band and
myself were not of any interest; they were, moreover, but few, broken
by long spells of silence on my part. All of which did not prevent me
from finding, in listening to them when they spoke to me, as much
pleasure as in gazing at them, in discovering in the voice of each one
of them a brightly coloured picture. It was with ecstasy that I caught
their pipings. Love helps us to discern things, to discriminate.
Standing in a wood, the lover of birds at once distinguishes the notes
of the different species, which to ordinary people sound the same.
The lover of girls knows that human voices vary even more. Each one
possesses more notes than the richest instrument of music. And the
combinations in which the voice groups those notes are as
inexhaustible as the infinite variety of personalities. When I talked
with any one of my friends I was conscious that the original, the
unique portrait of her individuality had been skilfully traced,
tyranically imposed on my mind as much by the inflexions of her voice
as by those of her face, and that these were two separate spectacles
which rendered, each in its own plane, the same single reality. No
doubt the lines of the voice, like those of the face, were not yet
definitely fixed; the voice had still to break, as the face to change.
Just as children have a gland the secretion in which enables them to
digest milk, a gland which is not found in grown men and women, so
there were in the twitterings of these girls notes which women's
voices no longer contain. And on this instrument with its greater
compass they played with their lips, shewing all the application, the
ardour of Bellini's little angel musicians, qualities which also are
an exclusive appanage of youth. Later on these girls would lose that
note of enthusiastic conviction which gave a charm to their simplest
utterances, whether it were Albertine who, in a tone of authority,
repeated puns to which the younger ones listened with admiration,
until that wild impulse to laugh caught them all with the irresistible
violence of a sneeze, or Andrée who began to speak of their work in
the schoolroom, work even more childish seemingly than the games they
played, with a gravity essentially puerile; and their words changed in
tone, like the lyrics of ancient times when poetry, still hardly
differentiated from music, was declaimed upon the different notes of a
scale. In spite of which, the girls' voices already gave a quite clear
indication of the attitude that each of these little people had
adopted towards life, an attitude so personal that it would be
speaking in far too general terms to say of one: "She treats
everything as a joke," of another: "She jumps from assertion to
assertion," of a third: "She lives in a state of expectant
hesitation." The features of our face are hardly more than gestures
which force of habit has made permanent. Nature, like the destruction
of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has
arrested us in an accustomed movement. Similarly, our intonations
embody our philosophy of life, what a person says to himself about
things at any given moment. No doubt these peculiarities were
to be found not only in the girls. They were those of their parents.
The individual is a part of something that is more generally diffused
than himself. By this reckoning, our parents furnish us not only with
those habitual gestures which are the outlines of our face and voice,
but also with certain mannerisms in speech, certain favourite
expressions, which, almost as unconscious as an intonation, almost as
profound, indicate likewise a definite point of view towards life. It
is quite true, since we are speaking of girls, that there are certain
of these expressions which their parents do not hand on to them until
they have reached a certain age, as a rule not before they are women.
These are kept in reserve. Thus, for instance, if you were to speak of
the pictures of one of Elstir's friends, Andrée, whose hair was still
'down,' could not yet make use, personally, of the expression which
her mother and elder sister employed: "It appears, the man is quite
charming!" But that would come in due course, when she was allowed to
go to the Palais–Royal. And already, since her first communion,
Albertine had begun to say, like a friend of her aunt: "I'm sure I
should find that simply terrible!" She had also had given to her, as
a little present, the habit of repeating whatever you had just been
saying to her, so as to appear to be interested, and to be trying to
form an opinion of her own. If you said that an artist's work was
good, or his house nice, "Oh, his work is good, is it?" "Oh, his house
is nice, is it?" Last of all, and even more general than the family
heritage, was the rich layer imposed by the native province from which
they derived their voices and of which indeed their intonations
smacked. When Andrée sharply struck a solemn note she could not
prevent the Perigordian string of her vocal instrument from giving
back a resonant sound quite in harmony, moreover, with the Meridional
purity of her features; while to the incessant pranks of Rosemonde the
substance of her North–Country face and voice responded, whatever her
mood at the time, in the accent of their province. Between that
province and the temperament of the little girl who dictated these
inflexions, I caught a charming dialogue. A dialogue, not in any
sense a discord. It would not have been possible to separate the girl
herself and her native place. She was herself; she was still it also.
Moreover this reaction of locally procured materials on the genius who
utilises them and to whose work their reaction imparts an added
freshness, does not make the work any less individual, and whether it
be that of an architect, a cabinet–maker or a composer, it reflects no
less minutely the most subtle shades of the artist's personality,
because he has been compelled to work in the millstone of Senlis or
the red sandstone of Strasbourg, has respected the knots peculiar to
the ash–tree, has borne in mind, when writing his score, the
resources, the limitations, the volume of sound, the possibilities of
flute or alto voice.