In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (78 page)

If Andrée had not believed me when I told her that Albertine's
relatives left me indifferent, that was because she thought that I was
in love with Albertine. And probably she was none too happy in the
thought.

She was generally present as a third party at my meetings with her
friend. And yet there were days when I was to see Albertine by
herself, days to which I looked forward with feverish impatience,
which passed without bringing me any decisive result, without having,
any of them, been that cardinal day whose part I immediately entrusted
to the day that was to follow, which would prove no more apt to play
it; thus there crumbled and collapsed, one after another, like waves
of the sea, those peaks at once replaced by others.

About a month after the day on which we had played 'ferret' together,
I learned that Albertine was going away next morning to spend a couple
of days with Mme. Bontemps, and, since she would have to start early,
was coming to sleep that night at the Grand Hotel, from which, by
taking the omnibus, she would be able, without disturbing the friends
with whom she was staying, to catch the first train in the morning. I
mentioned this to Andrée. "I don't believe a word of it," she replied,
with a look of annoyance. "Anyhow it won't help you at all, for I'm
quite sure Albertine won't want to see you if she goes to the hotel by
herself. It wouldn't be 'regulation,'" she added, employing an epithet
which had recently come into favour with her, in the sense of 'what is
done.' "I tell you this because I understand Albertine. What
difference do you suppose it makes to me, whether you see her or not?
Not the slightest, I can assure you!"

We were joined by Octave who had no hesitation in telling Andrée the
number of strokes he had gone round in, the day before, at golf, then
by Albertine, counting her diabolo as she walked along, like a nun
telling her beads. Thanks to this pastime she could be left alone for
hours on end without growing bored. As soon as she joined us I became
conscious of the obstinate tip of her nose, which I had omitted from
my mental pictures of her during the last few days; beneath her dark
hair the vertical front of her brow controverted—and not for the
first time—the indefinite image that I had preserved of her, while
its whiteness made a vivid splash in my field of vision; emerging from
the dust of memory, Albertine was built up afresh before my eyes. Golf
gives one a taste for solitary pleasures. The pleasure to be derived
from diabolo is undoubtedly one of these. And yet, after she had
joined us, Albertine continued to toss up and catch her missile, just
as a lady on whom friends have come to call does not on their account
stop working at her crochet. "I hear that Mme. de Villeparisis," she
remarked to Octave, "has been complaining to your father." I could
hear, underlying the word, one of those notes that were peculiar to
Albertine; always, just as I had made certain that I had forgotten
them, I would be reminded of a glimpse caught through them before of
Albertine's determined and typically Gallic mien. I might have been
blind, and yet have detected certain of her qualities, alert and
slightly provincial, from those notes, just as plainly as from the tip
of her nose. These were equivalent and might have been substituted for
one another, and her voice was like what we are promised in the
photo–telephone of the future; the visual image was clearly outlined
in the sound. "She's not written only to your father, either, she
wrote to the Mayor of Balbec at the same time, to say that we must
stop playing diabolo on the 'front' as somebody hit her in the face
with one." "Yes, I was hearing about that. It's too silly. There's
little enough to do here as it is." Andrée did not join in the
conversation; she was not acquainted, any more than was Albertine or
Octave, with Mme. de Villeparisis. She did, however, remark: "I can't
think why this lady should make such a song about it. Old Mme. de
Cambremer got hit in the face, and she never complained." "I will
explain the difference," replied Octave gravely, striking a match as
he spoke. "It's my belief that Mme. de Cambremer is a woman of the
world, and Mme. de Villeparisis is just an upstart. Are you playing
golf this afternoon?" And he left us, followed by Andrée. I was alone
now with Albertine. "Do you see," she began, "I'm wearing my hair now
the way you like—look at my ringlet. They all laugh at me and nobody
knows who' I'm doing it for. My aunt will laugh at me too. But I
shan't tell her why, either." I had a sidelong view of Albertine's
cheeks, which often appeared pale, but, seen thus, were flushed with a
coursing stream of blood which lighted them up, gave them that
dazzling clearness which certain winter mornings have when the stones
sparkling in the sun seem blocks of pink granite and radiate joy. The
joy that I was drawing at this moment from the sight of Albertine's
cheeks was equally keen, but led to another desire on my part, which
was not to walk with her but to take her in my arms. I asked her if
the report of her plans which I had heard were correct. "Yes," she
told me, "I shall be sleeping at your hotel to–night, and in fact as
I've got rather a chill, I shall be going to bed before dinner. You
can come and sit by my bed and watch me eat, if you like, and
afterwards we'll play at anything you choose. I should have liked you
to come to the station to–morrow morning, but I'm afraid it might look
rather odd, I don't say to Andrée, who is a sensible person, but to
the others who will be there; if my aunt got to know, I should never
hear the last of it. But we can spend the evening together, at any
rate. My aunt will know nothing about that. I must go and say good–bye
to Andrée. So long, then. Come early, so that we can have a nice long
time together," she added, smiling. At these words I was swept back
past the days in which I loved Gilberte to those in which love seemed
to me not only an external entity but one that could be realised as a
whole. Whereas the Gilberte whom I used to see in the Champs–Elysées
was a different Gilberte from the one whom I found waiting inside
myself when I was alone again, suddenly in the real Albertine, her
whom I saw every day, whom I supposed to be stuffed with middle–class
prejudices and entirely open with her aunt, there was incarnate the
imaginary Albertine, she whom, when I still did not know her, I had
suspected of casting furtive glances at myself on the 'front,' she who
had worn an air of being reluctant to go indoors when she saw me
making off in the other direction.

I went in to dinner with my grandmother. I felt within me a secret
which she could never guess. Similarly with Albertine; to–morrow her
friends would be with her, not knowing what novel experience she and I
had in common; and when she kissed her niece on the brow Mme. Bontemps
would never imagine that I stood between them, in that arrangement of
Albertine's hair which had for its object, concealed from all the
world, to give me pleasure, me who had until then so greatly envied
Mme. Bontemps because, being related to the same people as her niece,
she had the same occasions to don mourning, the same family visits to
pay; and now I found myself meaning more to Albertine than did the
aunt herself. When she was with her aunt, it was of me that she would
be thinking. What was going to happen that evening, I scarcely knew.
In any event, the Grand Hotel, the evening, would no longer seem empty
to me; they contained my happiness. I rang for the lift–boy to take me
up to the room which Albertine had engaged, a room that looked over
the valley. The slightest movements, such as that of sitting down on
the bench in the lift, were satisfying, because they were in direct
relation to my heart; I saw in the ropes that drew the cage upwards,
in the few steps that I had still to climb, only a materialisation of
the machinery, the stages of my joy. I had only two or three steps to
take now along the corridor before coming to that room in which was
enshrined the precious substance of that rosy form—that room which,
even if there were to be done in it delicious things, would keep that
air of permanence, of being, to a chance visitor who knew nothing of
its history, just like any other room, which makes of inanimate things
the obstinately mute witnesses, the scrupulous confidants, the
inviolable depositaries of our pleasure. Those few steps from the
landing to Albertine's door, those few steps which no one now could
prevent my taking, I took with delight, with prudence, as though
plunged into a new and strange element, as if in going forward I had
been gently displacing the liquid stream of happiness, and at the same
time with a strange feeling of absolute power, and of entering at
length into an inheritance which had belonged to me from all time.
Then suddenly I reflected that it was wrong to be in any doubt; she
had told me to come when she was in bed. It was as clear as daylight;
I pranced for joy, I nearly knocked over Françoise who was standing in
my way, I ran, with glowing eyes, towards my friend's room. I found
Albertine in bed. Leaving her throat bare, her white nightgown altered
the proportions of her face, which, flushed by being in bed or by her
cold or by dinner, seemed pinker than before; I thought of the colours
which I had had, a few hours earlier, displayed beside me, on the
'front,' the savour of which I was now at last to taste; her cheek was
crossed obliquely by one of those long, dark, curling tresses, which,
to please me, she had undone altogether. She looked at me and smiled.
Beyond her, through the window, the valley lay bright beneath the
moon. The sight of Albertine's bare throat, of those strangely vivid
cheeks, had so intoxicated me (that is to say had placed the reality
of the world for me no longer in nature, but in the torrent of my
sensations which it was all I could do to keep within bounds), as to
have destroyed the balance between the life, immense and
indestructible, which circulated in my being, and the life of the
universe, so puny in comparison. The sea, which was visible through
the window as well as the valley, the swelling breasts of the first of
the Maineville cliffs, the sky in which the moon had not yet climbed
to the zenith, all of these seemed less than a featherweight on my
eyeballs, which between their lids I could feel dilated, resisting,
ready to bear very different burdens, all the mountains of the world
upon their fragile surface. Their orbit no longer found even the
sphere of the horizon adequate to fill it. And everything that nature
could have brought me of life would have seemed wretchedly meagre, the
sigh of the waves far too short a sound to express the enormous
aspiration that was surging in my breast. I bent over Albertine to
kiss her. Death might have struck me down in that moment; it would
have seemed to me a trivial, or rather an impossible thing, for life
was not outside, it was in me; I should have smiled pityingly had a
philosopher then expressed the idea that some day, even some distant
day, I should have to die, that the external forces of nature would
survive me, the forces of that nature beneath whose godlike feet I was
no more than a grain of dust; that, after me, there would still remain
those rounded, swelling cliffs, that sea, that moonlight and that sky!
How was that possible; how could the world last longer than myself,
since it was it that was enclosed in me, in me whom it went a long way
short of filling, in me, where, feeling that there was room to store
so many other treasures, I flung contemptuously into a corner sky, sea
and cliffs. "Stop that, or I'll ring the bell!" cried Albertine,
seeing that I was flinging myself upon her to kiss her. But I reminded
myself that it was not for no purpose that a girl made a young man
come to her room in secret, arranging that her aunt should not
know—that boldness, moreover, rewards those who know how to seize
their opportunities; in the state of exaltation in which I was, the
round face of Albertine, lighted by an inner flame, like the glass
bowl of a lamp, started into such prominence that, copying the
rotation of a burning sphere, it seemed to me to be turning, like
those faces of Michelangelo which are being swept past in the arrested
headlong flight of a whirlwind. I was going to learn the fragrance,
the flavour which this strange pink fruit concealed. I heard a sound,
precipitous, prolonged, shrill. Albertine had pulled the bell with all
her might.

* * *

I had supposed that the love which I felt for Albertine was not based
on the hope of carnal possession. And yet, when the lesson to be drawn
from my experience that evening was, apparently, that such possession
was impossible; when, after having had not the least doubt, that first
day, on the beach, of Albertine's being unchaste, and having then
passed through various intermediate assumptions, I seemed to have
quite definitely reached the conclusion that she was absolutely
virtuous; when, on her return from her aunt's, a week later, she
greeted me coldly with: "I forgive you; in fact I'm sorry to have
upset you, but you must never do it again,"—then, in contrast to what
I had felt on learning from Bloch that one could always have all the
women one liked, and as if, in place of a real girl, I had known a wax
doll, it came to pass that gradually there detached itself from her my
desire to penetrate into her life, to follow her through the places in
which she had spent her childhood, to be initiated by her into the
athletic life; my intellectual curiosity to know what were her
thoughts on this subject or that did not survive my belief that I
might take her in my arms if I chose. My dreams abandoned her, once
they had ceased to be nourished by the hope of a possession of which I
had supposed them to be independent. Thenceforward they found
themselves once more at liberty to transmit themselves, according to
the attraction that I had found in her on any particular day, above
all according to the chances that I seemed to detect of my being,
possibly, one day, loved by her—to one or another of Albertine's
friends, and to Andrée first of all. And yet, if Albertine had not
existed, perhaps I should not have had the pleasure which I began to
feel more and more strongly during the days that followed in the
kindness that was shewn me by Andrée. Albertine told no one of the
check which I had received at her hands. She was one of those pretty
girls who, from their earliest youth, by their beauty, but especially
by an attraction, a charm which remains somewhat mysterious and has
its source perhaps in reserves of vitality to which others less
favoured by nature come to quench their thirst, have always—in their
home circle, among their friends, in society—proved more attractive
than other more beautiful and richer girls; she was one of those
people from whom, before the age of love and ever so much more after
it is reached, one asks more than they ask in return, more even than
they are able to give. From her childhood Albertine had always had
round her in an adoring circle four or five little girl friends, among
them Andrée who was so far her superior and knew it (and perhaps this
attraction which Albertine exerted quite involuntarily had been the
origin, had laid the foundations of the little band). This attraction
was still potent even at a great social distance, in circles quite
brilliant in comparison, where if there was a pavane to be danced,
they would send for Albertine rather than have it danced by another
girl of better family. The consequence was that, not having a penny
to her name, living a hard enough life, moreover, on the hands of M.
Bontemps, who was said to be 'on the rocks,' and was anyhow anxious to
be rid of her, she was nevertheless invited, not only to dine but to
stay, by people who, in Saint–Loup's sight, might not have had any
distinction, but to Rosemonde's mother or Andrée's, women who though
very rich themselves did not know these other and richer people,
represented something quite incalculable. Thus Albertine spent a few
weeks every year with the family of one of the Governors of the Bank
of France, who was also Chairman of the Board of Directors of a great
Railway Company. The wife of this financier entertained people of
importance, and had never mentioned her 'day' to Andrée's mother, who
thought her wanting in politeness, but was nevertheless prodigiously
interested in everything that went on in her house. Accordingly she
encouraged Andrée every year to invite Albertine down to their villa,
because, as she said, it was a real charity to offer a holiday by the
sea to a girl who had not herself the means to travel and whose aunt
did so little for her; Andrée's mother was probably not prompted by
the thought that the banker and his wife, learning that Albertine was
made much of by her and her daughter, would form a high opinion of
them both; still less did she hope that Albertine, good and clever as
she was, would manage to get her invited, or at least to get Andrée
invited, to the financier's garden–parties. But every evening at the
dinner–table, while she assumed an air of indifference slightly tinged
with contempt, she was fascinated by Albertine's accounts of
everything that had happened at the big house while she was staying
there, and the names of the other guests, almost all of them people
whom she knew by sight or by name. True, the thought that she knew
them only in this indirect fashion, that is to say did not know them
at all (she called this kind of acquaintance knowing people 'all my
life'), gave Andrée's mother a touch of melancholy while she plied
Albertine with questions about them in a lofty and distant tone,
speaking with closed lips, and might have left her doubtful and uneasy
as to the importance of her own social position had she not been able
to reassure herself, to return safely to the 'realities of life,' by
saying to the butler: "Please tell the chef that he has not made the
peas soft enough." She then recovered her serenity. And she was quite
determined that Andrée was to marry nobody but a man—of the best
family, of course—rich enough for her too to be able to keep a chef
and a couple of coachmen. This was the proof positive, the practical
indication of 'position.' But the fact that Albertine had dined at the
banker's house in the country with this or that great lady, and that
the said great lady had invited the girl to stay with her next winter,
did not invalidate a sort of special consideration which Albertine
shewed towards Andrée's mother, which went very well with the pity,
and even repulsion, excited by the tale of her misfortunes, a
repulsion increased by the fact that M. Bontemps had proved a traitor
to the cause (he was even, people said, vaguely Panamist) and had
rallied to the Government. Not that this deterred Andrée's mother, in
her passion for abstract truth, from withering with her scorn the
people who appeared to believe that Albertine was of humble origin.
"What's that you say? Why, they're one of the best families in the
country. Simonet with a single 'n,' you know!" Certainly, in view of
the class of society in which all this went on, in which money plays
so important a part, and mere charm makes people ask you out but not
marry you, a 'comfortable' marriage did not appear to be for Albertine
a practical outcome of the so distinguished patronage which she
enjoyed but which would not have been held to compensate for her
poverty. But even by themselves, and with no prospect of any
matrimonial consequence, Albertine's 'successes' in society excited
the envy of certain spiteful mothers, furious at seeing her received
like one of the family by the banker's wife, even by Andrée's mother,
neither of whom they themselves really knew. They therefore went about
telling common friends of those ladies and their own that both ladies
would be very angry if they knew the facts, which were that Albertine
repeated to each of them everything that the intimacy to which she was
rashly admitted enabled her to spy out in the household of the other,
a thousand little secrets which it must be infinitely unpleasant to
the interested party to have made public. These envious women said
this so that it might be repeated and might get Albertine into trouble
with her patrons. But, as often happens, their machinations met with
no success. The spite that prompted them was too apparent, and their
only result was to make the women who had planned them appear rather
more contemptible than before. Andrée's mother was too firm in her
opinion of Albertine to change her mind about her now. She looked upon
her as a 'poor wretch,' but the best–natured girl living, and one who
would do anything in the world to give pleasure.