Albertine might know all about the Ambresacs; but as he who can achieve great things is not necessarily capable of small, I did not find her, after I had greeted those young ladies, any more disposed to make me known to her friends. “It’s very good of you to attach importance to them. You shouldn’t take any notice of them; they don’t count. What on earth can a lot of kids like them mean to a man like you? Now Andrée, I must say, is remarkably clever. She’s a good girl, though perfectly weird at times, but the others are really dreadfully stupid.”
When I had left Albertine, I felt suddenly a keen regret that Saint-Loup should have concealed his engagement from me and that he should be doing anything so improper as to choose a wife before breaking with his mistress. And then, some days later, I met Andrée, and as she went on talking to me for some time I seized the opportunity to tell her that I would very much like to see her again next day; but she replied that this was impossible, because her mother was not at all well and she did not want to leave her alone. Two days later I went to see Elstir, who told me that Andrée had taken a great liking to me. When I protested that it was I who had taken a liking to her from the start, and had asked her to meet me again next day but she couldn’t, “Yes, I know, she told me all about that,” was his reply, “she was very sorry, but she had promised to go for a picnic somewhere miles from here. They were to drive over in a break, and it was too late for her to get out of it.” Although this falsehood was of no real significance since Andrée knew me so slightly, I ought not to have continued to seek the company of a person who was capable of it. For what people have once done they will go on doing indefinitely, and if you go every year to see a friend who, the first few times, was unable to keep an appointment with you, or was in bed with a chill, you will find him in bed with another chill which he has just caught, you will miss him again at another meeting-place where he has failed to appear, for a single and unalterable reason in place of which he supposes himself to have various reasons, according to the circumstances.
One morning, not long after Andrée had told me that she would be obliged to stay beside her mother, I was taking a short stroll with Albertine, whom I had found on the beach tossing up and catching again at the end of a string a weird object which gave her a look of Giotto’s “Idolatry”; it was called, as it happened, a “diabolo,” and has so fallen into disuse now that, when they come upon the picture of a girl playing with one, the commentators of future generations will solemnly discuss, as it might be in front of the allegorical figures in the Arena Chapel, what it is that she is holding. A moment later their friend with the penurious and hard appearance, the one who on that first day had sneered so malevolently: “I do feel sorry for him, poor old boy,” when she saw the old gentleman’s head brushed by the flying feet of Andrée, came up to Albertine and said: “Good morning. Am I disturbing you?” She had taken off her hat for comfort, and her hair, like a strange and fascinating plant, lay over her brow, displaying all the delicate tracery of its foliation. Albertine, perhaps irritated at seeing the other bare-headed, made no reply, and preserved a frigid silence in spite of which the girl stayed with us, kept apart from me by Albertine who arranged at one moment to be alone with her, at another to walk with me leaving her to follow. I was obliged, to secure an introduction, to ask for it in the girl’s hearing. Then, as Albertine uttered my name, the face and the blue eyes of this girl, whose expression I had thought so cruel when I heard her say: “Poor old boy, I do feel sorry for him,” lit up with a cordial and affectionate smile, and she held out her hand to me. Her hair was golden, and not her hair only; for if her cheeks were pink and her eyes blue, it was like the still roseate morning sky which sparkles everywhere with dazzling points of gold.
Instantly aroused, I said to myself that this was a child who when in love grew shy, that it was for my sake, for love of me that she had remained with us despite Albertine’s rebuffs, and that she must have rejoiced in the opportunity to confess to me at last, by that smiling, friendly look, that she would be as gentle to me as she was ferocious to other people. Doubtless she had noticed me on the beach when I did not yet know her, and had been thinking of me ever since; perhaps it was to win my admiration that she had mocked at the old gentleman, and because she had not succeeded in getting to know me that on the following days she had appeared so morose. I had often seen her from the hotel, walking by herself on the beach in the evenings. It was probably in the hope of meeting me. And now, hindered as much by Albertine’s presence as she would have been by that of the whole band, she had evidently attached herself to us, in spite of the increasing coldness of her friend’s attitude, only in the hope of outstaying her, of being left alone with me, when she might make a rendezvous with me for some time when she would find an excuse to slip away without either her family or her friends knowing that she had gone, and would meet me in some safe place before church or after golf. It was all the more difficult to see her because Andrée had quarrelled with her and now detested her. “I’ve put up quite long enough,” she told me, “with her appalling duplicity, her baseness, and all the dirty tricks she’s played on me. I’ve stood it all because of the others. But her latest effort was really too much!” And she told me of some piece of malicious gossip that this girl had perpetrated, which might indeed have injurious consequences for Andrée.
But those private words promised me by Gisèle’s confiding eyes for the moment when Albertine should have left us by ourselves were destined never to be spoken, because after Albertine, stubbornly planted between us, had continued to reply with increasing curtness, and had finally ceased to reply at all, to her friend’s remarks, Gisèle at length abandoned the attempt and turned back. I reproached Albertine for having been so disagreeable. “It will teach her to be more tactful. She’s not a bad kid, but she’s so boring. She’s got no business, either, to come poking her nose into everything. Why should she fasten herself on to us without being asked? In another minute I’d have told her to go to blazes. Besides, I can’t stand her going about with her hair like that; it’s such bad form.”
I gazed at Albertine’s cheeks as she spoke, and asked myself what might be the perfume, the taste of them: that day she was not fresh and cool but smooth, with a uniform pinkness, violet-tinted, creamy, like certain roses whose petals have a waxy gloss. I felt a passionate longing for them such as one feels sometimes for a particular flower. “I hadn’t noticed it,” was all that I said.
“You stared at her hard enough; anyone would have thought you wanted to paint her portrait,” she replied, not at all mollified by the fact that it was at herself that I was now staring so fixedly. “I don’t believe you would care for her, though. She’s not in the least a flirt. You like girls who flirt, I suspect. Anyhow, she won’t have another chance of sticking to us and having to be shaken off. She’s going back to Paris later today.”
“Are the rest of your friends going too?”
“No, only she and ‘Miss,’ because she’s got to take her exams again; she’ll have to swot for them, poor kid. It’s not much fun, I don’t mind telling you. Of course, you may be set a good subject, you never know. It’s such a matter of luck. One girl I know was given: Describe an accident that you have witnessed. That was a piece of luck. But I know another girl who had to discuss, in writing too: Which would you rather have as a friend, Alceste or Philinte? I’m sure I should have dried up altogether! Apart from everything else, it’s not a question to set to girls. Girls go about with other girls; they’re not supposed to have gentlemen friends.” (This announcement, which showed that I had small chance of being admitted to the little band, made me quake.) “But in any case, even if it was set for boys, what on earth would you expect them to find to say about it? Several parents wrote to the Gaulois, to complain of the difficulty of questions like that. The joke of it is that in a collection of prize-winning essays there were two which treated the question in absolutely opposite ways. You see, it all depends on the examiner. One wanted you to say that Philinte w
as a two-faced socialite flatterer, the other that you couldn’t help admiring Alceste, but that he was too cantankerous, and that as a friend you ought to choose Philinte. How can you expect a lot of unfortunate candidates to know what to say when the professors themselves don’t agree? But that’s nothing. It gets more difficult every year. Gisèle will have to pull a string or two if she’s to get through.”
I returned to the hotel. My grandmother was not there. I waited for her some time, and when at last she appeared, I begged her to allow me, in quite unexpected circumstances, to make an expedition which might keep me away for a couple of days. I had lunch with her, ordered a carriage and drove to the station. Gisèle would not be surprised to see me there. After we had changed at Doncières, in the Paris train there would be a carriage with a corridor, along which, while the governess dozed, I should be able to lead Gisèle into a dark corner and make an appointment to meet her on my return to Paris, which I would then try to put forward to the earliest possible date. I would travel with her as far as Caen or Evreux, whichever she preferred, and would take the next train back to Balbec. And yet, what would she have thought of me had she known that I had hesitated for a long time between her and her friends, that quite as much as with her I had contemplated falling in love with Albertine, with the girl with the bright eyes, with Rosemonde. I felt a pang of remorse, now that a bond of mutual affection was going to unite me with Gisèle. I could, however, truthfully have assured her that Albertine no longer attracted me. I had seen her that morning as she swerved aside, almost turning her back on me, to speak to Gisèle. Her head was sulkily lowered, and the hair at the back, which was different and darker still, glistened as though she had just been bathing. Like a wet hen, I had thought to myself, and this view of her hair had induced me to embody in Albertine a different soul from that implied hitherto by her violet face and mysterious gaze. That shining cataract of hair at the back of her head had been for a moment or two all that I was able to see of her, and continued to be all that I saw in retrospect. Our memory is like one of those shops in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen. While the coachman whipped on his horse I sat there listening to the words of gratitude and tenderness that Gisèle was murmuring in my ear, all of them born of her friendly smile and outstretched hand; for the fact was that in those periods of my life in which I was not actually in love but desired to be, I carried in my mind not only a physical ideal of beauty which, as the reader has seen, I recognised from a distance in every passing woman far enough away from me for her indistinct features not to belie the identification, but also the mental phantom—ever ready to become incarnate—of the woman who was going to fall in love with me, to take up her cues in the amorous comedy which I had had all written out in my mind from my earliest boyhood, and in which every attractive girl seemed to me to be equally desirous of playing, provided that she had also some of the physical qualifications required. In this play, whoever the new star might be whom I invited to create or to revive the leading part, the plot, the incidents, the lines themselves preserved an unalterable form.
Within the next few days, in spite of the reluctance that Albertine had shown to introduce me to them, I knew all the little band of that first afternoon (except Gisèle, whom, owing to a prolonged delay at the level crossing by the station and a change in the time-table, I had not succeeded in meeting on the train, which had left some minutes before I arrived, and to whom in any case I never gave another thought), and two or three other girls as well to whom at my request they introduced me. And thus, my expectation of the pleasure which I should find in a new girl springing from another through whom I had come to know her, the latest was like one of those new varieties of rose which gardeners get by using first a rose of another species. And as I passed from corolla to corolla along this chain of flowers, the pleasure of knowing a different one would send me back to the one to whom I was indebted for it, with a gratitude mixed with as much desire as my new hope. Presently I was spending all my time among these girls.
Alas! in the freshest flower it is possible to discern those just perceptible signs which to the instructed mind already betray what will, by the desiccation or fructification of the flesh that is today in bloom, be the ultimate form, immutable and already predestined, of the autumnal seed. The eye follows with delight a nose like a wavelet that deliciously ripples the surface of the water at daybreak, and seems motionless, capturable by the pencil, because the sea is so calm that one does not notice its tidal flow. Human faces seem not to change while we are looking at them, because the revolution they perform is too slow for us to perceive it. But one had only to see, by the side of any of these girls, her mother or her aunt, to realise the distance over which, obeying the internal gravitation of a type that was generally frightful, these features would have travelled in less than thirty years, until the hour when the looks have begun to wane, until the hour when the face, having sunk altogether below the horizon, catches the light no more. I knew that, as deep, as ineluctable as Jewish patriotism or Christian atavism in those who imagine themselves to be the most emancipared of their race, there dwelt beneath the rosy inflorescence of Albertine, Rosemonde, Andrée, unknown to themselves, held in reserve until the occasion should arise, a coarse nose, a protruding jaw, a paunch which would create a sensation when it appeared, but which was actually in the wings, ready to come on, unforeseen, inevitable, just as it might be a burst of Dreyfusism or clericalism or patriotic, feudal heroism, emerging suddenly in answer to the call of circumstance from a nature anterior to the individual himself, through which he thinks, lives, evolves, gains strength or dies, without ever being able to distinguish that nature from the particular motives he mistakes for it. Even mentally, we depend a great deal more than we think upon natural laws, and our minds possess in advance, like some cryptogamous plant, the characteristic that we imagine ourselves to be selecting. For we grasp only the secondary ideas, without detecting the primary cause (Jewish blood, French birth or whatever it may be) that inevitably produced them, and which we manifest when the time comes. But perhaps, while the one may appear to us to be the result of deliberate thought, the other of an imprudent disregard for our own health, we take from our family, as the papilionaceae take the form of their seed, as well the ideas by which we live as the malady from which we shall die.
As in a nursery plantation where the flowers mature at different seasons, I had seen them, in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those shrivelled seed-pods, those flabby tubers, which my new friends would one day be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering-time. And so when Mme de Villeparisis asked me to go for a drive, I sought an excuse to avoid doing so. I no longer visited Elstir unless accompanied by my new friends. I could not even spare an afternoon to go to Doncières, to pay the visit I had promised Saint-Loup. Social engagements, serious discussions, even a friendly conversation, had they usurped the place allotted to my outings with these girls, would have had the same effect on me as if, at lunch-time, one were taken not to eat but to look at an album. The men, the youths, the women, old or mature, in whose society we think to take pleasure, exist for us only on a flat, one-dimensional surface, because we are conscious of them only through visual perception restricted to its own limits; whereas it is as delegates from our other senses that our eyes direct themselves towards young girls; the senses follow, one after another, in search of the various charms, fragrant, tactile, savorous, which they thus enjoy even without the aid of hands and lips; and able, thanks to the arts of transposition, the genius for synthesis in which desire excels, to reconstruct beneath the hue of cheeks or bosom the feel, the taste, the contact that is forbidden them, they give to these girls the same honeyed consistency as they create when they go foraging in a rose-garden, or in a vine whose clusters their eyes devour.
If it rained, although the weather had no power to daunt Albertine,
who was often to be seen in her waterproof spinning on her bicycle through the showers, we would spend the day in the Casino, where on such days it would have seemed to me impossible not to go. I had the greatest contempt for the Ambresac sisters, who had never set foot in it. And I willingly joined my new friends in playing tricks on the dancing master. As a rule we had to listen to admonitions from the manager, or from some of his staff usurping directorial powers, because my friends—even Andrée whom on that account I had regarded when I first saw her as so Dionysiac a creature whereas in reality she was delicate, intellectual and this year far from well, in spite of which her actions were responsive less to the state of her health than to the spirit of that age which sweeps everything aside and mingles in a general gaiety the weak with the strong—could not go from the hall to the ball-room without breaking into a run, jumping over all the chairs, and sliding along the floor, their balance maintained by a graceful poise of their outstretched arms, singing the while, mingling all the arts, in that first bloom of youth, in the manner of those poets of old for whom the different genres were not yet separate, so that in an epic poem they would mix agricultural precepts with theological doctrine.
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