This Andrée, who had struck me when I first saw her as the coldest of them all, was infinitely more refined, more affectionate, more sensitive than Albertine, to whom she displayed the caressing, gentle tenderness of an elder sister. At the Casino she would come across the floor to sit down beside me and was prepared, unlike Albertine, to forgo a waltz or even, if I was tired, to give up the Casino and come to me instead at the hotel. She expressed her friendship for me, for Albertine, in terms that were evidence of the most exquisite understanding of the things of the heart, which may have been partly due to her delicate health. She had always a gay smile of excuse for the childish behaviour of Albertine, who expressed with naïve violence the temptation held out to her by the parties and pleasures which she was incapable of resisting, as Andrée could, in order to stay and talk to me. When the time came for her to go off to a tea-party at the golf-club, if we were all three together at that moment she would get ready to leave and then, coming up to Andrée, would say: “Well, Andrée, what are you waiting for? You know we’re having tea at the golf-club.” “No, I’m going to stay and talk to him,” Andrée would reply, pointing to me. “But you know Mme Durieux invited you,” Albertine would cry, as if Andrée’s intention to remain with me could be explained only by ignorance on her part as to whether or not she had been invited. “Come, my sweet, don’t be such an idiot,” Andrée would chide her, and Albertine would not insist, for fear that she might be asked to stay too. She would toss her head and say “Just as you like,” in the tone one uses to an invalid who is deliberately killing himself by inches. “Anyway I must fly; I’m sure your watch is slow,” and off she would go. “She’s a dear girl, but quite impossible,” Andrée would say, enveloping her friend in a smile at once caressing and critical. If in this craze for amusement Albertine might be said to echo something of the old original Gilberte, that is because a certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we successively love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, apt, that is to say, to gratify our senses and to wring our hearts. They are, these women, a product of our temperament, an image, an inverted projection, a negative of our sensibility. So that a novelist might, in relating the life of his hero, describe his successive love-affairs in almost exactly similar terms, and thereby give the impression not that he was repeating himself but that he was creating, since an artificial novelty is never so effective as a repetition that manages to suggest a fresh truth. He ought, moreover, to note in the character of the lover an index of variation which becomes apparent as the story moves into fresh regions, into different latitudes of life. And perhaps he would be expressing yet another truth if, while investing all the other dramatis personae with distinct characters, he refrained from giving any to the beloved. We understand the characters of people to whom we are indifferent, but how can we ever grasp that of a person who is an intimate part of our existence, whom after a while we no longer distinguish from ourselves, whose motives provide us with an inexhaustible source of anxious hypotheses, continually revised? Springing from somewhere beyond our intellect, our curiosity about the woman we love overleaps the bounds of that woman’s character, at which, even if we could stop, we probably never would. The object of our anxious investigation is something more basic than those details of character comparable to the tiny particles of epidermis whose varied combinations form the florid originality of human flesh. Our intuitive radiography pierces them, and the images which it brings back, far from being those of a particular face, present rather the joyless universality of a skeleton.
Andrée, being herself extremely rich while the other was penniless and an orphan, with real generosity lavished on Albertine the full benefit of her wealth. As for her feelings towards Gisèle, they were not quite what I had been led to suppose. News soon reached us of the young student, and when Albertine handed round the letter she had received from her, a letter intended by Gisèle to give an account of her journey and to report her safe arrival to the little band, apologising for her laziness in not yet having written to the others, I was surprised to hear Andrée, whom I imagined to be at daggers drawn with her, say: “I shall write to her tomorrow, because if I wait for her to write I may have to wait for ages, she’s such a slacker.” And turning to me she added: “You mightn’t see much in her, but she’s a jolly nice girl, and besides I’m really very fond of her.” From which I concluded that Andrée’s quarrels were apt not to last very long.
Except on these rainy days, as we always arranged to go on our bicycles along the cliffs, or on an excursion inland, an hour or so before it was time to start I would go upstairs to make myself smart and would complain if Françoise had not laid out all the things that I wanted. Now even in Paris, at the first word of reproach she would proudly and angrily straighten a back which the years had begun to bend, she so humble, modest and charming when her self-esteem was flattered. As this was the mainspring of Françoise’s life, her satisfaction and her good humour were in direct ratio to the difficulty of the tasks imposed on her. Those which she had to perform at Balbec were so easy that she displayed an almost continual dissatisfaction which was suddenly multiplied a hundred-fold and combined with an ironic air of offended dignity when I complained, on my way down to join my friends, that my hat had not been brushed or my ties sorted. She who was capable of taking such endless pains and would think nothing of it, on my simply remarking that a coat was not in its proper place would not only boast of the care with which she had “shut it away sooner than let it go gathering the dust,” but, paying a formal tribute to her own labours, lamented that it was little enough of a holiday that she was getting at Balbec, and that we would not find another person in the whole world who would consent to put up with such treatment. “I can’t think how people can leave things lying about the way you do; you just try and get anyone else to find what you want in such a pell and mell. The devil himself couldn’t make head nor tail of it.” Or else she would adopt a regal mien, scorching me with her fiery glance, and preserve a silence that was broken as soon as she had fastened the door behind her and had set off down the corridor, which would then reverberate with utterances which I guessed to be abusive, though they remained as indistinct as those of characters in a play whose opening lines are spoken in the wings, before they appear on the stage. But even if nothing was missing and Françoise was in a good temper, still she made herself quite intolerable when I was getting ready to go out with my friends. For, drawing upon a store of jokes which, in my need to talk about these girls, I had told her at their expense, she took it upon herself to reveal to me what I should have known better than she if it had been accurate, which it never was, Françoise having misunderstood what she had heard. She had, like everyone else, her own peculiar character, which in no one resembles a straight highway, but surprises us with its strange, unavoidable windings which other people do not see and which it is painful to have to follow. Whenever I arrived at the stage of “Where is my hat?” or uttered the name of Andrée or Albertine, I was forced by Françoise to stray into endless and absurd sidetracks which greatly delayed my progress. So too when I ordered the cheese or salad sandwiches or sent out for the cakes which I would eat on the cliff with the girls, and which they “might very well have taken turns to provide, if they hadn’t been so close-fisted,” declared Françoise, to whose aid there came at such moments a whole heritage of atavistic peasant rapacity and coarseness, and for whom one would have said that the divided soul of her late enemy Eulalie had been reincarnated, more becomingly than in St Eloi, in the charming bodies of my friends of the little band. I listened to these accusations with a dull fury at finding myself brought to a standstill at one of those places beyond which the rustic and familiar path that was Françoise’s character became impassable, though fortunately never for very long. Then, my hat or coat found and the sandwiches ready, I went to join Albertine, Andrée, R
osemonde, and any others there might be, and we would set out on foot or on our bicycles.
In the old days I should have preferred our excursions to be made in bad weather. For then I still looked to find in Balbec “the land of the Cimmerians,” and fine days were a thing that had no right to exist there, an intrusion of the vulgar summer of seaside holiday-makers into that ancient region swathed in eternal mist. But everything that I had hitherto despised and thrust from my sight, not only the effects of sunlight upon sea and shore, but even regattas and race-meetings, I now sought out with ardour, for the same reason which formerly had made me wish only for stormy seas: namely, that they were now associated in my mind, as the others had once been, with an aesthetic idea. For I had gone several times with my new friends to visit Elstir, and, on the days when the girls were there, what he had selected to show us were drawings of pretty women in yachting dress, or else a sketch made on a race-course near Balbec. I had at first shyly admitted to Elstir that I had not felt inclined to go to the meetings that had been held there. “You were wrong,” he told me, “it’s such a pretty sight, and so strange too. For one thing, that peculiar creature the jockey, on whom so many eyes are fastened, and who sits there in the paddock so gloomy and grey-faced in his bright jacket, reining in the rearing horse that seems to be one with him: how interesting to analyse his professional movements, the bright splash of colour he makes, with the horse’s coat blending in it, against the background of the course! What a transformation of every visible object in that luminous vastness of a race-course where one is constantly surprised by fresh lights and shades which one sees only there! How pretty the women can look there, too! The first meeting in particular was delightful, and there were some extremely elegant women there in the misty, almost Dutch light in which you could feel the piercing cold of the sea even in the sun itself. I’ve never seen women arriving in carriages, or standing with glasses to their eyes in so extraordinary a light, which was due, I suppose, to the moisture from the sea. Ah! how I should have loved to paint it. I came back from those races wild with enthusiasm and longing to get to work!” After which he waxed more enthusiastic still over the yacht-races, and I realised that regattas, and race-meetings where well-dressed women might be seen bathed in the greenish light of a marine race-course, might be for a modern artist as interesting a subject as the festivities which they so loved to depict were for a Veronese or a Carpaccio. When I suggested this to Elstir, “Your comparison is all the more apt,” he replied, “since because of the nature of the city in which they painted, those festivities were to a great extent aquatic. Except that the beauty of the shipping in those days lay as a rule in its solidity, in the complication of its structure. They had water-tournaments, as we have here, held generally in honour of some Embassy, such as Carpaccio shows us in his Legend of Saint Ursula. The ships were massive, built like pieces of architecture, and seemed almost amphibious, like lesser Venices set in the heart of the greater, when, moored to the banks by gangways decked with crimson satin and Persian carpets, they bore their freight of ladies in cerise brocade and green damask close under the balconies incrusted with multicoloured marble from which other ladies leaned to gaze at them, in gowns with black sleeves slashed with white, stitched with pearls or bordered with lace. You couldn’t tell where the land finished and the water began, what was still the palace or already the ship, the caravel, the galley, the Bucentaur.”
Albertine listened with passionate interest to these details of costume, these visions of elegance that Elstir described to us. “Oh, I should so like to see that lace you speak of; it’s so pretty, Venetian lace,” she exclaimed, “and I should love to see Venice.” “You may, perhaps, before very long,” Elstir informed her, “be able to gaze at the marvellous stuffs which they used to wear. One used only to be able to see them in the works of the Venetian painters, or very rarely among the treasures of old churches, or now and then when a specimen turned up in the sale-room. But I hear that a Venetian artist, called Fortuny, has rediscovered the secret of the craft, and that in a few years’ time women will be able to parade around, and better still to sit at home, in brocades as sumptuous as those that Venice adorned for her patrician daughters with patterns brought from the Orient. But I don’t know whether I should much care for that, whether it wouldn’t be too much of an anachronism for the women of today, even when they parade at regattas, for, to return to our modern pleasure-craft, the times have completely changed since ‘Venice, Queen of the Adriatic.’ The great charm of a yacht, of the furnishings of a yacht, of yachting clothes, is their simplicity, as things of the sea, and I do so love the sea. I must confess that I prefer the fashions of today to those of Veronese’s and even of Carpaccio’s time. What is so attractive about our yachts—and the medium-sized yachts especially, I don’t like the huge ones, they’re too much like ships; and the same goes for hats, there must be some sense of proportion—is the uniform surface, simple, gleaming, grey, which in a bluish haze takes on a creamy softness. The cabin ought to make us think of a little café. And it’s the same with women’s clothes on board a yacht; what’s really charming are those light garments, uniformly white, cotton or linen or nankeen or drill, which in the sunlight and against the blue of the sea show up with as dazzling a whiteness as a spread sail. Actually, there are very few women who know how to dress, though some of them are quite wonderful. At the races, Mlle Léa had a little white hat and a little white sunshade that were simply enchanting. I don’t know what I wouldn’t give for that little sunshade.”
I should have liked very much to know in what respect this little sunshade differed from any other, and for other reasons, reasons of feminine coquetry, Albertine was still more curious. But, just as Françoise used to explain the excellence of her soufflés by saying simply: “It’s a knack,” so here the difference lay in the cut. “It was tiny and round, like a Chinese parasol,” Elstir said. I mentioned the sunshades carried by various women, but none of them would do. Elstir found them all quite hideous. A man of exquisite taste, singularly hard to please, he would isolate some minute detail which was the whole difference between what was worn by three-quarters of the women he saw, and which he abominated, and a thing which enchanted him by its prettiness; and—in contrast to its effect on myself, for whom every kind of luxury was stultifying—stimulated his desire to paint “so as to make something as attractive.”
“Here you see a young lady who has guessed what the hat and sunshade were like,” he said to me, pointing to Albertine, whose eyes shone with covetousness.
“How I should love to be rich and to have a yacht!” she said to the painter. “I should come to you for advice on how to do it up. What lovely trips I’d make! And what fun it would be to go to Cowes for the regatta! And a motor-car! Tell me, do you think women’s fashions for motoring pretty?”
“No,” replied Elstir, “but that will come in time. You see, there are very few good couturiers at present, one or two only, Callot—although they go in rather too freely for lace—Doucet, Cheruit, Paquin sometimes. The others are all ghastly.”
“So there’s a vast difference between a Callot dress and one from any ordinary shop?” I asked Albertine.
“Why, an enormous difference, my little man! Oh, sorry! Only, alas! what you get for three hundred francs in an ordinary shop will cost two thousand there. But there can be no comparison; they look the same only to people who know nothing at all about it.”
“Quite so,” put in Elstir, “though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s as profound as the difference between a statue from Rheims Cathedral and one from Saint-Augustin. By the way, talking of cathedrals,” he went on, addressing himself exclusively to me, because what he was saying referred to an earlier conversation in which the girls had not taken part, and which for that matter would in no way have interested them, “I spoke to you the other day of Balbec church as a great cliff, a huge breakwater built of the stone of the country, but conversely,” he went on, showing me a water-colour
, “look at these cliffs (it’s a sketch I did near here, at the Creuniers); don’t those rocks, so powerfully and delicately modelled, remind you of a cathedral?”
And indeed one would have taken them for soaring red arches. But, painted on a scorching hot day, they seemed to have been reduced to dust, volatilised by the heat which had drunk up half the sea so that it had almost been distilled, over the whole surface of the picture, into a gaseous state. On this day when the sunlight had, so to speak, destroyed reality, reality concentrated itself in certain dusky and transparent creatures which, by contrast, gave a more striking, a closer impression of life: the shadows. Thirsting for coolness, most of them, deserting the torrid sea, had taken shelter at the foot of the rocks, out of reach of the sun; others, swimming gently upon the tide, like dolphins, kept close under the sides of occasional moving boats, whose hulls they extended upon the pale surface of the water with their glossy blue forms. It was perhaps the thirst for coolness which they conveyed that did most to give me the sensation of the heat of that day and made me exclaim how much I regretted not knowing the Creuniers. Albertine and Andrée were positive that I must have been there hundreds of times. If so I had been there without knowing it, never suspecting that one day the sight of these rocks would arouse in me such a thirst for beauty, not perhaps precisely natural beauty such as I had sought hitherto among the cliffs of Balbec, but architectural rather. Especially since, having come here to visit the kingdom of the storms, I had never found, on any of my drives with Mme de Villeparisis, when often we saw it only from afar, painted in a gap between the trees, that the sea was sufficiently real or sufficiently liquid or gave a sufficient impression of hurling its massed forces against the shore, and would have liked to see it lie motionless only under a wintry shroud of fog, I could never have believed that I should now be dreaming of a sea which was no more than a whitish vapour that had lost both consistency and colour. But of such a sea Elstir, like the people who sat musing on board those vessels drowsy with the heat, had felt so intensely the enchantment that he had succeeded in transcribing, in fixing for all time upon his canvas, the imperceptible ebb of the tide, the throb of one happy moment; and at the sight of this magic portrait, one could think of nothing else than to range the wide world, seeking to recapture the vanished day in its instantaneous, slumbering beauty.
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