In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  For those who were ignorant of Mme Swann’s practice of taking a ‘constitutional’, the impression she gave of walking along the avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne as though it was a pathway in her back garden was enhanced by the fact that she was on foot, that no carriage followed her, despite the fact that by the month of May she could usually be seen sitting behind the neatest pair of high-steppers in Paris, attended by grooms in the smartest livery, as relaxed and serene as a goddess, basking in the clement open air of a vast Cee-springed victoria. By walking, especially with her leisurely warm-weather gait, Mme Swann appeared to have acted on a whim, to be committing a graceful little breach of protocol, like a queen at a gala performance who, without telling anyone, and, as her household looks on in slightly shocked wonderment, none of them daring to protest, leaves the Royal box during an interval, so as to spend a few moments mingling with ordinary members of the audience. Watching Mme Swann as she walked, people sensed between her and themselves the barriers of a certain form of wealth, which always seem to the crowd to be the most impassable barriers of all. But the Faubourg Saint-Germain has its barriers too, albeit less striking to the eye and the imagination of members of the ‘Hard-up Club’. When the latter see a great lady who is unaffected in manner, whom, because she has never lost the common touch, they can almost take for someone as lowly as themselves, they will never have the feeling of inequality, one might say the feeling of their own unworthiness, that they have when faced with the likes of Mme Swann. Unlike them, a woman of her sort is no doubt unimpressed by the sumptuous world in which she moves; she ignores it, for the very reason that she has become accustomed to it; that is, she has come to see it as all the more natural and necessary to herself, she has come to judge other people according to their greater or lesser familiarity with these standards of luxury; and so, the grand manner (which she enjoys showing off and recognizes in others) being entirely material, flagrantly noticeable, long to acquire and hardly replaceable by anything, when such a woman deems a passer-by to be someone of no consequence, it is in the same way as he has seen her to be someone of the greatest consequence – without hesitation, at first sight and once for all. It may be that this particular class of women no longer exists, or at least not with the same character and the same charm. It was a social class which at that time included women like Lady Israels, who was on terms with women of the aristocracy, and Mme Swann, who was one day to be on terms with them, a class that was intermediate, lower than the Faubourg Saint-Germain, since they courted it, but higher than others who were not part of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; and it was peculiar in that, though existing apart from the society of the rich, it was of course a moneyed class, but one in which money had become tractable and had taken to responding to artistic ideas and purposes – it was malleable money, poetically refined money, money with a smile. In any case, the women who belonged to it then would have by now lost the quality which was their greatest claim to ascendancy: having aged, almost all of them have lost their beauty. For the stately, smiling, gentle Mme Swann who sauntered along the avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne was not only in the prime of her noble wealth, she was also at the glorious height of her own mellow and still delectable summertime, from which, like Hypatia, she could watch the turning of worlds beneath her measured tread.67 Young men, seeing her pass, glanced anxiously at her, unsure whether their tenuous acquaintance with her (and apprehensive, too, about whether Swann, whom they had hardly met on more than a single occasion, would recognize them) could justify their daring to greet her. When they plucked up the resolve to do so, they were full of trepidation, in case such a foolhardy and provocative act of sacrilege, slighting the inviolable supremacy of a caste, might set off a catastrophe or bring down upon their heads the thunderbolt of divine retribution. All it did set off, however, in a sort of clockwork reaction, was the gesticulation of many little characters, who suddenly started to bow – Odette’s courtiers, following the example of Swann, who, with the gracious smile once learned in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but without the indifference which would once have accompanied it, was raising his topper lined with green leather. As though he had been infected by the prejudices of Odette, his former indifference had become both the annoyance of having to acknowledge somebody so badly dressed and the satisfaction of having a wife who knew so many people, mixed feelings which he expressed to the retinue of their fashionable friends: ‘Another one! I must say I do wonder where Odette gets these people! – So it’s really all over between you? Mme Swann said to me, having nodded at the alarmed passer-by, who was now out of sight but whose heart was still palpitating. You’re never going to come and see Gilberte again? I’m certainly glad you’ve made an exception for me and that I’m not to be completely jilted. I do like it when you come. But I also liked your influence on my daughter. I’m sure she’s sorry about it all too. Still, I’m not going to bully you – you might decide you’d had enough of me too! – Odette, there’s Sagan68 saying good morning to you,’ Swann murmured. And there was the Prince, like a knight in an old painting, or as though taking part in a grandiose finale on a theatre stage or in a circus ring, making his horse wheel round and greeting Odette with a grand dramatic gesture which was almost allegorical in its evocation of politeness and chivalry, of the nobleman’s homage to Woman, even though she was embodied in a woman whom his mother or sister would never stoop to frequent. From all sides now, through the liquid transparency and glossy luminosity of the shadow cast on her by the sunshade, Mme Swann was being recognized and greeted by the last of the late riders, who looked as though filmed at a canter against the white midday shimmer of the avenue, members of fashionable clubs, whose names – Antoine de Castellane, Adalbert de Montmorency69 and many more – famous to the public mind, were to Mme Swann the familiar names of her friends. So it is that, the average life-expectancy, the relative longevity, of memories being much greater for those which commemorate poetic sensation than for those left by the pains of love, the heartbreak I suffered at that time because of Gilberte has faded for ever, and has been outlived by the pleasure I derive, whenever I want to read off from a sundial of remembrance the minutes between a quarter-past twelve and one o’clock on a fine day in May, from a glimpse of myself chatting with Mme Swann, sharing her sunshade as though standing with her in the pale glow of an arbour of wisteria.

  PART II: Place-names: the Place

  By the time my grandmother and I left for Balbec, two years later, I had reached a state of almost complete indifference towards Gilberte. At times, as when I was under the spell of a new face, or if the companion with whom I imagined discovering the great Gothic cathedrals, the palaces and gardens of Italy was some other girl, I would reflect sadly that the love one feels, insofar as it is love for a particular person, may not be a very real thing, since although an association of pleasant or painful fancies may fix it for a time on a woman, and even convince us that she was its necessary cause, the fact is that if we consciously or unconsciously outgrow those associations, our love, as though it was a spontaneous growth, a thing of our own making, revives and offers itself to another woman. However, when I set off for Balbec, and during the first part of my stay there, my indifference was still only intermittent. Often (life being so unchronological, so anachronistic in its disordering of our days) I found myself living not on days immediately following the day or two before, but in the much earlier time when I had been in love with Gilberte. Suddenly it was as painful to be living apart from her as it would have been in that earlier time. The self of mine that had once loved her, though now almost entirely supplanted in me by another self, would revisit me; and when it did, it was brought back much more often by some trifling thing than by something important. For instance (if I may step forward for a moment to the actual visit to Normandy) one day in Balbec I was to overhear a stranger mention, as I walked past him on the esplanade, ‘The family of the chief under-secretary at the Postmaster General’s.’ At the time, given that I had no idea then of the influence which tha
t family would have on my life, this mention should have passed me idly by. But it gave me a sharp stab of pain, the pain felt by a self which had long since mostly ceased to exist but which could still mourn the absence of Gilberte. For a conversation about the family of the ‘chief under-secretary at the Postmaster General’s’, which Gilberte and her father had once had in my presence, had gone completely from my mind. Memories of love are, in fact, no exception to the general laws of remembering, which are themselves subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit weakens all things; but the things which are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn’s first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away from our mind’s eye, in that abeyance of memory which may last for ever. It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves any more, but someone else who once loved something that we no longer care about. The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable. Or rather, it would be irrecoverable, were it not that a few words (such as ‘chief under-secretary at the Postmaster General’s’) had been carefully put away and forgotten, much as a copy of a book is deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale against the day when it may become unobtainable.

  However, this recurrence of pain and the renewal of my love for Gilberte did not last longer than they would have in a dream of her, for the very reason that my life at Balbec was free of the habits which in usual circumstances would have helped it to prevail. Such effects of Habit may seem contradictory; but the laws which govern it are many and varied. In Paris, it was because of Habit that I had become more and more indifferent to Gilberte. The change in my habits, that is the momentary suspension of Habit, put its finishing touch to that process when I set off for Balbec. Habit may weaken all things, but it also stabilizes them; it brings about a dislocation, but then makes it last indefinitely. For years past, I had been roughly modelling my state of mind each day on my state of mind of the day before. At Balbec, breakfast in bed – a different bed, a different breakfast – was to be incapable of nourishing the ideas on which my love for Gilberte had fed in Paris. There are instances, albeit infrequent, in which, the passing days having been immobilized by a sedentary way of life, the best way to gain time is to change place. My journey to Balbec was like the first outing of a convalescent who has not noticed until that moment that he is completely cured.

  Nowadays people would likely make the journey to Balbec by motor-car, in the belief that it would be pleasanter. As we shall see, it would certainly be a truer way to travel, in a sense, given that one’s relationship to the various changes in the surface of the earth would be closer, more immediate. But the specific pleasure of travelling is not that it enables one to stop when tired or to stay somewhere along the way; it is that it can make the difference between departure and arrival not as unnoticeable as possible, but as profound as possible; it is that one can experience that difference in its entirety, as intact as it was in our mind when imagination transported us immediately from where we were living to where we yearned to be, in a leap which seemed miraculous less because it made us cover such a distance than because it linked two distinct personalities of place, taking us from one name to another name, a leap which is epitomized (more acutely than by a run in a motor-car, which allows you to get out where you like and thereby all but abolishes arrival) by that mysterious performance which used to be enacted in those special places, railway-stations, which, though they are almost separate from the city, contain the essence of its individuality, as they bear its name on a signboard.

  But then in all sorts of ways, our age is plagued by the notion that objects should be shown only with things which accompany them in reality, thus depriving them of the essential, that act of mind which isolated them from reality in the first place. So a painting is ‘featured’ amid furniture, knick-knacks or hangings from the same period, the sort of insipid interior decoration which yesterday’s ignoramus among hostesses, who now spends her idle hours in the archives and the libraries, is today adept at composing, and among which the masterpiece that we glance at as we dine does not give us the intensity of pleasure we more rightly expect from it in an art gallery, where the bareness of walls unadorned by any distracting detail symbolizes much more aptly the inner spaces into which the artist withdrew to create it.

  Sad to say, those wonderful places, railway-stations, our starting-point for a distant destination, are also tragic places, for though they are the setting for the miracle which will turn a land hitherto non-existent except in the mind into one we are going to live in, for that very reason, as soon as we venture outside the waiting-room, we must abandon all hope of returning to the familiar bedroom which we left only a moment before. We have to give up all prospect of sleeping at home tonight, as soon as we have decided to venture into the reeking cavern which is the necessary anteroom to mystery, one of those huge glass-roofed machine-shops, such as the Gare Saint-Lazare, which was where I had to seek out the train for Balbec and which, above the great chasm slitting the city, had spread out one of those vast bleak skies, dense with portents of pent-up tragedy, resembling certain skies of Mantegna’s and Veronese’s, fraught with their quasi-Parisian modernity, an apt backdrop to the most awesome or hideous of acts, such as the Crucifixion or a departure by train.

  As long as I had been content to lie in my snug bed in Paris and see Balbec’s Persian church buffeted by blizzard and storm, my body had raised no objection to this journey. Objections only began once my body realized it was to be included and that on the evening of our arrival I would be shown to ‘my’ room, which would be completely unfamiliar to it. Its disagreement with this was especially acute since I had learned only on the eve of our departure that my mother was not to accompany us; my father, who was unable to get away from the Ministry until the date set for his visit to Spain with M. de Norpois, had decided to rent a house at Saint-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. Not that to be able to gaze upon Balbec seemed less desirable because it could only be enjoyed at the cost of pain to myself. On the contrary, it was this pain which seemed to embody and guarantee the reality of the impression which I sought; and that impression could never have been replaced by some other supposedly equivalent sight, such as a ‘fine view’ which I might have been able to go and see without its preventing me from going home at bed-time. Not for the first time I sensed that those who know love and those who enjoy life are not the same people. I was sure my desire to go to Balbec was as strong as my doctor’s when he said, on the very morning of our departure, surprised as he was by my unhappy expression, ‘Believe you me, if I could just take a single week off, to enjoy the sea-air, you wouldn’t have to ask me twice! Just think: there’ll be the races and the regattas – it will be lovely!’ Long before going to see La Berma, however, I had learned that whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit; and that this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it.

  My grandmother, of course, saw our impending departure in a rather different light. She was still as convinced as she had ever been that any present given to me should have an artistic element to it; and so she had at one point decided, so as to give me a sort of old ‘print’ representing our journey, that we should retrace, partly by train, partly by carriage, the route taken by Mme de Sévigné in 1689 when she had gone from Paris to ‘L’Orient’, as she called it, via
Chaulnes and ‘the Pont-Audemer’.1 My grandmother had eventually had to abandon this plan, faced with my father’s refusal to countenance such an itinerary – he foresaw that her idea of a tour designed for intellectual benefit would turn into a series of missed trains, lost luggage, sore throats and disregard of doctor’s orders. However, she took heart from the thought that at least when we were due to go down to the beach, we would never run the risk of being prevented from doing this by the arrival of what her dear Mme de Sévigné calls ‘a carriage-load of plaguy visitors’, given that we would know no one in Balbec, Legrandin having offered us no letter of introduction to his sister. (His remissness in this regard was not seen in the same light by my great-aunts Céline and Victoire:2 they, having long been in the habit of referring to this sister, whom they had known, before her marriage, as ‘Renée de Cambremer’, who had given them the sort of presents which may figure in bedrooms or reminiscences but which now denote no more than a former closeness, felt it incumbent upon themselves, when visiting old Mme Legrandin, never to name the daughter and even to congratulate each other later with statements such as, ‘I never so much as mentioned you-know-who’ and ‘I think we can say the point was taken’, in the belief that they were thereby avenging this snub to our family.)