The landscape became hilly and steep, and the train came to a halt at a little station between two mountains. Through the gorge, beside the swift stream, all one could see was the house of a level-crossing-keeper up to its window-sills in the flowing water. If a person can be the epitome of a place, conveying the charm and tang of its special savour, then this was demonstrated, more so than by the peasant girl I had longed for in the days of my lonely rambles along the Méséglise way, through the Roussainville woods, by the tall girl whom I saw come out of the keeper’s house and start walking towards the station, along a footpath lit by the slanting rays of the sunrise, carrying a crock of milk. In that valley, hidden from the rest of the world by the surrounding heights, the only times she ever saw people would be when a train made its brief halt there. She walked along beside the carriages, pouring out coffee with milk for a few of the passengers who were up and about. Glowing in the glory of the morning, her face was pinker than the sky. Looking at her, I was filled with that renewed longing for life which any fresh glimpse of beauty and happiness can bring. Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality which something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness. So we make our pessimistic pronouncements on life, which we think are valid, in the belief that we have taken account of beauty and happiness, whereas we have actually omitted them from consideration, substituting for them synthetic compounds which contain nothing of them. Likewise, a well-read man, hearing of the latest ‘great book’, can give a jaded yawn, assuming the work to be a sort of composite derived from all the fine works he has ever read. But the fact is that a great book is not just the sum of existing masterpieces; it is particular and unforeseeable, being made out of something which, because it lies somewhere beyond that existing sum, cannot be deduced simply from acquaintance with it, however close. No sooner has the well-read man discovered the new work than he forgets his earlier indifference and takes an interest in the reality it sets before him. In the same way this lovely girl, utterly different from the patterns of beauty devised by my mind in isolation, gave me an instantaneous taste for a particular form of happiness (the only form in which we can have the taste of happiness) which I might experience if I came to live here and shared her life. Of course, for this too the momentary intermission of Habit was largely responsible. I invested the milk-maid with advantages which came from the fact that it was my entire self, ready to gorge on life’s sweetest delights, that confronted her. We commonly live with a self reduced to its bare minimum; most of our faculties lie dormant, relying on habit; and habit knows how to manage without them. But, on that morning, their presence had once more become essential, so as to cope with travel, departure from life’s daily round, a change of place, the unwonted time of day. My habit, which was sedentary and unused to morning hours, was found wanting; and all my faculties had come flooding back to stand in for it, outdoing themselves, vying with each other, rising to the same unusual occasion, the basest of them and the noblest, from mere breathing and appetite, even the circulation of the blood, to sensitivity and imagination. I could not say whether the wild beauty of that place increased the beauty of the girl and made me see her as superior to other women; but she certainly beautified all things round about. How delightful life would have been if only I could have spent it with her, hour after hour, walking beside her to the river, to her cow, then out to meet the trains, being in her company at all times, feeling that she knew me, having a place reserved for me in her thoughts! She would have initiated me to the charms of rural life and the pleasures of early rising. I beckoned to her to bring me the coffee and milk. I needed her to notice me. She did not notice me, so I hailed her. Her tall person was topped by a face with a complexion so golden pink that I seemed to be seeing her through the radiance of a stained-glass window. She turned and walked back towards me: I could not look away from her face, which, as it neared and grew larger, was like a sun that did not dazzle the stare, no matter how close it came, which you could look straight at as it deluged you with its blaze of glorious golds and reds. Her eye, which had a piercing gaze, met mine; but just then, as the guard and station-master were shutting the doors, the train started to move. In broad daylight now, I watched as she walked away from the station and along her footpath: I was travelling away from the dawn. Whether my excitement had been caused by the girl, or whether it had been the cause of much of the enjoyment afforded me by the nearness of her, she was so much a part of my feeling that my desire to see her again was above all the longing to retain something of that excitement, not to let it die, not to be severed for ever from the one who, though she was unaware of this, had been part of it. It was not just that this feeling was pleasant. It was especially because (as the tightening of a string or the more rapid vibration of a nerve produces a different note or colour) it gave a sharper tone to what I saw, gave me a part to act in an unknown and infinitely more interesting world; and for as long as the gathering speed of the train allowed me to see the beautiful milk-girl, she was like a part of some other life, separated from the one I knew by a narrow borderline, another life in which the feelings transmitted to me by things were not the usual ones, and the leaving of which felt like a sort of inner death. To have the comfort of feeling that I was at least not cast out of her life, I would have been glad to live near enough to the little railway-station to be able to come down every morning and have this country-girl pour out coffee and milk for me. But, sadly, she would be for ever absent from the life towards which I was now heading faster and faster, a prospect I could accept only by imagining a plan to take this same train on some other day, and thus be able to stop again at the same station, a scheme which had the added advantage of fuelling the mind’s selfish, active, practical, mechanical, lazy and centrifugal predisposition to shirk the effort required to analyse in an abstract and disinterested way any pleasant impression which we have experienced. And, since we also want to dwell on such an impression, the mind prefers to imagine a future recurrence of it, to design clever circumstances that could bring it about, none of which teaches us anything about the essence of it; it just relieves us of the bother of trying to replicate it within ourselves and enables us to hope that the outside world will bring it back to us.
The principal church of certain towns, Vézelay or Chartres, Bourges or Beauvais, is sometimes called, for short, by the name of the town itself. This habit of synecdochism has the result, if it concerns towns where we have never been, of sculpting the broader meaning of the name, which, when we attempt to fit the image of the whole unknown town back into it, will shape it like a mould, stamping on it the same toolings, in the same style, and turning it into a sort of great cathedral. It was, however, on a sign in a railway-station, hanging above a refreshment stall, in white lettering against a blue background, that I was to read the name of Balbec, of almost Persian style. I strode out through the station and across the boulevard which led to it, where I asked for directions to the beach, so as to set eyes on this church by the sea. People stared at me as though not understanding what I meant: Balbec-le-Vieux, Balbec-en-Terre, where I had arrived, was neither a seaside resort nor a port. Had not fishermen brought back from the sea, or so said the legend, the miraculous Christ whose coming to that spot was depicted in a stained-glass window of the church standing only a few yards from where I was? Had not the stone for its nave and its steeples been hewn from wave-washed cliffs? But the breakers, which for those reasons I had imagined splashing their spray about that very window, were nearly fifteen miles away, at Balbec-Plage; and the steeple by the dome, which because I had read of it as a stark Norman cliff braving the worst of the sea-weather
, with birds wheeling in the squalls, I had always seen as being soaked by the spindrift blown from the tumultuous deep, now stood in a town square at the junction of two tramlines, opposite a café with the word Billiards above it in gilt lettering, against a background of houses with no masts swaying above their roofs. The church impinged on my mind with the café, the passer-by whom I had asked for directions and the railway-station to which I would soon return; it was just a part of its surroundings, with an accidental look to it, as though it was a detail of a late afternoon in which the dome against the sky had the mellow swell of a fruit ripening its golden melting pink in the same sunshine as touched the chimneys of the houses. But when I recognised the Apostles, whose statues I had seen as mouldings in the Trocadéro Museum and who now stood to the left and right of the Virgin, waiting by the deep recess of the porch as though to pay me homage, I tried to close my mind to everything but the eternal significance of the sculptures. Slightly stooping, with their kind faces, snub noses and mild expressions, they looked like choristers come to fill the fine day with a welcoming Hallelujah. Then one noticed that their expressions were as fixed as those of the dead, not changing unless one stepped over to see them from the other side. I stood there telling myself: ‘This is it! This is the church at Balbec! This town square, which looks as though it’s aware of its claim to fame, is the only place in the world which possesses the church of Balbec. Until now, all I’ve ever seen of it was just photos of the church and mouldings of the Apostles and the Virgin. But now, this is the church itself, the statue in person, the real things! And the real things are unique – this is much more!’
It was also much less, perhaps. Just as a young man, having sat an examination or fought a duel, sees the answers he gave to the questions, or the bullet he fired, as paltry achievements compared to the great potential of learning or courage which he would have liked to display, so my mind, which had rescued the Virgin of the porch from the reproductions I had seen, protecting her for ever from any vicissitudes which might jeopardize them, letting her stand unscathed amid their annihilation, ideal, full of her universal value, was now amazed to see that the statue it had so often sculpted was reduced to nothing but its own shape in stone, cheek by jowl with an election notice, no less reachable than it, no less touchable with the tip of my cane, rooted to the square, inseparable from the junction with the high street, incapable of hiding from any eyes looking out from the café or the horse-tram depot, her face sharing half of the rays of the setting sun – and soon, in a few hours, half of those of the street-lamp – with the local branch of the Savings Bank, and assailed, also like it, by the smells from the pastrycook’s kitchens, subjected so utterly to the tyranny of the Particular that, if I had felt like writing my name on the stone, it would have been this fabled Virgin, she whom until then I had endowed with a general existence and an inaccessible beauty, the unique (which meant, alas, the only) Virgin of Balbec, who would have been unable to avoid showing to all admirers who came to gaze upon her the mark of my piece of chalk and the letters of my name scrawled on her body, which was stained with the same soot as the neighbouring houses, she whom, like the church itself, I now found transformed from the immortal work of art that I had longed to see into a little old woman in stone, whose height I could measure and whose wrinkles I could count. Time was getting on; I had to make my way back to the station from where, having met my grandmother and Françoise, I was to travel on to Balbec-Plage. I kept remembering everything I had ever read about Balbec and the words Swann had spoken: ‘It’s a delight – every bit as fine as Siena.’ Blaming my disappointment on mere contingencies, my unready mood, the fact that I was tired, my inability to look at things properly, I tried to draw consolation from the knowledge that, intact and unvisited, other towns awaited me else where, that I might soon be able to walk about Quimperlé, amid a shower of pearls and a cool murmuring of constant droplets, or step through the greenish pink glow surrounding Pont-Aven. But with Balbec it felt as though, by going there, I had broken open a name which should have been kept hermetically sealed, and into which, through the breach which I had been ill-advised enough to make, replacing all the images I had allowed to escape from it, a horse-tram, a café, people crossing the square, a branch of the Savings Bank, under the irresistible forces of external pressure and air suction, had rushed into the vacuum left in the syllables, which had now closed upon them, turning them into a frame for the porch of my Persian church, and would never again be rid of them.
I did meet my grandmother on the little local branch-line which was to take us to Balbec-Plage; but she was unaccompanied. Intending to have everything arranged in advance for our arrival, she had sent Françoise on ahead of us; but by giving her misleading instructions, she had managed to send her off on the wrong train; so Françoise, all unknowing, was now travelling at full speed towards Nantes and might even not wake up until her train reached Bordeaux. I had barely sat down in the compartment, which was lit by the fading glow of sunset and still warm from the heat of the day (the former of these enabling me to see clearly on my grandmother’s face the saddening evidence of how much the latter had exhausted her), when she said, ‘So? How was Balbec?’, with a smile of such radiant expectation, full of the great pleasure I must have had, that I could not bear to blurt out my disappointment. Also, the closer we came to the place to which my body would have to become accustomed, the less I thought about the mental impression I had been looking forward to in visiting Balbec. Though we were still more than an hour away from the end of this journey, I was trying to imagine the manager of the hotel where we were to stay in Balbec, knowing that, for him, I was at that moment non-existent, and wishing that I could have entered the field of his awareness in the company of someone more impressive than my grandmother, who would no doubt ask him to give us a reduction. I could picture him already, very imprecise in his bodily appearance, but stiff with arrogance.
Every now and then, when our little train stopped at one or other of the halts on the Balbec line, I was struck by the strangeness of their names – Incarville, Marcouville, Doville, Pont-à-Couleuvre, Arambouville, Saint-Mars-le-Vieux, Hermonville, Maineville; whereas, had I read them in a book, I would have been struck by their obvious points of similarity with the names of certain places in the neighbourhood of Combray. To the ear of a musician, two phrases which have several notes in common may appear quite dissimilar, if they are coloured by different harmonies or orchestrations. And in the dismal litany of these names, which were full of sand and salt and too much empty, breezy space, with the startling syllable ville shrilling about them like a seabird, there was nothing to call to mind names like Roussainville or Martinville which, because I had heard them said so often by my great-aunt, over the dinner-table or in the ‘parlour’, had taken on a subdued patina of charm, an essence perhaps compounded of the taste of jam, the aroma of the wood-fire, the smell of the paper in a book by Bergotte and the colour of the free-stone house opposite, and which to this day, when they drift up like gas-bubbles from the depths of memory, retain their full specific virtue, though they have to traverse one after the other the many different layers of other mediums before reaching the surface.
These little places, perched high on their dune above a distant sea or already settling down for the night in the lee of flagrantly green hills, which were as ungainly as a hotel-room sofa when one sees it for the first time, were composed of a few villas, a tennis court and sometimes a casino with its pennant flapping in the fretful, freshening, vacuous wind, and showed me now for the first time their habitual denizens, leading their outside lives – tennis players in white caps, a station-master living on the premises with his tamarisk and his roses, a lady in a boater calling her dawdling whippet, then walking back towards her holiday house where the lamp was already lit, her steps revealing the daily shape of a life which I would never come to know – all of which, with the uncanny familiarity and disdainful everydayness of these glimpses, wounded my stranger’s eyes and my hom
esick heart. However, this was nothing to the pain I was to suffer once we had come to rest in the vestibule of the Grand-Hôtel at Balbec and were faced with its monumental staircase in imitation marble and its manager, a dumpy little person whose face and voice were covered in the scars left by the removal of many pimples and the addition of many accents betokening distant origins and a cosmopolitan upbringing, who was wearing tails like a fashionable gentleman, whose acute psychological glances at those who stepped off the ‘omnibus’ usually enabled him to take a duke for a skinflint and a hotel thief for a duke, and with whom my grandmother, oblivious to the animosity and disdain she must be fostering in the strangers among whom we were to live, set about a discussion of terms. The manager, no doubt forgetting that his own salary did not amount to 500 francs a month, had a withering scorn for anyone who thought 500 francs, or as he put it ‘Twenty-five louis’, was a substantial sum, and he looked down on them as a breed of untouchables whose place was not at the Grand-Hôtel. There were, of course, even at the Grand-Hôtel, guests who could enjoy living quite cheaply without forfeiting the good opinion of the manager, as long as he was sure their penny-pinching was motivated not by poverty but by miserliness. For miserliness, being a vice and therefore at home in any social class, is in no way incompatible with prestige. Class was the only thing the manager paid attention to, or rather he was impressed by anything which he believed showed high class, such as a man stepping into the vestibule without taking off his hat, or people who wore plus-fours with a waisted coat and extracted purple-and-gold-banded cigars from cases of crushed morocco (none of which signs, alas, could I display). He sprinkled his commercial patter with choice expressions, which he misused.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 30