But what delight there was the following morning! After a servant had come to waken me and bring hot water, and while I washed and vainly rummaged in my trunk for necessary things, pulling out a jumble of unnecessary ones, how exhilarating it was, amid pleasant prospects of breakfast and a walk, to see not only the window but all the glass doors of the bookcases, as though they were the portholes of a ship’s cabin, filled by the open sea, which showed no dark designs towards me (though half of its expanse was actually darkened by a shadow, marked off from the rest of it by a thin shifting frontier), and to gaze at the long rollers which came plunging in, one after the other, like divers from a board! Holding the stiff, starched towel inscribed with the name of the hotel, with which I was making unavailing efforts to dry myself, I kept going back to the window to look again at the huge, dazzling amphitheatre, mountainous with the snowy peaks of its breakers of emerald, here and there polished and translucent, which with placid violence let their beetling, lionlike crags and towering slopes topple into avalanches and collapse upon themselves under the faceless smile of the sun. Every morning from then on, that window was where I posted myself, as though leaning out at the door of an overnight coach to see whether a range of hills that one longs to reach has come closer or receded during the hours of darkness – for the hills of the sea, before they come dancing back towards us, can retreat so far that often it was only at a distance, beyond a great stretch of sandy plain, that I caught sight of their closest undulations, in a transparent, vaporous, bluish remoteness calling to mind those glaciers one sees in the backgrounds of paintings by Tuscan primitives. On other days, the waves would be very near; and the sunlight laughed on a green which was as soft as the green brought out in Alpine meadows (among mountains where the sun sprawls about like a reckless giant blithely tumbling downhill) not so much by the moistness of the ground as by the liquid mobility of the light. Moreover, in that breach that a beach and its waves make in the rest of the world, so as to let the light flood in, it is especially the light, according to the direction it shines from and the point of view it thereby gives to the eye, which makes for the placement and displacement of a seascape’s hills and dales. Variations in lighting can alter the outlook of a place, can bring before us new goals and give us the desire to attain them, no less effectively than can the laborious making of a long journey. In the mornings, when the sunlight came from behind the hotel, baring the illuminated sands for me all the way to the sea’s first foothills, it appeared to be showing me a concealed slope of them and to be urging me to undertake a varied though stationary tour, by way of the turning road of its rays, through the most impressive sites of the hours’ changing landscape. On the very first morning, the sun kept smiling and pointing out to me the sea’s distant blue summits, named on no map, until its sublime transit of the resounding chaos of their cliffs and avalanches brought it dazzled into my room, out of the wind, to lie about on the unmade bed and strew its wealth on the wet wash-stand, in my opened trunk, its very splendour and incongruous extravagance increasing the effect of untidiness. Unfortunately, my grandmother’s opinion of the sea-breeze, an hour later, as we had lunch in the large dining-room – sprinkling from a lemon’s leather gourd a few golden drops on a brace of sole, which soon left on our plates the plume of their skeletons, as fragile as a feather and as resonant as a zither – was that it was a shame not to feel its bracing effects, of which we were deprived by a screen which, transparent but closed, made the beach look like an exhibit behind plate-glass, exposing it completely to our view but separating us from it, while the sky seemed so much a part of the room that its blue appeared to be the colour of the panes and the white of the clouds looked like flaws in the glass. Fancying that Baudelaire’s lines about ‘lounging on the esplanade’ or ‘in the boudoir’ applied to me, I was wondering whether his ‘sunbeams gleaming on the sea’ – unlike the evening sunbeam, simple and shallow, a tremulous golden shaft – might not be those I could see at that very moment burnishing the surface of the waves to topaz, fermenting it to a pale milky beer, frothing it like milk, while every now and then great blue shadows passed over parts of it, as though high above us a god was having fun moving a mirror about. Compared to the ‘parlour’ at Combray, looking out on the houses opposite, its aspect was not, alas, the only way in which this dining-room in Balbec differed, with its great bare emptiness filled to the brim by sunshine as green as water in a swimming-pool, and with the high tide and broad daylight only a few feet away, as though guarding the celestial city with their indestructible moving barrier of emerald and gold. In Combray, where we were known by everybody, I paid attention to no one. But on holiday at the seaside, one is surrounded by strangers. I was not yet old enough, and had remained too sensitive, to have given up the wish to please others and to possess them. I had none of the dignified indifference that a man of the world would have felt towards the people lunching in that dining-room or the young men and girls walking past on the esplanade: it was galling to think I could go on none of their outings – though less galling than if my grandmother, in her disdain for polite convention and her concern for my well-being, had humiliated me by asking them whether I might not join them! Whether they were wandering back to some holiday house unknown to me, strolling out to tennis carrying racquets, or riding past on horses whose hooves trampled my heart, I sat gazing at them with passionate curiosity, as they dawdled in that seaside dazzle which alters social dimensions, watching their every move through the transparency of the grand glassed-in bay that let in so much light. However, it also kept the breeze out; and that was a shortcoming in my grandmother’s estimation, she finding it intolerable that I should lose the benefit of a single hour of fresh air. So she surreptitiously opened one of the windows, which had the effect of blowing away the menus, newspapers, veils and caps of the other people having lunch, while she herself, invigorated by the bracing breath from heaven, was as unruffled and full of smiles as Saint Blandine,14 braving the abuse which increased my feelings of aloneness and dejection and united the other guests against us in contempt, outrage and dishevelment.
Some of these people (and this was a feature which, at the Balbec hotel, gave quite a marked regional character to the guests, those who frequent such grand establishments being usually unremarkable in their common wealth and cosmopolitanism) were eminent personalities in the principal départements of those parts, one of Caen’s First Presidents, a bâtonnier15 from Cherbourg, a notary of note in Le Mans, who at each holiday season, leaving the far-flung points where they spent their workaday lives as disbanded free spirits, or pawns on the chessboard of western France, foregathered in this hotel. They always reserved the same rooms; and with their wives, who had pretensions to aristocratic connection, they formed a small group which also included a celebrated lawyer and a famous doctor, both from Paris, who would say on the last day of the holiday:
‘Ah yes, of course, we’re not taking the same train, are we? How fortunate you are – home by lunch-time!
– What do you mean ‘fortunate’? You’re from the capital, Paris, the hub of the nation. Whereas our humble abode is a mere country town of a hundred thousand souls – I tell a lie: a hundred and two thousand at the last census! But what’s that to you Parisians, with your two and a half millions, your asphalted pavements, your metropolitan glamour?’
This would be spoken with a peasant-like rolling of the r and without provincial rancour, for these were men of some consequence in their part of the country, men who could have gone up to Paris like many another – the First President from Caen had several times been offered a seat on the bench of the Cour de cassation16 – but who had chosen to stay put, because of their fondness for their native town or a preference for obscurity or for basking in local glory, because they were reactionary or else enjoyed being on friendly terms with the owners of local châteaux. Not all of them went straight back to their county towns, either.
The fact was that – since the Bay of Balbec was a little universe al
l to itself set amid the wider one, a posy of seasons composed of different sorts of days and many months, this meant that not only on days when one could see Rivebelle clearly (a thunder-storm warning, the sun shining on houses over there while the sky darkened over Balbec), but also when the colder weather had come to Balbec, one was always sure of two or three months more of warm days on that distant shore – each year when rains and fogs promised the coming of autumn, those regulars at the Grand-Hôtel whose holidays started late or lasted a long time had their luggage hoisted on to a boat and sailed across to continue their summer at Rivebelle or Costedor. This little group at the Balbec hotel would look askance at any new-comers and, though seeming to take no interest in them, would interrogate their friend the head waiter about them. Aimé by name, this head waiter was there for the season every year and made sure they all had the tables they preferred. Each of their good ladies, knowing that Aimé’s wife was expecting a baby, would work after meal-times at making baby-clothes, now and again glaring through their lorgnettes at my grandmother and myself because we liked to have hard-boiled eggs in our salad, a taste which was known to be ‘common’, quite unheard-of among the best families of Alençon. They and their husbands affected a posture of ironic disdain towards a Frenchman whom everyone called ‘Your Majesty’ and who had actually proclaimed himself king of the few savage tenants of a tiny islet in the South Seas. He was living at the hotel with his pretty mistress; and whenever she tripped out towards her bathing cabin, little boys would shout, ‘Hurrah for the Queen!’, she being in the habit of tossing handfuls of half-franc pieces in their direction. The bâtonnier from Cherbourg and the First President from Caen did their best to appear not to see her; and if anyone of their acquaintance looked at her, they felt duty-bound to point out that she was a mere mill-girl.
‘What? I was told they use the royal bathing-machine at Ostend!
– Well, of course! Anyone can rent it for twenty francs, you know. You could have it if you felt like it. I have it on very good authority too that he tried to get an audience with the King, who let him know it was out of the question for a real king to have anything to do with the likes of him!
– Well, I never! The things you hear … The people one meets nowadays!’
No doubt all this was true; but it was also because they were miffed by the knowledge that, for much of the world, they themselves were mere provincials unacquainted with this open-handed royal couple, that the notable notary, the First President and the bâtonnier were so upset by witnessing what they called ‘a circus’ and voiced aloud their indignation, which was no secret to their friend the head waiter, who, though obliged to smile upon the more generous than genuine Royals, made a point, as he took their order, of addressing a distant but meaning wink at his regular customers. There may also have been something of the same chagrin at being mistakenly thought less ‘smart’ and being unable to explain that they were more ‘smart’, in the ‘Pretty fellow!’ with which they greeted the appearance of the young ‘masher’, the consumptive prodigal son of a great industrialist, who drank champagne every day with his lunch, wearing a new jacket with an orchid in its buttonhole, then took his impassive pallor and smile of indifference off to the baccarat tables at the Casino, where he squandered a fortune ‘Which he can ill afford to lose, believe you me,’ as the notary, with a knowing air, vouchsafed to the First President, whose wife had it ‘on the very best authority’ that this deplorably fin-de-siècle young man would be the death of his long-suffering parents.
The bâtonnier and his friends also lavished sarcasm on the person of an old lady, rich and titled, because she would never travel without her entire household. Whenever the notary’s wife and the good lady of the First President saw her at meal-times in the dining-room, they would hold up their eye-glasses and give her a good, long, insolent stare, with such an air of punctilious distaste and misgiving that she might have been a dish of pompous name and dubious appearance which, after subjecting it to a rigorous inspection, one waves away with a distant gesture and a grimace of disgust.
Presumably all they wished to show was that, though there might be some things they lacked, such as certain of the old lady’s prerogatives and the fact of being acquainted with her, this was not because they could not aspire to them, but because they would not. But they had eventually come to convince themselves of the truth of this; and all desire for or curiosity about modes of life unknown to oneself, all hope of ever striking up new friendships, had been negated in these women and supplanted by a feigned disdain, a simulacrum of enjoyment of life, with the untoward effect that they called their displeasure satisfaction and had to lie to themselves all the time, two things that made for their constant unhappiness. But then no doubt everyone in that hotel behaved in the same way, albeit in different forms, sacrificing if not to self-esteem at least to certain principles of breeding or habits of mind the disquieting delights of mixing with unknown company. I have no doubt the little world to which the old lady restricted herself was free of the virulent embitterments and warped mockeries poisoning the lives of the wives of the notary and the First President. But her world, though it was fragrant with a fine old-fashioned perfume, was no less factitious than theirs. And if she had tried to please, if she had set out to win the mysterious regard of new people, which would have required her to renew herself too, she would most likely have experienced a charm which is absent from the twin pleasures of mixing only with one’s own sort and reminding oneself that, one’s own sort being the best sort, one can treat the ignorant disdain of others with the contempt it deserves. But perhaps she had sensed that by arriving incognito at the Grand-Hôtel of Balbec, wearing her black woollen dress and her old-fashioned bonnet, she might startle a smile out of some roisterer recuperating in his rocking-chair (‘Ye Gods! What a miserable old duck!’) or more likely that some worthy with the open face and witty sparkle to the eye that she liked in a man, such as the First President’s between his pepper-and-salt whiskers, would have instantly drawn the attention of the conjugal lorgnette’s magnifying lens to the manifestation of this bizarre phenomenon; and so it may have been the old lady’s unconscious apprehension of that moment of first encounter, which one knows is brief but dreads all the same, like the first time one dives into deep water, that made her send on a servant to inform the hotel of her character and her customs, then brusquely turn a deaf ear to the manager’s speech of welcome, so as to head speedily, albeit more from shyness than pride, for her room, where curtains of her own instead of the hotel’s hung at the windows and where, what with her private screens and family photographs, instead of adapting to the outside world, she could erect between it and herself a bulkhead of habit so deftly constructed that it was her own home with her inside it which had done the travelling and not her.
Then, having placed between herself and tradesmen not only the employees of the hotel but also her own servants, who took it upon themselves to deal with this new race of people and maintained the accustomed atmosphere about their mistress, having placed her prejudices between herself and the bathers, unperturbed at any offence she might give to people whom her friends would never have received, she continued to dwell in her own world, through exchanges of correspondence with these friends, through memory, through the private conviction she had of her own situation, of the quality of her own manners and the adequacy of her politeness. Every day, when she walked downstairs to take her carriage exercise, the footman who preceded her and the maidservant carrying her things who brought up the rear were like the guards who stand at the entrance of an embassy in the shade of the flag of the country it represents, and are the guarantors, in an alien land, of its privilege of extra-territoriality. On the day of our arrival, she did not leave her room until the middle of the afternoon; and we did not see her in the dining-room to which, in our capacity as new-comers, the manager himself condescended to conduct us, as a non-commissioned officer marches a pair of recruits to the quartermaster-sergeant’s to have them kitte
d out. However, we did see, after a moment, a squireen with his daughter, M. and Mlle de Stermaria, of an obscure but very old Breton family, at whose table, in the belief that they would not be back till that evening, we had been put. The sole purpose of their stay in Balbec being to meet certain landed families they knew in that district, the time they spent in the dining-room of the hotel, what with the invitations they accepted and the return visits they received, was the shortest possible. Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of a train, grim, hurried, stand-offish, brusque, fastidious and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure they keep away from one’s cold chicken and stay out of one’s chosen corner-seat. My grandmother and I had barely started lunch when we were asked to change tables, on the order of M. de Stermaria, who had just arrived and who, in a loud voice and without the slightest token of apology towards us, required the head waiter to be sure not to let any such contretemps happen again, as he did not like the idea of his table being taken by ‘persons unknown to him’.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 32