This dramatic period of their liaison (now reaching not only its climax but its cruellest phase for Saint-Loup, since in her exasperation with him she had forbidden him to remain in Paris and had obliged him to spend his leave at Balbec, not far from where he was garrisoned) had begun one evening at the house of one of his aunts, Saint-Loup having prevailed upon this lady to put on a performance by his mistress, in which she recited, before the aunt’s many guests, excerpts from a symbolist play in which she had once acted on an avant-garde stage, and which she admired so much that she had communicated her liking for it to him.
However, when she made her entrance in front of the gathering of club-men and duchesses, with a tall lily in her hand and wearing a costume copied from the Ancilla Domini,79 which she had assured Robert was a true ‘vision of art’, her appearance had been greeted by smiles, which the sing-song monotony of her delivery, the outlandishness of certain words and the frequent repetitions of them had changed into tittering, quickly stifled at first, but then becoming so irrepressible that the poor artiste had had to abandon the performance. The following day, Saint-Loup’s aunt had been unanimously condemned for having presented such a bizarre performer. A prominent duke made no secret of the fact that, if people were criticizing her, she only had herself to blame: ‘Well, for goodness’ sake, what do you expect, if you will expose people to that sort of nonsense? If the woman actually had a bit of talent – but she hasn’t, nor will she ever! And, heavens above, Paris isn’t as stupid as it’s said to be. Society isn’t entirely composed of idiots. It’s obvious that your little lady thought she could show Paris a thing or two. But it takes a bit more than that to show Paris anything, and there are some things which just won’t wash!’
The artiste herself said to Saint-Loup as she was leaving, ‘God, what a gang! Brainless hussies, ill-mannered bitches and rotten pigs, the lot of them! I don’t mind telling you that those dirty old men spent the evening making eyes at me, every single one of them, and trying to play footy-footy with me, and it was because I refused to have anything to do with them that they decided to get their own back!’
These words had changed Robert’s antipathy towards society into a much deeper and more painful abhorrence, which he felt especially in the presence of some towards whom it was least justified, those devoted relatives who, at the family’s behest, had attempted to persuade his mistress to give him up, and who she told Robert were motivated solely by their own desire for her. Though he had immediately broken off all contact with these men, Robert sometimes thought, especially when he was away from her, as he was at Balbec, that they or others would take advantage of his absence to make further advances to her, and that she had perhaps given in to them. When he spoke of the sort of rake who could deceive a friend, attempt to seduce women, lure them into bawdy houses, his face contorted with pain and hatred.
‘I could kill them with less compunction than if they were dogs – a dog is at least a loving, loyal and faithful animal. People like that deserve the guillotine, more so than the poor devil who has been pushed into crime by poverty and the ruthlessness of the rich.’
At Balbec, he spent most of his time writing letters to his mistress and sending off telegrams to her. Every time she managed not only to prevent him from returning to Paris, but to provoke a squabble with him, even at such a distance, I only had to glance at his wretched expression to know what had happened. She would never say outright what her grievance against him was; and Robert, with the idea that her silence on this matter meant she had no particular grievance but just a general feeling of having had enough of him, kept asking by letter for the frank discussion he would have preferred: ‘Please tell me what I have done wrong. I’m quite willing to admit I’ve behaved badly.’ His sorrow had the effect of convincing him that he was the one at fault.
She always kept him waiting for her answers, which, when they came at last, made no sense. I usually saw him coming back empty-handed and with furrowed brow from the post-office, the only person in the hotel, apart from Françoise, who fetched and carried his own letters, he being impelled to do this by lover’s haste, she by servant’s distrust. (To send his telegrams he was obliged to go much further afield.)
A few days after the dinner-party at the Blochs’, my grandmother told me, with an overjoyed air, that Saint-Loup had just asked her whether she would not like him to take a photograph of her before he left Balbec; and when I saw that, in view of this, she had put on her best clothes and was trying to decide which hat to wear, I felt a touch of irritation that she should make such a fuss over something so trivial, which struck me as surprising in her. I even wondered whether I was not mistaken in my estimate of my grandmother, whether I had not put her on too high a pedestal, whether concern for self was as genuinely foreign to her as I had always thought, whether she did not have some slight measure of what I believed her completely free of: affectation.
I was ill-advised enough, in Françoise’s presence, to show something of my disgruntlement at the intended photography session, and at the gratification that my grandmother seemed to derive from it; and Françoise, having noticed this, unintentionally aggravated my mood by making a sentimental and lachrymose remark, which I greeted with an expression calculated to dissociate myself from it.
‘Oh, master, your dear grandmother will love having her photo took – and she’s even going to wear the hat that her dear old Françoise has done up for her. We mustn’t stand in her way, sir.’
I told myself it was not unkind to scorn Françoise’s mode of sensibility, with the reminder that my mother and grandmother, my models in all things, often did so. But my grandmother, noticing that I looked put out, said that, if the taking of the photograph was bothersome to me, she would not go ahead with it. I did not want her to abandon the idea, told her I had no objection and let her titivate herself. But I thought it was pretty clever and superior of me to say a few hurtful and sarcastic words to her, so as to neutralize the pleasure she seemed to look forward to from being photographed; and, though I was obliged to see her magnificent hat, at least I managed to banish from her face the signs of a joy which I ought to have been happy to share with her, but which, as so often happens while those whom we love best are still alive, can strike us as a mere irritant, a mark of something silly and small-minded, rather than the precious revelation of the happiness we long to give to them. My bad mood was mainly the result of the fact that, throughout that week, my grandmother had appeared to be avoiding me and that I had been unable to have a moment with her, either during the day or in the evenings. When I went back to the hotel in the afternoons, so as to have a little time with her, I was told she was not in; or else she was closeted with Françoise, having long confabulations which I was supposed not to interrupt. Or if I had been out all evening with Saint-Loup, and came back to the hotel enjoying the prospect of being with her again and giving her a kiss, I would wait in vain for her little knocks on the wall, which were her invitation to me to go in and kiss her goodnight; I would get into bed, a little resentful at this unfamiliar indifference in her, at her way of depriving me of a pleasure which I had been much looking forward to; and with my heart throbbing as much as it had ever done when I was a child, I would lie there listening to the silence of the wall, until sleep came to dry my tears.
That day, as on the preceding days, Saint-Loup had had to go to Doncières, where his presence was required until late each afternoon and where he would soon have to return full-time. I missed him in Balbec. I could see young women alighting from carriages, some of them going into the ballroom at the Casino, some into the ice-cream parlour, and from a distance they seemed lovely. I was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes. We need only to see in passing a single real feature of a woman, a glimpse of her at a distance or from behind, which can be enough for us to project Beauty on to
her, and we imagine we have found it at last: the heart beats faster, we lengthen our stride and, on condition that she disappears, we may be left with the certainty of having set eyes upon it – it is only if we succeed in catching up with her that we discover our mistake.
Also, my health was going from bad to worse, and I was inclined to magnify the simplest of pleasures because of the obstacles that lay between me and the possibility of enjoying them. Beautifully dressed women seemed to be everywhere, because I was unable to approach them, either being too weary if I saw them on the beach, or too diffident if I saw them in the Casino or in a cake-shop. If I was fated to die young, I wished I could first find out for myself what real life had to offer in the persons of the prettiest girls, even if someone other than me, or possibly no one, was ultimately to enjoy them (I did not recognize that, underlying my curiosity about them, there was a desire for possession). I would have been brave enough to walk into the ballroom, if only Saint-Loup had been with me. By myself, I was standing about outside the Grand-Hôtel, waiting for the moment when I would go in to sit with my grandmother; and there, still far away along the esplanade, where they made a strange mass of moving colours, I saw five or six young girls, as different in their appearance and ways from all the other people one was used to seeing in Balbec as the odd gaggle of seagulls which turns up out of the blue to strut along the beach, the stragglers flapping their wings to catch up with the leaders, in a procession which seems as obscure in its purpose to the bathers, whom they seem not to see, as it is clear to their bird-minds.
One of these girls was walking along pushing her bicycle; two others carried golf-clubs; and their accoutrements made a flagrant contrast with the appearance of other young girls in Balbec, for even those who practised certain sports did not walk about dressed in a particular way.
It was the hour for ladies and gentlemen to take their daily walk along the esplanade, directly into the merciless line of fire of the lorgnette held by the wife of the First President from Caen, who scrutinized each and every one of them as though they might be tainted with some blemish which she felt bound to inspect in its minutest details, as she sat in her proud posture in front of the bandstand, midway along the redoubtable row of chairs in which the subjects of her scrutiny would themselves soon come to sit, actors turned critics, and set themselves to the task of examining all the other people strolling past. All these esplanade walkers were pitching about as though stepping along the deck of a ship (for they could not take a stride without also swinging an arm, shifting their glance, setting their shoulders straight, counter-balancing on one side of their body the movement they had just made on the other, and becoming flushed about the face), and though they pretended not to see the other strollers walking beside them or coming in the other direction, so as to let it be thought they had no interest in them, while actually glancing at them surreptitiously so as to avoid colliding with them, they collided with them nonetheless, or jostled them, because all of them had been furtively looking at each other, their attention concealed behind the same apparent disdain for everyone else; for love, hence fear, of the crowd is one of the most powerful motives in all individuals, whether they wish to please others, astonish them or show that they despise them. In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passers-by or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities which would make it necessary for him to leave the house.
Amid all these people, some of whom were following a train of thought, but who revealed its mobility through restless gesturing or wandering looks, all of which made them look just as uncoordinated as the others with their circumspect lurchings, the girls I had seen, with the confidence of gesture which comes from the perfect mastery of a supple body and sincere contempt for the rest of humanity, strode straight on, without hesitation or stiffness, making exactly the movements they wished to make, each of their limbs in complete independence from all the others, while most of their body retained the poise which is so remarkable in good waltzers. They were now not far from me. Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of colour were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or other of these girls and allot them to her. The fact that my view of them was devoid of demarcations, which I was soon to draw among them, sent a ripple of harmonious imprecision through their group, the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable and elusive beauty.
It may not have been mere fortuitousness which, in bringing all these girls together, had managed to choose only beautiful ones; the girls themselves (whose attitudes sufficed to show their tough, daring and frivolous nature), by their excessive sensitivity to anything ridiculous or ugly, their inability to feel an attraction of an intellectual or moral sort, may have naturally coincided in feeling repelled by any of their coevals whose pensive or sensitive dispositions were revealed by shyness, embarrassment or awkwardness, by girls whom they probably saw as ‘horrid’ and whom they had ruled out as possible friends; and they may have taken up with others to whom they felt drawn by a blend of gracefulness, ease and bodily elegance, the only appearance through which they could conceive of candour and attractiveness in a character, offering a promise of good times together. It may have been too that the social class to which they belonged, and which I could not define with any degree of precision, had reached a stage in its evolution where – by reason of growing prosperity and leisure, or because of the new interest in sports, spreading now even among the working classes, and in physical training without any concomitant training of the mind – a social environment similar to that of certain schools of sculpture, in which harmony of line and prolific creativity aspire as yet to no over-elaboration or distortions, produces naturally an abundance of beautiful bodies with lovely limbs and handsome hips, with lusty, unperturbed faces and an air of sprightly cunning. For surely these were noble and tranquil models of human beauty that met my eye, against the sea, like statues in the sun along a shore in Greece.
As though with a single mind, this gang of girls, making its way along the esplanade like a shining comet, seemed to think the crowd of people all about them was composed of beings of another species which, even if it was capable of suffering, could not move them to sympathy, as they advanced seemingly oblivious to it, forcing everyone who stood in their way to move aside, to give way as though to a locomotive bearing down upon them without the slightest likelihood that it would avoid pedestrians; and their only reaction, if some fearful or furious old gentleman, of manifestly negligible existence, whom they swept aside as they passed, hobbled urgently or ludicrously out of their path, was to exchange a look amongst themselves and burst out laughing. For anyone or anything outside their group they affected no scorn; their sincere scorn was enough. They could not see an obstacle without taking pleasure in jumping over it, e
ither by running at it or from the standing position, because they were full to overflowing with the youthfulness which must expend itself, which even when one is sad or unwell makes one obey the needs of age rather than the mood of the day, so that one can never come upon the possibility of leaping or sliding without making a point of leaping or sliding, and deliberately punctuating one’s slow progress, as Chopin does with even the most melancholy of his phrases, with serial detours full of grace, impulsiveness and virtuosity. The wife of an old banker, after having indecisively tried several different places for her husband to sit, had eventually settled him in his deck-chair facing the esplanade, where he was sheltered from the wind and the sun by the band-stand. Once he was comfortable, she went off to buy a newspaper, so as to read to him and keep him amused, never being away for more than five minutes at a time, while he sat by himself during her brief absences, which he found long but which she repeated, in the hope that her aged husband, the beneficiary of her close but unobtrusive care, could have the feeling that he was still capable of living a normal life and did not require help and support from anybody. The floor of the band-stand jutted out above the old man’s head, forming a natural springboard so tempting that the eldest of the little gang80 of girls, without the slightest hesitation, dashed across and jumped off the edge, sailing right over him: he was terrified by a pair of nimble feet grazing his nautical cap, to the great amusement of the other girls, and especially of a pair of green eyes in a chubby face full of admiration, merriment and possibly also some slight shyness, or rather a sort of bare-faced bashfulness, which was not apparent in the others’ expressions. ‘Oh, wot a poor old bloke! He’d break your heart, so he would – he’s got one foot in the grave!’ said one of them in a broad, husky accent that was half-ironic. They all walked on a few paces, before halting for a moment right in the middle of the promenade, unconcerned about holding up the procession of strollers, forming a dense, shapeless, untoward mass, loud with squawking, like a prattle of birds that gather just before flying off; and then they took up again their own slow stroll along the esplanade, above the sea.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 46