In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  By now, their charm was not blended into undifferentiated features. I could separate these from one another and apportion them to individual girls (in lieu of their names, which I had no knowledge of), such as the tall one who had jumped over the old banker; the small one who set off her plump pink cheeks and her green eyes against the horizon of the sea; the one whose darker colouring and straight nose made her look so different from the others; another one with a face as white as an egg, on which a little nose, like a chick’s beak, drew an arc of a circle, a face reminiscent of some very young men’s; the other one who was tall and wearing a hooded cape, which made her look so poor, and was in such contrast with the rest of her elegant outfit that my idea of her was that she must have parents whose brilliance and pride-in-self, drawn from things well above the heads of Balbec and its bathers, things utterly divorced from considerations of the elegance or otherwise or their own offspring, enabled them to be totally indifferent to the fact that this daughter of theirs went walking along the esplanade wearing something that people of the lower classes would have deemed too unprepossessing; a girl with shining, laughing eyes and full, matt-complexioned cheeks, a little black toque pulled right down, who was pushing a bicycle along and swinging her hips so freely, while using slang words which were so strong, and which she shouted out so loud as I passed close by (among which I distinctly heard the unladylike expression ‘She’s no better than she should be’), that I had to replace the hypothesis I had built on the hood and cape of her friend by another more plausible one: every one of these girls belonged to the crowds who frequent velodromes, and must be the extremely youthful girl-friends of racing cyclists. Certainly, in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste. I had known as much at a glance: I saw it in the way they kept exchanging looks and laughs, and in the insistent stare of the one with the cheeks and the matt complexion. Moreover, my grandmother’s concern for me had always been so over-scrupulous that I had come to believe that the things one must not do are a single indivisible set, and that young girls who are prepared to be rude to old age might well have few qualms about infringing other prohibitions, in which the pleasures to be enjoyed are more tempting than just jumping over an octogenarian.

  Though the girls were now individualized, the connivance in the glowing glances they kept exchanging, bright with conceit and their joy in being the little clique they were, flashing with self-interest or insolent indifference, depending on whether they were looking at each other or at people passing, as well as their sense of knowing one another closely enough to be always out together, to be ‘as thick as thieves’, linked their separate and independent bodies into an invisible harmony, as though they shared the same warm shade, walked within a separate atmosphere, which made of them an entity as alike in its parts as it was unlike the throng through which their closed little company wended its slow way.

  For an instant, as I passed close to the brunette with the full cheeks and the bicycle, I glimpsed her oblique, laughing glance, looking out from the inhumane world which circumscribed the life of their little tribe, an inaccessible terra incognita, obviously incapable of harbouring or offering a home to any notion of who or what I was. With her toque pulled down low on her brow, entirely engrossed in what her companions were saying, did she see me, at the moment when the black ray from her eyes encountered me? If so, what must I have seemed like to her? What sort of world was the one from which she was looking at me? I could not tell, any more than one can tell from the few details which a telescope enables us to descry on a neighbouring planet whether it is inhabited by human beings, whether or not they can see us, or whether their view of us has inspired any reflections in them.

  If we believed that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but shiny little discs of mica, we would not be eager to enter her life and link it to our own. But we are well aware that whatever it is that shines in those reflective discs is not reducible to their material composition; that flitting about behind them are the black incognizable shadows of the ideas she forms about the people and places she knows – the paddocks at race-courses, the sandy paths along which she might have pedalled, drawing me after her, over hill and meadow, like a little Peri81 more seductive than the sprite from the Persian paradise – the dimness of the house into which she will disappear, her own impenetrable projects and the designs of others upon her; and what we are most aware of is that she herself lies behind them, with her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will. I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore and which was composed of the lives led by these young girls, because what was laid out now before my eyes was that extension and potential multiplication of self which we know as happiness. The fact that they and I shared nothing, no habit, no idea, was surely bound to make it more difficult for me to make their acquaintance and meet with their approval. But perhaps it was my very awareness of these differences between us, my knowledge that, in the nature of the girls as in their every action, there was not one iota of an element that was known to me or that I could have access to, which had replaced my satiety of life by a thirst, akin to that of a drought-stricken land, for a life which my soul, having gone for ever without a single drop of it, would now absorb in great greedy draughts, letting it soak me to the roots.

  I had been staring so much at the bright-eyed cyclist that she seemed to notice it: she said something to the tallest girl, which I did not catch but which made her laugh. This bicycling brunette was not in fact the one I liked best, for the very reason that she was a brunette: for me, the unattainable ideal, ever since the day I had caught sight of Gilberte from the steep little lane by Tansonville, had been a golden-skinned girl with fairish ginger hair. But then, had I not also fallen in love with Gilberte because she had appeared to me surrounded by the halo of glory conferred upon her by being the friend of Bergotte, by going with him to look at cathedrals? In the same way, was it not promising that I had seen the brunette look at me (which made me hope it might prove easier to get to know her first), since she would be able to introduce me to the others, to the ruthless one who had jumped over the old man’s head, to the heartless one who had said, ‘Oh, wot a poor old bloke!’ and then all of them one after the other, in her capacity, and her prestige, as their inseparable companion? And yet in the assumption that I might one day be a friend of one or other of those girls, that the eyes which passed their unknown glances over me, as unaware of me as a touch of sun on a wall, might ever undergo the miraculous alchemy which would enable a notion of my existence, or friendship for my person, to merge with the inexpressible minutiae of their minds, that I myself might one day be a member of their bevy as it roamed along the sea-front, there was a contradiction as insoluble as though I had thought it possible not just to stand and admire the parading figures in an ancient frieze or fresco, but to be admired in return and step up to join in their divine progress.

  Was the happiness of knowing these young girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort which I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying. I needed only to think of all the unknown girls, even on the roads round Balbec, whom I had had to give up as the speeding carriage parted me from them for ever. Even the joy I derived from this little group, as noble as though composed of Hellenic virgins, had something in it akin to the feeling I got from those fleeting passers-by on the road. The transience of brief strangers who enter our life and force us out of the normality in which all the women we are used to will eventually reveal their blemishes, puts us into a state of readiness to pursue them, in which nothing inhibits the imagination. For a p
leasure divested of imagination is a pleasure reduced to itself, to nothing. If they had been offered to me by a madam – in the sort of house which, as has been seen, I did not disdain – divorced from the element which lent them so many colours and such attractive imprecision, they would have been less enchanting. The imagination, aroused by the possibility that it will not achieve its aim, is obliged to mask it with another, and by replacing sensual pleasure with the idea of penetrating someone’s life, makes sure we neither recognize that pleasure, experience its true flavour nor restrict it to its dimension of mere pleasure. If we were to set eyes on a fish for the first time as it might be served on a dinner table, it would hardly appear to be worth the countless ruses and devious tricks required to land it, unless between us and it there were afternoons spent fishing, eddies through which glimpses barely caught of fleshy gleams and an imprecise shape ruffle the surface of our indecision about what to do with them, in the blue fluidity of a transparent and mobile medium.

  The girls benefited also from the alteration in social proportions which is characteristic of holiday life at the seaside. All the ways in which our usual environment confers advantages on us, extending and inflating our importance, become invisible there, indeed are abolished, while other people in whom we imagine such advantages, which may be non-existent, move in a world enriched for us by this same fictitious density. It was this which made it easy for unknown women, as on that day this group of girls, to assume enormous significance in my eyes, while making it impossible for me to give them any indication of my own significance.

  Though this little sauntering gang of girls was an example of the countless occasions when young passers-by had escaped my grasp, a failure which had always irked me, this time the escapers had slowed their pace almost to the point of immobility. That faces, instead of dashing past, should make a slow enough disappearance for their features to be set and distinct, yet still appear beautiful, prevented me from believing, as I had so often believed when Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage was whisking me further and further away from a young woman, that at close range, if I had been able to pause for a moment, certain details of her face or body – a pock-marked complexion, an imperfection in the nostrils, a dull look, a crude smile, a graceless waist – would have supplanted those which my imagination had seen in her; for often I had needed no more than a pretty contour of a body, a glimpse of a cool complexion, to create in all good faith a lovely shoulder to go with it, or a look from delightful eyes, memories or preconceptions which I carried about with me at all times; and such cursory decipherings of a creature seen in a fleeting glimpse expose us to the same misconceptions as hasty readings of a text, whereby, on the faith of a single syllable, and without pausing to identify the others, we replace the word printed by another quite different word proffered by memory. But this occasion had to be different: I had been able to have a close look at each of their faces; and though I had been unable to see any of them from both sides, and few of them in full face, I had still managed to sketch two or three aspects of them which were sufficiently different from one another for me to be able to make either the necessary adjustments to their different hypothetical contours and colours, as jotted down by my first glance, or the verification and proof of them, and to see through their few overlaid expressions to something which was immutably material. So I knew I could say with certainty that, whether in Paris or in Balbec, assuming the most favourable possible outcomes with any of the young women who had ever caught my eye in passing, if I had been able to pause for a while and chat, there had never been any whose appearance, then disappearance without anything coming of it, would have left me with such regrets as would these ones, or who could make me believe there would be such excitement in being their friend. No actress, no peasant girl, no boarder at a convent school had ever been so beautiful to me, so fascinating in a suggestion of the unknown, so invaluably precious, so probably unattainable. The exemplar these girls offered of life’s potential for bringing unsuspected happiness was so full of charm, in a state of such perfection, that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I despaired of ever being able to experience, in unique conditions which would allow no room for possible error, the profound mystery to be found in the beauty one has longed for, the beauty one replaces, because one knows it is for ever beyond one’s reach, by seeking mere pleasure from women one has not desired – which Swann had always refused to do, before meeting Odette – with the result that one dies without ever having enjoyed that other form of fulfilment. It was of course possible that there would have been no revelation in such a fulfilment, that the mystery would have been nothing but a projection or mirage of desire, to be dispelled by proximity. If so, I would have to blame an inescapable law of nature (which, if it was applicable to these girls, would be applicable to all girls), and not any defectiveness in the present object. For this present object was the one I would have preferred above all, as I knew perfectly well, having botanized so much among such young blossoms, that it would be impossible to come upon a bouquet of rarer varieties than these buds, which, as I looked at them now, decorated the line of the water with their gentle stems, like a gardenful of Carolina roses edging a cliff-top, where a whole stretch of ocean can fit between adjacent flowers, and a steamer is so slow to cover the flat blue line separating two stalks that an idling butterfly can loiter on a bloom which the ship’s hull has long since passed, and is so sure of being first to reach the next flower that it can delay its departure until the moment when, between the vessel’s bow and the nearest petal of the one towards which it is sailing, nothing remains but a tiny glowing gap of blue.

  I had to go back to the hotel, as Robert and I were going out to dinner at Rivebelle and my grandmother insisted that, on such occasions, I take an hour’s rest on my bed, a siesta which the Balbec doctor soon ordered me to extend to all other evenings as well.

  To go back into the hotel, there was now no need to leave the esplanade, walk round the back and enter by the main vestibule: by a change of time-table analogous to Combray’s Saturday, when lunch was one hour early, the midsummer days had become so long that, when the tables were being laid for dinner at the Grand-Hôtel of Balbec, the sun was still high in the sky, making it feel like afternoon tea-time. And, as the tall sliding glass-doors, which opened right on to the esplanade, stayed wide open, all I had to do was step over a low wooden frame, straight into the dining-room, then walk directly to the lift.

  As I passed the office, I gave the manager a smile and received one in return, signalled by his face, which, since the beginning of our stay at Balbec, my studious attentiveness had been injecting and gradually transforming as though it was a specimen in natural history. The features of his face had become nondescript, expressive of a meaning which, though mediocre, was as intelligible as handwriting one can read; they no longer resembled the outlandish and unbearable characters printed on this face as I had seen it on our first day, when I had been confronted by a personage now forgotten – or at least, if I ever contrived to remember him, now unrecognizable – and difficult to identify in this polite and insignificant person, of whom the other had been only a caricature, hideous and summary. Freed of the shyness and distress of the evening of my arrival, I rang for the ‘lift’, who did not now observe unbroken silence as we ascended together, as though inside a mobile rib-cage gliding upwards along the vertical column, but kept saying, ‘Not as many people about now as a month ago. Days getting shorter. They’ll all start leaving soon.’ He said this not because it was true, but because he had another job waiting for him on a warmer stretch of the coast and wished we would all go away as soon as possible, so that the hotel would close and he might have a few days to himself before ‘recommencing’ his ‘new situation’. ‘Recommencing’ and ‘new’ were in no way contradictions for him, ‘to recommence’ being for him the normal form of the verb ‘to start’. The only thing that surprised me in what he said was the word ‘situation’, for he belonged to the working classes of mo
dern times, who try to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong. He also told me that in this ‘situation’ where he was about to ‘recommence’, he would have a handsomer ‘tunic’ and higher ‘remunerations’, the words ‘uniform’ and ‘wages’ seeming antiquated and unseemly to him. Vocabulary having, by an absurd contradiction, outlived the idea of inequality in the minds of the ‘bosses’, I always had trouble in understanding what the ‘lift’ said. For instance, if what I really wanted to know was whether my grandmother was in or out, the ‘lift’ would anticipate my questions and say, ‘The lady has just left your rooms.’ This caught me out every time without fail: I always thought he meant my grandmother. ‘No, I mean that lady that’s an employee of yours, I think.’ A cook, at least in middle-class terminology of former times, soon no doubt to be abolished, never having been ‘an employee’, I would think for a moment: ‘He’s mistaken: we’re not factory-owners – we don’t have employees.’ Then I remembered that the word ‘employee’ is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a moustache is to waiters in cafés, and realized that the ‘lady’ who had just left our rooms was Françoise (probably off to visit the buttery or to watch the young chambermaid sewing for the Belgian lady); though even this degree of self-esteem was insufficient for the ‘lift’, who, as he bemoaned the lot of his own class, also liked to say not ‘workers’ but ‘the worker’, not ‘commoners’ but ‘the commoner’, using the sort of singular with which Racine, meaning ‘poor men’, refers to ‘the poor man’. Usually, however, since I had lost all my early eagerness and timidity, I no longer spoke to the ‘lift’. He was the one who spoke without receiving an answer as he put his little craft to full speed ahead and, with his hand on the tiller, piloted us up through the hotel, which was like a hollow toy, and which, as storey replaced storey, deployed all about us its branching corridors, where distant light faded away into soft shadows, thinning down communicating doors and the faint steps of stairways, converting them into that golden amber, as insubstantial and mysterious as twilight, from which Rembrandt models a window-ledge or the handle of a well. And at each of these storeys, a golden glow on the carpet showed it was now sunset beyond the lavatory windows.