In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  I wondered whether the girls I had seen lived in Balbec and who they might be. When the focus of our desire singles out a tiny human tribe, whatever may bear upon them in any way sets off an emotion in us, which then becomes a wondering day-dream. On the esplanade I had overheard a lady say, ‘Yes, she’s one of the friends of the Simonet girl,’ with the smug, superior knowledge of the person in the know who says, ‘Yes, he’s very thick with the young Duc de La Rochefoucauld.’ I was instantly aware of a look of curiosity on the face of the person being told this, a quickened interest in somebody who was so favoured as to be ‘one of the friends of the Simonet girl’. It was clear this was a privilege not open to all and sundry. Aristocracy is relative: there are all sorts of inexpensive little resorts where the son of a furniture salesman may be the arbiter of all things elegant, holding court like a young Prince of Wales. Since that moment when I first heard the name ‘Simonet’, I have often tried over the years to remember how it must have sounded there on the esplanade, in my uncertainty about its shape, which I had not quite noticed, about its meaning and the identity of this or that person to whom it might belong: full of the imprecision and foreignness which we later find so moving, when our unremitting attention to this name, with its letters more deeply imprinted in us with each passing second, has turned it (as the name of ‘the Simonet girl’ was to be turned for me, but not until several years later) into the first word to come to consciousness, whether on waking each morning or after fainting, even before any inkling of the time of day, or where we are, almost before the word ‘I’ itself, as though the one it names were more us than we are ourselves, as though the first respite always to end after a few moments’ oblivion were the respite of not thinking of it. Why I decided, there and then, that the name ‘Simonet’ must belong to one of the gang of girls I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation, and especially how to be introduced to them by people they would see as above themselves – which should not prove difficult, if the girls were just vacuous and immoral specimens from the working classes – so that they could not look down on me: perfect knowledge of those who disdain you, like complete absorption of any such person, is impossible unless one has overcome that disdain. Every time we are assailed by images of women very different from ourself, unless these images are eliminated by being forgotten or overlaid by others, we can have no peace of mind until we have converted these strangers into something more like us, the self in that respect being similar in its action and reactions to the physical organism, which is incapable of accepting a foreign body within itself, without immediately setting to work to digest and assimilate the intruder. The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might be able to become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes. So I asked the ‘lift’ whether he knew of anyone in Balbec called Simonet. Being reluctant to admit to ignorance of anything, he replied that he thought he had ‘heard tell of some such a name’. When we reached the top floor, I asked him to have them send up the latest list of new-comers.

  On leaving the lift, instead of going directly to my room, I walked further along the corridor, as at that time of day the duty-servant, despite his aversion to draughts, had opened the window at the far end of it, and this window, though it overlooked the hillside and the valley, instead of the sea, never let one see them, since its panes were of opaque glass and it was usually kept shut. I stood for a moment in front of it, long enough to make my devotions to the view which it had for once disclosed: this went beyond the hill against which the hotel backed, and contained a single house, set some distance away, but with its bulk preserved by the perspective and the evening light, which had worked delicately on it, embossing it and setting it within a velvet-lined casket, as though it were an example of miniaturized architecture, a tiny temple or chapel worked in gold and enamel, used as a reliquary and exposed only on rare occasions to the veneration of the faithful. But my moment of worship had gone on too long, and the duty-servant, holding a bunch of keys in one hand and touching the other to his sexton’s cap, rather than exposing himself to the cool evening air by raising it to me, came along to close the windows, like the little double doors of a monstrance, thus putting an end to my adoration of the golden relic of the miniature church. I went to my room: the painting on show in the window-frame kept changing as the season advanced. At the beginning of my stay, it was broad daylight, its tones sometimes dulled by bad weather: the sea, through the glaucous glass bulging with its round waves, held between the iron uprights of the frame as though set in the lead of a latticed window, teased out along the deep, rocky fringe of the bay triangles plumed with spray which hung motionless, touched in with the delicacy of down or a feather pencilled by Pisanello, and fixed by the creamy white never-fading enamel used for a fall of snow in glass-works by Gallé.82

  Then the days grew shorter; and when I went to my room, the violet sky, which seemed to have been branded by the rigid, geometrical, fleeting, flashing iron of the sun (as though in representation of some miraculous sign or mystical apparition), hung down over the sea at the juncture of the horizon like a religious canvas above a high altar, while the different parts of the sunset, exhibited in the glass-doors of the low mahogany book-cases running round the walls, and which I mentally compared to the marvellous painting from which they had been detached, were like the different scenes with which an old master once decorated a shrine for a religious house, now divided into separate panels, for display in a museum, where only the imagination of a visitor to the exhibition can reassemble them on the predellas of the altar-piece. Some weeks later, when I went up, the sun would have already set. Lying above the sea, there would be a band of red, as dense and fine-edged as a slab of aspic, similar to the red striping the sky at Combray, above the wayside cross, on evenings when I was nearing home after a walk and intended to go down to the kitchen before dinner; and before long, right on top of the water, which had the coldness and the colour of the fish known as grey mullet, there would be another sky, of the same pink as one of the salmon we would soon order at Rivebelle; and these shades whetted my expectation of the pleasure of changing into evening clothes to go out to dine. Very close to the shore, trying to rise over the sea, in storeys which spread ever wider, its layers superimposed upon one another, there was a haze as black as soot, but also with the smooth sheen and consistency of agate, its highest parts, visibly top-heavy, beginning to tilt above their deformed support, leaning away from the centre of gravity of those which had underpinned them hitherto, and seeming about to crumble and collapse into the sea, dragging down with them from half-way up the sky the whole precarious edifice. The sight of a ship leaving, like a night traveller, gave me the impression I had once had in the train, of being freed of the restrictions of sleeping and staying closed up in a room. Not that I felt hemmed in by this room, since within the hour I was going to walk out of it and go off in a carriage. I lay down on the bed; and, as though I were on a bunk, aboard one of the boats which I could see not far away, and which after nightfall people might be surprised to see moving slowly through the darkness, like dim, silent swans that never sleep, I was surrounded on all sides by images of the sea.

  However, quite often they were nothing but images: I would forget that, beneath the colour of them, there was the forlorn, empty shoreline, with the uneasy evening wind which had so upset me on my arrival in Balbec. Also, even in my room, my thoughts were full of the girls I had seen walking along the esplanade, and my state of mind was neither calm enough nor disinterested enough for me to be able to attend properly to vivid impressions of beauty. Because I was looking forward to the dinner at Rivebelle, my state of expectancy made me feel even more frivolous; and my mind, occupying at such moments the surface of my body, which I was about to clothe in such a way as to appear as attractive as possible to the eyes of women staring at me under the bright lights of
the restaurant, was unable to see through the colours of things to anything deeper. Had it not been for the tireless and restful aerobatics of the swifts and swallows outside my window, their sudden vertical spurts like water-jets, fireworks of vitality, filling the intervals between their vertiginous rocket-like ascents with the straight white wake of a long unwavering glide, making a delightful miracle of a natural and local phenomenon, linking the landscapes before my eyes to reality, I could have seen these landscapes as a mere selection of paintings, changed every day, arbitrarily exhibited at the spot where I happened to be, but having no necessary relation to it. One evening it would be an exhibition of Japanese prints: beside the flimsy cut-out of the sun, red and as round as the moon, a yellow cloud was a lake against which black blades, and the trees on its bank, were silhouetted; a bar of soft pink, in a shade which I had not set eyes on since my very first paint-box, swelled like a river, with boats seemingly beached on both sides of it, looking as though waiting there to be refloated. With the bored, disdainful superficiality of the sated expert, or the elegant lady glancing in at an exhibition during her crowded day of visits to fashionable friends, I dismissed it with the thought: ‘Quite an interesting sunset, rather different, but I’ve seen plenty of others that are just as delicately done and every bit as striking.’ On other evenings, there was greater enjoyment to be had: from a ship which had been absorbed and liquefied by the horizon, and which had such an appearance of being of the same colour as it, as though in an Impressionist painting, that it also seemed to be made of the same material, as though once the hull and rigging had been cut out of it, it had faded away into the hazy blue of the sky. Or it was the sea itself which took up almost the whole height of the window, having been extended upwards by a broad band of sky topped by a strip of the same blue as the sea, and which I thought was the sea, the difference in shade being due to an effect of the light. Or else the sea was painted only in the lower part of the window, all the rest being filled by clouds in horizontal stripes piled on top of one another, so numerous that it looked as though the artist might have intended the panes to contain one of his specialities, a ‘Study in Clouds’, while the different glass-fronted doors of the book-cases, showing clouds which were similar, but reflected from other points of the horizon, and variously coloured by the light, seemed to be, as one sees in the works of certain contemporary masters, endless repetitions of a single effect, none of them noted at the same time of day, but all of them, through the immobility of art, now available to be viewed together in one room, executed in pastel and displayed under glass. Sometimes, with exquisite delicacy, a touch of pink was added to the uniform grey of sea and sky; and at the very bottom of this Harmony in Grey and Pink after Whistler,83 a tiny moth asleep on the window-pane seemed to lend its wings to the favourite signature of the master from Chelsea. Then even the pink disappeared and there was nothing else to look at. I got up to close the tall curtains, then lay down again. From my bed, I could see the fading line of daylight that lingered above the curtains, growing dimmer and fainter; but I had no qualms or regrets about letting the last daylight hour die behind the curtains at a time when I was usually in the dining-room, for I knew this day was of a different kind from the rest, lasting longer, like those polar days which turn into a night of a few minutes’ duration; I knew that a brilliant metamorphosis was at work within the chrysalis of this twilight, and that from it there would soon emerge the dazzling illuminations of the restaurant at Rivebelle. I thought, ‘It’s time’; I stretched, still lying on the bed, then got up and finished making ready to go; and I found a great charm in these slack moments unburdened by any material concern, which everyone else spent sitting downstairs at the dinner-table, as I used the energy stored during the inactive evening, drying my body, putting on a dinner-jacket, tying my bow-tie, going through all these motions which were already informed by the expected pleasure of being once again in the presence of a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purpose of giving me the chance to follow her out; it was a joy to put on this finery, so as to be ready to devote myself wholly to my new life of freedom and lack of care, when my hesitations could rest on Saint-Loup’s untroubled certainties, and I could choose, from all the species of natural history and products from all countries, those which would challenge my appetite or my imagination, to make the most unusual dishes, which my friend would order for me forthwith.

  Then, right at the end, there came days when it was no longer possible to step straight from the esplanade into the dining-room, because it was already dark outside and the glass-doors were not open, and the swarms of the poor and the curious, chilled to the marrow by the north wind, drawn towards the blazing, unreachable illuminations, were clinging in thick black clusters to the glowing sliding panels of our hive of glass.

  There was a knock at the door: it was Aimé, making a point of being the one to bring me the latest list of new-comers.

  Before he left the room, Aimé felt the need to inform me that there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly.84 ‘The whole truth, he said, will come out, not this year, but next. It was this gent that’s very in the know with the General Staff that told me.’ I asked him whether it would not be decided to divulge everything all at once, before the end of the year. ‘Look, he put down his cigarette,’ Aimé said, acting the scene for me, shaking his head and his forefinger at me, as the hotel-guest had done, meaning: Don’t be so demanding. ‘ “Not this year, Aimé,” he says, giving me a tap on the shoulder. “Out of the question. But just you wait and see what Easter brings!” ’ Aimé gave me a tap on the shoulder, then said, ‘There, that’s exactly what he did,’ either because he was flattered at having been treated so familiarly by a great man, or so that I could better appreciate the force of the argument and the validity of the reasons why we must live in hope.

  It was not without a little palpitation that I read, on the first page of the list of new-comers: The Simonet family. There was in me a residue of old dreams of love, dating since my childhood, full of all the tenderness my heart was capable of, all the love it had ever felt and which was now indistinguishable from it, which could be suddenly brought back to me by someone as different as possible from me. This someone I now once more invented, this time using the name ‘Simonet’ and the memory of the harmony shared by the group of young bodies I had seen making their way along the sea-front in an athletic procession worthy of ancient Greece or Giotto. I had no idea which of these girls – or indeed whether any of them – might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup’s presence, I was going to try to make her acquaintance. Unfortunately, he was obliged to return to Doncières every day, that being the condition on which he had managed to have an extension of his leave approved. Despite this, in the hope of having him disregard his orders, I had thought I might be able to play, if not on his friendship for me, at least on the same sort of naturalist’s curiosity about human beings which in my own case (on hearing a mere mention of a pretty till-girl working in a fruiterer’s shop, and without even having set eyes on the person spoken of) had so often led me to an observation of a new variety of feminine beauty. However, I had been mistaken in thinking that, by telling Saint-Loup about my gang of girls, I might stimulate this curiosity in him. It had been paralysed by his liaison with the actress whose lover he was. And even if he had been tempted to feel it, he would have repressed it, under the influence of a sort of superstitious belief: that the fidelity of his mistress to him might depend on his to her. So he gave me no promise to further my cause with the girls, and we set off to dine at Rivebelle.

  The first few times we went there, the sun had just set when we arrived, but there was still light: in the garden of the restaurant, they had not yet lit the lamps, and the heat of the day was dropping, subsiding, as though into a vase, lining the inner surface of it w
ith the dim, crystalline transparency of the air, which seemed so firm that a tall rose-bush, veining with pink the darkened wall against which it stood, resembled the arborization to be seen inside an onyx. Before long, it was dark by the time we stepped out of the carriage, or even by the time we left Balbec, if the weather was bad and we had delayed the moment of harnessing up, in the hope of an improvement. Even on those days, I was not upset by the bluster of the wind; I knew it would not frustrate plans for the evening or result in my having to stay indoors; I knew that, as we walked into the large dining-room of the restaurant, to the music of the gipsy band, the countless lamps would easily cure the dark and the cold, by applying to them their broad golden cauteries; and I happily took my place alongside Saint-Loup in the brougham which stood waiting in the rain. For some time, the conviction expressed by Bergotte that, despite what I said, I was made for the pleasures of the intellectual life, had made me think again about what I might do with my life, reviving hopes which were, however, doomed to frustration every time I sat down to a desk to sketch the draft of a critical study or a novel. ‘Well, I thought, it may be that the pleasure to be taken in writing it is not an infallible criterion of the value of a fine page. Perhaps it’s only an accessory state, often present, but not necessarily invalidating the writing by its absence. Perhaps it’s possible to yawn all the way through the composition of a masterpiece.’ My self-doubt was assuaged by my grandmother, who assured me that, if I were in good health, I would work well and with enjoyment. Our doctor having thought it wiser to add the view that my state of health could expose me to serious risks, setting forth all the precautions I must take so as to avoid having an attack, I now subordinated all pleasures to the aim, which seemed infinitely more important than they were, of becoming well enough to accomplish the work which I might have it in me to produce; and since coming to Balbec I had been paying constant and close attention to my health. No one could have made me drink a cup of coffee, and jeopardize thereby the night’s sleep which I needed if I were not to suffer from fatigue the following day. But as soon as we arrived at Rivebelle – because of the excitement generated in me by a new pleasure, and having crossed the line which anything exceptional makes us cross after it has severed the thread, patiently woven over so many days, which was leading us towards a more sensible way of living – as though no tomorrow would ever come, as though the worthier achievements were of no importance, the whole careful arrangement of wiser precautions, the whole point of which was to make those achievements possible, would disappear. While a servant helped to relieve me of my overcoat, Saint-Loup would say: