In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  My grandmother, because I had now developed an acute interest in golf and tennis, which was preventing me from seizing the opportunity of going to watch an artist at work – an artist she knew to be among the greatest – and listen to his talk, now treated me with scorn, which seemed to me very narrow-minded of her. At the Champs-Élysées I had had an inkling, which since those days had become clearer to me, that when we are in love with a woman, all we are doing is projecting on to her a state of our own self; that consequently what is important is not the merit of the woman, but the intensity of that state; and that the emotions which a mediocre young girl can give us may enable us to bring up to consciousness elements of ourself which are more private and personal, more remote and essential than anything which we may acquire from the conversation of an extraordinary man, or even the admiration with which we gaze at his works.

  I eventually had to comply with my grandmother’s urgings, though I did so with a bad grace, which was aggravated by the fact that Elstir lived nowhere near the esplanade, but in one of the newest avenues of Balbec. The heat of the day made me take the tram along the rue de la Plage; and I sat there trying to imagine that I was in the ancient realm of the Cimmerians, in the land of King Mark or perhaps on the very spot where the Forest of Broceliande had been,87 so as to avoid looking at the sham luxury of the buildings all about me, among which Elstir’s villa was perhaps the most sumptuous in its ugliness, despite which he had rented it because it was the only one of all Balbec’s villas which afforded him the use of a spacious studio.

  As I walked through the garden, I kept my eyes averted also from the lawn – smaller than, but reminiscent of, that of any middle-class philistine in the suburbs of Paris – the statuette of a lovelorn gardener, glass balls for looking at one’s reflection, borders of begonias and a little arbour with rocking-chairs set out round a metal table. After all these approaches full of citified ugliness, once in the studio itself, I paid no attention to the chocolate-coloured mouldings on its skirting-boards: I was perfectly happy among all the studies ranged about, for I glimpsed in them the possibility that I might rise to a poetic awareness, rich in fulfilling insights for me, of many forms which I had hitherto never distinguished in reality’s composite spectacle. Elstir’s studio seemed like the laboratory out of which would come a kind of new creation of the world: from the chaos made of all things we see, he had abstracted, by painting them on various rectangles of canvas now standing about on all sides, glimpses of things, like a wave in the sea crashing its angry lilac-shaded foam down on the sand, or a young man in white twill leaning on a ship’s rail. The young man’s jacket and the splash of the wave had taken on a new dignity, in virtue of the fact that they continued to exist, though now deprived of what they were believed to consist in, the wave being now unable to wet anyone, and the jacket unable to be worn.

  As I came in, the creator, paintbrush in hand, was just putting the last touch to the shape of the sun as it set.

  The blinds being down on most sides, the studio was rather cool; and, except for one part where daylight’s fleeting decoration dazzled the wall, it was dim; the only window open was a small rectangle framed in honeysuckle, looking out on a strip of garden, then a road; so most of the studio was in half-darkness, transparent and compact in its mass, but moist and glistening at the angles where the light edged it, like a block of rock crystal with one of its sides already cut and polished in patches, so that it shines like a mirror and gives off an iridescent glow. While Elstir, at my request, went on with his painting, I wandered through this chiaroscuro, stopping here and there in front of a picture.

  Most of those in the studio were not what I would have preferred to see: the paintings from his first and second periods, so called by an English art magazine which I had found lying on the table in the salon at the Grand-Hôtel, that is, his mythological manner and the paintings in which a Japanese influence had become evident, both of which were admirably represented, the article said, in the collection of Mme de Guermantes. Almost all of the works I could see about me in the studio were, of course, sea-scapes done recently here in Balbec. But I could see that their charm lay in a kind of metamorphosis of the things depicted, analogous to the poetical device known as metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, Elstir recreated them by removing their names, or by giving them another name. The names of things always express a view of the mind, which is foreign to our genuine impressions of them, and which forces us to eliminate from them whatever does not correspond to that view.

  At the hotel in Balbec, there had been mornings when Françoise unpinned the blankets keeping out the light, or evenings when I was waiting for it to be time to go out with Saint-Loup, when an effect of sunlight at my bedroom window had made me see a darker area of the sea as a distant coastline, or filled me with joy at the sight of a zone of liquid blue which it was impossible to say was either sea or sky. The mind quickly redistributed the elements into the categories which the impression had abolished. Similarly, in my room in Paris, I had heard sounds of squabbling, almost rioting in the streets, until I had linked them to their cause, for instance the rumbling approach of a dray, the sound of which, once identified, made me eliminate from it the high-pitched discordant shouting which my ear had really heard, but which my mind knew is not made by wheels. Those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir’s work was made of. One of the metaphors which recurred most often in the sea-pictures which surrounded him then was one which compares the land to the sea, blurring all distinction between them. And it was this comparison, tacitly, tirelessly repeated in a single canvas, imbuing it with its powerful and multifarious unity, which was the source of the enthusiasm felt, though sometimes they were not quite aware of this, by many lovers of Elstir’s painting.

  It was to a metaphor of this sort – in a painting showing the harbour of Carquethuit, which he had finished only a few days before, and which I looked at for a long time – that Elstir had alerted the mind of the spectator, by using marine terminology to show the little town, and urban terms for the sea. Whether because the houses hid part of the harbour and the caulking basin, say, or perhaps because inlets of sea indented the land, as is very frequent in the country round Balbec, beyond the extreme promontory on which the town stood, masts rose above roofs, like chimneys or steeples, as though making citified things of the ships to which they belonged, things built on land, an illusion enhanced by other boats lying alongside the pier, in ranks so serried that men conversed from one deck to the other without there being any visible separation between them, any interstice of water, giving the impression that the fishing-fleet was more out of place on the sea than, for instance, the churches of Criquebec, which seemed to be standing in the water, surrounded by it on all sides, so distant as to be seen without their town, amid a sparkling haze of sunlight and spindrift, blown out of alabaster or foam and making, when bounded by the versicoloured sash of a rainbow, an unreal and mystic picture. On the beach in the foreground, the painter had accustomed the eye to distinguish no clear frontier, no line of demarcation, between the land and the ocean. Men pushing boats out moved in the tide as on the sand, which being wet reflected the hulls as though it was water. The sea did not invade evenly, but followed the irregularities of the shoreline, which the perspective made more jagged, and a ship out to sea, half-hidden by the outworks of the arsenal, seemed to be sailing in the thick of the buildings; women shrimping among rocks looked, because they were surrounded by water and because, beyond the circular barrier of rocks, the beach dipped down to the level of the sea at the two points closest to the land, as though they were in an under-sea grotto, with waves and boats above, open yet miraculously protected from the inrush of waters. Though the whole painting gave the impression of seaports where the waves advance into the land, where the land almost belongs to the sea and the population is amphibious, the power of the marine element was everywhere manifest; and out by the rocks or at
the end of the pier, where the sea was rough, the efforts of the sailors, and the slanting of the boats, lying at an acute angle near the upright stability of the wharf, the church and the houses of the town, with some people coming in and others setting out to fish, made one sense the urgency in their step as they scurried over the heaving water, as though it were a swift and spirited animal which, had it not been for their nimbleness, might throw them to the ground.

  A group of holiday-makers were setting out gaily in a yawl, which was shaken about like a farm-cart; a sailor, cheerful but also careful, controlled it as though with reins, driving the spirited sail, everyone sitting in their proper place so as not to overload the equipage at one side and capsize it, and she cantered across sunlit fields and through shaded places, prancing down the slopes. The morning was radiant, despite a recent thunder-storm. One could even sense the powerful activity that the motionless boats had had to contend with, as they lazed now in their fine equilibrium in the sun and the cool, on parts of the sea which were so calm that the reflections were almost more solid and real than the hulls, which were turned to vapour by an effect of the light and run into one another by the perspective. Or rather, they did not look like other parts of the sea: there was as great a difference between these areas of sea as between any one of them and the church rising out of the waters, or the ships behind the town. It was the mind which, on second thoughts, came to see as one and the same element what was stormy black at one point, at another indistinguishable from the sky in colour and sheen, and elsewhere so blanched by sunlight, mist and spray, so compact, so landlike, so hedged about by houses, that one was reminded of a causeway of stone or a snowfield, on which it was alarming to see a ship steeply climbing the dry slope, like a carriage shaking water as it rattles up from a river-ford, but which one realized before long, as one saw other ships lurching about on the high, uneven expanse of its solid plateau, was identical in all its differences, and nothing other than the single sea.

  Although it is said, and rightly so, that it is only in the sciences, and not in art, that there can be progress or discovery, and that no artist who launches into his own endeavour can ever be helped or hindered by the endeavours of any others, it must be recognized that, in so far as art establishes certain laws, and once an industry has vulgarized them, the art of earlier times loses in retrospect something of its originality. Since the earliest period of Elstir, we have seen supposedly ‘admirable’ photographs of landscapes and cities. If one tries to define what it is that art lovers mean by that adjective, it can generally be seen to apply to some unfamiliar image of a familiar thing, an image that is different from the ones we are in the habit of noticing, unusual yet true, and which for that reason seems doubly striking, since it surprises us and shakes us out of our habits, while at the same time it turns us in on ourselves by recalling an impression. For instance, one of these ‘magnificent’ photographs will illustrate a law of perspective by showing a cathedral which we are accustomed to seeing in the centre of the city, but taken from a point of view chosen so as to make it appear thirty times higher than the houses and jutting out beside the river, whereas it is nowhere near it. The fact was that Elstir’s intent, not to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions that our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been first to uncover them. A bend in the course of a river, or the apparent contiguity of the cliffs bounding a bay, seemed to make a lake, completely enclosed, in the middle of the plain or the mountains. In a painting done at Balbec on a stifling hot summer’s day, a recess of the coastline, held between walls of pink granite, appeared not to be the sea, which could be seen further off: the unbrokenness of the ocean was suggested only by seagulls wheeling above what looked like solid stone, but which for them was wind and wave. The same canvas defined other laws, such as the Lilliputian grace of white sails at the foot of the immense cliffs, set on the blue mirror like sleeping butterflies, and certain contrasts between the depth of the shadows and the pallor of the light. This play of shadows, which photography has also spread far and wide, had fascinated Elstir so much that at one point he had enjoyed painting veritable mirages, in which a château topped by a tower looked like a completely circular château with a tower growing out of the roof and another one, inverted, beneath it, either because the extraordinary purity of a fine day gave the shadow reflected in the water the hardness and glitter of stone, or because morning mists made the stone as insubstantial as shadow. Similarly, beyond the sea, behind a stretch of woodland, the sea began again, turned pink by the setting sun, but it was the sky. The sunlight, as though inventing new solids, struck the hull of a boat and pushed it back beyond another one lying in the shade; it laid the steps of a crystal staircase across the surface of the morning sea, which, though in fact smooth, was broken by the angle of illumination. A river flowing under the bridges of a city was shown from a point of view that split it, spread it into a lake, narrowed it to a trickle, or blocked it by planting a hill in it, covered with woods, where the city-dwellers like to go for a breath of evening air; and the rhythm of the disrupted city was marked only by the inflexible verticality of the steeples, which did not climb skywards, but seemed rather, like gravity’s plumb-line marking the beat in a triumphal march, to have the whole vague mass of houses hanging beneath them, ranged in misty tiers along the crushed and dismembered river. Even that semi-human part of nature, a footpath along a cliff-top or on a mountain-side (Elstir’s earliest works dating from the period when landscapes had to feature the presence of a character), was affected, like rivers or the ocean, by the eclipses of perspective. And whether a mountain ridge, a haze of spume rising from a waterfall, or the sea prevented one from seeing the road in its entirety, visible to the character but not to us, the little human figure in outdated clothes, lost among this wilderness, often seemed to have stopped in front of an abyss, the route he was following having come to an end; and then, three hundred yards higher up, among the pine-woods, we would be touched and reassured to see the reappearance of the thin white line of sandy path, friendly to the wanderer’s tread, the intervening turns and twists of which, disappearing round the gulf or the waterfall, had been hidden from us by a mountainside.

  The effort made by Elstir, when seeing reality, to rid himself of all the ideas the mind contains, to make himself ignorant so as to paint, to forget everything for the sake of his own integrity (since the things one knows are not one’s own), was especially admirable in a man whose own mind was exceptionally cultivated. When I told him of my disappointment on seeing the church of Balbec, he said, ‘What’s that? Disappointed by that porch! Why, it’s the finest collection of Bible stories that the faithful could ever have had. That Virgin, and all those low-reliefs telling her life-story, make up the most tender and inspired expression of the long poem of adoration and praise which the Middle Ages dedicated to the glory of the Madonna. If you only realized, not just the closeness and fidelity to the sacred text, but the old sculptor’s touches of genius, the profundity of some of his ideas, the delicacy and poetry of the thing! The idea of the great veil in which the Angels bear away the body of the Virgin, which is too holy for them to dare to touch it (I told him the same subject was to be seen in the church at Saint-André-des-Champs: he said he had seen photographs of the porch, but observed that the scurrying of all those little peasants round about the Virgin was not quite the same thing as the gravity of Balbec’s two great angels, almost Italian in their tall, gentle slenderness); the angel taking away the soul of the Virgin to reunite it with her body; then in the meeting between the Virgin and Elizabeth, the gesture of the latter when she touches the breast of Mary and expresses her surprise at finding it already swollen; or the bandaged arm of the midwife who had been reluctant to believe, without touching for herself, in the Immaculate Conception; or the sash that the Virgin tosses to St Thomas to prove her resurrection; and the veil that th
e Virgin tears from her own breast so as to cover the nakedness of her son, from whose pierced side the Church gathers His blood, the liquor of the Eucharist, while on His other side the Synagogue, its reign over, blindfolded, and holding a half-broken sceptre, drops its crown and the tablets of the old Law; and what about the husband, at the hour of the Last Judgment, helping his young wife to step out of the tomb and holding her hand against his heart to reassure her and prove to her that it’s really beating – isn’t that a neat little touch? Then there’s the angel taking away the sun and the moon, because they’re useless now, since it’s written that the Light of the Cross will be seven times brighter than that of the heavenly bodies; or the one dipping his hand in Jesus’s bathwater to make sure it’s warm enough; or the other one coming down from the clouds to set his crown on the brow of the Virgin; and all the rest of them looking down from on high, peeping through the banisters of the heavenly Jerusalem, throwing up their hands in horror and joy at the sight of the evil ones in torment and the bliss of the chosen! It’s all the circles of heaven you’ve got there, you see, a huge theological and symbolic poem. It’s crazy, it’s divine, it’s far superior to anything you’ll ever see in Italy – and the Italians, by the way, literally copied the tympanum of Balbec, but they were sculptors with much less genius. For, you see, it all comes down to genius. There’s never been a period when everyone was a genius – that’s just nonsense, as much of a joke as the golden age. The chap that did that porch at Balbec, you can be sure, was every bit as good, with ideas every bit as sharp, as the people nowadays that you admire the most. If we go there one day, I can show you all that. There’s a phrase from the liturgy for the Assumption which is illustrated with a subtlety that your Redon88 can’t match.’