Though Elstir spoke of a grand vision of heaven and gave me an idea of a gigantic theological poem written on the face of the church, the eyes full of desires with which I had looked at it had seen nothing of them. I mentioned the large statues of saints on their stilts, forming a sort of avenue.
‘It’s an avenue which begins at the dawn of time, Elstir said, and leads to Jesus Christ. On one side, you’ve got His spiritual ancestors, and on the other, the Kings of Judah, His ancestors in the flesh. All the centuries are there. And if you had taken a closer look at what you call “stilts”, you’d have been able to put names to the ones standing up high – under the feet of Moses, there’s the Golden Calf; under the feet of Abraham, the ram; and under the feet of Joseph, the devil advising Potiphar’s wife.’
I told him the church I had been looking forward to seeing was almost Persian in character, and that this was no doubt one of the reasons why I had felt so disappointed. ‘Well, he said, there’s a lot of truth in that Persian idea. Some parts of it are completely Eastern. And on one of the columns, there’s a capital which reproduces so accurately a Persian subject that it can’t be explained just by the survival of Eastern traditions. The sculptor must have copied a casket brought back by navigators.’ In this connection, he was later to show me a photograph of a capital with very Chinese-looking dragons devouring each other, a little detail of sculpture which, as I stood before the church, I had failed to notice in the overall effect of a building which had not corresponded to the image created in my mind by the words ‘almost Persian’.
The intellectual pleasures I enjoyed by being in the studio did not prevent me from taking pleasure in other things, though they surrounded us in an incidental way: the room, with the tepid scumbles of its walls, its glowing penumbra; and beyond the little window set among honeysuckle, along the rural-looking road, the rough, desiccated surface of the sunburnt earth, which distance and the shadows of trees did no more than hazily veil. Perhaps the unconscious well-being drawn from the summer’s day helped to swell, like a tributary, the joy I had taken in seeing Harbour at Carquethuit.
I had assumed that Elstir was modest; but I realized I was mistaken in this when in thanking him I spoke the word ‘fame’, then saw a faint sadness in his expression. Those who think their works will last, and he did, come to see them as belonging to a time when they themselves will have become mere dust. By making them think of their own annihilation, any idea of fame saddens them, because it is inseparable from the idea of death. To disperse the cloud of arrogant melancholy which I had unwittingly brought to his features, I changed the subject. ‘I was once told,’ I said, recalling the conversation with Legrandin at Combray, and thinking it would be interesting to know Elstir’s view, ‘to stay away from Brittany. It was supposed to be bad for someone rather inclined to wistfulness. – Not at all, he replied. When the soul of a man inclines to the wistful, he mustn’t be kept away from it, he mustn’t have it rationed. If you keep your mind off it, your mind will never know what’s in it. And you’ll be the plaything of all sorts of appearances, because you’ll never have managed to understand the nature of them. If a little wistfulness is a dangerous thing, what cures a man of it is not less of it, it’s more of it, it’s all of it! Whatever dreams one may have, it is important to have a thorough acquaintance with them, so as to have done with suffering from them. A certain divorce between dreaming and daily life is so often useful to us that I wonder whether one should not take the precaution of practising it preventively, so to speak, in the way some surgeons recommend appendectomy for all children, so as to avoid the possibility of future appendicitis.’
Elstir and I were now right at the far end of his studio, by the window which looked out on the garden and a narrow side-street beyond it, little more than a country lane. The late afternoon air was cooling and we were standing by the window to enjoy it. I felt I was far from my gang of girls; and the hope of seeing them I had for once, if belatedly, sacrificed to my grandmother’s wish that I should be here with Elstir. We do not know where to find what we seek; and often we avoid for a long time the very place to which others, for other reasons, invite us, not knowing that it is the very spot where we could meet the one who is in our thoughts. I stood there, vaguely seeing the country lane which skirted the property where Elstir had his studio, but did not belong to it. Suddenly the young cyclist from the little group of girls came tripping along the lane, with her black hair, and her toque pulled down, her plump cheeks and her cheerful, rather insistent eyes; and in that blessed place, pregnant with the miracle of sweet promises, under the trees, I saw her give Elstir a smile and greet him like a friend, making a rainbow for me between our terraqueous world and spheres which until then I had believed to be inaccessible. She even came over to shake hands with the painter, without stopping, and I could see she had a small beauty-spot on her chin. ‘Do you know that young lady?’ I asked him, realizing that he could introduce me to her, invite her to the house. The tranquil studio, with its rustic outlook, was now filled with a delicious awareness of something more to come, like a house in which a child is enjoying himself, when he learns that, in addition to his present pleasures, in accordance with the generous propensity of beautiful things and nice people to go on being beautiful and nice, he is to be treated to a magnificent feast. Elstir told me her name – Albertine Simonet – and the names of her friends, whom I was able to describe accurately enough for him to have little hesitation in identifying them. It turned out that I had been mistaken about their social status, but in a way which was unlike my usual mistakes in Balbec, where I was in the habit of assuming that the merest son of a shopkeeper riding a horse must be a prince. My mistake this time had been to see the daughters of extremely wealthy lower-middle-class families, from the world of industry and business, as belonging to some unsavoury milieu. Their world was one which, prima facie, had least interest for me, as it was devoid of the sense of mystery I perceived both among the working classes and the society frequented by the Guermantes. If the shallow and flashy nature of seaside life had not made me see them through the prestige of a preconception, giving them a dazzle and charm they would never lose in my eyes, I daresay I might not have been able to overcome the knowledge that they were the daughters of big wholesalers. I could only stand amazed at the range of different sculptures produced, as in a wonderful workshop, by the French middle classes – so many unexpected patterns, so much inventiveness in the characters of faces, such decisive lines, such freshness and simplicity in the features! The miserly old burghers who had engendered such Dianas and nymphs I now saw as masters in statuary. Before I had time to notice the social metamorphosis of the girls – this type of discovery of a mistake, or a readjustment of one’s idea of a certain person, happens with the instantaneousness of a chemical reaction – behind these faces, young female ruffians as they had appeared to me, the girl-friends of racing cyclists and champion pugilists, there had already appeared the idea that they could very well be related to the family of a notary known to my own parents. As for Albertine Simonet, I had more no idea about what she might represent than she had about the importance she would one day come to have for me. Even the name of Simonet, which I had already heard down on the esplanade, was unfamiliar to me: I would have spelled it, if asked to, Simonnet, in my ignorance of the importance that her family attached to having only one n. The lower the level that people occupy in the social scale, the more snobbery they attach to insignificant things, which may be no more vacuous than the things valued by the aristocracy, but which, by being more obscure, more peculiar to individuals, are always more surprising. Perhaps at one time there had been Simonnets who had failed in business, or worse. Whatever the case, the Simonets had always been affronted, it seems, as though they had been defamed, whenever anyone doubled their n. The pride they took in being the only single-n Simonets was possibly comparable to that of the Montmorency family in being the first Barons of France. I asked Elstir whether the girls lived in Balbec: the an
swer was that some of them did. The villa of one of them happened to be situated right at the far end of the sea-front, near the cliffs of Canapville. I saw the fact that this particular girl was a great friend of Albertine Simonet as a further reason to believe it was the latter I had seen on the day when I was out walking with my grandmother. Not that I could have clearly identified at which corner of which side-street I had seen her, there being many of them running perpendicular to the beach and making a similar angle with it. We would like our memories to be clear; but at the time, our vision is unclear. It was almost certain that Albertine and the girl going to her friend’s house were one and the same. And yet, although the innumerable images that the dark-haired golfing-girl showed me at later times, however dissimilar they are, can be superimposed on one another, because I know she was the model of them all, and though, if I wind in the clew of my memories of her, I can follow the same identity from one to the other, find my way through the labyrinth and come back always to the same person, on the other hand if I try to find my way back to the girl I passed when I was with my grandmother, I lose my way. I am sure it must be Albertine, the same girl who used to come to a standstill among her friends, as they walked, profiled against the horizon of sea. But all the other images remain separate from this one, because I cannot give it in retrospect an identity it did not have for me at the moment when it impinged on my sight. In the strictest sense of the verb ‘to see again’, whatever the theory of probabilities has to say on the matter, that particular girl with full cheeks, who looked at me so boldly at the junction of the side-street with the sea-front, and who I think could have fallen in love with me, I was never to see again.
Was it my initial hesitancy, my inability to choose among the different girls of the little gang, in each of whom was preserved something of the collective attractiveness that had first excited me, which added to the other causes and, at the time of my greater love for Albertine, my later, second love for her, gave me, albeit intermittently and very briefly, the freedom to not love her? Because it had wandered about among all her friends, before opting definitively for her, my love kept some ‘slack’ between it and the image of Albertine, enabling it, like a badly adjusted beam of light, to settle briefly on others before returning to focus on her; the relation between the pain in my heart and the memory of Albertine did not seem a necessary one; I could perhaps have made it match the image of another person. And that enabled me, for a split second, to make reality vanish, not just external reality, as in my love for Gilberte (which I had recognized as an inner state, in which I was the source of the particular quality, the special character of the girl I loved, and of everything which made her indispensable to my happiness), but also the inner, purely subjective reality.
‘There’s hardly a day, Elstir said, when one or other of them doesn’t come down that lane and drop in to pay me a little visit,’ a statement that reduced me to despair – if I had gone to see him as soon as my grandmother had suggested it, I might well have made the acquaintance of Albertine long since!
She had walked on and was now out of sight from the studio. I guessed she had gone down to the esplanade to meet her friends. If I could be down there with Elstir, I might make their acquaintance. I tried to think of pretexts to have him come for a walk with me. The peace of mind I had enjoyed before the appearance of the girl had gone, and the frame of the little window, which had been so charming draped in its honeysuckle, was now very empty. Elstir filled me with joy and torture by saying he would be glad to take a stroll with me, but that he must first finish the piece he had been working on. It was a group of flowers, but not any of those – hawthorns, white and pink, cornflowers, apple blossom – whose portrait I would have liked to commission from him, in preference to that of any person, in the hope of having his genius reveal what it was in them I had so often sought in vain as I stood before them. As he worked, he spoke of botany, but I barely listened: to me, he was no longer sufficient in himself, being only the necessary intermediary between the girls and myself; and the only value of the prestige which his talent had lent him, only a few moments before, in my eyes, was that, when he introduced me to the little gang, it might lend some of itself to me, in their eyes.
I walked up and down, impatient for him to finish; of the many studies stacked against one another, face to the wall, I took up some and looked at them. So it was that I came upon a water-colour which must have dated from a much earlier time in the life of Elstir, and which made me feel that particular enchantment one gets from works which are not only painted to perfection, but the subject of which is so singular and delightful that we see it as accounting for much of the charm of the thing, as though the painter only had to notice this charm, study it as it stood before him fully present in the material reality of the natural world, then reproduce it. That such objects can exist, beautiful in themselves and without any painter’s interpretation of them, is something which satisfies an innate materialism in us, though resisted by reason, and serves as a counter-balance to the abstractions of aesthetics. The water-colour was the portrait of a young woman who, though not pretty, was of a curious type: she was wearing a close-fitting headdress, something like a bowler-hat edged with a ribbon of cerise silk; in one of her hands, which wore lace mittens, there was a lighted cigarette; and the other held at knee-height a sort of large garden hat, a mere screen of straw against the sunlight. On a table beside her, a little vase full of roses. Often, and it was the case here, the singularity of such works lies in the fact that they were executed in particular circumstances, which we do not clearly appreciate at first, for instance whether the odd get-up of a female model is in fact fancy dress worn for a ball, or whether the red robe worn by an old man, who looks as though he has just put it on at the passing whim of the painter, might not be his professor’s gown or his cardinal’s cape. The ambiguous character of the person whose portrait I was looking at came from the fact, which I did not understand, that it was a young actress of an earlier period, partly cross-dressed. However, her bowler, set on hair that was puffed out but cut short, and her velvet jacket, without lapels and open on a white dickey, made me hesitate about the date of the fashion and the sex of the model, so that I could not tell what I was looking at, except that it was a brilliant piece of painting. My pleasure in it was mitigated only by the fear that Elstir might delay so long as to make me miss the gang of girls, for the sun was now angling very low through the little window. The water-colour contained nothing that served merely as a factitious accessory to the scene depicted (the costume, for instance, for no better reason than that the woman had to be wearing something, or the flower-holder, because there were flowers): the glass of the receptacle, lovingly seen in its own right, seemed to surround the water in which the stems of the carnations stood with a substance which was no less limpid and almost as liquid; the garments worn by the woman enclosed her in a material which had its own charm, independent, fraternal and, if man-made things can equal the charm of nature’s wonders, as delicate, as satisfyingly smooth to the eye’s touch and as neatly painted as the fur of a cat, the petals of a carnation or the feathers of a dove. The shirt-front, its white as fine as hail and its frivolous pleating smocked with little bells like lily-of-the-valley, shone with bright reflections from the room, themselves sharply seen and as delicately shaded as though there were flower motifs brocaded on the linen. The velvet of the jacket, which had a pearly lustre in its pile, was roughened in places, frayed and shaggy in a way which was like the ruffled carnations in their vase. One’s main impression was that Elstir, not only unconcerned about what might appear immoral in this young actress dressed like a man, who was herself less interested in how well she would play her part in the performance than in the fascination and stimulation she was bound to offer to the sensuality, surfeited or depraved, of certain spectators, had actually focussed on these points of ambiguity as an aesthetic element in his picture, which he had worked hard to bring out. In the lines of the face, the sex of the person
seemed at times on the point of owning up to being that of a rather boyish girl, faded at others into the impression of an effeminate young man, perverted and pensive, then changed again, always elusive. In the look of the eyes, there was something wistful or forlorn which, in the contrast it made with the accessories from the worlds of the theatre and debauchery, gave a strange thrill. But one also felt that this look was affected, and that the young person in the provocative costume, seemingly asking to be fondled, must have thought there would be something even more intriguing in an expression suggestive of romantic or secret feelings, a hint of unspoken heartbreak. At the bottom of the picture were the words Miss Sacripant,89 October 1872. I could not contain my admiration. ‘Oh, that’s nothing – just a thing done by a young man. A costume from a pantomime at the Théâtre des Variétés. It’s all a very long time ago. – And what became of the model?’ At my question, his face showed surprise, which he replaced a moment later by a look of inattentive indifference. ‘Quick, let me have that canvas, he said. I can hear Mme Elstir coming. And though I can assure you the young creature in the bowler hat had no part to play in my life, it would be pointless to let my wife see this water-colour. I only kept it as an entertaining memento of the theatre of that period.’ Before hiding the work behind him, Elstir, who had perhaps not seen it for a long time, stared at it and murmured, ‘The head’s the only thing worth keeping. Those lower bits are dreadful. The hands are by a beginner.’ I was quite put out by the arrival of Mme Elstir, which was likely to make us delay even longer. The window-ledge soon turned pink. It would be futile to go out now: there was no longer the slightest chance of seeing the girls, and so it did not really matter whether Mme Elstir went away or stayed. In fact, she left again after only a short time. I thought her a bore: at twenty, leading a bullock in the Roman countryside, she would have been beautiful; but her black hair was turning white; and she was common but not simple in her manner, since she believed that a certain dignity of bearing and majesty of attitude were required by her mode of statuesque beauty, which had lost, in ageing, all its attractiveness. Her dress was striking in its utter simplicity. And it was touching and surprising to hear Elstir say, with great frequency and in a tone of caressing respect, as though by just speaking the words he was moved to tenderness and veneration, ‘My beautiful Gabrielle!’ At a later time, when I had become acquainted with his mythological paintings, I too came to see beauty in Mme Elstir; and I realized that, in a certain ideal pattern, the few outlines and arabesques of which could be seen to recur in his work over and over again, in a certain model of beauty, he had once seen something almost divine, since all of his time, the whole intellectual effort of which he was capable, in short the whole of his life, was devoted to the task of seeing those outlines more clearly and reproducing them more accurately. This ideal had become a form of worship, of such solemnity, and so demanding, that he could never be content; it was the innermost part of his self, and so he had never been able either to view it with detachment or to transform it into feelings, until the day when he came upon it externally manifested, in the body of a woman, who later became Mme Elstir, in whom he had at last been able – as we only ever are able, with that which is not part of ourselves – to see it as meritorious, moving and divine. What peace there was in placing his lips on Beauty, when until then he had had to drag it out of himself, create it in pain, but which now in a mysterious incarnation offered itself for a sequence of efficacious sacraments! By that time, Elstir had outgrown youth’s first confidence in the unaided power of thought to achieve the ideal. He was reaching the age at which one looks to the body and its fulfilments to stimulate the energy of the mind, when we are inclined by its weariness to materialism, by the lessening of its activity to the possibility of passively receiving influences, when we begin to accept that there may be certain bodies, certain professions, certain privileged rhythms which achieve our ideal very naturally, that even without genius, one can produce a masterpiece merely by copying the movement of a shoulder or the taut lines of a neck; it is the age at which we enjoy letting the caress of our eye rest on Beauty outside ourselves, close to us, on a tapestry, on a beautiful sketch by Titian discovered in an antique shop, or on a mistress every bit as beautiful as the sketch by Titian. Once I had come to understand this, I could never see Mme Elstir without pleasure; and her body lost all its ungainliness, for I filled it with an idea: that she was a creature of immateriality, a portrait by Elstir. And for Elstir too, that is what she was. The bare materials of life do not count for the artist; they merely offer him the opportunity to show his genius. Set side by side ten portraits of different people, all by Elstir, and their most flagrant feature is that they are Elstirs. But then, after the high tide of genius which once swamped the whole of life, once the brain has started to tire, gradually the equilibrium is lost, and like the flow of a great river beginning to prevail against the counter-flow of an exceptional tide, life reasserts itself. During his first period, the artist has managed to define the law, the formula, of his unconscious gift. He knows the situations, if he is a novelist, and the landscapes, if he is a painter, that can best provide him with the material which, though inessential in itself, is as indispensable to his research as a laboratory or a workshop. He knows he has made his masterpieces out of effects of attenuated light, remorse that changes the view of a wrong once done, women posed under trees or half-immersed in water like statues. A day will come when, with the onset of mental fatigue, he will face the materials which once served his genius, without finding in himself the intellectual vigour required for the creation of a work, yet will continue to seek them out and to enjoy their presence, because of the spiritual pleasure which, as the sometime spur of work, they still afford; and viewing them with a sort of superstition, as though they were superior to everything else, or as though they already contained a good part of the work of art, latent and ready-made, he will do no more than frequent and adore his subjects. He will continue to seek out rehabilitated criminals, whose remorse and repentance used to be the subjects of his novels; he will buy a country house in a region where the light is attenuated by mists; he will spend hours watching women bathing; he will become a collector of fine fabrics. So it was that, even for Elstir, a day would eventually come when he regressed to the attitude to beauty (which I had seen in Swann and beyond which he had never gone) implicit in the expression ‘the beauty of life’, a phrase almost devoid of meaning, suggesting beauty that never rises to art, a day when his creative genius would begin to dissipate, gradually giving way to idolatry, mere worship of the forms which had once nourished it and to the beguiling temptations of inertia.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 53