In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  As though on a seedling whose blossoms ripen at different times, I had seen in old ladies, on that beach at Balbec, the dried-up seeds and sagging tubers that my girl-friends would become. But, now that it was the time for buds to blossom, what did that matter? If Mme de Villeparisis invited me out for a carriage-ride, I made up an excuse for not going. The only times I went to visit Elstir were when my new friends went with me. I could not even find a spare afternoon to keep my promise to go and see Saint-Loup in Doncières. If my outings with the girls had been replaced by gatherings of the fashionable, earnest conversations, or even just a chat with a friend, it would have felt like a lunch-time at which, instead of being fed, I had been expected to take an interest in somebody’s picture-book. The men and youths, the old or middle-aged women, in whose company we think we take pleasure, we conceive of as shallow beings, existing on a flat and insubstantial surface, because our only awareness of them is that of unaided visual perception; but when our eye ventures in the direction of a young girl, it is as though it acts on behalf of all our other senses: they seek out her various properties, the smell of her, the feel of her, the taste of her, which they enjoy without the collaboration of the hands or the lips; and because of desire’s artful abilities in transposition, and its excellent spirit of synthesis, these senses can draw from the colour of cheeks or breasts the sensations of touching, of savouring, of forbidden contact, and can rifle girls’ sweet succulence, as they do in a rose-garden when plundering the fragrances of the flowers, or in a vineyard when gloating with greedy eyes upon the grapes.

  If it was raining – not that wet weather daunted Albertine, who could be seen in her waterproof dashing along on her bicycle, through the pelting rain – we would spend the day in the Casino. On such days it would have been inconceivable to me not to go there. I scorned the d’Ambresac girls, who had never set foot in it; and I was glad to be a party to the tricks played on the dancing-master. We usually brought down on our heads the wrath of the proprietor or of any of his employees who saw themselves as acting in his stead, since my girl-friends (even Andrée, who on the very first day had made me think she was such a Dionysiac creature, yet who was actually not at all robust, but intellectual and, that year, quite unwell; despite which, unconcerned for the good of her health, she acted in conformity with the spirit of her time of life, an age which carries all before it, infecting with its gaiety not just the hale and the hearty but the lame and the halt as well) were incapable of walking from the entrance-hall to the reception-room without breaking into a run, hurdling the chairs, sliding back across the floor towards the others, keeping their balance with gracefully outstretched arms, singing, mingling all the arts, youth’s first blush manifesting itself in them as it did in those poets of antiquity for whom the different genres had not yet diverged, and who would adorn an epic poem with agricultural advice and theological instruction.

  The Andrée who had struck me to begin with as being the most unfriendly of them all was in fact much more sensitive, affectionate and astute than Albertine, to whom she was all sweetness, as gentle and caressing as though she was her elder sister. At the Casino, she would come and sit by my side and, unlike Albertine, could even decline an invitation to waltz; or if I was tired, she would come to see me at the hotel rather than go to the Casino. The words in which she expressed her liking for me, and for Albertine, were exquisitely well chosen, showing the subtlest insight into things of the heart, which may have come in part from her acquaintance with ill-health. She always gave a bright smile, by way of excuse for the childish and vehement directness of Albertine’s ways of expressing her irresistible fascination with outings and parties, which she could not bring herself to forgo, as Andrée did, so as to stay and chat with me. If we were all together when the hour set for a tea-party at the golf-club was approaching, Albertine would get ready to go, then say to Andréee, ‘So what are you waiting for? You know we’re to take tea at the golf-club. – No, I’m going to stay here with him, Andrée replied, with a nod in my direction. – But as you know, Mme Durieux invited you,’ Albertine exclaimed, as though the real reason for Andrée’s intention to stay with me must be that she did not know she had been invited. ‘Oh, look, do stop being silly,’ Andrée replied. And Albertine let the matter drop, in case she should be requested to stay with me too. She shook her head and, as though dealing with an invalid who takes a reckless delight in committing very slow suicide, said, ‘Well, on your own head be it. I’m off, though, because I think my watch is a bit slow.’ She dashed away. ‘She’s just lovely, but quite preposterous,’ Andrée said, with an indulgent but critical smile for her friend. In this liking of Albertine’s for amusement there was something of the Gilberte I had known in the earliest days, the explanation of which is that there is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times; and this resemblance, though it evolves, derives from the unchanging nature of our own temperament, which is what selects them, by ruling out all those who are not likely to be both opposite and complementary to us, who cannot be relied on, that is, to gratify our sensuality and wound our heart. Such women are a product of our temperament, an inverted image or projection, a negative, of our sensitivity. A novelist could shape the whole life of his hero by depicting his consecutive loves in more or less the same terms, giving thereby the impression, not of being self-repetitive, but of being creative, there being less power in an artificial innovation than in a reiteration designed to convey a hitherto unrevealed truth. However, the novelist should take care to note in the character of the lover a factor of variability, which becomes more marked as the lover moves into new regions and explores some of life’s other latitudes. He might even speak a further truth if, in his apportionment of character to the other members of his cast, he made a point of giving none to the woman his hero loves. We are thoroughly acquainted with the characters of people who mean nothing to us; but how could we possibly grasp anything of a person who is intricately involved in our life, who soon becomes inseparable from our very self, whose motives are the subject of our anguished, incessant and constantly revised hypotheses? Our curiosity about the woman we love, the roots of which lie far beyond our reasoning mind, reaches far beyond her character. Even if we were capable of pausing and focussing on it, we would probably not wish to. The object of our anxious investigations is her essence, not to be confused with peculiarities of character more akin to the minute diamond-shapes on the surface of the skin, which in their varieties of combinations give rise to the rosy individuality of the person in the flesh. Our intuitive radiation sees through them, and the images it gives are not those of any particular face, but rather the lineaments of a skeleton, in all its dismal and dismaying universality.

  Andrée, who was extremely wealthy, showed great generosity in sharing her luxury with Albertine, who was poor and an orphan. Towards Gisèle, however, Andrée’s feelings were not quite those I had thought. News of the departed student soon came; and when Albertine showed the letter in which Gisèle, for the benefit of the whole group, recounted her journey and return to Paris, apologizing for being too lazy as yet to write to the others, I was surprised to hear Andrée, who I thought was at daggers drawn with her, saying, ‘I’ll write to her tomorrow. If I wait till she writes to me, I might wait for ever. She’s so haphazard.’ She added, to me, ‘I expect you wouldn’t think there was anything very outstanding about her. But she’s such a nice girl, and I’m really very fond of her.’ I decided that when Andrée was on bad terms with someone, it never lasted long.

  Except on these rainy days, we usually went cycling along the cliffs or into the countryside behind Balbec; and an hour before it was time to go I would be fully occupied in titivating myself and nagging at Françoise if she had not laid out my things properly.

  Even in Paris, at the slightest hint of a criticism, Françoise, who was so humble, capable of such charming modesty when her self-esteem was soothed by praise, would stiffen with offended pride, straightening her back, which was
beginning to stoop with age. And as the pride she took in her work was what gave purpose to her whole life, her satisfaction and good humour were in direct proportion to the difficulty of the duties she was required to perform. At Balbec, her only tasks were so easy that she went about them with an air of discontent, which could be instantly intensified and aggravated into a grimace of ironic pride if I should complain, when I was about to set off to meet my girl-friends, that my hat was unbrushed or my ties in disarray. She did not mind putting herself to any amount of trouble; but if one so much as remarked that a jacket was not in the right place, not only did she take pleasure and pique in pointing out the care with which she had ‘put it by, so as to not have the dust gather’, but she would treat you to a diatribe on the subject of her tasks, the sad fact that this whole long time in Balbec was no holiday for her, and that you could never find another body to put up with it! ‘I can’t understand how a body can be expected to just drop everything, and you mark my words, nobody else would be able to! A mess like this – it’s more than flesh and bone should have to cope with!’ Or else she would look regal, wither me with a glare and say nothing, until, that is, she had left the room, closed the door and was walking along the corridor, which then echoed with words which I could surmise were insulting, but which were as indistinct as those uttered by characters coming on stage and already speaking as they emerge from the wings. Moreover, at these times when I was getting ready to go for an outing with the girls, even if everything was in order and Françoise was in a good mood, she could still show herself at her insufferable worst: she trotted out jokes which, in my need to speak of the girls, I had retailed to her, and seemed to think she was informing me of things which, if they had been true, I would have known more about than she did, but which were not true, because she had misunderstood something I had told her. Like everyone, Françoise had her own character: no one we know ever resembles a straight path; and we will always be astonished by every person’s twists and turns, idiosyncratic, unavoidable and irksome as they may be, which others may not even be aware of, but which we have to put up with. Whenever my speech with Françoise reached the ‘Hat not in the right place’ stage or ‘Mention of the name of Andrée or Albertine’, she obliged me to follow her ludicrous rigmaroles along the highways and byways of her thought processes, all of which greatly delayed my preparations. The same happened when I asked her to make up sandwiches of Cheshire cheese and lettuce, or to buy some tarts, which I intended for a picnic later that afternoon, up on the cliffs, ‘with those girls who (said Françoise) could surely have been expected to buy their own once in a while, if they weren’t just out after what they could get’, all her atavistic avarice and provincial vulgarity coming out in such statements, which could have made one think the soul of Eulalie, dead, departed and divided, had been reincarnated, more gracefully than in St Éloi, in the delightful persons of my little gang of girl-friends. I weathered these aspersions, galled to know that here I had reached one of the points where the familiar and rambling country lane of Françoise’s character had just become impassable (though, fortunately, not for long). Then, the jacket having turned up, the sandwiches having been made, I would sally forth to meet Albertine, Andrée and Rosemonde, and at times others of the group, and together, on foot or on bicycles, we would set off.

  There was a time when I would have preferred such outings to take place in dreadful weather, when I looked forward to Balbec as ‘the land of the Cimmerians’, a place where there could be no such thing as a sunny day, that anomalous intrusion of vulgar sea-bathers and their summer into my ancient land wreathed in its mists. Now, however, everything I had disdained, everything my eyes had shunned, not just the sparkle of the sunlight, but even the regattas and the horse-racing, I would have passionately participated in, and that for the same reason which once made me yearn only for raging seas, which was that all of these things, then as now, were linked to an aesthetic idea: the girls and I had been together to Elstir’s, and on those days what the artist had shown us in particular was sketches he had pencilled of pretty yachtswomen, or a drawing done at a race-course not far from Balbec. With some diffidence, I had told Elstir of my reluctance to go to the events which took place there. ‘That’s not the view to take, he said. They’re very pretty and full of interest. Take that particular figure, the jockey, the centre of attraction: down in the paddock there he looks so dull, so featureless in his glowing colours, at one with the horse, reining it in as it wheels about – yet wouldn’t it be interesting to grasp the technical movements he makes, to show the bright blob he makes, along with the glossy coats of the horses, out on the turf! Look at how all things are transformed in that vast and luminous space of the race-course, full of so many surprising effects of light and shade which you can see nowhere else! Look at how pretty the women can be! The first race-meeting I went to was especially magnificent, with women of exceptional elegance, amid a wash of moist light, a Dutch light, and you could sense the penetrating chill from the water reaching up into the sunlight. I’d never seen women arriving in carriages, and looking through their binoculars, bathed in that sort of light, which must be saturated by the air off the sea. How I wished I could capture it! I went home from that race-meeting with my head reeling, bursting with the urge to paint!’ Elstir spoke even more lyrically about yachting events than about horse-racing, which made me realize that for a modern artist regattas and gatherings of sportsmen, where women are suffused by the glaucous glow of a seaside race-course, could be a study fully as captivating as the ceremonial celebrations which Veronese and Carpaccio so liked to depict. ‘Your comparison is especially apt, Elstir said, given that in the city where they painted, those celebrations were partly nautical. Except that the beauty of the vessels of that period lay often in their cumbersomeness and intricacy. As is also done here at Balbec, they held jousting on the water, usually in honour of a visiting embassy, like the one Carpaccio shows in The Legend of St Ursula. The ships were massive, built like cathedrals, and they looked almost amphibious, like smaller Venices within the real one, when they were moored to landing stages, draped with crimson satins and carpeted by Persian rugs, and carrying women in cherry-coloured brocades or green damask, close to balconies inlaid with multicoloured marble, where other women would lean out to get a good view, in gowns with black sleeves with white slashes in them thick with pearls or adorned with point lace. It was unclear where the land finished and the water began, what was still palace or possibly ship, a caravel, a galleas, the Bucentaur.’ With passionate concentration, Albertine listened to these details of dress and adornment, and gloated upon Elstir’s images of luxury: ‘Oh, I’d love to see point lace like that! Venice lace is so pretty! I’d really love to go to Venice. – Well, said Elstir, before long you may be able to gaze on the wonderful fabrics they used to wear in Venice. It has been impossible to see them except in the canvases of Venetian masters, or sometimes among the relics and ornaments of a church, though now and again a garment would come up for auction. But I’m told that a Venetian artist, Fortuny102 by name, has rediscovered the secret of their manufacture and that within a few years women will be able to walk out, or sit at home more likely, wearing brocades as magnificent as any which Venice, to grace its great ladies, ever adorned with designs from the Orient. To tell you the truth, I’ m not sure I would fancy that, or whether it might not be rather too much your “period costume” for women of today, even when they’re on display at a regatta, because after all, to revert to our modern pleasure craft, they’re quite different from those of the time when Venice was “Queen of the Adriatic”. The most charming thing about a yacht, about its fittings and the things people wear for yachting, is that they’re so simple, it’s their seafaring simplicity – and I do so love the sea! I don’t mind saying I prefer today’s styles to those of the time of Veronese and even Carpaccio. If there’s one really pretty thing about yachts, medium-sized yachts, I mean, not your great enormous ones which are more like ships – as with hats, th
ere is a limit – then it’s the plain and simple, the pale and the grey, which on hazy blue days takes on a creamy, blurred quality. The cabin where you sit should feel like a little café. And it’s the same with women’s clothes on board a yacht: the really graceful ones wear things that are light and white and plain, linen, lawn, duck, twill, which when you see them in the sunlight and against the blue of the sea are as white as the white of a sail. Actually, very few women dress well, although there are some who are quite exquisite: Mlle Léa at the races, for instance, with a little white hat and a little white sunshade – just delightful, I tell you. I would give a lot to have that little sunshade.’ I would have given a lot to understand what it was that made this little sunshade different from other sunshades; and for different reasons, related to feminine pleasure in appearance, Albertine would have given even more. But as Françoise used to say of her soufflés, ‘There’s a knack to it,’ and the difference lay in the lines of the thing: ‘It was just small and round, like a Chinese parasol,’ Elstir said. I mentioned the sunshades of particular women, but no, it was nothing like them. Elstir thought all these other sunshades were dreadful. He was a man of exact and exacting tastes, for whom a mere nothing, which was really everything, made the difference between what was worn by three-quarters of the women in the world, which he detested, and a single pretty thing which he thought charming, and which, unlike me (for I found luxury to have a numbing effect on the mind), filled him with the desire to paint and ‘try to make something as nice as that’. ‘You see that girl there – she’s someone who knows all about how that hat and sunshade looked,’ Elstir said, with a nod towards Albertine, who was gazing at him with a greedy gleam in her eye. – Oh, I’d love to be rich and have a yacht! she said to the painter. I’d ask your advice about fitting it out. Think of the lovely trips I could have in it! Wouldn’t it be lovely to sail across to Cowes for the regatta! What about a car, too? Do you think women’s fashions for motoring are nice? – No, I don’t, Elstir said. But that will come. There are so few dress-designers, you see, only one or two: Callot, for instance, though they go in rather too much for lacy things, Doucet, Cheruit and from time to time Paquin.103 But all the others are just rubbish. – So, is there such a huge difference between an outfit by Callot, say, and an average dressmaker? I asked Albertine. – Huge is the right word, young fellow! she replied. Oh, sorry! The only problem is, alas, that they charge you 2,000 francs for what you can get for 300 somewhere else! But of course, it never looks the same – except to people who’ve got no idea, that is. – Precisely, Elstir said. Though I wouldn’t want to say the difference is as far-reaching as between a statue on the cathedral at Rheims and a statue in Saint-Augustin.104 Speaking of cathedrals,’ he said to me, alluding to a conversation which the girls had taken no part in, and which would have been of no interest to them, ‘remember what I was saying the other day about the church of Balbec looking like a great cliff, a great outcrop of the stone of these parts. Well, have a look now at the opposite, he said, showing me a water-colour. Look at those cliffs – it’s a sketch done not far from here, at Les Creuniers105 – see the power and delicacy in the way these rocks have been chiselled. Aren’t they reminiscent of a cathedral?’ They did resemble vast pink vaulted arches; but, having been painted on a very hot day, they appeared to have been turned to dust, pulverized by the heat which, across the full breadth of the canvas, had also reduced the sea by half, diluting it to a haze. Illuminated in that way, reality had been almost destroyed by the light, but had been concentrated in dark, transparent creatures which by contrast gave a more vivid and faithful impression of being alive: the shadows. Gasping for coolness, most of them had abandoned the blaze of the open sea to cower under rocks, out of the sun’s reach; others swam slowly on the surface like dolphins sidling along by moving boats, their sleek blue bodies broadening the hulls on the top of the pale water. It may have been their suggestion of a longing for coolness which gave the greatest impression of the heat of such a day, and made me exclaim with regret at not being familiar with Les Creuniers. Albertine and Andrée assured me that I must have been there dozens of times. In which case, it must have been without my knowledge, without my so much as suspecting that a day might come when the sight of them would give me such a yearning for beauty, not exactly the natural beauty I had hitherto sought in the cliffs about Balbec, but rather an architectural beauty. I could never have thought – having come there to set eyes on the realm of gales and tempests, having been on outings with Mme de Villeparisis, when the ocean could only ever be seen in the distance, painted in the spaces between the trees, having never thought it real enough, liquid enough, alive enough, or giving a sufficient impression of the high seas tossing vast amounts of water about, having never wished to see it lie motionless except under a sheet of winter mist – that a day would come when the sea I would long for a glimpse of would be an expanse of whitish vapour, blanched of all consistency and colour. It was the enchantment of this sea that Elstir, like the people who dozed in those boats held comatose by the heat, had experienced so profoundly that he had been able to capture and set down on his canvas the imperceptible ebbing of the tide, the throb and thrill of a minute of happiness; and to see it in this magic picture was to fall suddenly in love with it, to be filled with the resolve to seek out that vanished day, somewhere in the world, and savour it in all the dormant immediacy of its charm.