In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  Whereas before my visits to Elstir’s studio (before I had seen in one of his seascapes a young woman wearing a dress of barège or lawn, on the deck of a yacht flying the American flag, who imprinted the spiritual replica of a dress of white lawn and a flag in my imagination, giving it an instantaneous and insatiable desire to set eyes on dresses of white lawn and flags by the sea, as though I had never seen such a sight before) I had always striven, when looking at the sea, to exclude from my field of vision not only the bathers in the foreground but the yachts with their sails as excessively white as beach-clothes, indeed anything which prevented me from having the feeling that I was gazing upon the timeless deep, whose mysterious existence had been rolling on unchanged since long before the first appearance of mankind, even the glorious weather which seemed to veil that foggy gale-lashed coastline behind summer’s trite and changeless aspect, filling it with an empty pause, the equivalent of what is called in music a rest, now, however, it was bad weather which seemed to have become the unfortunate accident and to have no place in the world of beauty; and so, burning with the desire to go and seek out from reality what had so stirred me, I hoped the day would be fine enough for me to see from the cliff-top the same blue shadows as I had admired in Elstir’s picture.

  Nor could I continue, as we walked along, to blinker myself with my hands as I had done in the days when I conceived of nature as being animated by a life of its own, dating from before the time of human beings and out of keeping with all these futile refinements of industry which made me yawn with boredom at universal exhibitions or in dressmakers’ displays, so as to see only the stretch of sea with no steamer on it, so as to go on imagining it as immemorial and still belonging, if not to that earliest era when it had been divided from the dry land, at least to the first centuries of ancient Greece, which enabled me to go on reciting to myself in all good faith the lines of ‘old Leconte’ that Bloch was so fond of:

  Ils sont partis, les rois des nefs éperonnées,

  Emmenant sur la mer tempétueuse, hélas!

  Les hommes chevelus de l’héroïque Hellas.106

  To despise dressmakers was no longer possible, since Elstir had said that the deft and gentle gesture with which they give a final ruffle, a last caress, to the bows and feathers of a just-completed hat was as much a challenge to his artistry as any movement by a jockey, a statement which had delighted Albertine. However, I could not hope to see a dressmaker till my return to Paris, or a horse-race or a regatta till my return to Balbec, where no more were to be held until the following year. There was even a dearth of yachts with women on board wearing white lawn.

  We would often encounter Bloch’s sisters; and, since I had dined at their father’s table, I was obliged to greet them. My new friends did not know them. ‘I’m not allowed to be friends with children of Israel,’ Albertine said. Her way of pronouncing ‘Issrael’ rather than ‘Izrael’ would have been enough to let you know, even if you had not heard the beginning of her sentence, that the chosen people did not inspire warm feelings in the bosoms of these daughters of the middle class who, with their good Catholic upbringing, probably believed that Jews fed on the flesh of infant Christians. ‘And anyway, there’s something quite unseemly about your girl-friends,’ said Andrée, with a smile which meant she knew perfectly well they were not my friends. ‘As there is about the whole tribe,’ added Albertine, in the worldly-wise tone of the woman of experience. The fact was that Bloch’s sisters, over-dressed but half-naked, managing to look both languid and brazen, resplendent and sluttish, did not create the best of impressions. And one of their cousins, a girl of no more than fifteen, shocked everyone at the Casino by her flagrant admiration for Mlle Léa, who, as an actress, was much to the taste of M. Bloch the elder, although her own tastes were reputed not to extend to gentlemen.

  On some days, we would take tea in one of the neighbourhood farmhouse-inns. These are the farms known as Les Écorres, the Marie-Thérèse, the Croix-d’Heuland, the Bagatelle, the Californie and the Marie-Antoinette. It was the last of these that the little gang of girls had adopted.

  Sometimes, though, instead of stopping at one of the farmhouses, we climbed to the top of the cliff; and having reached our destination, we would sit on the grass and unwrap our sandwiches and cakes. The girls all preferred sandwiches and exclaimed at seeing me eat only a chocolate cake, with its Gothic architecture of icing, or an apricot tart. But sandwiches of Cheshire cheese and lettuce, untried and unknowing fare, had nothing to say for themselves. Whereas cakes were privy to much, and tarts were talkative. In cakes, there was a cloying creaminess, and in tarts, a refreshing fruitiness, which were aware of many things about Combray and about Gilberte, and not just the Gilberte of Combray days, but the Gilberte of Paris too, for I had renewed my acquaintance with them at her afternoon teas. They brought back the illustrated Arabian Nights side-plates which had once afforded such a variety of entertainment to my Aunt Léonie, depending on whether Françoise brought her one day Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp or on another day Ali Baba or The Sleeper Awakes or Sinbad the Sailor Taking Ship at Basra with All his Riches. I wished I could see them again, but my grandmother did not know what had become of them; and in any case she believed they were just vulgar old plates, which had been bought locally. Even so, their multicoloured vignettes glowed among the greyness of Combray-in-Champagne,107 like the shimmer of the jewelled windows in the dark of its church, the illuminations from the magic lantern in the twilight of my bedroom, the buttercups from the Indies and the lilacs from Persia in the foreground of the view of the railway-station and the little local line, or the collection of old Chinese porcelain at my great-aunt’s, an old lady’s gloomy house in a country town.

  Lying there on the cliff-top, I could see nothing but meadows; and above them stretched not the seven superimposed heavens of Christian physics, but only two, one of which was darker – the sea – and the other, on top of it, lighter. We would enjoy our picnic; and then, if I had brought with me a trinket of some sort which I thought one or other of the girls might like to have, their translucent faces would instantly turn red with such a vehement surge of joy that their mouths could not contain it, and they would burst into laughter. They were grouped about me; and between their faces, which were close together, the airy spaces were like azure paths, such as a gardener might make so as to move about in his garden of roses.

  Once we had eaten, we would play at games which would hitherto have seemed boring to me, some of them real children’s games, such as ‘The King of the Barbarees’ or ‘Who’s Going to Laugh First?’, but which now I would not have missed for anything; the dawn-flush of youth which still glowed in the faces of the girls, which had already faded from mine, shone on everything about them and, like the fluid painting of certain primitives, brought out against a background of gold the most insignificant details of their lives. The faces of most of them were indistinctly suffused by their daybreak’s indiscriminate bloom, concealing the real features which would one day show through. All that was visible was an enchantment of colouring, behind which the profile of years to come was not yet distinguishable. The present profile was quite undefinitive; it might have been nothing more than a transient likeness to some long-dead relative, to whom nature accorded this commemorative acknowledgement. The moment comes so soon when there is nothing left to hope for, when the body is static, held in a state of immobility which promises no further surprises, when disappointment sets in at the sight of faces which, though still youthful, are framed by hair already thinning or fading, like leaves hanging dead on midsummer’s trees, when the brevity of their radiant early morning makes one able to love only very young girls, in whom the unleavened flesh, like a precious dough, has not yet risen. They are malleable, a soft flow of substance kneaded by every passing impression that possesses them. Each of them looks like a brief succession of little statuettes, representing gaiety, childish solemnity, fond coquettishness, amazement, every one of them modelled by an expression which i
s full and frank, but fleeting. This plasticity lends much variety and great charm to a girl who is trying her best to be nice to us. These qualities are of course indispensable in the grown woman too; and in our eyes, any woman who does not like us, or does not show that she likes us, takes on a depressing uniformity of manner. But after a certain age, even such graces are reflected only faintly in a face which the struggles of life have hardened into an immutable mask of righteousness or ecstasy. One face, through the relentless workings of the obedience which subjects helpmeet to husband, resembles a soldier’s rather than a wife’s; another, sculpted by the sacrifices which a mother makes day in, day out, for the sake of her children, is an apostle’s. A third, after years of hopes blighted and storms weathered, is the face of an old sea-dog, in a woman whose clothes alone reveal her sex. Of course, the loving attentions of a woman we love can still enchant the hours we spend with her. But she is not a series of different women to us. Her gaiety remains external to her unchanging face. Adolescence, however, comes before complete stabilization, and what is so refreshing in the presence of young girls is this spectacle of ceaselessly changing forms, reminiscent in its restless contrasts of that perpetual recreation of nature’s primordial elements which we witness by the sea.

  Fashionable gatherings and Mme de Villeparisis’s invitations to carriage-outings were not the only pastimes I was willing to sacrifice to my games of ring-on-a-string and riddles with the girls. Robert de Saint-Loup had several times sent me word that, since I never went to visit him at Doncières, he had requested twenty-four hours leave, so as to come to Balbec. On each of these occasions I wrote to put him off, inventing the excuse of a family visit which I said I was obliged to make that very day with my grandmother. He must have thought badly of me when he learned from his aunt the nature of this family visit and the identity of the people who were my grandmother for the occasion. Yet in sacrificing not just the joys of foregathering with the fashionable, but the joys of friendship too, to the pleasure of dallying the whole day in this lovely garden, perhaps I was not ill advised. Those who have the opportunity of living for themselves – they are artists, of course, and I was long since convinced that I would never be one – also have the duty to do so; and for them, friendship is a dereliction of that duty, a form of self-abdication. Even conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression, through which we can make no acquisition. We may converse our whole life away, without speaking anything other than the interminable repetitions that fill the vacant minute; but the steps of thought which we take during the lonely work of artistic creation all lead us downwards, deeper into ourselves, the only direction which is not closed to us, the only direction in which we can advance, albeit with much greater travail, towards an outcome of truth. Moreover, friendship is not just devoid of virtue, as conversation is, it is actively pernicious. Those of us whose law of growth is one of purely internal growth, and who cannot escape the impression of boredom inseparable from the presence of a friend, an impression which comes from having to stay at the surface of self, instead of sounding our depths for the discoveries which await us, can only be tempted by friendship, once we are alone, to disbelieve this impression, to let ourselves be retrospectively moved by the words spoken by our friend, to see them as the sharing of something valuable; whereas we are not like a building to which a brick or a stone can be added on the outside, but rather like a tree which distils from its own sap each new knot in its trunk and the next layer of its foliage. I lied to myself, I stunted my growth in the very direction which could lead me to genuine progress and happiness, each time I took pride in being liked and admired by a person as kind, as intelligent, as sought after as Saint-Loup, by adapting my mind not to my own confused impressions, which it should have been my duty to decipher, but to the words spoken by my friend, in which, as I repeated them to myself – or rather, as I listened to them being repeated by that person other than ourself who lives in us, and by whom we are always glad to be freed from the onus of thinking – I sought to find a mode of beauty, which was a far cry from the beauty I sought in the silence of my real solitude, but which I hoped might add merit to Robert, and to myself, while making my life more worthwhile. In the life which his friendship made for me, I could see myself as cosily protected from solitude, and full of a noble aspiration to self-sacrifice for his benefit, in a word, deprived of the power of self-realization. When I was with the girls, however, though the pleasure I took in being there was selfish, at least it was not founded on a lie: the lie which tries to have us believe we are not inescapably alone in the world, and which, when we converse with someone, prevents us from admitting that it is not we who are speaking, that at such times we try to take on the semblance of other people, rather than be the self which differs from them. When we spoke, which was not often, the things said by me and the girls of the little gang were without interest; and on my part, they were interrupted by long silences. This did not prevent me from listening to what the girls said with as much pleasure as when just looking at them, discovering through the voice of each of them the vividly coloured picture of her. It was a delight to listen to their piping chorus. Loving sharpens discernment and our power to make distinctions. In a wood, a birdwatcher’s ear will instantly pick out the chirps and warbles peculiar to different species which the uninstructed cannot tell apart. The fancier of young girls knows that human voices are even more varied. Each of them has a wider range of notes than the most versatile instrument; and the combinations it can make of them are as inexhaustible as the infinite variety of personalities. When I chatted with one of the girls, I noticed that the outline of her individuality, original and unique, was ingeniously drawn and ruthlessly imposed upon me as much by the modulations of her voice as by the shifting expressions of her face, and that I was confronted by two performances, each of which rendered in its own mode the same singular reality. The lines of the voice, like those of the face, were not yet fixed once for all: the former would deepen, the latter would develop. As infants possess a gland whose secretions help them digest milk, and which grown-ups no longer have, the lilt of the girls’ light voices struck notes which women’s never reach. On their more adaptable instrument they played with their lips, with all Bellini’s musical cherubs’ 108 diligence and ardour, which also belong exclusively to youth. Later they would lose their accents of eager earnestness, which gave a charm to whatever they said, however simple it was, whether it was the authoritative voice used by Albertine for making puns, which the younger ones listened to admiringly until, with the irresistible violence of a sneeze, they suddenly burst into giggles, or the essentially childish solemnity with which Andrée spoke of their school-work, which was even more child’s play than their play; and their words struck strangely different notes, like those strophes from ancient times in which poetry, still seen as not far removed from music, was chanted on a range of tones. In each of the voices there somehow managed to sound the viewpoint on life already adopted by these green girls, a bias with such an individuality to it that to define them by common terms such as ‘She takes everything with a laugh,’ or ‘She always lays down the law,’ or ‘She’s forever in a state of cautious expectation,’ would be to use a statement far too broad in its application. The features of our face are little more than expressions ingrained by habit. Nature, like the catastrophe at Pompeii or the metamorphosis of a nymph, freezes us into an accustomed cast of countenance. In the same way, the intonations of our voice express our philosophy of life, what one says to oneself at each moment about things. The facial features of these girls did not, of course, belong just to them: they belonged to their parents. As individuals, each of us lives immersed in something more general than ourselves. Parents, for that matter, do not hand on only the habitual act of a facial and vocal feature, but also turns of phrase, certain special sayings, which are almost as deeply rooted and unconscious as an inflection, and imply as much as it does a point of view on life. It is true that there are so
me of these set phrases which parents cannot hand on to young girls until they are of less tender years, usually after they have married. Such expressions are held in reserve. If, for example, the talk turned to the paintings of a certain friend of Elstir’s, Andrée, with her girlish waist-length hair, was not at liberty to say of him what her mother and married sister might have said: ‘I’m told that, as a man, he is quite a charmer.’ But one day, like the permission to walk in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, that would come. Certainly Albertine had been saying since the time of her first communion, copying one of her aunt’s lady-friends, ‘Well, I think that would be pretty terrific.’ Another present she had received was her way of having you repeat things you had just said, so as to appear interested in the subject and give herself the air of wishing to form a personal view on it. If someone said the work of this or that painter was good, or that he had a nice house, she would say, ‘So his work’s good, is it?’ or ‘Is that so, a nice house?’ Also, more general features than these family heirlooms were the body and redolence given to their whole speech by the far-flung regions of France from which their voices came, and which flavoured their intonations. Whenever Andrée gave a sharp twang to a deep note, she could not prevent the Périgourdine string in her vocal instrument from singing its little provincial song, in harmony with the south-western purity of her profile; and Rosemonde’s perpetual pranking and skittishness were a perfect match for her regional accent, which could not help shaping the northern substance of which her face and her voice were made. My ear enjoyed the bright dialogue between the province of origin and the temperament producing each girl’s inflections, a dialogue which never turned to discord. Nothing can come between a girl and the part of the country from which she hails: she is it. Such reaction of local materials on the genius of the one who exploits them, and whom it invigorates, does not make the outcome less individual; and whether the work produced is that of an architect, a cabinet-maker or a composer, its minutely detailed reflection of the most distinctive touches of the artist’s personality is no less faithful because he had to work in the coarse burr-stone of Senlis or red sandstone from Strasbourg, because he put to good use the knots peculiar to ash, because his writing took account of possibilities and limitations in the sound-range offered by the flute or the viola.