In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  I was aware of all this, and yet we hardly ever had a conversation! With Mme de Villeparisis or Saint-Loup, my words would have made a show of much more enjoyment than I really felt, concealing the fact that they always wore me out; whereas when I lay among those girls, the full cup of my joy, unaffected by the insignificance and sparseness of what we said, brimming in motionless silence, overflowed and let the murmuring wavelets of my happiness lap and ripple among these young roses.

  No convalescent who rests all day long in a flower-garden or an orchard is more aware of the scents of flowers and fruit, colouring the countless minutiae which sweeten his idle well-being, than I was of the tones and aromas that the presence of the girls fed to my feasting eyes, gradually permeating me with their deliciousness. Thus grapes mellow in the sunshine. The leisurely repetitiousness of the simple games we played had brought out in me, as in someone who just lies on a beach, relishing the salty air and the sun on the skin, a revelment in relaxation, a blissfully indulgent smile, an unfocussed daze of the delighted eyes.

  Now and then one or other of the girls would favour me in a way which sent a shock-wave of pleasure through me and weakened my desire for any of the others. One day Albertine said, ‘Who’s got a pencil, then?’ Andrée supplied it, Rosemonde proffered some paper and Albertine said, ‘All right, ladies, I forbid you to read what I’m writing.’ She took much trouble over shaping each letter, resting the paper on her knees; then she handed it to me, saying, ‘Make sure no one can read this.’ I unfolded it and read the words she had written: I like you.

  ‘Look here!’ she shouted to Andrée and Rosemonde, turning suddenly impetuous and serious, ‘instead of sitting about writing silly things, why don’t I show you this letter I got from Gisèle this morning. How stupid of me! It’s been sitting in my pocket all this time, and it could be so useful to us!’ Gisèle had had the idea of enclosing the composition she had written for her fourth-form examination, so that Albertine could show it to the others. The forebodings Albertine had expressed about the difficulty of the essays had been more than borne out by the two topics of which Gisèle had had to choose one: ‘Writing to Racine from the Underworld, Sophocles commiserates with him over the failure of Athalie’; and ‘Imagine that Mme de Sévigné, having seen the first performance of Racine’s Esther, writes a letter to Mme de Lafayette to say how much she wishes the latter could have been there too’ Gisèle, whose willingness to please must have touched the examiners, had chosen the first and more difficult of the two subjects, in which she had acquitted herself so well that her essay had been marked at fourteen out of twenty; and she had even been specially commended by the examiners. Altogether, they would have awarded her a pass with distinction, had she not ‘come a cropper’ in her Spanish exam. Albertine now read aloud to us the copy of the essay which Gisèle had sent: she was soon to sit the same examination herself and felt much in need of some advice from Andrée, who, being by far the cleverest of them all, might be able to give her some good tips. ‘She’s as lucky as anything! Albertine said. She got to choose one of the subjects her French teacher made her mug up when she was here!’ Sophocles’ letter to Racine, as drafted by Gisèle, began like this: ‘Dear Racine, Do forgive me for presuming to write like this without having the honour of being personally acquainted with you, but your new tragedy Athalie suggests that you yourself have a close acquaintance with my own modest productions. You have put verse not only into the mouths of the protagonists (the leading characters of the piece) but have also composed other lines – full of charm, if I may say so without incurring a suspicion of toadying – to be spoken by the chorus, which some have said was quite a good thing in Greek tragedy, but is a real novelty in France. Furthermore, your talent, which is such a graceful one, so delicate, so charming, so fine, so painstaking, has displayed itself so consummately as to deserve my congratulation. In Athalie and Joad, you have brought off a pair of characters whom your rival Corneille could not have developed better. You present personalities who are forceful, and a plot which is simple and solid. Here is a tragedy without love as its mainspring, on which I compliment you most sincerely. The most famous precepts are not always the truest ones. Let me quote as an example what Boileau says about love:

  De cette passion la sensible peinture

  Est pour aller au cœur la route la plus sûre.109

  You show that religious feeling, as chanted by your chorus, is no less capable of touching the heart. The vulgar may be disaffected, but true connoisseurs salute you. Please accept the warmest admiration of one who begs to remain, my dear Racine, your most humble and obedient servant, etc.’

  As Albertine read, her eyes had been sparkling; and as soon as she had finished, she burst out: ‘I bet you she copied it! I wouldn’t think Gisèle could write a thing like this all by herself. I mean, look at the poetry she quotes – where do you think she pinched it?’ Her admiration, now shifting its focus to Andrée, continued to make her eyes ‘start out of her head’, as did the close attention she paid to Andrée’s words, when the latter, in her capacity as the most senior and the best at French, commented on Gisèle’s essay with a touch of irony at first, then redrafted the letter in her own way, with an air of light-heartedness which barely concealed true earnestness. ‘It’s not bad, she said to Albertine. But if I were you, having to write on that subject – and that’s perfectly possible, you know, because it’s one they set quite a lot – I wouldn’t do it like that. Here’s what I’d do: for one thing, if I’d been Gisèle, I wouldn’t have plunged in straight away. I’d have started by writing out my plan on a separate page: on the first line, the statement of the question and the setting out of the subject. Next, the broad ideas to be brought into the discussion. And then at the end, the appreciation, the style and the conclusion. If you follow an outline like that, you always know where you’re going. You see, Titine, right from the setting out of the subject, or if you like, since it’s a letter, right from the opening salutation, Gisèle went and muffed it. I mean, if he’s writing to a man in the seventeenth century, Sophocles shouldn’t say “Dear Racine”. – I know! Albertine interjected, full of passion. She should’ve made him say “My dear Monsieur Racine”. That’d be much better. – Not at all, Andrée replied in a slightly supercilious voice. She should have put just “Sir”. And at the end she should have put something like “While assuring you of the high esteem in which I hold you, I remain, Sir (or at the most Dear Sir), yours etc.” Also, Gisèle says the chorus is a novelty in Athalie, but she’s forgetting Esther, as well as two other little-known tragedies that the examiner himself has just written an analysis of this year! So he’s got a real bee in his bonnet about them and all anyone has to do to pass is mention them: they’re called Les juives by Robert Gamier and Aman by Antoine de Montchrestien.’110 As she spoke these names and titles, Andrée was unable to conceal a little smirk of indulgent self-satisfaction, which was not without charm. Albertine burst out: ‘Andrée, you’re a wonder! Write down those two titles for me. Just think – if I got that subject, even just in the oral exam, I could quote them straight away and really take his breath away!’ (After that, every time Albertine asked Andrée to say the names and titles again, so that she could make a note of them, her well-read friend said she had forgotten them; and she never in fact repeated them.) ‘The next thing,’ Andrée said, in a tone of faint disdain for these more childish friends, though glad of their admiration, and investing more self-esteem than she meant to show in this matter of how she would have dealt with the essay, ‘is that Sophocles in the Underworld is bound to be well informed – he must know that Athalie wasn’t performed for the vulgar, but for the Sun King himself and a few privileged courtiers. Mind you, what Gisèle says about true connoisseurs is really quite good, but it doesn’t go far enough. I mean, Sophocles is now immortal, so it would be quite all right for him to have the gift of second sight, and be able to predict that Voltaire will come along and say Athalie is “not just the masterpiece of Racine, but of the w
hole human spirit”.’111 Albertine, her eyes glowing with concentration, was not missing a single word of what Andrée was saying: she declined indignantly Rosemonde’s suggestion that they should start a game. ‘And then,’ Andrée said, in the same detached, casual voice, with a tone of slight mockery and rather heart-felt conviction, ‘if Gisèle had bothered to note down the broad ideas she was going to include in her discussion, she might have thought of doing what I would have done: show the difference in religious inspiration between Sophocles’ chorus and Racine’s. I’d have made Sophocles point out that though Racine’s chorus is as full of religious feeling as the choruses in Greek tragedy, it’s not for the same gods. The God of Joad has got nothing to do with the god of Sophocles. And that would lead naturally into the concluding question, after the end of the development, “What does it matter that the beliefs are not the same?” Sophocles would make a point of insisting on this, not wishing to hurt Racine’s feelings, and would then slip in a few words about the latter’s masters at Port-Royal, by way of congratulating his rival on his high-minded poetic spirit.’

  Albertine, warmed by her efforts of admiration and attention, had broken out in a sweat; whereas Andrée had the cool, self-possessed smile of a female dandy. ‘It would be a good idea too to quote the views of a few famous critics,’ she said, just before we started another game. ‘So I’ve been told, Albertine said. The best opinions to use are usually Sainte-Beuve’s and Merlet’s, aren’t they?’ – You’re not completely mistaken, said Andrée, still refusing to write down the other two names, despite Albertine’s pleas. Sainte-Beuve and Merlet are quite good. But the ones you’ve got to quote are Deltour and Gasc-Desfossés.’112

  I had been thinking about Albertine’s little slip of paper torn from the note-pad: I like you; and an hour later, climbing down the paths back to Balbec, a little too steep for my liking, I was thinking she was the one who would be the great love of my life.

  No doubt my state of mind, marked by the presence of symptoms which we usually interpret as meaning we are in love – such as the orders I gave at the hotel that I was not to be disturbed for any visitor, unless it was one or other of the girls; the palpitations with which I waited for whichever of them I was expecting to come; and my rage on those days if I had been unable to find a barber to shave me and was obliged to appear unkempt to the eyes of Albertine, Rosemonde or Andrée – and which shifted at will from one of them to the other, was as different from what we call love as human life differs from the life of zoophytes, in which existence or individuality, so to speak, is divided among different organisms. Yet natural history teaches that such an animal, thus organized, can be observed; and the life of any of us who have lived a little is no less instructive about the reality of states of mind of which we once lived in total ignorance, to which we are bound to come, though very likely also bound to grow out of at a later stage; and for me that was the loving state, simultaneously divided among several young girls, in which I lived. Divided, or rather undivided, for more often than not what I found delightful and different from everything else in the world, what had begun to endear itself to me so intensely that the sweetest joy in life was the hope of being with them again the next day, was really the whole group of girls, taken together, inseparable from those breezy afternoon hours up on the cliffs, on that stretch of grass where their faces lay, full of excitement for my imagination, Albertine, Rosemonde, Andrée making it impossible for me to know which of them made this place so precious, which of them I most longed to love. At the very beginning of love, as at its end, we are not exclusively attached to a single beloved: it is the yearning to love, of which that person will be the loved outcome, and later the echo left in the memory, which wanders voluptuously in a place full of charms – sometimes deriving only from contingencies of nature, bodily pleasures or habitation – interchangeable and interrelated enough for it to feel in harmony with any of them. Also, since my perceptions of the girls were at that time unsated by habit, whenever I was with them I was still able to see them, that is to be profoundly surprised by setting eyes on them. This feeling of surprise can be explained in part no doubt by the fact that it is a new side that the person shows us each time; but there is such multiplicity in each woman, such richness in the lines of her face and body, so little of which is preserved during her absence by our high-handed and simple-minded memory, it having opted to single out one particular feature of her which has struck us, to isolate and exaggerate it, turning a woman who appeared to be tall into a study in elongated disproportion, or one who seemed pink and blonde into a pure Harmony in pink and gold, that when we are once again in her presence we are beset by the complex confusion of all her other forgotten features, which balanced the one we have retained, and now reduce her height, dilute her pink, replacing the exclusive object of our anticipation with other particulars, which we now recall having noticed the last time and find it incomprehensible that we should not have looked forward to seeing again. Our recollection, our expectation was of a peacock; the reality is a bullfinch. Nor is this inevitable surprise the only one that awaits us: there is another sort that comes not from the disparate stylizations of the remembered and the real, but from the difference between the person we saw on the previous occasion and the one we have before us today, seen from a new point of view and now showing a hitherto undisclosed aspect. The human face is truly like that of a god in some Oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces side by side, but on different planes and never all visible at once.