What was sure was that she was upset at not having been nice to me, and that she gave me a little golden pencil, acting on that virtuous perversity of people who are moved by the liking we inspire in them to do us a favour, not the one we would prefer, but some other: a critic, rather than writing a good review on a novelist, takes him out to dinner; a duchess, instead of including a social climber in her theatre party, lends him her box for an evening when she stays at home. Thus conscience, in those who do little and who could do nothing, makes them do something more. I told Albertine that I was very pleased by her gift of a pencil, but that I would have been better pleased if she had let me kiss her on the evening when she stayed at the hotel: ‘It would have made me so happy! What difference could it have made to you? I’m surprised you didn’t want to. – Well, I’m surprised you’re surprised! she replied. What sort of girls must you be familiar with to be surprised at what I did? – I’m sorry if I upset you, but I can’t say, even now, that I think what I did was wrong. If you ask me, it’s the sort of thing which is utterly unimportant, and I can’t see why a girl who could so easily be nice to someone won’t do it. Mind you, I added, the memory of the girl who was friendly with the actress Léa, and the odium heaped on her by Albertine and her group of friends, making me concede a sort of semi-agreement with her ideas of morality, I don’t mean girls can do just anything, or that there’s no such thing as immorality. I mean, that Balbec girl you were all talking about the other day, who’s supposed to be carrying on with that actress, well I think that’s just disgusting – so disgusting, actually, that I can only assume it’s not true, but was invented by the girl’s enemies. It just strikes me as improbable, impossible in fact. But letting a chap that you like kiss you, and go even further, since you say you like me … – I do! But I’ve liked other chaps too. Believe you me, I’ve known other boys who were just as fond of me as you are. But there wasn’t one of them who would’ve dared do any such thing! They knew perfectly well they’d have got a good slap in the face! Anyway, the thought never entered their heads – we just shook hands in the usual way, like ordinary good friends. No one would ever have thought of kissing, but that didn’t stop us being close friends. Look, if you really want us to be friends, then you can count yourself lucky – I must be pretty fond of you to forgive you like this. In any case, I’m sure you’re just having me on! Andrée’s the one you really like – admit it! And I’m sure you’re right – she’s much nicer than me, and she’s beautiful! Oh, you men!’ That Albertine should speak so openly was balm to my recent hurt feelings; and this gave me a high opinion of her. The consolation I drew from her words may even have had, much later, far-reaching and grave consequences for me, because it contributed to the development of a sort of family feeling for her, a moral core which gathered in the centre of my love for her, and was to be for ever inseparable from it. Such a feeling can be the harbinger of acute suffering: for a woman to cause us great pain, there must have been a time when we trusted her implicitly. For the time being, this embryo of friendliness, of moral esteem, lay latent within me, a toothing stone for a future extension. Without that growth to come, if it had remained in the inert state in which it still was the following year, let alone during the last weeks of my first stay in Balbec, it would have been unavailing against my happiness. It lived in me like a quiescent parasite, which it would really be wiser to be rid of, but which one leaves to its own devices, undisturbed, harmless for the moment, weak and lost as it is in the further reaches of a foreign self.
My dreams were now free to recruit one or other of Albertine’s friends, first and foremost Andrée, whose attentions to me might not have endeared her so much to me, had I not known that Albertine would be bound to be told of it. My feigned fondness for Andrée had already given me, in the form of our cosy chats and murmured confidences, a sort of outer semblance of love for her, which lacked only the sincerity of a feeling that my heart, in its new state of availability, could now have afforded. However, it was impossible for any love of mine for Andrée to be true: she was too intellectual, too highly strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself. Though Albertine now seemed empty, Andrée was full of something with which I was over-familiar. At my first sight of her on the beach, I had supposed she was a racing cyclist’s girlfriend, infatuated with the sporting life; yet Andrée now told me that, though she had taken an interest in sports, it was only on the advice of her doctor, who recommended it as a way of treating her neurasthenia and her eating difficulties, and that she was actually never happier than when translating into French a novel by George Eliot. This disappointment, the outcome of my own misconception about her, was actually of no consequence for me. But it was a misconception of the kind which, though they may foster the onset of love, and may not be recognized as misconceptions until love is beyond containment, can also foster sorrow. Such misconceptions (including some which differ from mine about Andrée, or which may even be the opposite of it) can be abetted by the fact – and this was exactly Andrée’s case – that, in our desire to be seen as someone we are not, we take on enough of the appearance and the ways of that someone to create an illusion at first encounter. To that outward appearance, affectation, imitation and the desire to be admired, either by the righteous or the unrighteous, add the misleading effects of words and gesture. Many a figment of cynicism or cruelty does not stand the test of closer acquaintance, any more than some acts of apparent goodness or generosity. A man renowned as a champion of charity can turn out a self-conceited skinflint; by showing off as though shameless, a simple girl full of the primmest prejudices can seem a Messalina. I had taken Andrée for a healthy, uncouth creature, whereas she was only a person seeking health, like many people in whom she herself may have seen evidence of rude health, but who came no closer to it than an overweight arthritic with a red face and a white flannel blazer comes to being a Hercules. In certain circumstances, our happiness may be compromised by the discovery that someone in whom we loved an appearance of good health is really an invalid, in whom the good health is as second-hand, as borrowed, as the light shed on us from the planets, or the electricity that certain inert bodies can conduct.
However, Andrée, like Rosemonde and Gisèle, and even more than they, was a friend of Albertine’s, sharing her life, and imitating her ways so much that, at my first sight of them, I had been unable to tell which of them was which. My bevy of girls, like long-stemmed roses, whose main charm was that they stood against the blue background of the sea, was as indivisible now as in the days when its members were strangers to me, when any one of them only had to appear, for me to be seized by the thrilling expectation that the whole group must soon come and join her. A moment with one of them could still give me a pleasure which was indefinably mingled with the joy of knowing that the others would be along soon; and, even if they did not turn up that same day, I had the joy of talking with her about them, and of being sure they would be told I had been down to the beach.
My feeling was no longer the simple attraction of the first days: it was an incipient tentative love for each or any of them, every single one of them being a natural substitute for any of the others. My greatest sorrow would not have been to be forsaken by the one I preferred: I would have instantly preferred the one who forsook me, since that would have focussed on her the whole indeterminate mist of sadness and romance through which I saw them all. In that eventuality, it was all the others, in whose eyes I would soon come to lose all prestige, whom I would have unconsciously missed through my yearning for the forsaker, my collective love for them being of the sort felt by a politician or an actor who, having once basked in the approval of electors and audiences, cannot bear to fall from their favour. The sweets I had not managed to taste in Albertine’s arms I went on expecting to enjoy with one or other of her friends, each of whom could suddenly attract my desire to herself, for a day at a time, merely by taking leave of me the evening before with a word or a glance into which I could read an ulterior meaning.
In such things, Albertine’s face was no different from her girl-friends’. There were days when she was thin, with a dull complexion and a sullen look, with a dark violet zone, oblique and transparent, somewhere in her eyes, such as can be seen at times in the sea, and seemingly oppressed by all the sorrows of an outcast. On other days, her face was smoother and it beguiled my desires, keeping them engrossed in its glossy surface, and preventing them from going beyond it, unless a quick sidelong glimpse of her, with an inner pink glowing through her cheeks, which were as matt white as wax on the surface, made me long to kiss them and get at that inaccessible inner tint of her. Or else there were times when happiness rippled through her cheeks, so bright and mobile that their skin turned fluid and tenuous, as though traversed by underlying glances which gave it the appearance of being made from the same substance as her eyes, only of a different colour; and sometimes, when one caught sight, unthinkingly, of her face with its punctuation of little brownish blotches, and its pair of bluer ones among them, one had the brief impression of having glanced at a goldfinch’s egg, or an opalescent agate which had been worked and polished at only two spots, where, amid all the dusky stone, like the translucent wings of an azure butterfly, one caught the glow of the eyes, in which flesh becomes mirror and gives us the illusion that through them, more than through any other part of the body, we come closest to the soul. Mostly, however, she had more colour, and was more animated; sometimes the single touch of pink, amid her whole white face, was the tip of her nose, as neat as the nose of a sly little kitten, made to be played with; sometimes the smoothness of her cheeks was so even that one’s eye slid over their pink enamel as though it was the pink of a miniature, a semblance given more delicacy and intimacy by the black hair set above it like a locket lid half-lifted; on occasion the shade of her cheeks was as deep as the purplish pink of cyclamens; and there were moments too, if she was feverish or flushed with warmth, when the midnight shades of certain roses, whose red is so dark as to be almost black, gave her complexion an unhealthy appearance, debasing my desire for her to something more sensual, filling her eyes with a look that was more perverse and unwholesome; and each of these Albertines was unlike the others, as the colours, the shape, the character of a ballerina may be transmuted, each time she comes on, by the constantly changing effects from a spot-light. It may be because the personalities I perceived in her at that time were so various that I later took to turning into a different person, depending on which Albertine was in my mind: I became a jealous man, an indifferent man, a voluptuary, a melancholic, a madman, these characters coming over me not just in response to the random recurrence of memories, but also under the variable influence of some intervening belief which affected this or that memory by making me see it differently. There was, there is, no getting away from these beliefs: most of the time they fill our minds unawares; yet they are more important for our happiness than the very person standing there in front of us, given that it is through these ideas that we see such a person, that it is they which endow the person seen with whatever importance he or she may have. In the interests of accuracy, I should really give a separate name to each of the selves in me which was to harbour a future thought of Albertine; and it would be even more appropriate if I had a different name for each of the Albertines who appeared in her single guise, none of whom were identical to any of the others, as variable as the seas I saw before me, which I simplified to the same word ‘sea’, and which served as the back-cloth to my inconstant nymph. But above all (analogously to, but more usefully than, the story-teller’s mention of what the weather was like on a certain day), I should give her invariable name to whichever belief about her, when I saw her on different days, prevailed in my mind, constituting its atmosphere, as the appearance of each person seen, like that of each day’s new sea, is modified by those barely visible clouds which, by their density and changeableness, their distribution across the sky and their impermanence, can alter the colours of all things, like the cloud which Elstir had banished on the evening when he failed to introduce me to the group of girls with whom he had paused to talk, and whose figures, as they started to move away from me, had immediately begun to seem more beautiful – a cloud which had reformed a few days later, once I had met them, muting the glow of their loveliness, often passing between them and my eyes, which saw them now dimmed, as through a gentle haze, reminiscent of Virgil’s Leucothea.117
The meaning to be read in their faces had of course changed, since their speech had revealed some of it; and the significance I saw in whatever they said was directly related to the fact that I could make them say it, in answer to my own questions, and that, like an experimental scientist who designs a control test to check an apparent finding, I could also make them say different things. One way of solving the problem of existence, after all, is to become so closely acquainted with thin
gs and individuals we once saw from further away as being full of beauty and mystery, that we realize they are devoid of both: therein lies one of the modes of mental hygiene available to us, which though it may not be the most recommendable, can certainly afford us a measure of equanimity for getting through life and – since it enables us to have no regrets, by assuring us we have had the best of things, and that the best of things was not up to much – in resigning us to death.
I had at last rooted out, from the minds of these girls, all aversion to chastity, any memory of their lives of casual fornications, and these I had replaced by staunch precepts which, though they might at times be severely tried, had managed to protect them against all misconduct and kept them in the paths of middle-class righteousness. However, when we have started out from a wrong assumption, even one affecting only minor things, when a faulty deduction or an unreliable memory, say, leads us away from the true originator of a piece of mischievous gossip, or the place where we have mislaid a possession, it is possible, once we have discovered our mistake, to replace it not with the truth, but with another mistake. In assessing the girls’ modes of life, in deciding how to behave towards them, I had inferred all the implications of the word ‘innocence’, which I could now read, writ large on their faces, as I chatted with them. But my eye, baffled by its own haste, may have misread the word, and perhaps it was not to be seen there, any more than the name of Jules Ferry had figured on the programme of the matinée at which I had had my first sight of La Berma – despite which, I had assured M. de Norpois that Jules Ferry,118 without the slightest doubt, was a writer of curtain-raisers.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 65