In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (45 page)

When we heard these advanced opinions—though never so far advanced as
to amount to Socialism, which Mme. de Villeparisis held in
abhorrence—expressed so frequently and with so much frankness
precisely by one of those people in consideration of whose
intelligence our scrupulous and timid impartiality would refuse to
condemn outright the ideas of the Conservatives, we came very near, my
grandmother and I, to believing that in the pleasant companion of our
drives was to be found the measure and the pattern of truth in all
things. We took her word for it when she appreciated her Titians, the
colonnade of her country house, the conversational talent of
Louis–Philippe. But—like those mines of learning who hold us
spellbound when we get them upon Egyptian paintings or Etruscan
inscriptions, and yet talk so tediously about modern work that we ask
ourselves whether we have not been over–estimating the interest of the
sciences in which they are versed since there is not apparent in their
treatment of them the mediocrity of mind which they must have brought
to those studies just as much as to their fatuous essays on
Baudelaire—Mme. de Villeparisis, questioned by me about
Chateaubriand, about Balzac, about Victor Hugo, each of whom had in
his day been the guest of her parents, and had been seen and spoken to
by her, smiled at my reverence, told amusing anecdotes of them, such
as she had a moment ago been telling us of dukes and statesmen, and
severely criticised those writers simply because they had been lacking
in that modesty, that self–effacement, that sober art which is
satisfied with a single right line, and lays no stress on it, which
avoids more than anything else the absurdity of grandiloquence, in
that opportuneness, those qualities of moderation, of judgment and
simplicity to which she had been taught that real greatness aspired
and attained: it was evident that she had no hesitation in placing
above them men who might after all, perhaps, by virtue of those
qualities, have had the advantage of a Balzac, a Hugo, a Vigny in a
drawing–room, an academy, a cabinet council, men like Molé, Fontanes,
Vitroles, Bersot, Pasquier, Lebrun, Salvandy or Daru.

"Like those novels of Stendhal, which you seem to admire. You would
have given him a great surprise, I assure you, if you had spoken to
him in that tone. My father, who used to meet him at M. Mérimée's—now
he was a man of talent, if you like—often told me that Beyle (that
was his real name) was appallingly vulgar, but quite good company at
dinner, and never in the least conceited about his books. Why, you can
see for yourself how he just shrugged his shoulders at the absurdly
extravagant compliments of M. de Balzac. There at least he shewed that
he knew how to behave like a gentleman." She possessed the autographs
of all these great men, and seemed, when she put forward the personal
relations which her family had had with them, to assume that her
judgment of them must be better founded than that of young people who,
like myself, had had no opportunity of meeting them. "I'm sure I have a
right to speak, for they used to come to my father's house; and as M.
Sainte–Beuve, who was a most intelligent man, used to say, in forming
an estimate you must take the word of people who saw them close, and
were able to judge more exactly of their real worth."

Sometimes as the carriage laboured up a steep road through tilled
country, making the fields more real, adding to them a mark of
authenticity like the precious flower with which certain of the old
masters used to sign their pictures, a few hesitating cornflowers,
like the Combray cornflowers, would stream in our wake. Presently the
horses outdistanced them, but a little way on we would catch sight of
another which while it stayed our coming had pricked up to welcome us
amid the grass its azure star; some made so bold as to come and plant
themselves by the side of the road, and the impression left in my mind
was a nebulous blend of distant memories and of wild flowers grown
tame.

We began to go down hill; and then met, climbing on foot, on a
bicycle, in a cart or carriage, one of those creatures—flowers of a
fine day but unlike the flowers of the field, for each of them
secretes something that is not to be found in another, with the result
that we can never satisfy upon any of her fellows the desire which she
has brought to birth in us—a farm–girl driving her cow or half–lying
along a waggon, a shopkeeper's daughter taking the air, a fashionable
young lady erect on the back seat of a landau, facing her parents.
Certainly Bloch had been the means of opening a new era and had
altered the value of life for me on the day when he had told me that
the dreams which I had entertained on my solitary walks along the
Méséglise way, when I hoped that some peasant girl might pass whom I
could take in my arms, were not a mere fantasy which corresponded to
nothing outside myself, but that all the girls one met, whether
villagers or 'young ladies,' were alike ready and willing to give ear
to such prayers. And even if I were fated, now that I was ill and did
not go out by myself, never to be able to make love to them, I was
happy all the same, like a child born in a prison or a hospital, who,
having always supposed that the human organism was capable of
digesting only dry bread and 'physic,' has learned suddenly that
peaches, apricots and grapes are not simply part of the decoration of
the country scene but delicious and easily assimilated food. Even if
his gaoler or his nurse does not allow him to pluck those tempting
fruits, still the world seems to him a better place and existence in
it more clement. For a desire seems to us more attractive, we repose
on it with more confidence, when we know that outside ourselves there
is a reality which conforms to it, even if, for us, it is not to be
realised. And we think with more joy of a life in which (on condition
that we eliminate for a moment from our mind the tiny obstacle,
accidental and special, which prevents us personally from doing so) we
can imagine ourself to be assuaging that desire. As to the pretty
girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that
their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls.
And the universe had appeared to me more interesting.

Mme. de Villeparisis's carriage moved fast. Scarcely had I time to see
the girl who was coming in our direction; and yet—as the beauty of
people is not like the beauty of things, as we feel that it is that of
an unique creature, endowed with consciousness and free–will—as soon
as her individuality, a soul still vague, a will unknown to me,
presented a tiny picture of itself, enormously reduced but complete,
in the depths of her indifferent eyes, at once, by a mysterious
response of the pollen ready in me for the pistils that should receive
it, I felt surging through me the embryo, as vague, as minute, of the
desire not to let this girl pass without forcing her mind to become
conscious of my person, without preventing her desires from wandering
to some one else, without coming to fix myself in her dreams and to
seize and occupy her heart. Meanwhile our carriage rolled away from
her, the pretty girl was already left behind, and as she had—of
me—none of those notions which constitute a person in one's mind, her
eyes which had barely seen me had forgotten me already. Was it because
I had caught but a fragmentary glimpse of her that I had found her so
attractive? It may have been. In the first place, the impossibility of
stopping when I came to her, the risk of not meeting her again another
day, give at once to such a girl the same charm as a place derives
from the illness or poverty that prevents us from visiting it, or the
so unadventurous days through which we should otherwise have to live
from the battle in which we shall doubtless fall. So that, if there
were no such thing as habit, life must appear delightful to those of
us who would at every moment be threatened with death—that is to say,
to all mankind. Then, if our imagination is set going by the desire
for what we may not possess, its flight is not limited by a reality
completely perceived, in these casual encounters in which the charms
of the passing stranger are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness
of our passage. If only night is falling and the carriage is moving
fast, whether in town or country, there is not a female torso,
mutilated like an antique marble by the speed that tears us away and
the dusk that drowns it, but aims at our heart, from every turning in
the road, from the lighted interior of every shop, the arrows of
Beauty, that Beauty of which we are sometimes tempted to ask ourselves
whether it is, in this world, anything more than the complementary
part that is added to a fragmentary and fugitive stranger by our
imagination over–stimulated by regret.

Had I been free to stop, to get down from the carriage and to speak to
the girl whom we were passing, should I perhaps have been
disillusioned by some fault in her complexion which from the carriage
I had not distinguished? (After which every effort to penetrate into
her life would have seemed suddenly impossible. For beauty is a
sequence of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short when it bars the way
that we could already see opening into the unknown.) Perhaps a single
word which she might have uttered, a smile, would have furnished me
with a key, a clue that I had not expected, to read the expression of
her face, to interpret her bearing, which would at once have ceased to
be of any interest. It is possible, for I have never in real life met
any girls so desirable as on days when I was with some serious person
from whom, despite the—myriad pretexts that I invented, I could not
tear myself away: some years after that in which I went for the first
time to Balbec, as I was driving through Paris with a friend of my
father, and had caught sight of a woman walking quickly along the dark
street, I felt that it was unreasonable to forfeit, for a purely
conventional scruple, my share of happiness in what may very well be
the only life there is, and jumping from the carriage without a word
of apology I followed in quest of the stranger; lost her where two
streets crossed; caught her up again in a third, and arrived at last,
breathless, beneath a street lamp, face to face with old Mme. Verdurin
whom I had been carefully avoiding for years, and who, in her delight
and surprise, exclaimed: "But how very nice of you to have run all
this way just to say how d'ye do to me!"

That year at Balbec, at the moments of such encounters, I would assure
my grandmother and Mme. de Villeparisis that I had so severe a
headache that the best thing for me would be to go home alone on foot.
But they would never let me get out of the carriage. And I must add
that pretty girl (far harder to find again than an historic building,
for she was nameless and had the power of locomotion) to the
collection of all those whom I promised myself that I would examine
more closely at a later date. One of them, however, happened to pass
more than once before my eyes in circumstances which allowed me to
believe that I should be able to get to know her when I chose. This
was a milk–girl who came from a farm with an additional supply of
cream for the hotel. I fancied that she had recognised me also; and
she did, in fact, look at me with an attentiveness which was perhaps
due only to the surprise which my attentiveness caused her. And next
day, a day on which I had been resting all morning, when Françoise
came in about noon to draw my curtains, she handed me a letter which
had been left for me downstairs. I knew no one at Balbec. I had no
doubt that the letter was from the milk–girl. Alas, it was only from
Bergotte who, as he happened to be passing, had tried to see me, but
on hearing that I was asleep had scribbled a few charming lines for
which the lift–boy had addressed an envelope which I had supposed to
have been written by the milk–girl. I was bitterly disappointed, and
the thought that it was more difficult, and more flattering to myself
to get a letter from Bergotte did not in the least console me for this
particular letter's not being from her. As for the girl, I never came
across her again any more than I came across those whom I had seen
only from Mme. de Villeparisis's carriage. Seeing and then losing
them all thus increased the state of agitation in which I was living,
and I found a certain wisdom in the philosophers who recommend us to
set a limit to our desires (if, that is, they refer to our desire for
people, for that is the only kind that ends in anxiety, having for its
object a being at once unknown and unconscious. To suppose that
philosophy could refer to the desire for wealth would be too silly.).
At the same time I was inclined to regard this wisdom as incomplete,
for I said to myself that these encounters made me find even more
beautiful a world which thus caused to grow along all the country
roads flowers at once rare and common, fleeting treasures of the day,
windfalls of the drive, of which the contingent circumstances that
would never, perhaps, recur had alone prevented me from taking
advantage, and which gave a new zest to life.

But perhaps in hoping that, one day, with greater freedom, I should be
able to find on other roads girls much the same, I was already
beginning to falsify and corrupt what there is exclusively individual
in the desire to live in the company of a woman whom one has found
attractive, and by the mere fact that I admitted the possibility of
making this desire grow artificially, I had implicitly acknowledged my
allusion.

The day on which Mme. de Villeparisis took us to Carqueville, where
there was that church, covered in ivy, of which she had spoken to us,
a church that, built upon rising ground, dominated both its village
and the river that flowed beneath it, and had kept its own little
bridge from the middle ages, my grandmother, thinking that I would
like to be left alone to study the building at my leisure, suggested
to her friend that they should go on and wait for me at the
pastry–cook's, in the village square which was clearly visible from
where we were and, in its mellow bloom in the sunshine, seemed like
another part of a whole that was all mediaeval. It was arranged that
I should join them there later. In the mass of verdure before which I
was left standing I was obliged, if I was to discover the church, to
make a mental effort which involved my grasping more intensely the
idea 'Church'; in fact, as happens to schoolboys who gather more fully
the meaning of a sentence when they are made, by translating or by
paraphrasing it, to divest it of the forms to which they are
accustomed, this idea of 'Church,' which as a rule I scarcely needed
when I stood beneath steeples that were recognisable in themselves, I
was obliged perpetually to recall so as not to forget, here that the
arch in this clump of ivy was that of a pointed window, there that the
projection of the leaves was due to the swelling underneath of a
capital. Then came a breath of wind, and sent a tremor through the
mobile porch, which was overrun by eddies that shot and quivered like
a flood of light; the pointed leaves opened one against another; and,
shuddering, the arboreal front drew after it green pillars, undulant,
caressed and fugitive.