In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (62 page)

Presently Saint–Loup's visit drew to an end. I had not seen that party
of girls again on the beach. He was too little at Balbec in the
afternoons to have time to bother about them, or to attempt, in my
interest, to make their acquaintance. In the evenings he was more
free, and continued to take me constantly to Rivebelle. There are, in
those restaurants, as there are in public gardens and railway trains,
people embodied in a quite ordinary appearance, whose name astonishes
us when, having happened to ask it, we discover that this is not the
mere inoffensive stranger whom we supposed but nothing less than the
Minister or Duke of whom we have so often heard. Two or three times
already, in the Rivebelle restaurant, we had—Saint–Loup and I—seen
come in and sit down at a table when everyone else was getting ready
to go, a man of large stature, very muscular, with regular features
and a grizzled beard, gazing, with concentrated attention, into the
empty air. One evening, on our asking the landlord who was this
obscure, solitary and belated diner, "What!" he exclaimed, "do you
mean to say you don't know the famous painter Elstir?" Swann had once
mentioned his name to me, I had entirely forgotten in what connexion;
but the omission of a particular memory, like that of part of a
sentence when we are reading, leads sometimes not to uncertainty but
to a birth of certainty that is premature. "He is a friend of Swann, a
very well known artist, extremely good," I told Saint–Loup. Whereupon
there passed over us both, like a wave of emotion, the thought that
Elstir was a great artist, a celebrated man, and that, confounding us
with the rest of the diners, he had no suspicion of the ecstasy into
which we were thrown by the idea of his talent. Doubtless, his
unconsciousness of our admiration and of our acquaintance with Swann
would not have troubled us had we not been at the seaside. But since
we were still at an age when enthusiasm cannot keep silence, and had
been transported into a life in which not to be known is unendurable,
we wrote a letter, signed with both our names, in which we revealed to
Elstir in the two diners seated within a few feet of him two
passionate admirers of his talent, two friends of his great friend
Swann, and asked to be allowed to pay our homage to him in person. A
waiter undertook to convey this missive to the celebrity.

A celebrity Elstir was, perhaps, not yet at this period quite to the
extent claimed by the landlord, though he was to reach the height of
his fame within a very few years. But he had been one of the first to
frequent this restaurant when it was still only a sort of farmhouse,
and had brought to it a whole colony of artists (who had all, as it
happened, migrated elsewhere as soon as the farm–yard in which they
used to feed in the open air, under a lean–to roof, had become a
fashionable centre); Elstir himself had returned to Rivebelle this
evening only on account of a temporary absence of his wife, from the
house which he had taken in the neighbourhood. But great talent, even
when its existence is not yet recognised, will inevitably provoke
certain phenomena of admiration, such as the landlord had managed to
detect in the questions asked by more than one English lady visitor,
athirst for information as to the life led by Elstir, or in the number
of letters that he received from abroad. Then the landlord had further
remarked that Elstir did not like to be disturbed when he was working,
that he would rise in the middle of the night and take a little model
down to the water's edge to pose for him, nude, if the moon was
shining; and had told himself that so much labour was not in vain, nor
the admiration of the tourists unjustified when he had, in one of
Elstir's pictures, recognised a wooden cross which stood by the
roadside as you came into Rivebelle.

"It's all right!" he would repeat with stupefaction, "there are all
the four beams! Oh, he does take a lot of trouble!"

And he did not know whether a little
Sunrise Over the Sea
which
Elstir had given him might not be worth a fortune.

We watched him read our letter, put it in his pocket, finish his
dinner, begin to ask for his things, get up to go; and we were so
convinced that we had shocked him by our overture that we would now
have hoped (as keenly as at first we had dreaded) to make our escape
without his noticing us. We did not bear in mind for a single instant
a consideration which should, nevertheless, have seemed to us most
important, namely that our enthusiasm for Elstir, on the sincerity of
which we should not have allowed the least doubt to be cast, which we
could indeed have supported with the evidence of our breathing
arrested by expectancy, our desire to do no matter what that was
difficult or heroic for the great man, was not, as we imagined it to
be, admiration, since neither of us had ever seen anything that he had
painted; our feeling might have as its object the hollow idea of a
'great artist,' but not a body of work which was unknown to us. It
was, at the most, admiration in the abstract, the nervous envelope,
the sentimental structure of an admiration without content, that is to
say a thing as indissolubly attached to boyhood as are certain organs
which have ceased to exist in the adult man; we were still boys.
Elstir meanwhile was reaching the door when suddenly he turned and
came towards us. I was transported by a delicious thrill of terror
such as I could not have felt a few years later, because, while age
diminishes our capacity, familiarity with the world has meanwhile
destroyed in us any inclination to provoke such strange encounters, to
feel that kind of emotion.

In the course of the few words that Elstir had come back to say to us,
sitting down at our table, he never gave any answer on the several
occasions on which I spoke to him of Swann. I began to think that he
did not know him. He asked me, nevertheless, to come and see him at
his Balbec studio, an invitation which he did not extend to
Saint–Loup, and which I had earned (as I might not, perhaps, from
Swann's recommendation, had Elstir been intimate with him, for the
part played by disinterested motives is greater than we are inclined
to think in people's lives) by a few words which made him think that I
was devoted to the arts. He lavished on me a friendliness which was as
far above that of Saint–Loup as that was above the affability of a
mere tradesman. Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness
of a great gentleman, charming as it may be, has the effect of an
actor's playing a part, of being feigned. Saint–Loup sought to please;
Elstir loved to give, to give himself. Everything that he possessed,
ideas, work, and the rest which he counted for far less, he would have
given gladly to anyone who could understand him. But, failing society
that was endurable, he lived in an isolation, with a savagery which
fashionable people called pose and ill–breeding, public authorities a
recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness
and pride.

And no doubt at first he had thought, even in his solitude, with
enjoyment that, thanks to his work, he was addressing, in spite of
distance, he was giving a loftier idea of himself, to those who had
misunderstood or hurt him. Perhaps, in those days, he lived alone not
from indifference but from love of his fellows, and, just as I had
renounced Gilberte to appear to her again one day in more attractive
colours, dedicated his work to certain people as a way of approaching
them again, by which without actually seeing him they would be made to
love him, admire him, talk about him; a renunciation is not always
complete from the start, when we decide upon it in our original frame
of mind and before it has reacted upon us, whether it be the
renunciation of an invalid, a monk, an artist or a hero. But if he had
wished to produce with certain people in his mind, in producing he had
lived for himself, remote from the society to which he had become
indifferent; the practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as
happens with every big thing which we have begun by fearing, because
we knew it to be incompatible with smaller things to which we clung,
and of which it does not so much deprive us as it detaches us from
them. Before we experience it, our whole preoccupation is to know to
what extent we can reconcile it with certain pleasures which cease to
be pleasures as soon as we have experienced it.

Elstir did not stay long talking to us. I made up my mind that I would
go to his studio during the next few days, but on the following
afternoon, when I had accompanied my grandmother right to the point at
which the 'front' ended, near the cliffs of Canapville, on our way
back, at the foot of one of the little streets which ran down at right
angles to the beach, we came upon a girl who, with lowered head like
an animal that is being driven reluctant to its stall, and carrying
golf–clubs, was walking in front of a person in authority, in all
probability her or her friends' 'Miss,' who suggested a portrait of
Jeffreys by Hogarth, with a face as red as if her favourite beverage
were gin rather than tea, on which a dried smear of tobacco at the
corner of her mouth prolonged the curve of a moustache that was
grizzled but abundant. The girl who preceded her was like that one of
the little band who, beneath a black polo–cap, had shewn in an
inexpressive chubby face a pair of laughing eyes. Now, the girl who
was now passing me had also a black polo–cap, but she struck me as
being even prettier than the other, the line of her nose was
straighter, the curve of nostril at its base fuller and more fleshy.
Besides, the other had seemed a proud, pale girl, this one a child
well–disciplined and of rosy complexion. And yet, as she was pushing
a bicycle just like the other's, and was wearing the same reindeer
gloves, I concluded that the differences arose perhaps from the angle
and circumstances in which I now saw her, for it was hardly likely
that there could be at Balbec a second girl, with a face that, when
all was said, was so similar and with the same details in her
accoutrements. She cast a rapid glance in my direction; for the next
few days, when I saw the little band again on the beach, and indeed
long afterwards when I knew all the girls who composed it, I could
never be absolutely certain that any of them—even she who among them
all was most like her, the girl with the bicycle—was indeed the one
that I had seen that evening at the end of the 'front,' where a street
ran down to the beach, a girl who differed hardly at all, but was
still just perceptibly different from her whom I had noticed in the
procession.

From that moment, whereas for the last few days my mind had been
occupied chiefly by the tall one, it was the one with the golf–clubs,
presumed to be Mlle. Simonet, who began once more to absorb my
attention. When walking with the others she would often stop, forcing
her friends, who seemed greatly to respect her, to stop also. Thus it
is, calling a halt, her eyes sparkling beneath her polo–cap, that I
see her again to–day, outlined against the screen which the sea
spreads out behind her, and separated from me by a transparent, azure
space, the interval of time that has elapsed since then, a first
impression, faint and fine in my memory, desired, pursued, then
forgotten, then found again, of a face which I have many times since
projected upon the cloud of the past to be able to say to myself, of a
girl who was actually in my room: "It is she!" But it was perhaps yet
another, the one with geranium cheeks and green eyes, whom I should
have liked most to know. And yet, whichever of them it might be, on
any given day, that I preferred to see, the others, without her, were
sufficient to excite my desire which, concentrated now chiefly on one,
now on another, continued—as, on the first day, my confused
vision—to combine and blend them, to make of them the little world
apart, animated by a life in common, which for that matter they
doubtless imagined themselves to form; and I should have penetrated,
in becoming a friend of one of them—like a cultivated pagan or a
meticulous Christian going among barbarians—into a rejuvenating
society in which reigned health, unconsciousness of others, sensual
pleasures, cruelty, unintellectuality and joy.

My grandmother, who had been told of my meeting with Elstir, and
rejoiced at the thought of all the intellectual profit that I might
derive from his friendship, considered it absurd and none too polite
of me not to have gone yet to pay him a visit. But I could think only
of the little band, and being uncertain of the hour at which the girls
would be passing along the front, I dared not absent myself. My
grandmother was astonished, too, at the smartness of my attire, for I
had suddenly remembered suits which had been lying all this time at
the bottom of my trunk. I put on a different one every day, and had
even written to Paris ordering new hats and neckties.

It adds a great charm to life in a watering–place like Balbec if the
face of a pretty girl, a vendor of shells, cakes or flowers, painted
in vivid colours in our mind, is regularly, from early morning, the
purpose of each of those leisured, luminous days which we spend upon
the beach. They become then, and for that reason, albeit unoccupied by
any business, as alert as working–days, pointed, magnetised, raised
slightly to meet an approaching moment, that in which, while we
purchase sand–cakes, roses, ammonites, we will delight in seeing upon
a feminine face its colours displayed as purely as on a flower. But at
least, with these little traffickers, first of all we can speak to
them, which saves us from having to construct with our imagination
their aspects other than those with which the mere visual perception
of them furnishes us, and to recreate their life, magnifying its
charm, as when we stand before a portrait; moreover, just because we
speak to them, we can learn where and at what time it will be possible
to see them again. Now I had none of these advantages with respect to
the little band. Their habits were unknown to me; when on certain days
I failed to catch a glimpse of them, not knowing the cause of their
absence I sought to discover whether it was something fixed and
regular, if they were to be seen only every other day, or in certain
states of the weather, or if there were days on which no one ever saw
them. I imagined myself already friends with them, and saying: "But
you weren't there the other day?" "Weren't we? Oh, no, of course not;
that was because it was a Saturday. On Saturdays we don't ever come,
because…" If it were only as simple as that, to know that on black
Saturday it was useless to torment oneself, that one might range the
beach from end to end, sit down outside the pastry–cook's and pretend
to be nibbling an
éclair
, poke into the curiosity shop, wait for
bathing time, the concert, high tide, sunset, night, all without
seeing the longed–for little band. But the fatal day did not, perhaps,
come once a week. It did not, perhaps, of necessity fall on Saturdays.
Perhaps certain atmospheric conditions influenced it or were entirely
unconnected with it. How many observations, patient but not at all
serene, must one accumulate of the movements, to all appearance
irregular, of those unknown worlds before being able to be sure that
one has not allowed oneself to be led astray by mere coincidence, that
one's forecasts will not be proved wrong, before one elucidates the
certain laws, acquired at the cost of so much painful experience, of
that passionate astronomy. Remembering that I had not yet seen them on
some particular day of the week, I assured myself that they would not
be coming, that it was useless to wait any longer on the beach. And at
that very moment I caught sight of them. And yet on another day
which, so far as I could suppose that there were laws that guided the
return of those constellations, must, I had calculated, prove an
auspicious day, they did not come. But to this primary uncertainty
whether I should see them or not that day, there was added another,
more disquieting: whether I should ever set eyes on them again, for I
had no reason, after all, to know that they were not about to sail for
America, or to return to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to
love them. One can feel an attraction towards a particular person.
But to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable,
those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be—and this
is, perhaps, more than any person can be, the actual object which our
passion seeks so anxiously to embrace—the risk of an impossibility.
Thus there were acting upon me already those influences which recur in
the course of our successive love–affairs, which can, for that matter,
be provoked (but then rather in the life of cities) by the thought of
little working girls whose half–holiday is we know not on what day,
and whom we are afraid of having missed as they came out of the
factory; or which at least have recurred in mine. Perhaps they are
inseparable from love; perhaps everything that formed a distinctive
feature of our first love attaches itself to those that come after, by
recollection, suggestion, habit, and through the successive periods of
our life gives to its different aspects a general character.