In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (64 page)

The effort made by Elstir to strip himself, when face to face with
reality, of every intellectual concept, was all the more admirable in
that this man who, before sitting down to paint, made himself
deliberately ignorant, forgot, in his honesty of purpose, everything
that he knew, since what one knows ceases to exist by itself, had in
reality an exceptionally cultivated mind. When I confessed to him the
disappointment that I had felt upon seeing the porch at Balbec:
"What!" he had exclaimed, "you were disappointed by the porch! Why,
it's the finest illustrated Bible that the people have ever had. That
Virgin, and all the bas–reliefs telling the story of her life, they
are the most loving, the most inspired expression of that endless poem
of adoration and praise in which the middle ages extolled the glory of
the Madonna. If you only knew, side by side with the most scrupulous
accuracy in rendering the sacred text, what exquisite ideas the old
carver had, what profound thoughts, what delicious poetry!

"A wonderful idea, that great sheet in which the angels are carrying
the body of the Virgin, too sacred for them to venture to touch it
with their hands"; (I mentioned to him that this theme had been
treated also at Saint–André–des–Champs; he had seen photographs of the
porch there, and agreed, but pointed out that the bustling activity of
those little peasant figures, all hurrying at once towards the Virgin,
was not the same thing as the gravity of those two great angels,
almost Italian, so springing, so gentle) "the angel who is carrying
the Virgin's soul, to reunite it with her body; in the meeting of the
Virgin with Elizabeth, Elizabeth's gesture when she touches the
Virgin's Womb and marvels to feel that it is great with child; and the
bandaged arm of the midwife who had refused, unless she touched, to
believe the Immaculate Conception; and the linen cloth thrown by the
Virgin to Saint Thomas to give him a proof of the Resurrection; that
veil, too, which the Virgin tears from her own bosom to cover the
nakedness of her Son, from Whose Side the Church receives in a chalice
the Wine of the Sacrament, while, on His other side the Synagogue,
whose kingdom is at an end, has its eyes bandaged, holds a half–broken
sceptre and lets fall, with the crown that is slipping from its head,
the tables of the old law; and the husband who, on the Day of
Judgment, as he helps his young wife to rise from her grave, lays her
hand against his own heart to reassure her, to prove to her that it is
indeed beating, is that such a trumpery idea, do you think, so stale
and commonplace? And the angel who is taking away the sun and the
moon, henceforth useless, since it is written that the Light of the
Cross shall be seven times brighter than the light of the firmament;
and the one who is dipping his hand in the water of the Child's bath,
to see whether it is warm enough; and the one emerging from the clouds
to place the crown upon the Virgin's brow, and all the angels who are
leaning from the vault of heaven, between the balusters of the New
Jerusalem, and throwing up their arms with terror or joy at the sight
of the torments of the wicked or the bliss of the elect! For it is all
the circles of heaven, a whole gigantic poem full of theology and
symbolism that you have before you there. It is fantastic, mad,
divine, a thousand times better than anything you will see in Italy,
where for that matter this very tympanum has been carefully copied by
sculptors with far less genius. There never was a time when genius
was universal; that is all nonsense; it would be going beyond the age
of gold. The fellow who carved that front, you may make up your mind
that he was every bit as great, that he had just as profound ideas as
the men you admire most at the present day. I could shew you what I
mean if we went there together. There are certain passages from the
Office of the Assumption which have been rendered with a subtilty of
expression that Redon himself has never equalled."

This vast celestial vision of which he spoke to me, this gigantic
theological poem which, I understood, had been inscribed there in
stone, yet when my eyes, big with desire, had opened to gaze upon the
front of Balbec church, it was not these things that I had seen. I
spoke to him of those great statues of saints, which, mounted on
scaffolds, formed a sort of avenue on either side.

"It starts from the mists of antiquity to end in Jesus Christ," he
explained. "You see on one side His ancestors after the spirit, on
the other the Kings of Judah, His ancestors after the flesh. All the
ages are there. And if you had looked more closely at what you took
for scaffolds you would have been able to give names to the figures
standing on them. At the feet of Moses you would have recognised the
calf of gold, at Abraham's the ram and at Joseph's the demon
counselling Potiphar's wife."

I told him also that I had gone there expecting to find an almost
Persian building, and that this had doubtless been one of the chief
factors in my disappointment. "Indeed, no," he assured me, "it is
perfectly true. Some parts of it are quite oriental; one of the
capitals reproduces so exactly a Persian subject that you cannot
account for it by the persistence of Oriental traditions. The carver
must have copied some casket brought from the East by explorers." And
he did indeed shew me, later on, the photograph of a capital on which
I saw dragons that were almost Chinese devouring one another, but at
Balbec this little piece of carving had passed unnoticed by me in the
general effect of the building which did not conform to the pattern
traced in my mind by the words, 'an almost Persian church.'

The intellectual pleasures which I enjoyed in this studio did not in
the least prevent me from feeling, although they enveloped us as it
were in spite of ourselves, the warm polish, the sparkling gloom of
the place itself and, through the little window framed in honeysuckle,
in the avenue that was quite rustic, the resisting dryness of the
sun–parched earth, screened only by the diaphanous gauze woven of
distance and of a tree–cast shade. Perhaps the unaccountable feeling
of comfort which this summer day was giving me came like a tributary
to swell the flood of joy that had surged in me at the sight of
Elstir's
Carquethuit Harbour
.

I had supposed Elstir to be a modest man, but I realised my mistake on
seeing his face cloud with melancholy when, in a little speech of
thanks, I uttered the word 'fame.' Men who believe that their work
will last—as was the case with Elstir—form the habit of placing that
work in a period when they themselves will have crumbled into dust.
And thus, by obliging them to reflect on their own extinction, the
thought of fame saddens them because it is inseparable from the
thought of death. I changed the conversation in the hope of driving
away the cloud of ambitious melancholy with which unwittingly I had
loaded Elstir's brow. "Some one advised me once," I began, thinking of
the conversation we had had with Legrandin at Combray, as to which I
was glad of an opportunity of learning Elstir's views, "not to visit
Brittany, because it would not be wholesome for a mind with a natural
tendency to dream." "Not at all;" he replied. "When the mind has a
tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to
ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams,
it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being
taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have
grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure
for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
One must have a thorough understanding of one's dreams if one is not
to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating one's dreams from
one's life which so often produces good results that I ask myself
whether one ought not, at all costs, to try it, simply as a
preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we ought, to avoid
the risk of appendicitis later on, to have all our appendices taken
out when we are children."

Elstir and I had meanwhile been walking about the studio, and had
reached the window that looked across the garden on to a narrow
avenue, a side–street that was almost a country lane. We had gone
there to breathe the cooler air of the late afternoon. I supposed
myself to be nowhere near the girls of the little band, and it was
only by sacrificing for once the hope of seeing them that I had
yielded to my grandmother's prayers and had gone to see Elstir. For
where the thing is to be found that we are seeking we never know, and
often we steadily, for a long time, avoid the place to which, for
quite different reasons, everyone has been asking us to go. But we
never suspect that we shall there see the very person of whom we are
thinking. I looked out vaguely over the country road which, outside
the studio, passed quite close to it but did not belong to Elstir.
Suddenly there appeared on it, coming along it at a rapid pace, the
young bicyclist of the little band, with, over her dark hair, her
polo–cap pulled down towards her plump cheeks, her eyes merry and
almost importunate; and on that auspicious path, miraculously filled
with promise of delights, I saw her beneath the trees throw to Elstir
the smiling greeting of a friend, a rainbow that bridged the gulf for
me between our terraqueous world and regions which I had hitherto
regarded as inaccessible. She even came up to give her hand to the
painter, though without stopping, and I could see that she had a tiny
beauty spot on her chin. "Do you know that girl, sir?" I asked Elstir,
realising that he could if he chose make me known to her, could invite
us both to the house. And this peaceful studio with its rural horizon
was at once filled with a surfeit of delight such as a child might
feel in a house where he was already happily playing when he learned
that, in addition, out of that bounteousness which enables lovely
things and noble hosts to increase their gifts beyond all measure,
there was being prepared for him a sumptuous repast. Elstir told me
that she was called Albertine Simonet, and gave me the names also of
her friends, whom I described to him with sufficient accuracy for him
to identify them almost without hesitation. I had, with regard to
their social position, made a mistake, but not the mistake that I
usually made at Balbec. I was always ready to take for princes the
sons of shopkeepers when they appeared on horseback. This time I had
placed in an interloping class the daughters of a set of respectable
people, extremely rich, belonging to the world of industry and
business. It was the class which, on first thoughts, interested me
least, since it held for me neither the mystery of the lower orders
nor that of a society such as the Guermantes frequented. And no doubt
if an inherent quality, a rank which they could never forfeit, had not
been conferred on them, in my dazzled eyes, by the glaring vacuity of
the seaside life all round them, I should perhaps not have succeeded
in resisting and overcoming the idea that they were the daughters of
prosperous merchants. I could not help marvelling to see how the
French middle class was a wonderful studio full of sculpture of the
noblest and most varied kind. What unimagined types, what richness of
invention in the character of their faces, what firmness, what
freshness, what simplicity in their features. The shrewd old
money–changers from whose loins these Dianas and these nymphs had
sprung seemed to me to have been the greatest of statuaries. Before I
had time to register the social metamorphosis of these girls—so are
these discoveries of a mistake, these modifications of the notion one
has of a person instantaneous as a chemical combination—there was
already installed behind their faces, so street–arab in type that I
had taken them for the mistresses of racing bicyclists, of boxing
champions, the idea that they might easily be connected with the
family of some lawyer or other whom we knew. I was barely conscious of
what was meant by Albertine Simonet; she had certainly no conception
of what she was one day to mean to me. Even the name, Simonet, which I
had already heard spoken on the beach, if I had been asked to write it
down I should have spelt with a double 'n,' never dreaming of the
importance which this family attached to there being but one in their
name. In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness
fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the
distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure,
more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise. Possibly
there had been Simonnets who had done badly in business, or something
worse still even. The fact remains that the Simonets never failed, it
appeared, to be annoyed if anyone doubled their 'n.' They wore the air
of being the only Simonets in the world with one 'n' instead of two,
and were as proud of it, perhaps, as the Montmorency family were of
being the premier barons of France. I asked Elstir whether these girls
lived at Balbec; yes, he told me, some of them at any rate. The villa
in which one of them lived was at that very spot, right at the end of
the beach, where the cliffs of Canapville began. As this girl was a
great friend of Albertine Simonet, this was another reason for me to
believe that it was indeed the latter whom I had met that day when I
was with my grandmother. There were of course so many of those little
streets running down to the beach, and all at the same angle, that I
could not have pointed out exactly which of them it had been. One
would like always to remember a thing accurately, but at the time
one's vision was clouded. And yet that Albertine and the girl whom I
had seen going to her friend's house were one and the same person was
a practical certainty. In spite of which, whereas the countless images
that have since been furnished me by the dark young golfer, however
different they may have been from one another, have overlaid one
another (because I now know that they all belong to her), and if I
retrace the thread of my memories I can, under cover of that identity,
and as though along a tunnelled passage, pass through all those images
in turn without losing my consciousness of the same person behind them
all, if, on the other hand, I wish to revert to the girl whom I passed
that day when I was with my grandmother, I must escape first into
freer air. I am convinced that it is Albertine whom I find there, the
same girl as her who would often stop dead among her moving comrades,
in her walk along the foreground of the sea; but all those more recent
images remain separate from that earlier one because I am unable to
confer on her retrospectively an identity which she had not for me at
the moment in which she caught my eye; whatever assurance I may derive
from the law of probabilities, that girl with plump cheeks who stared
at me so boldly from the angle of the little street and the beach, and
by whom I believe that I might have been loved, I have never, in the
strict sense of the words, seen again.