In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (65 page)

My hesitation between the different girls of the little band, all of
whom retained something of the collective charm which had at first
disturbed me, combined with the reasons already given to allow me
later on, even at the time of my greater—my second—passion for
Albertine, a sort of intermittent and very brief liberty to abstain
from loving her. From having strayed among all her friends before it
finally concentrated itself on her, my love kept, now and then,
between itself and the image of Albertine a certain 'play' of light
and shade which enabled it, like a badly fitted lamp, to flit over the
surface of each of the others before settling its focus upon her; the
connexion between the pain which I felt in my heart and the memory of
Albertine did not seem to me necessary; I might perhaps have managed
to co–ordinate it with the image of another person, Which enabled me,
in a momentary flash, to banish reality altogether, not only external
reality, as in my love for Gilberte (which I had recognised to be an
internal state in which I drew from myself alone the particular
quality, the special character of the person whom I loved, everything
that rendered her indispensable to my happiness), but even the other
reality, internal and purely subjective.

"Not a day passes but one or the other of them comes by here, and
looks in for a minute or two," Elstir told me, plunging me in despair
when I thought that if I had gone to see him at once, when my
grandmother had begged me to do so, I should, in all probability, long
since have made Albertine's acquaintance.

She had passed on; from the studio she was no longer in sight. I
supposed that she had gone to join her friends on the 'front.' Could I
have appeared there suddenly with Elstir, I should have got to know
them all. I thought of endless pretexts for inducing him to take a
turn with me on the beach. I had no longer the same peace of mind as
before the apparition of the girl in the frame of the little window;
so charming until then in its fringe of honeysuckle, and now so
drearily empty. Elstir caused me a joy that was tormenting also when
he said that he would go a little way with me, but that he must first
finish the piece of work on which he was engaged. It was a flower
study but not one of any of the flowers, portraits of which I would
rather have commissioned him to paint than the portrait of a person,
so that I might learn from the revelation of his genius what I had so
often sought in vain from the flowers themselves—hawthorn white and
pink, cornflowers, apple–blossom. Elstir as he worked talked botany to
me, but I scarcely listened; he was no longer sufficient in himself,
he was now only the necessary intermediary between these girls and me;
the distinction which, only a few moments ago, his talent had still
given him in my eyes was now worthless save in so far as it might
confer a little on me also in the eyes of the little band to whom I
should be presented by him.

I paced up and down the room, impatient for him to finish what he was
doing; I picked up and examined various sketches, any number of which
were stacked against the walls. In this way I happened to bring to
light a water–colour which evidently belonged to a much earlier period
in Elstir's life, and gave me that particular kind of enchantment
which is diffused by works of art not only deliriously executed but
representing a subject so singular and so seductive that it is to it
that we attribute a great deal of their charm, as if the charm were
something that the painter had merely to uncover, to observe, realised
already in a material form by nature, and to reproduce in art. That
such objects can exist, beautiful quite apart from the painter's
interpretation of them, satisfies a sort of innate materialism in us,
against which our reason contends and acts as a counterpoise to the
abstractions of aesthetics. It was—this water–colour—the portrait of
a young woman, by no means beautiful but of a curious type, in a
close–fitting mob–cap not unlike a 'billy–cock' hat, trimmed with a
ribbon of cherry–coloured silk; in one of her mittened hands was a
lighted cigarette, while the other held, level with her knee, a sort
of broad–brimmed garden hat, nothing more than a fire screen of
plaited straw to keep off the sun. On a table by her side, a tall vase
filled with pink carnations. Often (and it was the case here) the
singularity of such works is due principally to their having been
executed in special conditions for which we do not at first sight make
proper allowance, if, for instance, the strange attire of a feminine
model is her costume for a masked ball, or conversely the scarlet
cloak which an elderly man looks as though he had put on to humour
some whim in the painter is his gown as a professor or alderman or his
cardinal's cassock. The ambiguous character of the person whose
portrait now confronted me arose, without my understanding it, from
the fact that she was a young actress of an earlier generation half
dressed for a part. But the cap or hat, beneath which the hair stuck
out but was cut short, the velvet coat opening without lapels over a
white shirt–front, made me hesitate as to the period of the clothes
and the sex of the model, so that I did not know what it was exactly
that I was holding before my eyes, unless simply the brightest
coloured of these scraps of painting. And the pleasure which it
afforded me was disturbed only by the fear that Elstir, by delaying
further, would make me miss the girls, for the sun was now declining
and hung low in the little window. Nothing in this water–colour was
merely stated there as a fact and painted because of its utility to
the composition, the costume because the young woman must be wearing
something, the vase to hold the flowers. The glass of the vase,
cherished for its own sake, seemed to be holding the water in which
the stems of the carnations were dipped in something as limpid, almost
as liquid as itself; the woman's dress encompassed her in a manner
that had an independent, a brotherly charm, and, if the works of man
can compete in charm with the wonders of nature, as delicate, as
pleasing to the touch of the eye, as freshly painted as the fur of a
cat, the petals of a flower, the feathers of a dove. The whiteness of
the shirt–front, fine as driven rain, with its gay pleats gathered
into little bells like lilies of the valley, was starred with bright
gleams of light from the room, as sharply edged and as finely shaded
as though they had been posies of flowers stitched on the woven lawn.
And the velvet of the coat, brilliant with a milky sheen, had here and
there a roughness, a scoring, a shagginess on its surface which made
one think of the crumpled brightness of the carnations in the vase.
But above all one felt that Elstir, sublimely indifferent to whatever
immoral suggestion there might be in this disguise of a young actress
for whom the talent with which she would play her part on the stage
was doubtless of less importance than the irritant attraction which
she would offer to the jaded or depraved senses of some of her
audience, had on the contrary fastened upon those ambiguous points as
on an aesthetic element which deserved to be brought into prominence,
and which he had done everything in his power to emphasise. Along
the lines of the face, the latent sex seemed to be on the point of
confessing itself to be that of a somewhat boyish girl, then vanished
and farther on reappeared with a suggestion rather of an effeminate
youth, vicious and pensive, then fled once more to remain
uncapturable. The dreamy sadness in the expression of her eyes, by the
mere fact of its contrast with the accessories belonging to the world
of love–making and play–acting, was not the least disturbing element
in the picture. One imagined moreover that it must be feigned, and
that the young person who seemed ready to submit to caresses in this
provoking costume had probably thought it effective to enhance the
provocation with this romantic expression of a secret longing, an
unspoken grief. At the foot of the picture was inscribed "
Miss
Sacripant
: October, 1872." I could not contain my admiration. "Oh,
it's nothing, only a rough sketch I did when I was young; it was a
costume for a variety show. It's all ages ago now." "And what has
become of the model?" A bewilderment provoked by my words preceded on
Elstir's face the indifferent, absent–minded air which, a moment
later, he displayed there. "Quick, give it to me!" he cried, "I hear
Madame Elstir coming, and, though, I assure you, the young person in
the billy–cock hat never played any part in my life, still there's no
point in my wife's coming in and finding it staring her in the face. I
have kept it only as an amusing sidelight on the theatre of those
days." And, before putting it away behind the pile, Elstir, who
perhaps had not set eyes on the sketch for years, gave it his careful
scrutiny. "I must keep just the head," he murmured, "the lower part is
really too shockingly bad, the hands are a beginner's work." I was
miserable at the arrival of Mme. Elstir, who could only delay us still
further. The window sill was already aglow. Our excursion would be a
pure waste of time. There was no longer the slightest chance of our
seeing the girls, consequently it mattered now not at all how soon
Mme. Elstir left us or how long she stayed. Not that she did stay for
any length of time. I found her most tedious; she might have been
beautiful, once, at twenty, driving an ox in the Roman Campagna, but
her dark hair was streaked with grey and she was common without being
simple, because she believed that a pompous manner and majestic
attitudes were required by her statuesque beauty, which, however,
advancing age had robbed of all its charm. She was dressed with the
utmost simplicity. And it was touching, but at the same time
surprising to hear Elstir, whenever he opened his mouth, and with a
respectful gentleness, as if merely uttering the words moved him to
tenderness and veneration, repeat: "My beautiful Gabrielle!" Later on,
when I had become familiar with Elstir's mythological paintings, Mme.
Elstir acquired beauty in my eyes also. I understood then that to a
certain ideal type illustrated by certain lines, certain arabesques
which reappeared incessantly throughout his work, to a certain canon
of art he had attributed a character that was almost divine, since the
whole of his time, all the mental effort of which he was capable, in a
word his whole life he had consecrated to the task of distinguishing
those lines as clearly and of reproducing them as faithfully as
possible. What such an ideal inspired in Elstir was indeed a cult so
solemn, so exacting that it never allowed him to be satisfied with
what he had achieved; was the most intimate part of himself, and so he
had never been able to look at it from a detached standpoint, to
extract emotion from it, until the day on which he encountered it
realised outside, apart from himself, in the body of a woman, the body
of her who in due course became Mme. Elstir and in whom he had been
able (as one is able only with something that is not oneself) to find
it meritorious, moving, god–like. How comforting, moreover, to let his
lips rest upon that Beauty which hitherto he had been obliged with so
great labour to extract from within himself, whereas now,
mysteriously incarnate, it offered itself to him in a series of
communions, filled with saving grace. Elstir at this period was no
longer in that early youth in which we look only to the power of our
own mind for the realisation of our ideal. He was nearing the age at
which we count on bodily satisfactions to stimulate the forces of the
brain, at which the exhaustion of the brain inclining us to
materialism and the diminution of our activity to the possibility of
influences passively received, begin to make us admit that there may
indeed be certain bodies, certain callings, certain rhythms that are
privileged, realising so naturally our ideal that even without genius,
merely by copying the movement of a shoulder, the tension of a throat,
we can achieve a masterpiece, it is the age at which we like to caress
Beauty with our eyes objectively, outside ourselves, to have it near
us, in a tapestry, in a lovely sketch by Titian picked up in a
second–hand shop, in a mistress as lovely as Titian's sketch. When I
understood this I could no longer look without pleasure at Mme.
Elstir, and her body began to lose its heaviness, for I filled it with
an idea, the idea that she was an immaterial creature, a portrait by
Elstir. She was one for me, and for him also I dare say. The facts of
life have no meaning for the artist, they are to him merely an
opportunity for exposing the naked blaze of his genius. One feels
unmistakably, when one sees side by side ten portraits of different
people painted by Elstir, that they are all, first and foremost,
Elstirs. Only, after this rising tide of genius, which sweeps over and
submerges a man's life, when the brain begins to tire, gradually the
balance is upset and, like a river that resumes its course after the
counter–flow of a spring tide, it is life that once more takes the
upper hand. While the first period lasted, the artist has gradually
evolved the law, the formula of his unconscious gift. He knows what
situations, should he be a novelist—if a painter, what
scenes—furnish him with the subject matter, which may be anything in
the world but, whatever it is, is essential to his researches as a
laboratory might be of a workshop. He knows that he has created his
masterpieces out of effects of attenuated light, the action of remorse
upon consciousness of guilt, out of women posed beneath trees or
half–immersed in water, like statues. A day will come when, owing to
the exhaustion of his brain, he will no longer have the strength, when
provided with those materials which his genius was wont to use, to
make the intellectual effort which alone can produce his work, and
will yet continue to seek them out, happy when he finds himself in
their presence, because of the spiritual pleasure, the allurement to
work that they arouse in him; and, surrounding them besides with a
kind of hedge of superstition as if they were superior to all things
else, as if in them already dwelt a great part of the work of art
which they might be said to carry within them ready made, he will
confine himself to the company, to the adoration of his models. He
will hold endless conversations with the repentant criminals whose
remorse, whose regeneration formed, when he still wrote, the subject
of his novels; he will buy a country house in a district where mists
attenuate the light, he will spend long hours gazing at the limbs of
bathing women; will collect sumptuous stuffs. And thus the beauty of
life, a phase that has to some extent lost its meaning, a stage beyond
the boundaries of art at which I had already seen Swann come to rest,
was that also which, by a slackening of the creative ardour, idolatry
of the forms which had inspired it, desire to avoid effort, must
ultimately arrest an Elstir's progress.