In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (67 page)

But I must not keep Elstir waiting. I caught sight of myself in a
glass. To add to the disaster of my not having been introduced to the
girls, I noticed that my necktie was all crooked, my hat left long
wisps of hair shewing, which did not become me; but it was a piece of
luck, all the same, that they should have seen me, even thus attired,
in Elstir's company and so could not forget me; also that I should
have put on, that morning, at my grandmother's suggestion, my smart
waistcoat, when I might so easily have been wearing one that was
simply hideous, and be carrying my best stick. For while an event for
which we are longing never happens quite in the way we have been
expecting, failing the advantages on which we supposed that we might
count, others present themselves for which we never hoped, and make up
for our disappointment; and we have been so dreading the worst that in
the end we are inclined to feel that, taking one thing with another,
chance has, on the whole, been rather kind to us.

"I did so much want to know them," I said as I reached Elstir. "Then
why did you stand a mile away?" These were his actual words, not that
they expressed what was in his mind, since, if his desire had been to
grant mine, to call me up to him would have been quite easy, but
perhaps because he had heard phrases of this sort, in familiar use
among common people when they are in the wrong, and because even great
men are in certain respects much the same as common people, take their
everyday excuses from the same common stock just as they get their
daily bread from the same baker; or it may be that such expressions
(which ought, one might almost say, to be read 'backwards,' since
their literal interpretation is the opposite of the truth) are the
instantaneous effect, the negative exposure of a reflex action. "They
were in a hurry." It struck me that of course they must have stopped
him from summoning a person who did not greatly attract them;
otherwise he would not have failed, after all the questions that I had
put to him about them, and the interest which he must have seen that I
took in them, to call me. "We were speaking just now of Carquethuit,"
he began, as we walked towards his villa. "I have done a little
sketch, in which you can see much better how the beach curves. The
painting is not bad, but it is different. If you will allow me, just
to cement our friendship, I would like to give you the sketch," he
went on, for the people who refuse us the objects of our desire are
always ready to offer us something else.

"I should very much like, if you have such a thing, a photograph of
the little picture of Miss Sacripant. 'Sacripant'—that's not a real
name, surely?" "It is the name of a character the sitter played in a
stupid little musical comedy." "But, I assure you, sir, I have never
set eyes on her; you look as though you thought that I knew her."
Elstir was silent. "It isn't Mme. Swann, before she was married?" I
hazarded, in one of those sudden fortuitous stumblings upon the truth,
which are rare enough in all conscience, and yet give, in the long
run, a certain cumulative support to the theory of presentiments,
provided that one takes care to forget all the wrong guesses that
would invalidate it. Elstir did not reply. The portrait was indeed
that of Odette de Crécy. She had preferred not to keep it for many
reasons, some of them obvious. But there were others less apparent.
The portrait dated from before the point at which Odette, disciplining
her features, had made of her face and figure that creation the
broad outlines of which her hairdressers, her dressmakers, she
herself—in her way of standing, of speaking, of smiling, of moving
her hands, her eyes, of thinking—were to respect throughout the years
to come. It required the vitiated tastes of a surfeited lover to make
Swann prefer to all the countless photographs of the 'sealed pattern'
Odette which was his charming wife the little photographs which he
kept in his room and in which, beneath a straw hat trimmed with
pansies, you saw a thin young woman, not even good–looking, with
bunched–out hair and drawn features.

But apart from this, had the portrait been not anterior like Swann's
favourite photograph, to the systematisation of Odette's features in a
fresh type, majestic and charming, but subsequent to it, Elstir's
vision would alone have sufficed to disorganise that type. Artistic
genius in its reactions is like those extremely high temperatures
which have the power to disintegrate combinations of atoms which they
proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, following
another type. All that artificially harmonious whole into which a
woman has succeeded in bringing her limbs and features, the
persistence of which every day, before going out, she studies in her
glass, changing the angle of her hat, smoothing her hair, exercising
the sprightliness in her eyes, so as to ensure its continuity, that
harmony the keen eye of the great painter instantly destroys,
substituting for it a rearrangement of the woman's features such as
will satisfy a certain pictorial ideal of femininity which he carries
in his head. Similarly it often happens that, after a certain age, the
eye of a great seeker after truth will find everywhere the elements
necessary to establish those relations which alone are of interest to
him. Like those craftsmen, those players who, instead of making a fuss
and asking for what they cannot have, content themselves with the
instrument that comes to their hand, the artist might say of anything,
no matter what, that it would serve his purpose. Thus a cousin of the
Princesse de Luxembourg, a beauty of the most queenly type, having
succumbed to a form of art which was new at that time, had asked the
leading painter of the naturalist school to do her portrait. At once
the artist's eye had found what he sought everywhere in life. And on
his canvas there appeared, in place of the proud lady, a street–boy,
and behind him a vast, sloping, purple background which made one think
of the Place Pigalle. But even without going so far as that, not only
will the portrait of a woman by a great artist not seek in the least
to give satisfaction to various demands on the woman's part—such as
for instance, when she begins to age, make her have herself
photographed in dresses that are almost those of a young girl, which
bring out her still youthful figure and make her appear like the
sister, or even the daughter of her own daughter, who, if need be, is
tricked out for the occasion as a 'perfect fright' by her side—it
will, on the contrary, emphasise those very drawbacks which she seeks
to hide, and which (as for instance a feverish, that is to say a livid
complexion) are all the more tempting to him since they give his
picture 'character'; they are quite enough, however, to destroy all
the illusions of the ordinary man who, when he sees the picture, sees
crumble into dust the ideal which the woman herself has so proudly
sustained for him, which has placed her in her unique, her unalterable
form so far apart, so far above the rest of humanity. Fallen now,
represented otherwise than in her own type in which she sat
unassailably enthroned, she is become nothing more than just an
ordinary woman, in the legend of whose superiority we have lost all
faith. In this type we are so accustomed to regard as included not
only the beauty of an Odette but her personality, her identity, that
standing before the portrait which has thus transposed her from it we
are inclined to protest not simply "How plain he has made her!" but
"Why, it isn't the least bit like her!" We find it hard to believe
that it can be she. We do not recognise her. And yet there is a person
there on the canvas whom we are quite conscious of having seen before.
But that person is not Odette; the face of the person, her body, her
general appearance seem familiar. They recall to us not this
particular woman who never held herself like that, whose natural pose
had no suggestion of any such strange and teasing arabesque in its
outlines, but other women, all the women whom Elstir has ever painted,
women whom invariably, however they may differ from one another, he
has chosen to plant thus on his canvas facing you, with an arched foot
thrust out from under the skirt, a large round hat in one hand,
symmetrically corresponding at the level of the knee which it hides to
what also appears as a disc, higher up in the picture: the face. And
furthermore, not only does a portrait by the hand of genius
disintegrate and destroy a woman's type, as it has been denned by her
coquetry and her selfish conception of beauty, but if it is also old,
it is not content with ageing the original in the same way as a
photograph ages its sitter, by shewing her dressed in the fashions of
long ago. In a portrait, it is not only the manner the woman then had
of dressing that dates it, there is also the manner the artist had of
painting. And this, Elstir's earliest manner, was the most damaging of
birth certificates for Odette because it not only established her, as
did her photographs of the same period, as the younger sister of
various time–honoured courtesans, but made her portrait contemporary
with the countless portraits that Manet or Whistler had painted of all
those vanished models, models who already belonged to oblivion or to
history.

It was along this train of thought, meditated in silence by the side
of Elstir as I accompanied him to his door, that I was being led by
the discovery that I had just made of the identity of his model, when
this original discovery caused me to make a second, more disturbing
still, involving the identity of the artist. He had painted the
portrait of Odette de Crécy. Could it possibly be that this man of
genius, this sage, this eremite, this philosopher with his marvellous
flow of conversation, who towered over everyone and everything, was
the foolish, corrupt little painter who had at one time been 'taken up'
by the Verdurins? I asked him if he had known them, whether by any
chance it was he that they used to call M. Biche. He answered me in
the affirmative, with no trace of embarrassment, as if my question
referred to a period in his life that was ended and already somewhat
remote, with no suspicion of what a cherished illusion his words were
shattering in me, until looking up he read my disappointment upon my
face. His own assumed an expression of annoyance. And, as we were now
almost at the gate of his house, a man of less outstanding eminence,
in heart and brain, might simply have said 'good–bye' to me, a trifle
dryly, and taken care to avoid seeing me again. This however was not
Elstir's way with me; like the master that he was—and this was,
perhaps, from the point of view of sheer creative genius, his one
fault, that he was a master in that sense of the word, for an artist
if he is to live the true life of the spirit in its full extent, must
be alone and not bestow himself with profusion, even upon
disciples—from every circumstance, whether involving himself or other
people, he sought to extract, for the better edification of the young,
the element of truth that it contained. He chose therefore, rather
than say anything that might have avenged the injury to his pride, to
say what he thought would prove instructive to me. "There is no man,"
he began, "however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said
things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant
to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it
from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because
he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as
it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through
all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate
stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons
and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them
nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have,
perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to
retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of
everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures,
feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and
sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for
ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else
can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom
is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are
not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at
school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by
reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that
prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I
can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not
be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in
later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence
that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of
life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life,
of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming that one is a
painter—extracted something that goes beyond them." Meanwhile we had
reached his door. I was disappointed at not having met the girls. But
after all there was now the possibility of meeting them again later
on; they had ceased to do no more than pass beyond a horizon on which
I had been ready to suppose that I should never see them reappear.
Around them no longer swirled that sort of great eddy which had
separated me from them, which had been merely the expression of the
perpetually active desire, mobile, compelling, fed ever on fresh
anxieties, which was aroused in me by their inaccessibility, their
flight from me, possibly for ever. My desire for them, I could now set
it at rest, hold it in reserve, among all those other desires the
realisation of which, as soon as I knew it to be possible, I would
cheerfully postpone. I took leave of Elstir; I was alone once again.
Then all of a sudden, despite my recent disappointment, I saw in my
mind's eye all that chain of coincidence which I had not supposed
could possibly come about, that Elstir should be a friend of those
very girls, that they who only that morning had been to me merely
figures in a picture with the sea for background had seen me, had seen
me walking in friendly intimacy with a great painter, who was now
informed of my secret longing and would no doubt do what he could to
assuage it. All this had been a source of pleasure to me, but that
pleasure had remained hidden; it was one of those visitors who wait
before letting us know that they are in the room until all the rest
have gone and we are by ourselves. Then only do we catch sight of
them, and can say to them, "I am at your service," and listen to what
they have to tell us. Sometimes between the moment at which these
pleasures have entered our consciousness and the moment at which we
are free to entertain them, so many hours have passed, we have in the
interval seen so many people that we are afraid lest they should have
grown tired of waiting. But they are patient, they do not grow tired,
and as soon as the crowd has gone we find them there ready for us.
Sometimes it is then we who are so exhausted that it seems as though
our weary mind will not have the strength left to seize and retain
those memories, those impressions for which our frail self is the one
habitable place, the sole means of realisation. And we should regret
that failure, for existence to us is hardly interesting save on the
days on which the dust of realities is shot with magic sand, on which
some trivial incident of life becomes a spring of romance. Then a
whole promontory of the inaccessible world rises clear in the light of
our dream, and enters into our life, our life in which, like the
sleeper awakened, we actually see the people of whom we have been so
ardently dreaming that we came to believe that we should never behold
them save in our dreams.