In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (37 page)

It was something less, perhaps, also. As a young man on the day of an
examination or of a duel feels the question that he has been asked,
the shot that he has fired, to be a very little thing when he thinks
of the reserves of knowledge and of valour that he possesses and would
like to have displayed, so my mind, which had exalted the Virgin of
the Porch far above the reproductions that I had had before my eyes,
inaccessible by the vicissitudes which had power to threaten them,
intact although they were destroyed, ideal, endowed with universal
value, was astonished to see the statue which it had carved a thousand
times, reduced now to its own apparent form in stone, occupying, on
the radius of my outstretched arm, a place in which it had for rivals
an election placard and the point of my stick, fettered to the Square,
inseparable from the head of the main street, powerless to hide from
the gaze of the Café and of the omnibus office, receiving on its face
half of that ray of the setting sun (half, presently, in a few hours'
time, of the light of the street lamp) of which the Bank building
received the other half, tainted simultaneously with that branch
office of a money–lending establishment by the smells from the
pastry–cook's oven, subjected to the tyranny of the Individual to such
a point that, if I had chosen to scribble my name upon that stone, it
was she, the illustrious Virgin whom until then I had endowed with a
general existence and an intangible beauty, the Virgin of Balbec, the
unique (which meant, alas, the only one) who, on her body coated with
the same soot as defiled the neighbouring houses, would have
displayed—powerless to rid herself of them—to all the admiring
strangers come there to gaze upon her, the marks of my piece of chalk
and the letters of my name; it was she, indeed, the immortal work of
art, so long desired, whom I found, transformed, as was the church
itself, into a little old woman in stone whose height I could measure
and count her wrinkles. But time was passing; I must return to the
station, where I was to wait for my grandmother and Françoise, so that
we should all arrive at Balbec–Plage together. I reminded myself of
what I had read about Balbec, of Swann's saying: "It is exquisite; as
fine as Siena." And casting the blame for my disappointment upon
various accidental causes, such as the state of my health, my
exhaustion after the journey, my incapacity for looking at things
properly, I endeavoured to console myself with the thought that other
towns remained still intact for me, that I might soon, perhaps, be
making my way, as into a shower of pearls, into the cool pattering
sound that dripped from Quimperlé, cross that green water lit by a
rosy glow in which Pont–Aven was bathed; but as for Balbec, no sooner
had I set foot in it than it was as though I had broken open a name
which ought to have been kept hermetically closed, and into which,
seizing at once the opportunity that I had imprudently given them when
I expelled all the images that had been living in it until then, a
tramway, a Café, people crossing the square, the local branch of a
Bank, irresistibly propelled by some external pressure, by a pneumatic
force, had come crowding into the interior of those two syllables
which, closing over them, let them now serve as a border to the porch
of the Persian church, and would never henceforward cease to contain
them.

In the little train of the local railway company which was to take us
to Balbec–Plage I found my grandmother, but found her alone—for,
imagining that she was sending Françoise on ahead of her, so as to
have everything ready before we arrived, but having mixed up her
instructions, she had succeeded only in packing off Françoise in the
wrong direction, who at that moment was being carried down all
unsuspectingly, at full speed, to Nantes, and would probably wake up
next morning at Bordeaux. No sooner had I taken my seat in the
carriage, filled with the fleeting light of sunset and with the
lingering heat of the afternoon (the former enabling me, alas, to see
written clearly upon my grandmother's face how much the latter had
tired her), than she began: "Well, and Balbec?" with a smile so
brightly illuminated by her expectation of the great pleasure which
she supposed me to have been enjoying that I dared not at once confess
to her my disappointment. Besides, the impression which my mind had
been seeking occupied it steadily less as the place drew nearer to
which my body would have to become accustomed. At the end—still more
than an hour away—of this journey I was trying to form a picture of
the manager of the hotel at Balbec, to whom I, at that moment, did not
exist, and I should have liked to be going to present myself to him in
more impressive company than that of my grandmother, who would be
certain to ask for a reduction of his terms. The only thing positive
about him was his haughty condescension; his lineaments were still
vague.

Every few minutes the little train brought us to a standstill in one
of the stations which came before Balbec–Plage, stations the mere
names of which (Incarville, Marcouville, Doville, Pont–à–Couleuvre,
Arambouville, Saint–Mars–le–Vieux, Hermonville, Maineville) seemed to
me outlandish, whereas if I had come upon them in a book I should at
once have been struck by their affinity to the names of certain places
in the neighbourhood of Combray. But to the trained ear two musical
airs, consisting each of so many notes, several of which are common to
them both, will present no similarity whatever if they differ in the
colour of their harmony and orchestration. So it was that nothing
could have reminded me less than these dreary names, made up of sand,
of space too airy and empty and of salt, out of which the termination
'ville' always escaped, as the 'fly' seems to spring out from the end
of the word 'butterfly'—nothing could have reminded me less of those
other names, Roussainville or Martinville, which, because I had heard
them pronounced so often by my great–aunt at table, in the
dining–room, had acquired a certain sombre charm in which were blended
perhaps extracts of the flavour of 'preserves,' the smell of the fire
of logs and of the pages of one of Bergotte's books, the colour of the
stony front of the house opposite, all of which things still to–day
when they rise like a gaseous bubble from the depths of my memory
preserve their own specific virtue through all the successive layers
of rival interests which must be traversed before they reach the
surface.

These were—commanding the distant sea from the crests of their
several dunes or folding themselves already for the night beneath
hills of a crude green colour and uncomfortable shape, like that of
the sofa in one's bedroom in an hotel at which one has just arrived,
each composed of a cluster of villas whose line was extended to
include a lawn–tennis court and now and then a casino, over which a
flag would be snapping in the freshening breeze, like a hollow
cough—a series of watering–places which now let me see for the first
time their regular visitors, but let me see only the external features
of those visitors—lawn–tennis players in white hats, the
station–master spending all his life there on the spot among his
tamarisks and roses, a lady in a straw 'boater' who, following the
everyday routine of an existence which I should never know, was
calling to her dog which had stopped to examine something in the road
before going in to her bungalow where the lamp was already lighted for
her return—which with these strangely usual and slightingly familiar
sights stung my ungreeted eyes and stabbed my exiled heart. But how
much were my sufferings increased when we had finally landed in the
hall of the Grand Hotel at Balbec, and I stood there in front of the
monumental staircase that looked like marble, while my grandmother,
regardless of the growing hostility of the strangers among whom we
should have to live, discussed 'terms' with the manager, a sort of
nodding mandarin whose face and voice were alike covered with scars
(left by the excision of countless pustules from one and from the
other of the divers accents acquired from an alien ancestry and in a
cosmopolitan upbringing) who stood there in a smart dinner–jacket,
with the air of an expert psychologist, classifying, whenever the
'omnibus' discharged a fresh load, the 'nobility and gentry' as
'geesers' and the 'hotel crooks' as nobility and gentry. Forgetting,
probably, that he himself was not drawing five hundred francs a month,
he had a profound contempt for people to whom five hundred francs—or,
as he preferred to put it,'twenty–five louis' was 'a lot of money,'
and regarded them as belonging to a race of pariahs for whom the Grand
Hotel was certainly not intended. It is true that even within its
walls there were people who did not pay very much and yet had not
forfeited the manager's esteem, provided that he was assured that they
were watching their expenditure not from poverty so much as from
avarice. For this could in no way lower their standing since it is a
vice and may consequently be found at every grade of social position.
Social position was the one thing by which the manager was impressed,
social position, or rather the signs which seemed to him to imply that
it was exalted, such as not taking one's hat off when one came into
the hall, wearing knickerbockers, or an overcoat with a waist, and
taking a cigar with a band of purple and gold out of a crushed morocco
case—to none of which advantages could I, alas, lay claim. He would
also adorn his business conversation with choice expressions, to
which, as a rule, he gave a wrong meaning.

While I heard my grandmother, who shewed no sign of annoyance at his
listening to her with his hat on his head and whistling through his
teeth at her, ask him in an artificial voice, "And what are…your
charges?…Oh! far too high for my little budget," waiting upon a
bench, I sought refuge in the innermost depths of my own
consciousness, strove to migrate to a plane of eternal thoughts—to
leave nothing of myself, nothing that lived and felt on the surface of
my body, anaesthetised as are those of animals which by inhibition
feign death when they are attacked—so as not to suffer too keenly in
this place, with which my total unfamiliarity was made all the more
evident to me when I saw the familiarity that seemed at the same
moment to be enjoyed by a smartly dressed lady for whom the manager
shewed his respect by taking liberties with the little dog that
followed her across the hall, the young 'blood' with a feather in his
hat who asked, as he came in, 'Any letters?'—all these people to whom
it was an act of home–coming to mount those stairs of imitation
marble. And at the same time the triple frown of Minos, Æacus and
Rhadamanthus (beneath which I plunged my naked soul as into an unknown
element where there was nothing now to protect it) was bent sternly
upon me by a group of gentlemen who, though little versed perhaps in
the art of receiving, yet bore the title 'Reception Clerks,' while
beyond them again, through a closed wall of glass, were people sitting
in a reading–room for the description of which I should have had to
borrow from Dante alternately the colours in which he paints Paradise
and Hell, according as I was thinking of the happiness of the elect
who had the right to sit and read there undisturbed, or of the terror
which my grandmother would have inspired in me if, in her
insensibility to this sort of impression, she had asked me to go in
there and wait for her by myself.

My sense of loneliness was further increased a moment later: when I
had confessed to my grandmother that I did not feel well, that I
thought that we should be obliged to return to Paris, she had offered
no protest, saying merely that she was going out to buy a few things
which would be equally useful whether we left or stayed (and which, I
afterwards learned, were all for my benefit, Françoise having gone off
with certain articles which I might need); while I waited for her I
had taken a turn through the streets, packed with a crowd of people
who imparted to them a sort of indoor warmth, streets in which were
still open the hairdresser's shop and the pastry–cook's, the latter
filled with customers eating ices, opposite the statue of
Duguay–Trouin. This crowd gave me just about as much pleasure as a
photograph of it in one of the 'illustrateds' might give a patient who
was turning its pages in the surgeon's waiting–room. I was astonished
to find that there were people so different from myself that this
stroll through the town had actually been recommended to me by the
manager as a distraction, and also that the torture chamber which a
new place of residence is could appear to some people a 'continuous
amusement,' to quote the hotel prospectus, which might, it was true,
exaggerate, but was, for all that, addressed to a whole army of
clients to whose tastes it must appeal. True, it invoked, to make them
come to the Grand Hotel, Balbec, not only the 'exquisite fare' and the
'fairy–like view across the Casino gardens,' but also the 'ordinances
of her Majesty Queen Fashion, which no one may break with impunity, or
without being taken for a Bœotian, a charge that no well–bred man
would willingly incur.' The need that I now had of my grandmother was
enhanced by my fear that I had shattered another of her illusions. She
must be feeling discouraged, feeling that if I could not stand the
fatigue of this journey there was no hope that any change of air could
ever do me good. I decided to return to the hotel and to wait for her
there: the manager himself came forward and pressed a button, and a
person whose acquaintance I had not yet made, labelled 'LIFT' (who at
that highest point in the building, which corresponded to the lantern
in a Norman church, was installed like a photographer in his darkroom
or an organist in his loft) came rushing down towards me with the
agility of a squirrel, tamed, active, caged. Then, sliding upwards
again along a steel pillar, he bore me aloft in his train towards the
dome of this temple of Mammon. On each floor, on either side of a
narrow communicating stair, opened out fanwise a range of shadowy
galleries, along one of which, carrying a bolster, a chambermaid came
past. I lent to her face, which the gathering dusk made featureless,
the mask of my most impassioned dreams of beauty, but read in her eyes
as they turned towards me the horror of my own nonentity. Meanwhile,
to dissipate, in the course of this interminable assent, the mortal
anguish which I felt in penetrating thus in silence the mystery of
this chiaroscuro so devoid of poetry, lighted by a single vertical
line of little windows which were those of the solitary water–closet
on each landing, I addressed a few words to the young organist,
artificer of my journey and my partner in captivity, who continued to
manipulate the registers of his instrument and to finger the stops. I
apologised for taking up so much room, for giving him so much trouble,
and asked whether I was not obstructing him in the practice of an art
to which, so as to flatter the performer, I did more than display
curiosity, I confessed my strong attachment. But he vouchsafed no
answer, whether from astonishment at my words, preoccupation with what
he was doing, regard for convention, hardness of hearing, respect for
holy ground, fear of danger, slowness of understanding, or by the
manager's orders.