In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (44 page)

THE Balbec doctor, who had been called in to cope with a sudden
feverish attack, having given the opinion that I ought not to stay out
all day on the beach, in the blazing sun, without shelter, and having
written out various prescriptions for my use, my grandmother took his
prescriptions with a show of respect in which I could at once discern
her firm resolve not to have any of them 'made up,' but did pay
attention to his advice on the matter of hygiene, and accepted an
offer from Mme. de Villeparisis to take us for drives in her carriage.
After this I would spend the mornings, until luncheon, going to and
fro between my own room and my grandmother's. Hers did not look out
directly upon the sea, as mine did, but was lighted from three of its
four sides—with views of a strip of the 'front,' of a well inside the
building, and of the country inland, and was furnished differently
from mine, with armchairs upholstered in a metallic tissue with red
flowers from which seemed to emanate the cool and pleasant odour that
greeted me when I entered the room. And at that hour when the sun's
rays, coming from different aspects and, as it were, from different
hours of the day, broke the angles of the wall, thrust in a reflexion
of the beach, made of the chest of drawers a festal altar, variegated
as a bank of field–flowers, attached to the wall the wings, folded,
quivering, warm, of a radiance that would, at any moment, resume its
flight, warmed like a bath a square of provincial carpet before the
window overlooking the well, which the sun festooned and patterned
like a climbing vine, added to the charm and complexity of the room's
furniture by seeming to pluck and scatter the petals of the silken
flowers on the chairs, and to make their silver threads stand out from
the fabric, this room in which I lingered for a moment before going to
get ready for our drive suggested a prism in which the colours of the
light that shone outside were broken up, or a hive in which the sweet
juices of the day which I was about to taste were distilled,
scattered, intoxicating, visible, a garden of hope which dissolved in
a quivering haze of silver threads and rose leaves. But before all
this I had drawn back my own curtains, impatient to know what Sea it
was that was playing that morning by the shore, like a Nereid. For
none of those Seas ever stayed with us longer than a day. On the
morrow there would be another, which sometimes resembled its
predecessor. But I never saw the same one twice.

There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on
catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege,
on one morning rather than another, did the window on being
uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose
lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparence of a vaporous
emerald beneath whose surface I could see teeming the ponderable
elements that coloured it? She made the sun join in her play, with a
smile rendered languorous by an invisible haze which was nought but a
space kept vacant about her translucent surface, which, thus
curtailed, became more appealing, like those goddesses whom the
sculptor carves in relief upon a block of marble, the rest of which he
leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless colour, she invited us out
over those rough terrestrial roads, from which, seated beside Mme. de
Villeparisis in her barouche, we should see, all day long and without
ever reaching it, the coolness of her gentle palpitation.

Mme. de Villeparisis used to order her carriage early, so that we
should have time to reach Saint–Mars–le–Vêtu, or the rocks of
Quetteholme, or some other goal which, for a somewhat lumbering
vehicle, was far enough off to require the whole day. In my joy at the
long drive we were going to take I would be humming some tune that I
had heard recently as I strolled up and down until Mme. de
Villeparisis was ready. If it was Sunday hers would not be the only
carriage drawn up outside the hotel; several hired flies would be
waiting there, not only for the people who had been invited to Féterne
by Mme. de Cambremer, but for those who, rather than stay at home all
day, like children in disgrace, declared that Sunday was always quite
impossible at Balbec and started off immediately after luncheon to
hide themselves in some neighbouring watering–place or to visit one of
the 'sights' of the district. And indeed whenever (which was often)
anyone asked Mme. Blandais if she had been to the Cambremers', she
would answer peremptorily: "No; we went to the Falls of the Bee," as
though that were the sole reason for her not having spent the day at
Féterne. And the barrister would be charitable, and say:

"I envy you. I wish I had gone there instead; they must be well worth
seeing."

Beside the row of carriages, in front of the porch in which I stood
waiting, was planted, like some shrub of a rare species, a young page
who attracted the eye no less by the unusual and effective colouring
of his hair than by his plant–like epidermis. Inside, in the hall,
corresponding to the narthex, or Church of the Catechumens in a
primitive basilica, through which persons who were not staying in the
hotel were entitled to pass, the comrades of this 'outside' page did
not indeed work much harder than he but did at least execute certain
drilled movements. It is probable that in the early morning they
helped with the cleaning. But in the afternoon they stood there only
like a Chorus who, even when there is nothing for them to do, remain
upon the stage in order to strengthen the cast. The General Manager,
the same who had so terrified me, reckoned on increasing their number
considerably next year, for he had 'big ideas.' And this prospect
greatly afflicted the manager of the hotel, who found that all these
boys about the place only 'created a nuisance,' by which he meant that
they got in the visitors' way and were of no use to anyone. But
between luncheon and dinner at least, between the exits and entrances
of the visitors, they did fill an otherwise empty stage, like those
pupils of Mme. de Maintenon who, in the garb of young Israelites,
carry on the action whenever Esther or Joad 'goes off.' But the
outside page, with his delicate tints, his tall, slender, fragile
trunk, in proximity to whom I stood waiting for the Marquise to come
downstairs, preserved an immobility into which a certain melancholy
entered, for his elder brothers had left the hotel for more brilliant
careers elsewhere, and he felt keenly his isolation upon this alien
soil. At last Mme. de Villeparisis appeared. To stand by her carriage
and to help her into it ought perhaps to have been part of the young
page's duties. But he knew on the one hand that a person who brings
her own servants to an hotel expects them to wait on her and is not as
a rule lavish with her 'tips,' and that generally speaking this was
true also of the nobility of the old Faubourg Saint–Germain. Mme. de
Villeparisis was included in both these categories. The arborescent
page concluded therefore that he need expect nothing from her, and
leaving her own maid and footman to pack her and her belongings into
the carriage, he continued to dream sadly of the enviable lot of his
brothers and preserved his vegetable immobility.

We would start off; some time after rounding the railway station, we
came into a country road which soon became as familiar to me as the
roads round Combray, from the bend where, like a fish–hook, it was
baited with charming orchards, to the turning at which we left it,
with tilled fields upon either side. Among these we could see here and
there an apple–tree, stripped it was true of its blossom, and bearing
no more now than a fringe of pistils, but sufficient even so to
enchant me since I could imagine, seeing those inimitable leaves, how
their broad expanse, like the ceremonial carpet spread for a wedding
that was now over, had been but the other day swept by the white satin
train of their blushing flowers.

How often in Paris, during the May of the following year, was I to
bring home a branch of apple–blossom from the florist, and to stay all
night long before its flowers in which bloomed the same creamy essence
that powdered besides and whitened the green unfolding leaves, flowers
between whose snowy cups it seemed almost as though it had been the
salesman who had, in his generosity towards myself, out of his wealth
of invention too and as an effective contrast, added on either side
the supplement of a becoming crimson bud: I sat gazing at them, I
grouped them in the light of my lamp—for so long that I was often
still there when the dawn brought to their whiteness the same flush
with which it must at that moment have been tingeing their sisters on
the Balbec road—and I sought to carry them back in my imagination to
that roadside, to multiply them, to spread them out, so as to fill the
frame prepared for them, on the canvas, all ready, of those closes the
outline of which I knew by heart, which I so longed to see—which one
day I must see again, at the moment when, with the exquisite fervour
of genius, spring was covering their canvas with its colours.

Before getting into the carriage I had composed the seascape for which
I was going to look out, which I had hoped to see with the 'sun
radiant' upon it, and which at Balbec I could distinguish only in too
fragmentary a form, broken by so many vulgar intromissions that had no
place in my dream, bathers, dressing–boxes, pleasure yachts. But when,
Mme. de Villeparisis's carriage having reached high ground, I caught
a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of trees, then no doubt
at such a distance those temporal details which had set the sea, as it
were, apart from nature and history disappeared, and I could as I
looked down towards its waves make myself realise that they were the
same which Leconte de Lisle describes for us in his
Orestie
, where
"like a flight of birds of prey, before the dawn of day" the
long–haired warriors of heroic Hellas "with oars an hundred thousand
sweep the huge resounding deep." But on the other hand I was no longer
near enough to the sea which seemed to me not a living thing now, but
fixed; I no longer felt any power beneath its colours, spread like
those of a picture among the leaves, through which it appeared as
inconsistent as the sky and only of an intenser blue.

Mme. de Villeparisis, seeing that I was fond of churches, promised me
that we should visit one one day and another another, and especially
the church at Carqueville 'quite buried in all its old ivy,' as she
said with a wave of the hand which seemed tastefully to be clothing
the absent 'front' in an invisible and delicate screen of foliage.
Mme. de Villeparisis would often, with this little descriptive
gesture, find just the right word to define the attraction and the
distinctive features of an historic building, always avoiding
technical terms, but incapable of concealing her thorough
understanding of the things to which she referred. She appeared to
seek an excuse for this erudition in the fact that one of her father's
country houses, the one in which she had lived as a girl, was situated
in a district in which there were churches similar in style to those
round Balbec, so that it would have been unaccountable if she had not
acquired a taste for architecture, this house being, incidentally, one
of the finest examples of that of the Renaissance. But as it was also
a regular museum, as moreover Chopin and Liszt had played there,
Lamartine recited poetry, all the most famous artists for fully a
century inscribed 'sentiments,' scored melodies, made sketches in the
family album, Mme. de Villeparisis ascribed, whether from delicacy,
good breeding, true modesty or want of intelligence, only this purely
material origin to her acquaintance with all the arts, and had come,
apparently, to regard painting, music, literature and philosophy as
the appanage of a young lady brought up on the most aristocratic lines
in an historic building that was catalogued and starred. You would
have said, listening to her, that she knew of no pictures that were
not heirlooms. She was pleased that my grandmother liked a necklace
which she wore, and which fell over her dress. It appeared in the
portrait of an ancestress of her own by Titian which had never left
the family. So that one could be certain of its being genuine. She
would not listen to a word about pictures bought, heaven knew where,
by a Croesus, she was convinced before you spoke that they were
forgeries, and had so desire to see them. We knew that she herself
painted flowers in water–colour, and my grandmother, who had heard
these praised, spoke to her of them. Mme. de Villeparisis modestly
changed the subject, but without shewing either surprise or pleasure
more than would an artist whose reputation was established and to whom
compliments meant nothing. She said merely that it was a delightful
pastime because, even if the flowers that sprang from the brush were
nothing wonderful, at least the work made you live in the company of
real flowers, of the beauty of which, especially when you were obliged
to study them closely in order to draw them, you could never grow
tired. But at Balbec Mme. de Villeparisis was giving herself a
holiday, so as to spare her eyes.

We were astonished, my grandmother and I, to find how much more
'Liberal' she was than even the majority of the middle class. She did
not understand how anyone could be scandalised by the expulsion of the
Jesuits, saying that it had always been done, even under the Monarchy,
in Spain even. She took up the defence of the Republic, and against
its anti–clericalism had not more to say than: "I should be equally
annoyed whether they prevented me from hearing mass when I wanted to,
or forced me to hear it when I didn't!" and even startled us with such
utterances as: "Oh! the aristocracy in these days, what does it
amount to?" "To my mind, a man who doesn't work doesn't
count!"—perhaps only because she felt that they gained point and
flavour, became memorable, in fact, on her lips.