In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (68 page)

The sense of comfort that I drew from the probability of my now being
able to meet the little band whenever I chose was all the more
precious to me because I should not have been able to keep watch for
them during the next few days, which would be taken up with
preparations for Saint–Loup's departure. My grandmother was anxious to
offer my friend some proof of her gratitude for all the kindnesses
that he had shewn to her and myself. I told her that he was a great
admirer of Proudhon, and this put it into her head to send for a
collection of autograph letters by that philosopher which she had once
bought; Saint–Loup came to her room to look at them on the day of
their arrival, which was also his last day at Balbec. He read them
eagerly, fingering each page with reverence, trying to get the
sentences by heart; and then, rising from the table, was beginning to
apologise to my grandmother for having stayed so long, when he heard
her say: "No, no; take them with you; they are for you to keep; that
was why I sent for them, to give them to you."

He was overpowered by a joy which he could no more control than we can
a physical condition that arises without the intervention of our will.
He blushed scarlet as a child who has just been whipped, and my
grandmother was a great deal more touched to see all the efforts that
he was making (without success) to control the joy that convulsed him
than she would have been to hear any words of thanks that he could
have uttered. But he, fearing that he had failed to shew his gratitude
properly, begged me to make his excuses to her again, next day,
leaning from the window of the little train of the local railway
company which was to take him back to his regiment. The distance was,
as a matter of fact, nothing. He had thought of going, as he had
frequently done that summer, when he was to return the same evening
and was not encumbered with luggage, by road. But this time he would
have had, anyhow, to put all his heavy luggage in the train. And he
found it simpler to take the train himself also, following the advice
of the manager who, on being consulted, replied that "Carriage or
train, it was more or less equivocal." He meant us to understand that
they were equivalent (in fact, very much what Françoise would have
expressed as "coming to as near as made no difference"). "Very well,"
Saint–Loup had decided, "I will take the 'little crawler.'" I should
have taken it too, had I not been tired, and gone with my friend to
Doncières; failing this I kept on promising, all the time that we
waited in the Balbec station—the time, that is to say, which the
driver of the little train spent in waiting for unpunctual friends,
without whom he refused to start, and also in seeking some refreshment
for himself—to go over there and see him several times a week. As
Bloch had come to the station also—much to Saint–Loup's disgust—the
latter, seeing that our companion could hear him begging me to come to
luncheon, to dinner, to stay altogether at Doncières, finally turned
to him and, in the most forbidding tone, intended to counteract the
forced civility of the invitation and to prevent Bloch from taking it
seriously: "If you ever happen to be passing through Doncières any
afternoon when I am off duty, you might ask for me at the barracks;
but I hardly ever am off duty." Perhaps, also, Robert feared lest, if
left to myself, I might not come, and, thinking that I was more
intimate with Bloch than I made out, was providing me in this way with
a travelling companion, one who would urge me on.

I was afraid that this tone, this way of inviting a person while
warning him not to come, might have wounded Bloch, and felt that
Saint–Loup would have done better, saying nothing. But I was mistaken,
for after the train had gone, while we were walking back together as
far as the crossroads at which we should have to part, one road going
to the hotel, the other to the Blochs' villa, he never ceased from
asking me on what day we should go to Doncières, for after "all the
civilities that Saint–Loup had shewn" him, it would be 'too unmannerly'
on his part not to accept the invitation. I was glad that he had not
noticed, or was so little displeased as to wish to let it be thought
that he had not noticed on how far from pressing, how barely polite a
note the invitation had been sounded. At the same time I should have
liked Bloch, for his own sake, to refrain from making a fool of
himself by going over at once to Doncières. But I dared not offer a
piece of advice which could only have offended him by hinting that
Saint–Loup had been less pressing than himself impressed. He was a
great deal too ready to respond, and even if all his faults of this
nature were atoned for by remarkable qualities which others, with more
reserve than he, would not possess, he carried indiscretion to a pitch
that was almost maddening. The week must not, to hear him speak, pass
without our going to Doncières (he said 'our' for I think that he
counted to some extent on my presence there as an excuse for his own).
All the way home, opposite the gymnasium, in its grove of trees,
opposite the lawn–tennis courts, the mayor's office, the shell–fish
stall, he stopped me, imploring me to fix a day, and, as I did not,
left me in a towering rage, saying: "As your lordship pleases. For my
part, I'm obliged to go since he has invited me."

Saint–Loup was still so much afraid of not having thanked my
grandmother properly that he charged me once again to express his
gratitude to her a day or two later in a letter I received from him
from the town in which he was quartered, a town which seemed, on the
envelope where the post–mark had stamped its name, to be hastening to
me across country, to tell me that within its walls, in the Louis XVI
cavalry barracks, he was thinking of me. The paper was embossed with
the arms of Marsantes, in which I could make out a lion, surmounted by
a coronet formed by the cap of a Peer of France.

"After a journey which," he wrote, "passed pleasantly enough, with a
book I bought at the station, by Arvède Barine (a Russian author, I
fancy; it seemed to me remarkably well written for a foreigner, but
you shall give me your critical opinion, you are bound to know all
about it, you fount of knowledge who have read everything), here I am
again in the thick of this debased existence, where, alas, I feel a
sad exile, not having here what I had to leave at Balbec; this life in
which I cannot discover one affectionate memory, any intellectual
attraction; an environment on which you would probably look with
contempt—and yet it has a certain charm. Everything seems to have
changed since I was last here, for in the interval one of the most
important periods in my life, that from which our friendship dates,
has begun. I hope that it may never come to an end. I have spoken of
our friendship, of you, to one person only, to the friend I told you
of, who has just paid me a surprise visit here. She would like
immensely to know you, and I feel that you would get on well together,
for she too is extremely literary. I, on the other hand, to go over in
my mind all our talk, to live over again those hours which I never
shall forget, have shut myself off from my comrades, excellent
fellows, but altogether incapable of understanding that sort of thing.
This remembrance of moments spent with you I should almost have
preferred, on my first day here, to call up for my own solitary
enjoyment, without writing. But I was afraid lest you, with your
subtle mind and ultra–sensitive heart, might, if you did not hear from
me, needlessly torment yourself, if, that is to say, you still
condescend to occupy your thoughts with this blunt trooper whom you
will have a hard task to polish and refine, and make a little more
subtle and worthier of your company."

On the whole this letter, in its affectionate spirit, was not at all
unlike those which, when I did not yet know Saint–Loup, I had imagined
that he would write to me, in those daydreams from which the coldness
of his first greeting had shaken me by bringing me face to face with
an icy reality which was not, however, to endure. Once I had received
this letter, whenever, at luncheon–time, the post was brought in, I
could tell at once when it was from him that a letter came, for it had
always that second face which a person assumes when he is absent, in
the features of which (the characters of his script) there is no
reason why we should not suppose that we are tracing an individual
soul just as much as in the line of a nose or the inflexions of a
voice.

I would now gladly remain at the table while it was being cleared,
and, if it was not a moment at which the girls of the little band
might be passing, it was no longer solely towards the sea that I would
turn my eyes. Since I had seen such things depicted in water–colours
by Elstir, I sought to find again in reality, I cherished, as though
for their poetic beauty, the broken gestures of the knives still lying
across one another, the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin upon
which the sun would patch a scrap of yellow velvet, the half–empty
glass which thus shewed to greater advantage the noble sweep of its
curved sides, and, in the heart of its translucent crystal, clear as
frozen daylight, a dreg of wine, dusky but sparkling with reflected
lights, the displacement of solid objects, the transmutation of
liquids by the effect of light and shade, the shifting colour of the
plums which passed from green to blue and from blue to golden yellow
in the half–plundered dish, the chairs, like a group of old ladies,
that came twice daily to take their places round the white cloth
spread on the table as on an altar at which were celebrated the rites
of the palate, where in the hollows of oyster–shells a few drops of
lustral water had gathered as in tiny holy water stoups of stone; I
tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it
could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundities of 'still
life.'

When, some days after Saint–Loup's departure, I had succeeded in
persuading Elstir to give a small tea–party, at which I was to meet
Albertine, that freshness of appearance, that smartness of attire,
both (alas) fleeting, which were to be observed in me at the moment of
my starting out from the Grand Hotel, and were due respectively to a
longer rest than usual and to special pains over my toilet, I
regretted my inability to reserve them (and also the credit accruing
from Elstir's friendship) for the captivation of some other, more
interesting person; I regretted having to use them all up on the
simple pleasure of making Albertine's acquaintance. My brain assessed
this pleasure at a very low value now that it was assured me. But,
inside, my will did not for a moment share this illusion, that will
which is the persevering and unalterable servant of our successive
personalities; hiding itself in secret places, despised, downtrodden,
untiringly faithful, toiling without intermission and with no thought
for the variability of the self, its master, if only that master may
never lack what he requires. Whereas at the moment when we are just
about to start on a long–planned and eagerly awaited holiday, our
brain, our nerves begin to ask themselves whether it is really worth
all the trouble involved, the will, knowing that those lazy masters
would at once begin to consider their journey the most wonderful
experience, if it became impossible for them to take it, the will
leaves them explaining their difficulties outside the station,
multiplying their hesitations; but busies itself with taking the
tickets and putting us into the carriage before the train starts. It
is as invariable as brain and nerves are fickle, but as it is silent,
gives no account of its actions, it seems almost non–existent; it is
by its dogged determination that the other constituent parts of our
personality are led, but without seeing it, while they distinguish
clearly all their own uncertainties. My nerves and brain then started
a discussion as to the real value of the pleasure that there would be
in knowing Albertine, while I studied in the glass vain and perishable
attractions which nerves and brain would have preserved intact for use
on some other occasion. But my will would not let the hour pass at
which I must start, and 'it was Elstir's address that it called out to
the driver. Brain and nerves were at liberty, now that the die was
cast, to think this 'a pity.' If my will had given the man a different
address, they would have been finely 'sold.'

When I arrived at Elstir's, a few minutes later, my first impression
was that Mlle. Simonet was not in the studio. There was certainly a
girl sitting there in a silk frock, bareheaded, but one whose
marvellous hair, whose nose, meant nothing to me, in whom I did not
recognise the human entity that I had formed out of a young cyclist
strolling past, in a polo–cap, between myself and the sea. It was
Albertine, nevertheless. But even when I knew it to be she, I gave her
no thought. On entering any social gathering, when we are young, we
lose consciousness of our old self, we become a different man, every
drawing–room being a fresh universe, in which, coming under the sway
of a new moral perspective, we fasten our attention, as if they were
to matter to us for all time, on people, dances, card–tables, all of
which we shall have forgotten by the morning. Obliged to follow, if I
was to arrive at the goal of conversation with Albertine, a road in no
way of my own planning, which first brought me to a halt at Elstir,
passed by other groups of guests to whom I was presented, then along
the table, at which I was offered, and ate, a strawberry tart or two,
while I listened, motionless, to the music that was beginning in
another part of the room, I found myself giving to these various
incidents the same importance as to my introduction to Mlle. Simonet,
an introduction which was now nothing more than one among several such
incidents, having entirely forgotten that it had been, but a few
minutes since, my sole object in coming there that day. But is it not
ever thus in the bustle of daily life, with every true happiness,
every great sorrow? In a room full of other people we receive from her
whom we love the answer, propitious or fatal, which we have been
awaiting for the last year. But we must go on talking, ideas come, one
after another, forming a smooth surface which is pricked, at the very
most, now and then by a dull throb from within of the memory,
deep–rooted enough but of very slender growth, that misfortune has
come upon us. If, instead of misfortune, it is happiness, it may be
that not until many years have elapsed will we recall that the most
important event in our sentimental life occurred without our having
time to give it any prolonged attention, or even to become aware of it
almost, at a social gathering, it may have been, to which we had gone
solely in expectation of that event.