In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (62 page)

I told him also that I had gone there expecting to find an almost Persian building, and that this had doubtless been one of the chief factors in my disappointment. “Not at all,” he assured me, “it’s perfectly true. Some parts of it are quite oriental. One of the capitals reproduces so exactly a Persian subject that you cannot simply explain it by the persistence of oriental traditions. The carver must have copied some casket brought from the East by navigators.” And indeed he was later to show me the photograph of a capital on which I saw dragons that were almost Chinese devouring one another, but at Balbec this little piece of sculpture had passed unnoticed by me in the general effect of the building which did not conform to the pattern traced in my mind by the words “an almost Persian church.”

The intellectual pleasures which I was enjoying in this studio did not in the least prevent me from being aware, although they enveloped us as it were in spite of ourselves, of the warm glazes, the sparkling penumbra of the room itself and, through the little window framed with honeysuckle, in the rustic avenue, the resilient dryness of the sun-parched earth, veiled only by the diaphanous gauze woven of distance and the shade of the trees. Perhaps the unconscious well-being induced by this summer day came like a tributary to swell the flood of joy that had surged in me at the sight of Elstir’s
Carquethuit Harbour
.

I had supposed Elstir to be a modest man, but I realised my mistake on seeing his face cloud with melancholy when, in a little speech of thanks, I uttered the word “fame.” Men who believe that their works will last—as was the case with Elstir—form the habit of placing them in a period when they themselves will have crumbled into dust. And thus, by obliging them to reflect on their own extinction, the idea of fame saddens them because it is inseparable from the idea of death. I changed the subject in the hope of dispelling the cloud of ambitious melancholy with which I had unwillingly shadowed Elstir’s brow. “Someone advised me once,” I said, thinking of the conversation we had had with Legrandin at Combray, as to which I was glad of an opportunity of learning Elstir’s views, “not to visit Brittany, because it would not be wholesome for a mind with a natural inclination towards day-dreams.” “Not at all,” he replied. “When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it’s a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them. So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearances because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one’s day-dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating one’s dreams from one’s life which so often produces good results that I wonder whether one oughtn’t to try it just in case, simply as a preventative, as certain surgeons suggest that, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on, we ought all to have our appendixes taken out when we’re children.”

Elstir and I had meanwhile been walking towards the end of the studio, and had reached the window that looked across the garden on to a narrow side-street that was almost a country lane. We had gone there to breathe the cooler air of the late afternoon. I supposed myself to be nowhere near the girls of the little band, and it was only by sacrificing for once the hope of seeing them that I had yielded to my grandmother’s entreaties and had gone to see Elstir. For we do not know the whereabouts of what we are seeking, and often we avoid for a long time the place to which, for quite different reasons, everyone has been asking us to go; but we never suspect that we shall there see the very person of whom we are thinking. I looked out vaguely over this rustic path which passed quite close to the studio but did not belong to Elstir. Suddenly there appeared on it, coming towards us at a rapid pace, the young cyclist of the little band, with her polocap pulled down over her dark hair towards her plump cheeks, her eyes gay and slightly challenging; and on that auspicious path, miraculously filled with the promise of delights, I saw her, beneath the trees, address to Elstir the smiling greeting of a friend, a rainbow that bridged for me the gulf between our terraqueous world and regions which I had hitherto regarded as inaccessible. She even came up to shake hands with the painter, though without stopping, and I saw that she had a tiny beauty spot on her chin. “Do you know that girl, Monsieur?” I asked Elstir, realising that he might introduce me to her, invite her to his house. And this peaceful studio with its rural horizon was at once filled with a surfeit of delight such as a child might feel in a house where he was already happily playing when he learned that, in addition, out of that bounteousness which enables lovely things and noble hosts to increase their gifts beyond all measure, a sumptuous meal was being prepared for him. Elstir told me that she was called Albertine Simonet, and gave me the names also of her friends, whom I described to him with sufficient accuracy for him to identify them almost without hesitation. I had made a mistake with regard to their social position, but not the mistake that I usually made at Balbec. I was always ready to take the sons of shopkeepers for princes when they appeared on horseback. This time I had placed in a shady milieu the daughters of middle-class people, extremely rich, belonging to the world of trade and industry. It was the class which, at first sight, interested me least, since it held for me none of the mystery either of the people or of a society such as that of the Guermantes. And no doubt if a preliminary glamour which they would never now lose had not been conferred on them, in my dazzled eyes, by the glaring vacuity of seaside life, I should perhaps not have succeeded in resisting and overcoming the idea that they were the daughters of prosperous merchants. I could not help marvelling at what a wonderful workshop the French middle class was for sculpture of the most varied kind. What unexpected types, what richness of invention in the character of the faces, what firmness, what freshness, what simplicity in the features! The shrewd old burghers from whom these Dianas and these nymphs had sprung seemed to me to have been the greatest of statuaries. Scarcely had I had time to register the social metamorphosis of the little band—for these discoveries of a mistake, these modifications of the notion one has of a person, have the instantaneousness of a chemical reaction—than the idea had already established itself behind the guttersnipe ways of these girls, whom I had taken for the mistresses of racing cyclists or prize-fighters, that they might easily be connected with the family of some lawyer or other whom we knew. I was barely conscious of who Albertine Simonet was. She had certainly no conception of what she was one day to mean to me. Even the name, Simonet, which I had already heard spoken on the beach, I should have spelt with a double “n” had I been asked to write it down, never dreaming of the importance which this family attached to there being only one. The further we descend the social scale the more we find that snobbery fastens on to mere trifles which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to each individual, surprise us more. Possibly there had been Simonnets who had done badly in business, or worse still. The fact remains that the Simonets never failed, it appeared, to be annoyed if anyone doubled their “n.” They were as proud, perhaps, of being the only Simonets in the world with one “n” instead of two as the Montmorencys of being the premier barons of France. I asked Elstir whether these girls lived at Balbec; yes, he told me, some of them at any rate. The villa in which one of them lived was precisely at the far end of the beach, where the cliffs of Canapville began. Since this girl was a great friend of Albertine Simonet, this was one more reason for me to believe that it was indeed the latter whom I had met that day when I was with my grandmother. There were of course so many of those little streets running down to the beach, and all at the same angle, that I could not have specified exactly which of them it had been. One would like to remember a thing accurately, but at the time one’s vision is always clouded. And yet that Albertine and the girl whom I had seen going to her friend’s house were one and the same person was a practical certainty. In spite of this, whereas the countless images that have since been presented to me by the dark young golfer, however different they may be, are superimposed one upon the other (because I know that they all belong to her), and by retracing my memories I can, under cover of that identity and as if through an internal passageway, run through all those images in turn without losing my grasp of one and the same person; if, on the other hand, I wish to go back to the girl whom I passed that day when I was with my grandmother, I have to emerge into the open air. I am convinced that it is Albertine whom I find there, the same who used often to come to a halt in the midst of her friends during their walks against the backdrop of the sea; but all those more recent images remain separate from that earlier one because I am unable to confer on her retrospectively an identity which she did not have for me at the moment she caught my eye; whatever assurance I may derive from the law of probabilities, that girl with the plump cheeks who stared at me so boldly from the corner of the little street and from the beach, and by whom I believe that I might have been loved, I have never, in the strict sense of the words, seen again.

Was it my hesitation between the different girls of the little band, all of whom retained something of the collective charm which had disturbed me from the first, that, combined with those other reasons, allowed me later on, even at the time of my greater—my second—love for Albertine, a sort of intermittent and all too brief liberty to abstain from loving her? From having strayed among all her friends before it finally concentrated on her, my love kept for some time between itself and the image of Albertine a certain “play” which enabled it, like ill-adjusted stage lighting, to flit over others before returning to focus upon her; the connexion between the pain which I felt in my heart and the memory of Albertine did not seem to me a necessary one; I might perhaps have been able to co-ordinate it with the image of another person. And this enabled me, in a momentary flash, to banish the reality altogether, not only the external reality, as in my love for Gilberte (which I had recognised to be an inner state wherein I drew from myself alone the particular quality, the special character of the person 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 other of them comes by here, and looks in for a minute or two,” Elstir told me, plunging me into despair at the 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 have made Albertine’s acquaintance long since.

She had continued on her way; from the studio she was no longer in sight. I supposed that she had gone to join her friends on the front. If I could have been there with Elstir, I should have got to know them. I thought up endless pretexts to induce him to take a stroll with me on the beach. I no longer had the same feeling of serenity as before the apparition of the girl in the frame of the little window, so charming until then in its fringe of honey-suckle and now so drearily empty. Elstir caused me a joy that was mixed with torture when he agreed to walk a few steps with me but said that he must first finish the piece of work on which he was engaged. It was a study of some flowers, but not those of which I would rather have commissioned a portrait from him than one 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 prestige which, only a few moments ago, his talent had still given him in my eyes was now worthless except in so far as it might confer a little on me also in the eyes of the little band to whom I should be introduced 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, quantities of which were stacked against the walls. It was thus that 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 delightfully 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 that charm were something that the painter had merely to discover and observe, realised already in a material form by nature, and to reproduce. The fact 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 aesthetic theory. It was—this water-colour—the portrait of a young woman, by no means beautiful but of a curious type, in a close-fitting hat not unlike a bowler, trimmed with a ribbon of cerise silk; in one of her mittened hands was a lighted cigarette, while the other held at knee-level a sort of broadbrimmed garden hat, no more than a 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, so that it is not immediately clear to us whether, for instance, the strange attire of a female model is her costume for a fancy-dress ball, or whether, conversely, the scarlet cloak which an elderly man looks as though he had put on in response to some whim of the painter’s is his professor’s or alderman’s gown or his cardinal’s cape. The ambiguous character of the person whose portrait now confronted me arose, without my understanding it, from the fact that it was a young actress of an earlier generation half dressed up as a man. But the bowler beneath which the hair was fluffy but short, the velvet jacket, without lapels, opening 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 exactly what I had before my eyes, except that it was a most luminous piece of painting. And the pleasure which it afforded me was troubled only by the fear that Elstir, by delaying further, would make me miss the girls, for the declining sun now hung low in the little window. Nothing in this water-colour was merely set down there as a fact and painted because of its practical relevance to the scene, 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 clothes enveloped her in a material that had an independent, fraternal charm, and, if the products of industry 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, as fine as soft hail, with its gay pleats gathered into little bells like lilies of the valley, was spangled with bright gleams of light from the room, themselves sharply etched and subtly shaded as if they were flowers stitched into the linen. And the velvet of the jacket, with its brilliant sheen, had something rough, frayed and shaggy about it here and there that recalled the crumpled brightness of the carnations in the vase. But above all one felt that Elstir, heedless of any impression of immorality that might be given by this transvestite costume worn by a young actress for whom the talent she would bring to the role was doubtless of less importance than the titillation she would offer to the jaded or depraved senses of some of her audience, had on the contrary fastened upon this equivocal aspect 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 reappeared further on with a suggestion rather of an effeminate, vicious and pensive youth, then fled once more and remained elusive. The dreamy sadness in the expression of the eyes, by its very contrast with the accessories belonging to the world of debauchery and the stage, 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 intriguing 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 said, “I hear Madame Elstir coming, and though, I assure you, the young person in the bowler hat never played any part in my life, still there’s no point in my wife’s coming in and finding the picture staring her in the face. I’ve 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 a 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, and consequently it mattered now not at all how quickly Mme Elstir left us. In fact she did not stay very long. I found her most tedious; she might have been beautiful 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 a majestic pose 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 exclaim, whenever he opened his mouth, and with a respectful gentleness, as if merely uttering the words moved him to tenderness and veneration: “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 he had dedicated all his time, all the mental effort of which he was capable, in a word his whole life, 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; it was the most intimate part of himself; and so he had never been able to look at it with detachment, to extract emotion from it, until the day on which he encountered it, realised outside himself, in the body of a woman, the body of the woman who had in due course become Mme Elstir and in whom he had been able (as is possible only with something that is not oneself) to find it meritorious, moving, divine. How restful, moreover, to be able to place his lips upon that ideal Beauty which hitherto he had been obliged so laboriously to extract from within himself, and which now, mysteriously incarnate, offered itself to him in a series of communions, filled with saving grace. Elstir at this period was no longer at that youthful age in which we look only to the power of the mind for the realisation of our ideal. He was nearing the age at which we count on bodily satisfactions to stimulate the force of the brain, at which mental fatigue, by inclining us towards materialism, and the diminution of our energy, towards the possibility of influences passively received, begin to make us admit that there may indeed be certain bodies, certain callings, certain rhythms that are specially privileged, realising so naturally our ideal that even without genius, merely by copying the movement of a shoulder, the tension of a neck, 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 beautiful 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 at Mme Elstir without a feeling of pleasure, 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 doubtless for him too. The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare 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 that rising tide of genius which sweeps over and submerges an artist’s life, when the brain begins to tire, gradually the balance is disturbed and, like a river that resumes its course after the counterflow of a spring tide, it is life that once more takes the upper hand. But, while the first period lasted, the artist has gradually evolved the law, the formula of his unconscious gift. He knows what situations, if he is a novelist, what scenes, if he is a painter, provide him with the material, unimportant in itself but essential to his researches, as a laboratory might be or a workshop. He knows that he has created his masterpieces out of effects of attenuated light, out of 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 erosion of his brain, he will no longer have the strength, faced with those materials which his genius was wont to use, to make the intellectual effort which alone can produce his work, and yet will continue to seek them out, happy to be near them because of the spiritual pleasure, the allurement to work, that they arouse in him; and, surrounding them besides with an aura of superstition as if they were superior to all things else, as if there dwelt in them already 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 and regeneration once formed the subject of his novels; he will buy a house in a countryside where mists attenuate the light, he will spend long hours looking at women bathing; he will collect sumptuous stuffs. And thus the beauty of life, an expression somehow devoid of meaning, a stage this side of art at which I had seen Swann come to rest, was that also which, by a slackening of creative ardour, idolatry of the forms which had inspired it, a tendency to take the line of least resistance, must gradually undermine an Elstir’s progress.