In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (72 page)

Albertine’s admiration, with a change, it is true, of object, but with no loss—an increase, rather—of intensity, combined with the closest attention to what was being said, continued to make her eyes “start from her head” all the time that Andrée (consulted as being the biggest and cleverest) first of all spoke of Gisèle’s essay with a certain irony, then, with a levity of tone which failed to conceal her underlying seriousness, proceeded to reconstruct the letter in her own way.

“It’s not bad,” she said to Albertine, “but if I were you and had the the same subject set me, which is quite likely, as they set it very often, I shouldn’t do it in that way. This is how I would tackle it. In the first place, if I had been Gisèle, I shouldn’t have got carried away and I’d have begun by making a rough sketch of what I was going to write on a separate piece of paper. First and foremost, the formulation of the question and the exposition of the subject; then the general ideas to be worked into the development; finally, appreciation, style, conclusion. In that way, with a summary to refer to, you know where you are. But at the very start, with the exposition of the subject, or, if you like, Titine, since it’s a letter, with the preamble, Gisèle has made a bloomer. Writing to a person of the seventeenth century, Sophocles ought never to have said ‘My dear friend.’ ”

“Why, of course, she ought to have said ‘My dear Racine,’ ” came impetuously from Albertine. “That would have been much better.”

“No,” replied Andrée, with a trace of mockery in her tone, “She ought to have put ‘Sir.’ In the same way, to end up, she ought to have thought of something like, ‘Allow me, Sir,’ (at the very most, ‘Dear Sir’) ‘to inform you of the high esteem with which I have the honour to be your servant.’ Then again, Gisèle says that the chorus in
Athalie
is a novelty. She is forgetting
Esther
, and two tragedies that are not much read now but happen to have been analysed this year by the teacher himself, so that you need only mention them, since they’re his hobby-horse, and you’re bound to pass. I mean
Les Juives
by Robert Garnier, and Montchrestien’s
Aman
.”

Andrée quoted these titles without managing quite to conceal a secret sense of benevolent superiority, which found expression in a rather charming smile. Albertine could contain herself no longer.

“Andrée, you really are staggering,” she cried. “You must write down those names for me. Just fancy, what luck it would be if I got on to that, even in the oral, I should quote them at once and make a colossal impression.”

But in the days that followed, every time that Albertine asked Andrée to tell her again the names of those two plays so that she might write them down, her erudite friend seemed to have forgotten them, and never recalled them for her.

“And another thing,” Andrée went on with the faintest note of scorn for companions more childish than herself, though relishing their admiration and attaching to the manner in which she herself would have composed the essay a greater importance than she wished to reveal, “Sophocles in the Shades must be well-informed about all that goes on. He must therefore know that it was not before the general public but before the Sun King and a few privileged courtiers that
Athalie
was first played. What Gisèle says in this connexion of the esteem of the connoisseurs is not at all bad, but she might have gone a little further. Sophocles, now that he is mortal, may quite well have the gift of prophecy and announce that, according to Voltaire,
Athalie
will be the supreme achievement not only of Racine but of the human mind.”

Albertine was drinking in every word. Her eyes blazed. And it was with the utmost indignation that she rejected Rosemonde’s suggestion that they should have a game.

“Finally,” Andrée concluded in the same detached, airy tone, a trifle mocking and at the same time fairly warmly convinced, “if Gisèle had first calmly noted down the general ideas that she was going to develop, it might perhaps have occurred to her to do what I myself should have done, point out what a difference there is between the religious inspiration of Racine’s choruses and those of Sophocles. I should have made Sophocles remark that if Racine’s choruses are impregnated with religious feeling like those of the Greek tragedians, the gods are not the same. The god of Joad has nothing in common with the god of Sophocles. And that brings us quite naturally, when we have finished developing the subject, to our conclusion: What does it matter if beliefs are different? Sophocles would hesitate to insist upon this point. He would be afraid of wounding Racine’s convictions, and so, slipping in a few appropriate words on his masters at Port-Royal, he prefers to congratulate his disciple on the loftiness of his poetic genius.”

Admiration and attention had made Albertine so hot that she was sweating profusely. Andrée preserved the unruffled calm of a female dandy. “It would not be a bad thing, either, to quote some of the opinions of famous critics,” she added, before they began their game.

“Yes,” put in Albertine, “so I’ve been told. The best ones to quote, on the whole, are Sainte-Beuve and Merlet, aren’t they?”

“Well, you’re not absolutely wrong,” Andrée told her. “Merlet and Sainte-Beuve would do no harm. But above all you ought to mention Deltour and Gasq-Des-fossés.”

Meanwhile I had been thinking of the little page torn from a scribbling block which Albertine had handed me. “I like you,” she had written. And an hour later, as I scrambled down the paths which led back, a little too vertically for my liking, to Balbec, I said to myself that it was with her that I would have my romance.

The state of being characterised by the presence of all the signs by which we are accustomed to recognise that we are in love, such as the orders which I left in the hotel not to wake me whoever might ask to see me, unless it were one or other of the girls, the throbbing of my heart while I waited for them (whichever of them it might be that I was expecting), and, on those mornings, my fury if I had not succeeded in finding a barber to shave me, and would make an unsightly appearance before Albertine, Rosemonde or Andrée, no doubt this state, recurring for each of them in turn, was as different from what we call love as is from human life the life of the zoophytes, in which existence, individuality if we may so term it, is divided up among several organisms. But natural history teaches us that such an organisation of animal life is indeed to be observed, and that our own life, provided we have outgrown the first phase, is no less positive as to the reality of states hitherto unsuspected by us through which we have to pass, even though we abandon them later. Such was for me this state of love divided among several girls at once. Divided, or rather undivided, for more often than not what was so delicious to me, different from the rest of the world, what was beginning to become so precious to me that the hope of encountering it again the next day was the greatest joy of my life, was rather the whole of the group of girls, taken as they were all together on those afternoons on the cliffs, during those wind-swept hours, upon the strip of grass on which were laid those forms, so exciting to my imagination, of Albertine, of Rosemonde, of Andrée; and that without my being able to say which of them it was that made those scenes so precious to me, which of them I most wanted to love. At the start of a new love as at its ending, we are not exclusively attached to the object of that love, but rather the desire to love from which it will presently arise (and, later on, the memory it leaves behind) wanders voluptuously through a zone of interchangeable charms—simply natural charms, it may be, gratification of appetite, enjoyment of one’s surroundings—which are harmonious enough for it not to feel at a loss in the presence
of any one of them. Besides, as my perception of them was not yet dulled by familiarity, I still had the faculty of seeing them, that is to say of feeling a profound astonishment every time that I found myself in their presence.

No doubt this astonishment is to some extent due to the fact that the other person on such occasions presents some new facet; but so great is the multiformity of each individual, so abundant the wealth of lines of face and body, so few of which leave any trace, once we are no longer in the presence of the other person, on the arbitrary simplicity of our recollection, since the memory has selected some distinctive feature that had struck us, has isolated it, exaggerated it, making of a woman who has appeared to us tall a sketch in which her figure is elongated out of all proportion, or of a woman who has seemed to be pink-checked and golden-haired a pure “Harmony in pink and gold,” that the moment this woman is once again standing before us, all the other forgotten qualities which balance that one remembered feature at once assail us, in their confused complexity, diminishing her height, paling her cheeks, and substituting for what we came exclusively to seek other features which we remember having noticed the first time and fail to understand why we so little expected to find them again. We remembered, we anticipated a peacock, and we find a peony. And this inevitable astonishment is not the only one; for side by side with it comes another, born of the difference, not now between the stylisations of memory and the reality, but between the person whom we saw last time and the one who appears to us today from another angle and shows us a new aspect. The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once.

But to a great extent our astonishment springs from the fact that the person presents to us also a face that is the same as before. It would require so immense an effort to reconstruct everything that has been imparted to us by things other than ourselves—were it only the taste of a fruit—that no sooner is the impression received than we begin imperceptibly to descend the slope of memory and, without realising it, in a very short time we have come a long way from what we actually felt. So that every fresh glimpse is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we in fact saw. Already we no longer had any recollection of it, to such an extent does what we call remembering a person consist really in forgetting him. But as long as we can still see, as soon as the forgotten feature appears we recognise it, we are obliged to correct the straying line, and thus the perpetual and fruitful surprise which made so salutary and invigorating for me these daily outings with the charming damsels of the sea shore consisted fully as much in recollection as in discovery. When there is added to this the agitation aroused by what these girls were to me, which was never quite what I had supposed, and meant that my expectancy of our next meeting resembled not so much my expectancy the time before as the still vibrant memory of our last encounter, it will be realised that each of our excursions brought about a violent change in the course of my thoughts and not at all in the direction which, in the solitude of my own room, I had traced for them at my leisure. That plotted course was forgotten, had ceased to exist, when I returned home buzzing like a bee-hive with remarks which had disturbed me and were still echoing in my brain. Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all. For the minimum variation that is to be found in these creations is twofold. Remembering a strong and searching glance, a bold manner, it is inevitably, next time, by an almost languid profile, a sort of dreamy gentleness, overlooked by us in our previous impression, that at the next encounter we shall be astonished, that is to say almost uniquely struck. In confronting our memory with the new reality it is this that will mark the extent of our disappointment or surprise, will appear to us like a revised version of the reality by notifying us that we had not remembered correctly. In its turn, the facial aspect neglected the time before, and for that very reason the most striking this time, the most real, the most corrective, will become a matter for day-dreams and memories. It is a languorous and rounded profile, a gentle, dreamy expression which we shall now desire to see again. And then once more, next time, such resolution, such strength of character as there may be in the piercing eyes, the pointed nose, the tight lips, will come to correct the discrepancy between our desire and the object to which it has supposed itself to correspond. Of course, this fidelity to the first and purely physical impressions experienced anew at each encounter with my young friends did not only concern their facial appearance, since the reader has seen that I was sensitive also to their voices, more disturbing still, perhaps (for not only does a voice offer the same strange and sensuous surfaces as a face, it issues from that unknown, inaccessible region the mere thought of which sets the mind swimming with unattainable kisses), those voices, like the unique sound of a little instrument into which each of them put all of herself and which belonged to her alone. Traced by a casual inflexion, a sudden deep chord in one of these voices would surprise me when I recognised it after having forgotten it. So much so that the corrections which after every fresh meeting I was obliged to make so as to ensure absolute accuracy were as much those of a tuner or singing-master as of a draughtsman.

As for the harmonious cohesion into which, by the resistance that each brought to bear against the expansion of the others, the several waves of feeling induced in me by these girls had become neutralised, it was broken in Albertine’s favour one afternoon when we were playing the game of “ferret.”
¹⁴
It was in a little wood on the cliff. Stationed between two girls, strangers to the little band, whom the band had brought in its train because we wanted that day to have a bigger party than usual, I gazed enviously at Albertine’s neighbour, a young man, saying to myself that if I had been in his place I could have been touching my beloved’s hands during those unhoped-for moments which perhaps would never recur and which might have taken me a long way. Already, in itself, and even without the consequences which it would probably have involved, the contact of Albertine’s hands would have been delicious to me. Not that I had never seen prettier hands than hers. Even in the group of her friends, those of Andrée, slender and far more delicate, had as it were a private life of their own, obedient to the commands of their mistress, but independent, and would often stretch out before her like thoroughbred greyhounds, with lazy pauses, languid reveries, sudden flexings of a finger-joint, seeing which Elstir had made a number of studies of these hands; and in one of them, in which Andrée was to be seen warming them at the fire, they had, with the light behind them, the golden diaphanousness of two autumn leaves. But, plumper than these, Albertine’s hands would yield for a moment, then resist the pressure of the hand that clasped them, giving a sensation that was quite peculiar to themselves. The act of pressing Albertine’s hand had a sensual sweetness which was in keeping somehow with the pink, almost mauve colouring of her skin. This pressure seemed to allow you to penetrate into the girl’s being, to plumb the depths of her senses, like the ringing sound of her laughter, indecent in the way that the cooing of doves or certain animal cries can be. She was one of those women with whom shaking hands affords so much pleasure that one feels grateful to civilisation for having made of the handclasp a lawful act between boys and girls when they meet. If the arbitrary code of good manners had replaced the hand-shake by some other gesture, I should have gazed, day after day, at the untouchable hands of Albertine with a curiosity to know the feel of them as ardent as was my curiosity to learn the savour of her cheeks. But in the pleasure of holding her hand unrestrictedly in mine, had I been next to her at “ferret,” I did not envisage that pleasure alone; what avowals, what declarations silenced hitherto by my bashfulness, I could have conveyed by certain pressures of hand on hand; for her part, how easy it would have been, in responding by other pressures, to show me that she accepted; what complicity, what a vista of sensual delight stood open! My love would be able to make more progress in a few minutes spent thus by her side than it had yet made in all the time that I had known her. Feeling that they would last but a short time, were rapidly nearing their end, since presumably we were not going on much longer with this game, and that once it was over it would be too late, I could not stay in my place for another moment. I let myself deliberately be caught with the ring, and, once in the middle, when the ring passed I pretended not to see it but followed its course with my eyes, waiting for the moment when it should come into the hands of the young man next to Albertine, who herself, convulsed with laughter, and in the excitement and pleasure of the game, was flushed pink. “Why, we really are in the Fairy Wood,” said Andrée to me, pointing to the trees all round us, with a smile in her eyes which was meant only for me and seemed to pass over the heads of the other players, as though we two alone were intelligent and detached enough to make, in connexion with the game we were playing, a remark of a poetic nature. She even carried the delicacy of her fancy so far as to sing half-unconsciously: “The ferret of the Wood has passed this way, sweet ladies; he has passed by this way, the ferret of Fairy Wood!” like those people who cannot visit Trianon without getting up a party in Louis XVI costume, or think it amusing to have a song sung to its original setting. I should no doubt have been saddened not to see any charm in this realisation, had I had time to think about it. But my thoughts were all elsewhere. The players began to show surprise at my stupidity in never getting the ring. I was looking at Albertine, so pretty, so indifferent, so gay, who, though she little knew it, would be my neighbour when at last I should catch the ring in the right hands, thanks to a stratagem which she did not suspect, and would certainly have resented if she had. In the heat of the game her long hair had become loosened, and fell in curling locks over her cheeks on which it served to intensify, by its dry brownness, the carnation pink. “You have the tresses of Laura Dianti, of Eleanor of Guyenne, and of her descendant so beloved of Chateaubriand. You ought always to wear your hair half down like that,” I murmured in her ear as an excuse for drawing close to her. Suddenly the ring passed to her neighbour. I sprang upon him at once, forced open his hands and seized it; he was obliged now to take my place inside the circle, while I took his beside Albertine. A few minutes earlier I had been envying this young man, when I saw that his hands as they slipped over the string were constantly brushing against hers. Now that my turn had come, too shy to seek, too agitated to savour this contact, I no longer felt anything but the rapid and painful beating of my heart. At one moment Albertine leaned her round pink face towards me with an air of complicity, pretending thus to have the ring in order to deceive the ferret and prevent him from looking in the direction in which it was being passed. I realised at once that it was to this ruse that the insinuations of Albertine’s look applied, but I was excited to see thus kindle in her eyes the image—simulated purely for the purposes of the game—of a secret understanding between her and myself which did not exist but which from that moment seemed to me to be possible and would have been divinely sweet. While I was still enraptured by this thought, I felt a slight pressure of Albertine’s hand against mine, and her caressing finger slip under my finger along the cord, and I saw her, at the same moment, give me a wink which she tried to make imperceptible to the others. At once, a multitude of hopes, invisible hitherto, crystallised within me. “She’s taking advantage of the game to make it clear to me that she likes me,” I thought to myself in a paroxysm of joy from which I instantly relapsed on hearing Albertine mutter furiously: “Why can’t you take it? I’ve been shoving it at you for the last hour.” Stunned with grief, I let go the cord, the ferret saw the ring and swooped down on it, and I had to go back into the middle, where I stood helpless, in despair, looking at the unbridled rout which continued to circle round me, stung by the jeers of all the players, obliged, in reply, to laugh when I had so little mind for laughter, while Albertine kept on repeating: “People shouldn’t play if they won’t pay attention and spoil the game for the others. We shan’t ask him again when we’re going to play, Andrée, or else I shan’t come.” Andrée, with a mind above the game, still chanting her “Fairy Wood” which, in a spirit of imitation, Rosemonde had taken up too, without conviction, sought to take my mind off Albertine’s reproaches by saying to me: “We’re quite close to those old Creuniers you wanted so much to see. Look, I’ll take you there by a pretty little path, while these idiots play at eight-year-olds.” Since Andrée was extremely nice to me, as we went along I said to her everything about Albertine that seemed calculated to endear me to the latter. Andrée replied that she too was very fond of Albertine, and thought her charming; nevertheless my compliments about her friend did not seem altogether to please her. Suddenly, in the little sunken path, I stopped short, touched to the heart by an exquisite memory of my childhood. I had just recognised, from the fretted and glossy leaves which it thrust out towards me, a hawthorn-bush, flowerless, alas, now that spring was over. Around me floated an atmosphere of far-off Months of Mary, of Sunday afternoons, of beliefs, of errors long since forgotten. I wanted to seize hold of it. I stood still for a moment, and Andrée, with a charming divination of what was in my mind, left me to converse with the leaves of the bush. I asked them for news of the flowers, those hawthorn flowers that were like merry little girls, headstrong, provocative, pious. “The young ladies have been gone from here for a long time now,” the leaves told me. And perhaps they thought that, for the great friend of those young ladies that I pretended to be, I seemed to have singularly little knowledge of their habits. A great friend, but one who had never been to see them again for all these years, despite his promises. And yet, as Gilberte had been my first love among girls, so these had been my first love among flowers. “Yes, I know, they leave about the middle of June,” I answered, “but I’m delighted to see the place where they lived when they were here. They came to see me at Combray, in my room; my mother brought them when I was ill in bed. And we used to meet again on Saturday evenings, at the Month of Mary devotions. Can they go to them here?” “Oh, of course! Why, they make a special point of having our young ladies at Saint-Denis du Désert, the church near here.” “So if I want to see them now?” “Oh, not before May next year.” “But can I be sure that they will be here?” “They come regularly every year.” “Only I don’t know whether I’ll be able to find the place.” “Oh, dear, yes! They are so gay, the young ladies, they stop laughing only to sing hymns together, so that you can’t possibly miss them, you can recognise their scent from the other end of the path.”