In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (10 page)

When New Year's Day came, I first of all paid a round of family visits
with Mamma who, so as not to tire me, had planned them beforehand
(with the aid of an itinerary drawn up by my father) according to
districts rather than to degrees of kinship. But no sooner had we
entered the drawing–room of the distant cousin whose claim to being
visited first was that her house was at no distance from ours, than my
mother was horrified to see standing there, his present of
marrons
glacés
or
déguisés
in his hand, the bosom friend of the most
sensitive of all my uncles, to whom he would at once go and report
that we had not begun our round with him. And this uncle would
certainly be hurt; he would have thought it quite natural that we
should go from the Madeleine to the Jardin des Plantes, where he
lived, before stopping at Saint–Augustin, on our way to the Rue de
l'Ecole de Médecine.

Our visits ended (my grandmother had dispensed us from the duty of
calling on her, since we were to dine there that evening), I ran all
the way to the Champs–Elysées to give to our own special stall–keeper,
with instructions to hand it over to the person who came to her
several times a week from the Swanns to buy gingerbread, the letter
which, on the day when my friend had caused me so much anxiety, I had
decided to send her at the New Year, and in which I told her that our
old friendship was vanishing with the old year, that I would forget,
now, my old sorrows and disappointments, and that, from this first day
of January, it was a new friendship that we were going to cement, one
so solid that nothing could destroy it, so wonderful that I hoped that
Gilberte would go out of her way to preserve it in all its beauty, and
to warn me in time, as I promised to warn her, should either of us
detect the least sign of a peril that might endanger it. On our way
home Françoise made me stop at the corner of the Rue Royale, before an
open–air stall from which she selected for her own stock of presents
photographs of Pius IX and Raspail, while for myself I purchased one
of Berma. The innumerable admiration which that artist excited gave an
air almost of poverty to this one face that she had to respond with,
unalterable and precarious as are the garments of people who have not
a 'change,' this face on which she must continually expose to view
only the tiny dimple upon her upper lip, the arch of her eyebrows, a
few other physical peculiarities always the same, which, when it came
to that, were at the mercy of a burn or a blow. This face, moreover,
could not in itself have seemed to me beautiful, but it gave me the
idea, and consequently the desire to kiss it by reason of all the
kisses that it must have received, for which, from its page in the
album, it seemed still to be appealing with that coquettishly tender
gaze, that artificially ingenuous smile. For our Berma must indeed
have felt for many young men those longings which she confessed under
cover of the personality of Phaedra, longings of which everything,
even the glamour of her name which enhanced her beauty and prolonged
her youth, must render the gratification so easy to her. Night was
falling; I stopped before a column of playbills, on which was posted
that of the piece in which she was to appear on January 1. A moist
and gentle breeze was blowing. It was a time of day and year that I
knew; I suddenly felt a presentiment that New Year's Day was not a day
different from, the rest, that it was not the first day of a new
world, in which, I might, by a chance that had never yet occurred,
that was still intact, make Gilberte's acquaintance afresh, as at the
Creation of the World, as though the past had no longer any existence,
as though there had been obliterated, with the indications which I
might have preserved for my future guidance, the disappointments which
she had sometimes brought me; a new world in which nothing should
subsist from the old—save one thing, my desire that Gilberte should
love me. I realised that if my heart hoped for such a reconstruction,
round about it, of a universe that had not satisfied it before, it was
because my heart had not altered, and I told myself that there was no
reason why Gilberte's should have altered either; I felt that this new
friendship was the same, just as there is no boundary ditch between
their forerunners and those new years which our desire for them,
without being able to reach and so to modify them, invests, unknown to
themselves, with distinctive names. I might dedicate this new year, if
I chose, to Gilberte, and as one bases a religious system upon the
blind laws of nature, endeavour to stamp New Year's Day with the
particular image that I had formed of it; but in vain, I felt that it
was not aware that people called it New Year's Day, that it was
passing in a wintry dusk in a manner that was not novel to me; in the
gentle breeze that floated about the column of playbills I had
recognised, I had felt reappear the eternal, the universal substance,
the familiar moisture, the unheeding fluidity of the old days and
years.

I returned to the house. I had spent the New Year's Day of old men,
who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have
ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased
to believe in the New Year. Presents I had indeed received, but not
that present which alone could bring me pleasure, namely a line from
Gilberte. I was young still, none the less, since I had been able to
write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my
solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her.
The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even
thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their
experience has shewn.

After I was in bed, the noises of the street, unduly prolonged upon
this festive evening, kept me awake. I thought of all the people who
were ending the night in pleasure, of the lover, the troop, it might
be, of debauchees who would be going to meet Berma at the stage–door
after the play that I had seen announced for this evening. I was not
even able, so as to calm the agitation which that idea engendered in
me during my sleepless night, to assure myself that Berma was not,
perhaps, thinking about love, since the lines that she was reciting,
which she had long and carefully rehearsed, reminded her at every
moment that love is an exquisite thing, as of course she already knew,
and knew so well that she displayed its familiar pangs—only enriched
with a new violence and an unsuspected sweetness—to her astonished
audience; and yet each of them had felt those pangs himself. I lighted
my candle again, to look once more upon her face. At the thought that
it was, no doubt, at that very moment being caressed by those men whom
I could not prevent from giving to Berma and receiving from her joys
superhuman but vague, I felt an emotion more cruel than voluptuous, a
longing that was aggravated presently by the sound of a horn, as one
hears it on the nights of the Lenten carnival and often of other
public holidays, which, because it then lacks all poetry, is more
saddening, coming from a toy squeaker, than "at evening, in the depth
of the woods." At that moment, a message from Gilberte would perhaps
not have been what I wanted. Our desires cut across one another's
paths, and in this confused existence it is but rarely that a piece of
good fortune coincides with the desire that clamoured for it.

I continued to go to the Champs–Elysées on fine days, along streets
whose stylish pink houses seemed to be washed (because exhibitions of
water–colours were then at the height of fashion) in a lightly
floating atmosphere. It would be untrue to say that in those days
the palaces of Gabriel struck me as being of greater beauty, or even
of another epoch than the adjoining houses. I found more style, and
should have supposed more antiquity if not in the Palais de
l'Industrie at any rate in the Trocadéro. Plunged in a restless
sleep, my adolescence embodied in one uniform vision the whole of the
quarter through which it might be strolling, and I had never dreamed
that there could be an eighteenth century building in the Rue Royale,
just as I should have been astonished to learn that the
Porte–Saint–Martin and the Porte–Saint–Denis, those glories of the age
of Louis XIV, were not contemporary with the most recently built
tenements in the sordid regions that bore their names. Once only one
of Gabriel's palaces made me stop for more than a moment; that was
because, night having fallen, its columns, dematerialised by the
moonlight, had the appearance of having been cut out in pasteboard,
and by recalling to me a scene in the operetta
Orphée aux Enfers
gave me for the first time an impression of beauty.

Meanwhile Gilberte never came to the Champs–Elysées. And yet it was
imperative that I should see her, for I could not so much as remember
what she was like. The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of
looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which shall
give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow,
and, until that word is uttered, our alternative if not simultaneous
imaginings of joy and of despair, all these make our observation, in
the beloved object's presence, too tremulous to be able to carry away
a clear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the
senses at once which endeavours to learn from the visible aspect alone
what lies behind it is over–indulgent to the thousand forms, to the
changing fragrance, to the movements of the living person whom as a
rule, when we are not in love, we regard as fixed in one permanent
position. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our
mental photographs of her are always blurred. I did not rightly know
how Gilberte's features were composed, save in the heavenly moments
when she disclosed them to me; I could remember nothing but her smile.
And not being able to see again that beloved face, despite every
effort that I might make to recapture it, I would be disgusted to
find, outlined in my memory with a maddening precision of detail, the
meaningless, emphatic faces of the man with the wooden horses and of
the barley–sugar woman; just as those who have lost a dear friend whom
they never see even while they are asleep, are exasperated at meeting
incessantly in their dreams any number of insupportable creatures whom
it is quite enough to have known in the waking world. In their
inability to form any image of the object of their grief they are
almost led to assert that they feel no grief. And I was not far from
believing that, since I could not recall the features of Gilberte, I
had forgotten Gilberte herself, and no longer loved her. At length she
returned to play there almost every day, setting before me fresh
pleasures to desire, to demand of her for the morrow, indeed making my
love for her every day, in this sense, a new love. But an incident was
to change once again, and abruptly, the manner in which, at about two
o'clock every afternoon, the problem of my love confronted me. Had M.
Swann intercepted the letter that I had written to his daughter, or
was Gilberte merely confessing to me long after the event, and so that
I should be more prudent in future, a state of things already long
established? As I was telling her how greatly I admired her father
and mother, she assumed that vague air, full of reticence and kept
secrets, which she invariably wore when anyone spoke to her of what
she was going to do, her walks, drives, visits—then suddenly
expressed it with: "You know, they can't abide you!" and, slipping
from me like the Undine that she was, burst out laughing. Often her
laughter, out of harmony with her words, seemed, as music seems, to be
tracing an invisible surface on another plane. M. and Mme. Swann did
not require Gilberte to give up playing with me, but they would have
been just as well pleased, she thought, if we had never begun. They
did not look upon our relations with a kindly eye; they believed me to
be a young person of low moral standard and imagined that my influence
over their daughter must be evil. This type of unscrupulous young man
whom the Swanns thought that I resembled, I pictured him to myself as
detesting the parents of the girl he loved, flattering them to their
faces but, when he was alone with her, making fun of them, urging her
on to disobey them and, when once he had completed his conquest, not
allowing them even to set eyes on her again. With these
characteristics (though they are never those under which the basest of
scoundrels recognises himself) how vehemently did my heart contrast
the sentiments that did indeed animate it with regard to Swann, so
passionate, on the contrary, that I never doubted that, were he to
have the least suspicion of them, he must repent of his condemnation
of me as of a judicial error. All that I felt about him I made bold to
express to him in a long letter which I entrusted to Gilberte, with
the request that she would deliver it. She consented. Alas! so he saw
in me an even greater impostor than I had feared; those sentiments
which I had supposed myself to be portraying, in sixteen pages, with
such amplitude of truth, so he had suspected them; in short, the
letter that I had written him, as ardent and as sincere as the words
that I had uttered to M. de Norpois, met with no more success.
Gilberte told me next day, after taking me aside behind a clump of
laurels, along a little path by which we sat down on a couple of
chairs, that as he read my letter, which she had now brought back to
me, her father had shrugged his shoulders, with: "All this means
nothing; it only goes to prove how right I was." I, who knew the
purity of my intentions, the goodness of my soul, was furious that my
words should not even have impinged upon the surface of Swann's
ridiculous error. For it was an error; of that I had then no doubt. I
felt that I had described with such accuracy certain irrefutable
characteristics of my generous sentiments that, if Swann had not at
once reconstructed these from my indications, had not come to ask my
forgiveness and to admit that he had been mistaken, it must be because
these noble sentiments he had never himself experienced, which would
make him incapable of understanding the existence of them in other
people.