In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (72 page)

Within the next few days, in spite of the reluctance that Albertine
had shewn from introducing me to them, I knew all the little band of
that first afternoon (except Gisèle, whom, owing to a prolonged delay
at the level crossing by the station and a change in the time–table, I
had not succeeded in meeting on the train, which had been gone some
minutes before I arrived, and to whom as it happened I never gave
another thought), and two or three other girls as well to whom at my
request they introduced me. And thus, my expectation of the pleasure
which I should find in a new girl springing from another girl through
whom I had come to know her, the latest was like one of those new
varieties of rose which gardeners get by using first a rose of another
kind. And as I passed from blossom to blossom along this flowery
chain, the pleasure of knowing one that was different would send me
back to her to whom I was indebted for it, with a gratitude in which
desire was mingled fully as much as in my new expectation. Presently I
was spending all my time among these girls.

Alas! in the freshest flower it is possible to discern those just
perceptible signs which to the instructed mind indicate already what
will be, by the desiccation or fructification of the flesh that is
to–day in bloom, the ultimate form, immutable and already
predestinate, of the autumnal seed. The eye rapturously follows a nose
like a wavelet that deliriously curls the water's face at daybreak and
seems not to move, to be capturable by the pencil, because the sea is
so calm then that one does not notice its tidal flow. Human faces
seem not to change while we are looking at them, because the
revolution which they perform is too slow for us to perceive it. But
we have only to see, by the side of any of those girls, her mother or
her aunt, to realise the distance over which, obeying the gravitation
of a type that is, generally speaking, deplorable, her features will
have travelled in less than thirty years, and must continue to travel
until the sunset hour, until her face, having vanished altogether
below the horizon, catches the light no more. I knew that, as deep, as
ineluctable as is their Jewish patriotism or Christian atavism in
those who imagine themselves to be the most emancipated of their race,
there dwelt beneath the rosy inflorescence of Albertine, Rosemonde,
Andrée, unknown to themselves, held in reserve until the circumstances
should arise, a coarse nose, a protruding jaw, a bust that would
create a sensation when it appeared, but was actually in the wings,
ready to "come on," just as it might be a burst of Dreyfusism, or
clericalism, sudden, unforeseen, fatal, some patriotic, some feudal
form of heroism emerging suddenly when the circumstances demand it
from a nature anterior to that of the man himself, by means of which
he thinks, lives, evolves, gains strength himself or dies, without
ever being able to distinguish that nature from the successive phases
which in turn he takes for it. Even mentally, we depend a great deal
more than we think upon natural laws, and our mind possesses already,
like some cryptogamous plant, every little peculiarity that we imagine
ourselves to be selecting. For we can see only the derived ideas,
without detecting the primary cause (Jewish blood, French birth or
whatever it may be) that inevitably produced them, and which at a
given moment we expose. And perhaps, while the former appear to us to
be the result of deliberate thought, the latter that of an imprudent
disregard for our own health, we take from our family, as the
papilionaceae take the form of their seed, as well the ideas by which
we live as the malady from which we shall die.

As on a plant whose flowers open at different seasons, I had seen,
expressed in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those
shrivelled seed–pods, those flabby tubers which my friends would one
day be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering–time.
And so when Mme. de Villeparisis asked me to drive with her I sought
an excuse to be prevented. I never went to see Elstir unless
accompanied by my new friends. I could not even spare an afternoon to
go to Doncières, to pay the visit I had promised Saint–Loup. Social
engagements, serious discussions, even a friendly conversation, had
they usurped the place allotted to my walks with these girls, would
have had the same effect on me as if, when the luncheon bell rang, I
had been taken not to a table spread with food but to turn the pages
of an album. The men, the youths, the women, old or mature, whose
society we suppose that we shall enjoy, are borne by us only on an
unsubstantial plane surface, because we are conscious of them only by
visual perception restricted to its own limits; whereas it is as
delegates from our other senses that our eyes dart towards young
girls; the senses follow, one after another, in search of the various
charms, fragrant, tactile, savoury, which they thus enjoy even without
the aid of fingers and lips; and able, thanks to the art of
transposition, the genius for synthesis in which desire excels, to
reconstruct beneath the hue of cheeks or bosom the feel, the taste,
the contact that is forbidden them, they give to these girls the same
honeyed consistency as they create when they stand rifling the sweets
of a rose–garden, or before a vine whose clusters their eyes alone
devour.

If it rained, although the weather had no power to daunt Albertine,
who was often to be seen in her waterproof spinning on her bicycle
through the driving showers, we would Spend the day in the Casino,
where on such days it would have seemed to me impossible not to go. I
had the greatest contempt for the young Ambresacs, who had never set
foot in it. And I willingly joined my friends in playing tricks on the
dancing master. As a rule we had to listen to admonition from the
manager, or from some of his staff, usurping dictatorial powers,
because my friends, even Andrée herself, whom on that account I had
regarded when I first saw her as so dionysiac a creature, whereas in
reality she was delicate, intellectual, and this year far from well,
in spite of which her actions were controlled less by the state of her
health than by the spirit of that age which overcomes every other
consideration and confounds in a general gaiety the weak with the
strong, could not enter the outer hall of the rooms without starting
to run, jumping over all the chairs, sliding back along the floor,
their balance maintained by a graceful poise of their outstretched
arms, singing the while, mingling all the arts, in that first bloom of
youth, in the manner of those poets of ancient days for whom the
different 'kinds' were not yet separate, so that in an epic poem they
would introduce rules of agriculture with theological doctrine.

This Andrée who had struck me when I first saw them as the coldest of
them all, was infinitely more refined, more loving, more sensitive
than Albertine, to whom she displayed the caressing, gentle affection
of an elder sister. At the Casino she would come across the floor to
sit down by me, and knew instinctively, unlike Albertine, to refuse my
invitation to dance, or even, if I was tired, to give up the Casino
and come to me instead at the hotel. She expressed her friendship for
me, for Albertine, in terms which were evidence of the most exquisite
understanding of the things of the heart, which may have been partly
due to the state of her health. She had always a merry smile of excuse
for the childish behaviour of Albertine, who expressed with a crude
violence the irresistible temptation held out to her by the parties
and picnics to which she had not the sense, like Andrée, resolutely to
prefer staying and talking with me. When the time came for her to go
off to a luncheon party at the golf–club, if we were all three
together she would get ready to leave us, then, coming up to Andrée:
"Well, Andrée, what are you waiting for now? You know we are lunching
at the golf–club." "No; I'm going to stay and talk to him," replied
Andrée, pointing to me. "But you know, Mme. Durieux invited you,"
cried Albertine, as if Andrée's intention to remain with me could be
explained only by ignorance on her part where else and by whom she had
been bidden. "Look here, my good girl, don't be such an idiot,"
Andrée chid her. Albertine did not insist, fearing a suggestion that
she too should stay with me. She tossed her head. "Just as you like,"
was her answer, uttered in the tone one uses to an invalid whose
self–indulgence is killing him by inches, "I must fly; I'm sure your
watch is slow," and off she went. "She is a dear girl, but quite
impossible," said Andrée, bathing her friend in a smile at once
caressing and critical. If in this craze for amusement Albertine might
be said to echo something of the old original Gilberte, that is
because a certain similarity exists, although the type evolves,
between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity
of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all
those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted
that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart. They are,
these women, a product of our temperament, an image inversely
projected, a negative of our sensibility. So that a novelist might, in
relating the life of his hero, describe his successive love–affairs in
almost exactly similar terms, and thereby give the impression not that
he was repeating himself but that he was creating, since an artificial
novelty is never so effective as a repetition that manages to suggest
a fresh truth. He ought, moreover, to indicate in the character of
the lover a variability which becomes apparent as the story moves into
fresh regions, into different latitudes of life. And perhaps he would
be stating yet another truth if while investing all the other persons
of his story with distinct characters he refrained from giving any to
the beloved. We understand the characters of people who do not
interest us; how can we ever grasp that of a person who is an intimate
part of our existence, whom after a little we no longer distinguish in
any way from ourselves, whose motives provide us with an inexhaustible
supply of anxious hypotheses which we perpetually reconstruct.
Springing from somewhere beyond our understanding, our curiosity as to
the woman whom we love overleaps the bounds of that woman's character,
which we might if we chose but probably will not choose to stop and
examine. The object of our uneasy investigation is something more
essential than those details of character comparable to the tiny
particles of epidermis whose varied combinations form the florid
originality of human flesh. Our intuitive radiography pierces them,
and the images which it photographs for us, so far from being those of
any single face, present rather the joyless universality of a
skeleton.

Andrée, being herself extremely rich while the other was penniless and
an orphan, with real generosity lavished on Albertine the full benefit
of her wealth. As for her feelings towards Gisèle, they were not quite
what I had been led to suppose. News soon reached us of the young
student, and when Albertine handed round the letter she had received,
a letter intended by Gisèle to give an account of her journey and to
report her safe arrival to the little band, pleading laziness as an
excuse for not having written yet to the rest, I was surprised to hear
Andrée (for I imagined an irreparable breach between them) say: "I
shall write to her to–morrow, because if I wait for her to write I may
have to wait for years, she's such a slacker." And, turning to myself,
she added: "You saw nothing much in her, evidently; but she's a jolly
nice girl, and besides I'm really very fond of her." From which I
concluded that Andrée's quarrels were apt not to last very long.

Except on these rainy days, as we had always arranged to go on our
bicycles along the cliffs, or on an excursion inland, an hour or so
before it was time to start I would go upstairs to make myself smart
and would complain if Françoise had not laid out all the things that I
wanted. Now even in Paris she would proudly, angrily straighten a back
which the years had begun to bend, at the first word of reproach, she
so humble, she so modest and charming when her self–esteem was
flattered. As this was the mainspring of her life: her satisfaction,
her good humour were in direct ratio to the difficulty of the tasks
imposed on her. Those which she had to perform at Balbec were so easy
that she shewed almost all the time a discontent which was suddenly
multiplied an hundredfold, with the addition of an ironic air of
offended dignity when I complained, on my way down to join my friends,
that my hat had not been brushed or my ties sorted. She who was
capable of taking such endless pains, without in consequence assuming
that she had done anything at all, on my simply remarking that a coat
was not in its proper place, not only did she boast of the care with
which she had "put it past sooner than let it go gathering the dust,"
but, paying a formal tribute to her own labours, lamented that it was
little enough of a holiday that she was getting at Balbec, and that we
would not find another person in the whole world who would consent to
put up with such treatment. "I can't think how anyone can leave
things lying about the way you do; you just try and get anyone else to
find what you want in such a mix–up. The devil himself would give it
up as a bad job." Or else she would adopt a regal mien, scorching me
with her fiery glance, and preserve a silence that was broken as soon
as she had fastened the door behind her and was outside in the
passage, which would then reverberate with utterances which I guessed
to be insulting, though they remained as indistinct as those of
characters in a play whose opening lines are spoken in the wings,
before they appear on the stage. And even if nothing was missing and
Françoise was in a good temper, still she made herself quite
intolerable when I was getting ready to go out with my friends. For,
drawing upon a store of stale witticisms at their expense which, in my
need to be talking about the girls, I had made in her hearing, she put
on an air of being about to reveal to me things of which I should have
known more than she had there been any truth in her statements, which
there never was, Françoise having misunderstood what she had heard.
She had, like most people, her own ways; a person is never like a
straight highway, but surprises us with the strange, unavoidable
windings of his course through life, by which, though some people may
not notice them, we find it a perpetual annoyance to be stopped and
hindered. Whenever I arrived at the stage of "Where is my hat?" or
uttered the name of Andrée or Albertine, I was forced by Françoise to
stray into endless and absurd side–tracks which greatly delayed my
progress. So too when I asked her to cut me the sandwiches of cheese
or salad, or sent her out for the cakes which I was to eat while we
rested on the cliffs, sharing them with the girls, and which the girls
"might very well have taken turns to provide, if they had not been so
close," declared Françoise, to whose aid there came at such moments a
whole heritage of atavistic peasant rapacity and coarseness, and for
whom one would have said that the soul of her late enemy Eulalie had
been broken into fragments and reincarnate, more attractively than it
had ever been in Saint–Eloi's, in the charming bodies of
my friends of the little band. I listened to these accusations with a
dull fury at finding myself brought to a standstill at one of those
places beyond which the well–trodden country path that was Françoise's
character became impassable, though fortunately never for very long.
Then, my hat or coat found and the sandwiches ready, I sailed out to
find Albertine, Andrée, Rosemonde, and any others there might be, and
on foot or on our bicycles we would start.