In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (75 page)

All this I realised, and yet we talked so little. Whereas with Mme. de
Villeparisis or Saint–Loup I should have displayed by my words a great
deal more pleasure than I should actually have felt, for I used always
to be worn out when I parted from them; when, on the other hand, I was
lying on the grass among all these girls, the plenitude of what I was
feeling infinitely outweighed the paucity, the infrequency of our
speech, and brimmed over from my immobility and silence in floods of
happiness, the waves of which rippled up to die at the feet of these
young roses.

For a convalescent who rests all day long in a flower–garden or
orchard, a scent of flowers or fruit does not more completely pervade
the thousand trifles that compose his idle hours than did for me that
colour, that fragrance in search of which my eyes kept straying
towards the girls, and the sweetness of which finally became
incorporated in me. So it is that grapes grow sugary in sunshine. And
by their slow continuity these simple little games had gradually
wrought in me also, as in those who do nothing else all day but lie
outstretched by the sea, breathing the salt air and growing sunburned,
a relaxation, a blissful smile, a vague sense of dizziness that had
spread from brain to eyes.

Now and then a pretty attention from one or another of them would stir
in me vibrations which dissipated for a time my desire for the rest.
Thus one day Albertine had suddenly asked: "Who has a pencil?" Andrée
had provided one, Rosemonde the paper; Albertine had warned them:
"Now, young ladies, you are not to look at what I write." After
carefully tracing each letter, supporting the paper on her knee, she
had passed it to me with: "Take care no one sees." Whereupon I had
unfolded it and read her message, which was: "I love you."

"But we mustn't sit here scribbling nonsense," she cried, turning
impetuously, with a sudden gravity of demeanour, to Andrée and
Rosemonde.

"I ought to shew you the letter I got from Gisèle this morning. What
an idiot I am; I've had it all this time in my pocket—and you can't
think how important it may be to us." Gisèle had been moved to copy
out for her friend, so that it might be passed on to the others, the
essay which she had written in her certificate examination.
Albertine's fears as to the difficulty of the subjects set had been
more than justified by the two from which Gisèle had had to choose.
The first was: "Sophocles, from the Shades, writes to Racine to
console him for the failure of
Athalie
"; the other: "Suppose that,
after the first performance of
Esther
, Mme. de Sévigné is writing to
Mme. de La Fayette to tell her how much she regretted her absence."
Now Gisèle, in an excess of zeal which ought to have touched the
examiners' hearts, had chosen the former, which was also the more
difficult of the two subjects, and had handled it with such remarkable
skill that she had been given fourteen marks, and had been
congratulated by the board. She would have received her 'mention' if
she had not 'dried up' in the Spanish paper. The essay, a copy of
which Gisèle had now sent her, was immediately read aloud to us by
Albertine, for, having presently to pass the same examination, she was
anxious to have an opinion from Andrée, who was by far the cleverest
of them all and might be able to give her some good 'tips.' "She did
have a bit of luck!" was Albertine's comment."It's the very subject
her French mistress made her swot up while she was here." The letter
from Sophocles to Racine, as drafted by Gisèle, ran as follows: "My
dear friend, You must pardon me the liberty of addressing you when I
have not the honour of your personal acquaintance, but your latest
tragedy, Athalie, shews, does it not, that you have made the most
thorough study of my own modest works. You have not only put poetry in
the mouths of the protagonists, or principal persons of the drama, but
you have written other, and, let me tell you without flattery,
charming verses for the choruses, a feature which was not too bad,
according to all one hears, in Greek Tragedy, but is a complete
novelty in France. Nay more, your talent always so fluent, so
finished, so winning, so fine, so delicate, has here acquired an
energy on which I congratulate you. Athalie, Joad—these are figures
which your rival Corneille could have wrought no better. The
characters are virile, the plot simple and strong. You have given us a
tragedy in which love is not the keynote, and on this I must offer you
my sincerest compliments. The most familiar proverbs are not always
the truest. I will give you an example:

You have shewn us that the religious sentiment in which your choruses
are steeped is no less capable of moving us. The general public may
have been puzzled at first, but those who are best qualified to judge
must give you your due. I have felt myself impelled to offer you all
my congratulations, to which I would add, my dear brother poet, an
expression of my very highest esteem." Albertine's eyes, while she was
reading this to us, had not ceased to sparkle. "Really, you'd think she
must have cribbed it somewhere!" she exclaimed, as she reached the
end. "I should never have believed that Gisèle could hatch out anything
like as good! And the poetry she brings in! Where on earth can she
have got that from?" 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 of the band and more knowledgeable
than the others) 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 is not badly done," she told Albertine, "but if I were you
and had the same subject set me, which is quite likely, as they do
very often set that, I shouldn't do it in that way. This is how I
would tackle it. Well, first of all, if I had been Gisèle, I should
not have let myself get tied up, I should have begun by making a rough
sketch of what I was going to write on a separate piece of paper. On
the top line I should state the question and give an account of the
subject, then the general ideas to be worked into the development.
After that, appreciation, style, conclusion. In that way, with a
summary to refer to, you know where you are. But at the very start,
where she begins her account of the subject, or, if you like, Titine,
since it's a letter we're speaking of, where she comes to the matter,
Gisèle has gone off the rails altogether. 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, 'Suffer me, Sir,' (at the very most, 'Dear
Sir') to inform you of the sense of high esteem with which I have the
honour to be your servant.' Then again, Gisèle says that the choruses
in
Athalie
are 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 Professor himself, so that you need only mention them, since
he's got them on the brain, and you're bound to pass. I mean
Les
Juives
, by Robert Gamier, and Montchrestien's
L'Aman
." Andrée
quoted these titles without managing quite to conceal a secret sense
of benevolent superiority, which found expression in a smile, quite a
delightful smile, for that matter. Albertine could contain herself
no—longer. "Andrée, you really are a perfect marvel," 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 bring them in
at once and make a colossal impression." But in the days that
followed, every time that Albertine begged Andrée just to tell her
again the names of those two plays so that she might write them down,
her blue–stocking friend seemed most unfortunately to have forgotten
them, and left her none the wiser. "And another thing," Andrée went
on with the faintest note in her voice of scorn for companions so much
younger than herself, though she relished their admiration and
attached to the manner in which she herself would have composed the
essay a greater importance than she wanted us to think, "Sophocles in
the Shades must be kept well–informed of all that goes on. He must
know, therefore, that it was not before the general public but before
the King's Majesty and a few privileged courtiers that
Athalie
was
first played. What Gisèle says in this connexion of the esteem of
qualified judges is not at all bad, but she might have gone a little
further. Sophocles, now that he is immortal, might quite well have the
gift of prophecy and announce that, according to Voltaire,
Athalie
is to be the supreme achievement not of Racine merely 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 begin to play. "And so," Andrée concluded,
in the same easy, detached tone, blending a faint sneer with a certain
warmth of conviction, "if Gisèle had noted down properly, first of
all, 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
Sophocles's choruses and Racine's. I should have made Sophocles remark
that if Racine's choruses are instinct 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 their beliefs are different?
Sophocles would hesitate to insist upon such a 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 so heated Albertine that great drops were
rolling down her cheeks. 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 are
by no means bad. But you certainly ought to mention Deltour and
Gascq–Desfossés." She refused, however, despite Albertine's
entreaties, to write down these two unfamiliar names.

Meanwhile I had been thinking of the little page torn from a
scribbling block which Albertine had handed me. "I love 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 indicated 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 awaken me whoever might ask to see
me, unless it were one or other of the girls, the beating of my heart
while I waited for her (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 must appear with the disfigurement
of a hairy chin before Albertine, Rosemonde or Andrée, no doubt this
state, recurring indifferently at the thought of one or another, was
as different from what we call love as is from human life the life of
the zoophytes, where an existence, an individuality, if we may term
it, is divided up among several organisms. But natural history teaches
us that such an organization of animal life is indeed to be observed,
and that our own life, provided only that 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, and can then abandon
them altogether. Such was for me this state of love divided among
several girls at once. Divided—say 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
finding it again on the morrow was the greatest happiness in 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 lifeless
hours, upon that strip of grass on which were laid those forms, so
exciting to my imagination, of Albertine, Rosemonde, 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 was most anxious 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 be
loving from which it will presently emerge (and, later on, the memory
which 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
so far harmonised among themselves that it does not in the presence of
any one of them feel itself out of place. Besides, as my perception of
them was not yet dulled by familiarity, I had still 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 himself in a fresh aspect; but so great is the
multiformity of each of us, so abundant the wealth of lines of face
and body, lines so few of which leave any trace, once we have parted
from the other person, on the arbitrary simplicity of our memory. As
our mind has selected some peculiarity 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 absurdly elongated, or of a
woman who has seemed to be pink–cheeked and golden–haired a pure
'Harmony in pink and gold,' so, the moment that woman is once again
standing before us, all the other forgotten qualities which restore
the balance of that one remembered feature at once assail us, in their
confused complexity, diminishing her height, paling her cheeks, and
substituting for what we have come to her solely to seek other
peculiarities which we remember now that we did notice the first time,
and fail to understand how we can so far have forgotten to look out
for again. We thought we remembered; it was a peahen, surely; we go to
see it and 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 stereotyped forms of memory and
reality, but between the person whom we saw last time and him who
appears to us to–day from another angle and shews us another aspect.
The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some Oriental
theogony, a whole cluster of faces, crowded together but on different
surfaces so that one does not see them all at once.