In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  When New Year’s Day came round, my first occupation was to accompany Mama on visits to family. So as not to tire me, she had my father map out an itinerary for us; and she arranged our calls according to which part of town our relatives lived in, rather than in any order of family precedence. But we had hardly set foot in the drawing-room of a rather distant cousin – the lack of distance to her house being the reason why she was first on the list – when my mother was horrified to see, among the bringers of seasonal offerings of marrons glacés and marrons déguisés, the best friend of the touchiest of my uncles, who would therefore be informed that we had seen fit to make our first visit of the morning to someone other than himself. My uncle would be sure to be offended, as he would no doubt have taken it for granted that we should go all the way down from the Madeleine to his house near the Jardin des Plantes, then come all the way back to Saint-Augustin before crossing the river again to go to the rue de l’École-de-Médecine.

  When these visits were finished, my grandmother having excused us from making one to her as we were to dine with her that evening, I dashed to the Champs-Élysées with a letter for Gilberte which I wanted to give to our woman in the booth, who would pass it on to the servant of the Swanns’ who bought the spice-cake from her several times a week. This letter was a New Year’s Day message which I had decided to write to Gilberte on the day when she had made me so unhappy, in which I told her that our former friendship had died with the old year, that I was going to forget my grievances and disappointments and that, from 1 January, we were going to build together a new friendship, which would be so sound that nothing could destroy it, and so wonderful that I hoped she would try to take pride in it, keep it beautiful and warn me in good time, as I promised to do for her too, of anything that might jeopardize its well-being. On the way home, Françoise made me stop at an open-air stall on the corner of the rue Royale, where she spent her New Year gratuity on two photographs, one of Pius IX and the other of Raspail,20 and where I bought one of La Berma. The artiste’s face, her only one, seemed a meagre gratification to offer to so many admirers: as unvarying and precarious as the coat worn by people who have no more than one to wear, all it could ever display was the same soft little groove on the upper lip, the high-set eyebrows and a few other physical features, always the same ones, always vulnerable to a chance burn or blow. It was a face which of itself would not have seemed beautiful; but because of all the kissing it must have had, kissing which its flirtatiously tender looks and archly innocent smile still seemed to invite from the surface of the ‘album copy’, it gave me the idea and consequently the desire to kiss it myself. After all, the desires that La Berma confessed through the disguise of Phèdre she must often experience for young men in real life; and everything, including the prestige of her name, which enhanced her beauty and extended her youth, must make it easy for her to satisfy those desires. In the gathering dusk, I stood beside a Morris column with its posters announcing La Berma’s New Year’s Day performance. There was a mild, damp wind blowing. It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year’s Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing: my wish that Gilberte would love me. I realized that, since my heart yearned in this way for the redesign of a universe which had not satisfied it, this meant that my heart had not changed; and I could see there was no reason why Gilberte’s should have changed either. I sensed that, though it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though we may put different names to them, they remain beyond the reach of our yearnings, unaware of these and unaffected by them. Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year’s Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind workings of nature, it was in vain: I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year’s Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me. What I recognized, what I sensed in that mild wind blowing about the Morris column with its posters, was the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity.

  I went home. I had just experienced the New Year’s Day of older men, who differ on that day from the young, not because nobody brings them presents, but because they no longer believe in the New Year. I had received presents; but they had not included the only one which could have brought me any pleasure: a note from Gilberte. However, I was still young, as I had been capable of writing one to her, full of the forlorn yearning for tenderness which I had hoped would inspire the same in her. The sadness of the man who has grown old is that, having learned how pointless they are, he does not even think of writing such letters.

  I lay in bed, prevented from sleeping by the street-noises, which went on later than usual because of the celebrations. I thought of all the people who would end the day in pleasure, the lover or possibly the band of rakes who must have waited at the stage-door for La Berma, after the performance I had seen advertised for this evening. To soothe the agitation I suffered from during the sleepless night, I could not even tell myself that La Berma probably gave no thought to love, since the lines she spoke, and which she had studied at great length, reminded her incessantly that love is full of delights, which she knew anyway, as was clear from her ability not only to reproduce its notorious pangs – albeit fraught with a fresh violence and an unsuspected sweetness – but to strike new wonder into spectators, though each of them had felt these pangs to the full. I lit my candle again to gaze once more at her face. At the thought that at this very moment it was being caressed by the men whom I could not prevent myself from seeing with her, from drawing superhuman but imprecise pleasures from her person, the passion I felt was a cruel rather than a sensuous yearning, exacerbated now by the note of the hunting-horn one hears in the night at Mid-Lent and often at other public holidays, which, because it is devoid at such times of poetry, sounds more mournfully from a drinking-den than when it ‘haunts the heart of the evening woods’.21 At that moment, a note from Gilberte might not have been what I most needed. Our desires interweave with each other; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire which longed for it.

  On fine days, I continued to go to the Champs-Élysées, through streets of elegant pink houses which, because there were a great many exhibitions of water-colourists at that time, were washed by the subdued and variable light of pastel skies. It would not be true to say that in those days the palaces of Gabriel in the place de la Concorde seemed to me things of greater beauty than the adjoining buildings, or even that they dated from a different period.22 To my eye there was greater style and even greater age if not in the Palais de l’Industrie, at least in the Palais du Trocadéro.23 My adolescence, wherever it walked, deep in its fevered sleep, saw whole districts through the same waking dream; and I had never suspected that there might be an eighteenth-century building in the rue Royale, just as I would have been astonished to learn that the Porte Saint-Martin and the Porte Saint-Denis, masterpieces dating from the days of Louis XIV, were not of the same period as the most recent constructions in the squalid areas which now surround them. Only once did one of the palaces of Gabriel make me stop and gaze for a longish moment: it was after nightfall, and the columns of stone had been desolidified by the moonlight, which, by turning them into cardboard cut-outs, and reminding me of a stage set for Orpheus in the Underworld,24 gave me my very first glimpse of beauty.

  Gilberte had still not come back to the Champs-�
�lysées. Yet I very much needed to set eyes on her, as I could not even remember her face. When we look at the person we love, our inquisitive, anxious, demanding gaze, our expectation of the words which will make us hope for (or despair of) another meeting tomorrow and, until those words are spoken, our obsession fluctuating between possible joy and sorrow, or imagining both of these together, all this distracts our tremulous attention and prevents it from getting a clear picture of the loved one. Also, it may be that this simultaneous activity of all the senses, striving to discover through the unaided eyes something that is out of their reach, is too mindful of the countless forms, all the savours and movements of the living person, all those things which, in a person with whom we are not in love, we immobilize. But the beloved model keeps moving; and the only snapshots we can take are always out of focus. I could not really say what the features of Gilberte’s face were like, except at those heavenly moments when she was there, displaying them to me. All I could remember was her smile. Unable to picture the loved face, however strenuously I tried to make myself remember it, I was for ever irritated to find that my memory had retained exact replicas of the striking and futile faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman, just as the bereaved, who each night search their dreams in vain for the lost beloved, will find their sleep is peopled by all manner of exasperating and unbearable intruders, whom they have always found, even in the waking world, more than dislikable. Faced with the impossibility of seeing clearly the object of their grief, they come close to accusing themselves of not grieving, just as I was tempted to believe that my inability to remember the features of Gilberte’s face meant that I had forgotten her and had stopped loving her. Eventually, she came back to the Champs-Élysées to play almost every day. Each time she came, she left me with new things to desire for the following day, new things to ask her; and this did have the effect of transforming my love for her into a new love every day. But then something happened to alter once again the way in which, about two o’clock every afternoon, I was faced with the problem of my love. Had M. Swann intercepted the letter I had sent to Gilberte? Or was she perhaps alluding to a state of affairs of long standing, meaning that I should be more careful? As I was telling her how much I admired her father and mother, her features started to take on that unfocussed look, full of secrecy and unspoken things, which she always put on when anyone mentioned the things she had to do, visits she had to pay, shopping to be done; and suddenly she said, ‘They don’t fancy you very much, you know!’ Then, slipping away like a water-nymph – that was how she was – she burst out laughing. There were times when her laughter was at variance with her words, and appeared to be translating an invisible surface into another dimension, as music does. Her parents were not demanding that she give up coming to play with me; but she thought they would have preferred our relationship never to have begun. They frowned upon my having any dealings with her, thought I was quite untrustworthy and assumed that I was bound to have a bad influence on their daughter. I could imagine the type of unscrupulous young man that M. Swann thought I was: hating the parents of the girl he loves, flattering them to their faces but scoffing about them when with her, enticing her into disobedience of them and finally, once he has had his way with her, preventing them from seeing her. Against these characteristics (which are never those which the most hardened villain sees in himself) my innocent heart protested vehemently, alleging the true nature of the feelings it held for M. Swann, which were so passionate that, if he could only know of them, I was convinced he would come to see his assessment of me as a miscarriage of justice crying out to be put right! I went so far as to set out everything I felt for him in a long letter, which I asked Gilberte to take to him. She agreed to do this – but alas, it turned out that he took me for an even greater fraud than I had thought! He was sceptical about my sixteen pages of protestations and truth! And so the letter, which contained no less passion and sincerity than the words I had spoken to M. de Norpois, met with no more success than they had. Gilberte told me the following day, after having taken me round to a secluded little pathway behind a clump of laurel, where we sat on chairs, that as her father had read the letter, which she had brought to give back to me, he had shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘This whole thing is pointless. It just goes to show how right I was!’ To me, knowing the innocence of my intentions, the purity of my conscience, it was galling that my words had had not the slightest effect on M. Swann’s absurd misconception. For at that moment I had no doubt that it was a misconception. I was convinced that my delineation of certain unimpeachable features of my sincerest self had been so accurate that the only explanation of M. Swann’s inability to recognize them through my words, as of his failure to seek me out, beg my forgiveness and admit to his mistake, was that he had never had such noble feelings himself, and consequently that he was incapable of appreciating them in others.

  Of course, Swann may well have known that magnanimity is often nothing more than the outward appearance of a selfish impulse, which we have not yet seen as such or named. In my protestations of good will towards him, perhaps he recognized a mere effect, as well as a resounding confirmation, of my love for his daughter; and he may have foreseen that my subsequent acts would be inevitably governed by this love, and not by my secondary veneration for himself. This was not a view I could share, as I had not managed to isolate my love from my self, to see it as belonging to the same general category as any other love, and to hazard an experimental deduction about its likely consequences. I was in despair. I had to leave Gilberte for a moment, as Françoise had called me. She wanted me to go with her to a little green-trellissed pavilion that looked rather like one of the disused Paris toll-booths from former times, in which had recently been installed what the English call a lavabo25 and the French, in their misguided anglomania, water closets. In the entrance, where I stood waiting for Françoise, the smell of the old damp walls, which was cool and musty, instantly freed me from the worries I had contracted from M. Swann’s words as told to me by Gilberte, filling me with a pleasure which was of a different essence from all others; for they leave us more unstable, unable to grasp them or possess them, whereas this one was of a denser consistency, reliable, delightful, peaceful, pregnant with a lasting truthfulness, which was as inexplicable as it was undeniable. I would have liked to try, as I had done before, on our walks along the Guermantes way, to fathom the charm of the impression which had come over me, to pause for a moment’s investigation of this old-fashioned redolence, which invited me not just to enjoy the pleasure, offered as a mere bonus, but to see through it to a reality which it had not quite revealed. But the woman in charge of the establishment, an old dame with plastered cheeks and a ginger wig, struck up a conversation with us. Françoise was convinced the woman came from ‘her parts of the country’. Her eldest had married what Françoise called ‘a posh young man’, that is someone who in her view differed as much from a worker as in Saint-Simon‘s26 view a duke differed from a man ‘belonging to the dregs of the people’. No doubt this woman, before becoming what she was, had been better off. But Françoise was convinced she was a countess, of the Saint-Ferréol family. The countess urged me not to stand about in the inclement air; she even opened one of her cubicles for me: ‘Wouldn’t you like to step inside? Here’s one that’s nice and clean – and you can use it free of charge!’ This may have been nothing more than the sort of offer I sometimes received from the sales assistants in Gouache’s, who when Mama and I were placing an order, would urge me to have one of the sweets under the glass covers standing on the counter, which my mother, to my chagrin, would never allow me to accept; or it may have been the slightly less innocent sort of suggestion made by an old florist from whom Mama bought blooms for her ornamental flower-stands, who would make eyes at me and give me a rose. But if the fancy of Françoise’s countess did run to youths for whom she opened the hypogean portal into her stone cubes, where men crouch like sphinxes, the aim of this kindness towards them must have be
en less the chance of seducing them than the unrequited pleasure of being indulgent towards a loved one, as I never saw her being visited by anyone other than one of the old park-keepers.

  Having taken leave of the ‘countess’, I soon left Françoise to her own devices and went back to Gilberte. I saw her sitting on a chair behind the clump of laurels, so as to be invisible to her friends, with whom she was playing hide-and-seek. I sat beside her. She was wearing a flat toque, which almost covered her eyes and gave them the sly, unfocussed, evasive expression I remembered from the first time I had seen it at Combray. I asked her whether there might not be a way for me to talk this thing over with her father. Gilberte said she had already suggested this, and that he could see no point in it. ‘Anyway, look,’ she said, ‘here’s your letter back. We’d better go back to the others now since nobody’s found me.’

  If M. Swann had come upon us before I had managed to retrieve the letter whose sincerity he had been unreasonable enough to doubt, he might well have concluded that his doubt was fully justified. As I came close to Gilberte, who was leaning back in her chair, telling me to take the letter, but not handing it to me, I felt so attracted by her body that I said: