In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  ‘Really? my mother said. He said you were intelligent? Well, that’s good to hear, from such a talented man.

  – Did he really say that? my father asked. Well, I’ve got nothing to say against him at all on literary things – nobody has. It’s just rather a pity about those dubious goings-on of his that old Norpois hinted at.’ My father did not notice that, against the power of the magic words I had just spoken, Bergotte’s moral depravity could not hold out much longer than his nasty and bogus mind had.

  ‘But, my dear, my mother said, nothing proves there’s any truth in any of that. People say all sorts of things. And of course, although M. de Norpois is extremely nice, he’s not always full of good-will, particularly towards people who are not quite his cup of tea.

  – True, true, said my father. I’ve noticed that about him too.

  – Anyway, my mother said, stroking my hair and gazing dreamily at me, if Bergotte likes my little boy, we’ll not judge him too harshly.’

  Without knowing Bergotte’s opinion of me, she had already told me that, the next time I had friends to tea, I could invite Gilberte. There were two reasons why I did not dare do this. One was that, at the Swanns’, the only thing to drink was tea; whereas my mother insisted that, in addition to tea, we should have hot chocolate. I dreaded the thought that Gilberte would think this was common of us, and despise us for it. The other reason was a difficulty of protocol that I was never able to resolve. Each time I arrived at Mme Swann’s, my hostess would ask:

  ‘And how is your dear mother?’

  To me, whether Mama would agree to follow suit when Gilberte came to tea was a more serious matter than Louis XIV’s insistence that at Versailles only the Dauphin should be addressed as Monseigneur; and so I had broached it with her. She would hear nothing of it.

  ‘Well, no, she said, because I don’t know Madame Swann.

  – Yes, but she doesn’t know you either.

  – That may be. But we’re not obliged to be exactly the same as each other. I can be nice to Gilberte in ways which are different from the ways her mother is nice to you.’

  But I was unconvinced and preferred not to invite Gilberte to tea.

  Having gone to my room, I was changing my clothes when I suddenly discovered in my pocket the envelope which the Swanns’ butler had handed me just before showing me into the drawing-room. Being no longer under the butler’s eye, I opened it – inside was a card on which was written the name of the lady whom I was expected to take in to lunch.

  It was about this time that Bloch disturbed my conception of the world and opened before me new vistas of possible happiness (which were later to turn into possibilities of great unhappiness): contradicting what I had believed about women in the days when I used to go for walks along the Méséglise way, he assured me that they were always on the look-out for opportunities to make love. This good turn he complemented with another, which I did not fully appreciate till much later: he it was who took me for the first time to a brothel. He had of course told me there were many pretty women in the world to be slept with. But the faces I had imagined for them were devoid of detail; and these brothels were to enable me to see that each of them had an individual face. So it was that, on the one hand, because of Bloch’s ‘good news’ – that happiness and the possession of beauty are not unattainable, and that we are misguided if we despair of ever enjoying them – I was as indebted to him as one is to the optimistic doctor or philosopher who gives one grounds for expecting a long life in this world, or a continued contact with it even after we pass into another world; and on the other hand, the brothels I frequented some years later (by giving me samples of happiness, and enabling me to enhance the beauty of women with that element which we can never invent, which is not just an amalgam of types of beauty familiar to us, but the truly divine gift, the only one we cannot receive from ourselves, the one beside which all the logical figments of our mind fade away, and which can be acquired only from reality: the charm of the individual) deserve to stand beside those other benefactors, more recent in origin but equal in utility, thanks to whom we can now revel in the full glory of Mantegna, Wagner and Siena, without having to invent pale, imagined versions of them based on other painters, other composers and other towns: the publishers of illustrated volumes on the history of painting, producers of symphony concerts and the compilers of those series on ‘Cities of the Arts’. But the first hotel Bloch took me to, which he himself had not frequented for some time, was of a rather inferior sort; its women were too nondescript, and they were not renewed often enough, for me to gratify familiar urges or contract unfamiliar ones. The madam did not know any of the women one asked her for, and kept suggesting others that one had no desire for. There was one woman in particular whom she praised to the skies, saying with a suggestive smile, as though talking about a treat or a rarity, ‘She’s a Jewess! Eh? Couldn’t you fancy that?’ (That was presumably why she called the girl Rachel.) And she added, filling her voice with a vacuous, affected rapturousness, which she hoped would be infectious, and dropping it almost to a moan of sensuous delight, ‘Just think, dearie! A Jewess! I mean! That must be a bit of all right, wouldn’t you say? Eh? Yer!’ I was able to look at Rachel without her seeing me: she was dark, not pretty but with an intelligent look, and as she licked her lips with the tip of her tongue, she smiled pertly at the different customers who were being introduced to her, and whom I could hear striking up conversation with her. Her face was thin and narrow, framed by black curly hair, which looked so irregular as to have been cross-hatched in an Indian ink wash-drawing. At each visit I assured the madam, who kept urging me to have the girl, stressing her high intelligence and level of education, that I would be sure to come back one day for the express purpose of meeting Rachel, for whom my private nickname was ‘Rachel, when of the Lord’.58 But the fact was that on the very first evening, I had overheard the girl say to the madam as she was leaving:

  ‘So that’s agreed, all right? I’m available tomorrow and if you’ve got somebody you’ll be sure to send round for me?’

  These words had instantly prevented me from seeing her as a person, by making her indistinguishable from the ordinary run of those women whose common practice was to turn up there in the evening in the hope of earning a few francs. This statement of Rachel’s rarely varied: sometimes she said, ‘If you need me’; and sometimes it was, ‘If you need anyone’.

  The madam, being unfamiliar with Halévy’s opera, had no idea why I had taken to calling the girl ‘Rachel, when of the Lord’. But an inability to understand a joke has never been an impediment to being amused by it, and she always greeted me with a great laugh and the words:

  ‘So is tonight the night when I can fix you up with “Rachel, when of the Lord”? Let’s hear the way you say it now: “Rachel, when of the Lord”! It’s very funny, you know! I’m going to betroth you to her. You won’t be sorry, you’ll see!’

  On one occasion I had almost decided to accept the offer; but the girl was ‘on the job’. Then another time she was with the ‘hairdresser’ (this was an old gentleman whose hairdressing consisted solely of oiling the women’s hair, once they had let it down, and then combing it for them). I tired of waiting for her, although several denizens of the establishment, of very humble charms, allegedly working-class women but always out of work, came up to make me a cup of tisane and engage me in a lengthy conversation to which, despite the seriousness of the subjects we talked about, their partial or total nakedness gave a piquant simplicity. However, I gave up going to that house, because in my desire to do the madam a good turn, she being rather short of furniture, I made her a present of some pieces, notably a large couch, which had been left to me by my Aunt Léonie. I rarely saw these things, since my parents, having no room to accommodate them, had put them into storage. But as soon as I set eyes on them again in that brothel, put to use by those women, I was assailed by all the virtues which had perfumed the air in my aunt’s bedroom at Combray, now defiled by the brutal dea
lings to which I had condemned the dear, defenceless things. I could not have suffered more if it had been the dead woman herself being violated. So I stopped going to that procuress’s establishment, as they seemed to be living creatures, crying out silently to me, like those apparently inanimate objects inside which, as a Persian tale has it, souls are imprisoned, subjected to constant torture and begging for ever to be freed. Moreover, given that memory does not usually produce recollections in chronological order, but acts more like a reflection which inverts the sequence of parts, it was not until much later that I remembered this was the couch on which, many years before, I had been initiated into the pleasures of love by one of my cousins, a girl whose presence embarrassed and excited me to distraction, and who had urged me to take perilous advantage of an hour when our Aunt Léonie was out of the room.

  Another large lot of Aunt Léonie’s furniture, including especially a magnificent set of old silverware, I sold, against the express wishes of my parents, so as to have more money with which to send more flowers to Mme Swann. When she received my huge baskets of orchids, she would say, ‘Young man, if I was your father, I’d have your allowance stopped!’ But could I imagine that a day would come when I would regret having parted with that silver, a day when the greatest pleasure in my life, paying respects to Gilberte’s parents, would have become absolutely worthless? Similarly, it was because of Gilberte, so as not to part from her, that I had decided not to undertake a career as a diplomat. Our farthest-reaching resolutions are always made in a short-lived state of mind. I could barely conceive that the strange substance inhering in Gilberte, and radiating from her parents and the house where she lived, making me feel indifferent to everything else, could detach itself from her person and migrate into another. The very same substance, yet destined to have completely different effects on me. The same illness can evolve; and a sweet poison comes to be less tolerated, when with the years the heart’s resistance has weakened.

  Meanwhile, my parents would have preferred it if the intelligence which had so impressed Bergotte could have been made manifest in some achievement. As long as I had been excluded from the Swanns’ acquaintance, I was convinced that my inability to get down to work was caused by the state of emotional disturbance to which I was reduced by the impossibility of seeing Gilberte as and when I wished to. But then, once I had free access to their house, I could hardly sit down at my desk before I had to jump up again and be off there to visit them. And when I had left the Swanns’ and gone back home, it was only in appearance that I sat alone; my own thoughts could not withstand the torrent of words on which for hours past I had let myself be carried along: I went on turning out words and sentences which might have impressed the Swanns; to make the game more enjoyable, I even played the parts of the absent others, asking myself fictitious questions so designed that, in answering them, I could show off the brilliance of my banter. Silent as it was, this exercise was a real conversation and not a form of reflection; my solitude was a mental drawing-room scene, in which imaginary interlocutors and not myself were in charge of my speech, in which by producing not ideas which I believed to be true, but ideas that came to me without trouble, without any action of the outer world on the inner, I enjoyed the same sort of pleasure as is enjoyed, in utter passivity, by the person who has nothing better to do after dinner but sit quietly, lulled into a dull somnolence by poor digestion.

  If I had not been so determined to set seriously to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready – and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things. However, I was a reasonable person. When one has waited for years, it would be childish not to tolerate a delay of a couple of days. In the knowledge that by the day after tomorrow I would have several pages written, I said no more about my decision to the family: much better to wait for a few hours, then once I had a piece of work in progress to show, my grandmother would be consoled and convinced. Unfortunately, tomorrow turned out not to be that broad, bright, outward-looking day that I had feverishly looked forward to. When it had ended, my idleness and hard struggle against my inner obstacles had just lasted for another twenty-four hours. After a few days, when my projects had still not come to anything, when some of my hope that they would very soon come to something had faded, and with it some of the courage I required in order to subordinate everything to my coming achievement, I went back to staying up late, as I now also lacked my incentive (the certain knowledge that the great work would be begun by the following morning) to go to bed early on any given evening. Before regaining my impetus, I was in need of a respite of several days; and on the only occasion when my grandmother hazarded a reproach in a tone of mild disenchantment – ‘So is anything happening about this writing?’ – I was aggrieved at her, and I concluded that, by her inability to see the staunchness of my purpose, by the anguish which her gross unfairness caused me, an utterly unsuitable state of mind in which to undertake such a work as mine, she had just succeeded in putting off once again (and possibly for a long time!) the moment when its accomplishing would be begun. She sensed that her sceptical air had offended an unsuspected but genuine resolve. She apologized with a kiss: ‘I’m sorry. I won’t say another word about it.’ So that I would not lose heart, she added her assurance that a day would come when I would feel well again, and that, of its own accord, my work would then start to flow smoothly.

  Anyway, I thought, what if I do spend a lot of time at the Swanns? So does Bergotte! My family’s view on this might almost have been that, though I was lazy, the life I was leading was actually the best suited to a developing talent, since I was frequenting the same drawing-room as a great writer. Yet, to acquire talent from someone else, to bypass the need to create it out of oneself, is as impossible as it would be to lead a healthy life by dining out frequently with a doctor, while flouting all the rules of hygiene and indulging in every sort of excess. The person who was most taken in by this illusion, shared by myself and my family, was Mme Swann. If I told her I could not accept one of her invitations, that I had to stay at home and work, she looked at me as though I was making difficulties for the sake of it, as though I had said something rather silly and pretentious:

  ‘But, look here, Bergotte keeps coming, doesn’t he? And you don’t think his stuff isn’t well written, surely now, do you? You’ll see, he’ll be even better soon – since he’s taken up journalism, he’s actually sharper, and there’s more to him than in his books, where he tends to be a bit thinnish. I’ve managed to get him into the Figaro, he’s going to do their “leader article”.’ She used the English expression, to which she added another:

  ‘You’ll see, it’ll be a perfect case of “the right man in the right place”. So, do come! Just think of the tips you can pick up from him about writing!’

  It sounded as though she was inviting a private to meet his colonel: it was so as to further my career, as though knowing ‘the right people’ could help produce a masterpiece, that she urged me not to miss dinner with Bergotte at her house the following evening.

  So it was that my new sweet life with Gilberte was now untroubled both by the Swanns and by my family, the two sources which at different times had appeared likely to make a difficulty; and I could go on seeing her at will, with delight though not with peace of mind. Peace of mind is foreign to love, since each new fulfilment one attains is never anything but a new starting-point for the desire to go beyond it. For as long as I had been prevented from going to her house, my gaze had been riveted to that unattainable happiness, and it had been impossible for me even to imagine the new sources of emotional disturbance that awaited me in it. Once her parents’ resistance had been overcome, the problem which had thus bee
n solved was to go on being reformulated, but each time in different terms. In that sense, it really was a new relationship that began with Gilberte each day. Back at home each evening, I realized there were things of paramount importance that I had to say to her, things on which the future of our friendship depended; and yet from one day to the next they were never the same things. Still, I was happy and there was no sign of any threat to my continuing happiness. A threat was to materialize, however, coming from a source which I had never seen as a potential danger, that is from Gilberte and myself. I should really have been disturbed by what reassured me, by what I took for happiness. In love, happiness is an abnormal state, capable of instantly conferring on the pettiest-seeming incident, which can occur at any moment, a degree of gravity which in other circumstances it would never have. What makes one so happy is the presence of something unstable in the heart, something one contrives constantly to keep in a state of stability, and which one is hardly even aware of as long as it remains like that. In fact, though, love secretes a permanent pain, which joy neutralizes in us, makes virtual and holds in abeyance; but at any moment, it can turn into torture, which is what would have happened long since, if one had not obtained what one desired.