The Balbec doctor, summoned to my bedside because of a bout of fever, having ruled that, while the very hot weather lasted, I ought not to sit about on the shore in the sun, wrote out some prescriptions, which my grandmother received from his hand with an appearance of respect in which I recognized at once her firm resolve to have none of them made up for me. She did, however, heed his advice about leading a healthier life and accepted Mme de Villeparisis’s offer to take us out and about in her carriage. Before lunch-time, I kept toing and froing between my room and my grandmother’s. Unlike mine, hers did not directly overlook the sea, although it had three different aspects: on a short stretch of the esplanade, a courtyard and the countryside. Its furnishings were also very different, including armchairs embroidered in filigree and embossed with pink flowers, which seemed to be the source of the fresh and pleasant smell one encountered on entering. At that late morning moment, when rays of sunlight came in from more than one aspect and seemingly from other times of day, breaking the angles of the walls, setting side by side on the chest of drawers a reflection from the beach and a wayside altar of colours as variegated as flowers along a lane, alighting brightly on the wainscot with the warm tremble of folded wings ready to fly away, warming like bath-water a country mat by the little courtyard window, which the sunshine festooned like a vine, adding to the charm and the decorative complexity of the furnishings by seeming to peel away the flowered silk of the armchairs and unpick their braidings, that room where I loitered for a moment before dressing for our outing was a prism in which the colours of the light from outside were dispersed, a hive in which all the heady nectars of the day awaiting me were still separate and ungathered but already visible, a garden of hopes shimmering with shafts of silver and rose petals. My very first act had been to open my curtains, in my impatience to see which sea was playing by the shore each morning like a Nereid. Whichever one it was, it was never there for more than a day. The following day, it would be replaced by another one, which at times resembled it; but I never saw the same one twice.
Some of them were full of such rare beauty that my delight in seeing them was increased by surprise. When I opened my window, why did my marvelling eyes have the mysterious privilege, on one morning rather than on another, of seeing the nymph Glauconome,26 whose lazy, soft-breathing loveliness had all the glow of a cloudy emerald, through which I could see the swell of the elements which gave her body and colour? She flirted with the sunshine, her melting smile veiled by an invisible mist which was only a vacant space about her translucent surface, making it more succinct and striking, like the goddess shaped by a sculptor on a block, the rest of which he leaves rough-hewn. With her unique colour, she whetted the appetite for an outing; and all day long, as we rode in Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage along rough, land-bound roads, we would look at the cool, smooth-swelling, unattainable sea.
Mme de Villeparisis had her horses harnessed at an early hour, so that we could have time to go as far as Saint-Mars-le-Vêtu, the rocks at Quetteholme or some other destination, which at a pace as sedate as ours lay rather far away and would require the whole day to go there and back. Looking forward to the lengthy excursion, I walked up and down, humming a tune recently heard as I waited for Mme de Villeparisis to come down. If it was a Sunday morning, there would be other carriages besides hers standing outside the hotel: several hired cabs would have come for the people who had been invited by Mme de Cambremer to her château at Féterne, and also for those who, rather than sit about moping like children deprived of a treat, announced that a Sunday in Balbec was unbearable, then set off as soon as breakfast was over to take refuge in a nearby resort or visit one of the local beauty spots. If anyone asked Mme Blandais whether she had been to the Cambremers’, she would bark, ‘Of course not! We went to the waterfalls at Le Bec,’ as though that was the sole reason why she had not spent the day at Féterne. The bâtonnier would say in a sympathetic voice:
‘I must say I do envy you. I wish we could have changed places. They’re so much more interesting.’
Like a rare species of shrub in a tub, near the carriages, in front of the porch where I was waiting, stood a young page who amazed the eye as much by the remarkable harmonies of his coloured hair as by his plant-like skin. Inside the hotel, in the vestibule, which could be entered by people not staying at the hotel, and which corresponded to the narthex or church of the catechumens in Romanesque church buildings, the outside page’s fellows, though just as inactive as he was, were at least in motion. Very likely they helped with the cleaning in the mornings. But in the afternoons, they stood about like members of the chorus who, even when serving no musical purpose, remain on stage to fill out crowd scenes. The managing director, he whom I found so awesome, was considering increasing their numbers the following summer, for he was a ‘man of vision’. This was a decision which upset the manager of the hotel, who was convinced that all these lads were just ‘obstruberant’, by which he meant they got in everybody’s way and served no useful purpose. However, they did at least fill up that slack time, punctuated only by the comings and goings of guests, between lunch and dinner, as Mme de Maintenon’s charges used to walk on, in the guise of young Israelites, at each exit of Esther or Joad.27 But the outside page with his remarkable hues and his tall willowy figure, near whom I stood waiting for the Marquise to appear, was a model of immobility, with something weepy in his posture as well, as his brothers had left this hotel behind them on their rise to higher destinies, and he felt lonely planted in this foreign field. Mme de Villeparisis came down eventually. To busy himself about her carriage, to hand her into it might have seemed to be part of the outside page’s duties. But he was well aware that those who travel accompanied by servants not only expect them to serve but also hand out few tips to employees of hotels; and that the nobles of the erstwhile Faubourg Saint-Germain behave in the same way. Mme de Villeparisis belonged to both of these groups. The arborescent page, deciding that he could expect nothing from the Marquise, and leaving it to the head waiter and her own maid-servant to settle her in with all her things, went on sadly envying his roaming brothers’ freer fates and maintaining his vegetable stillness.
We would set off. Some time after having driven past the railway-station, we would come to a rural road which was soon to become as familiar to me as any in Combray, from the sharp turn off the main road, between pleasant little orchards, as far as the bend where we branched off, with ploughed fields on either side. Dotted here and there in the fields could be seen single apple trees, minus their blossom, of course, and showing only bunches of pistils; but this was enough to delight me, as I recognized the broad spread of those inimitable leaves which, like a carpet in church once a wedding ceremony is over, had been visited not long since by a white satin train of blushing blossom.
Back in Paris, in the May of the following year, how often I was to buy a sprig of apple from a flower-shop, then spend the night hours in the presence of its blossom, which was steeped in the same creamy essence as the frothy dust on the unopened leaf-buds, and which looked as though the florist himself, as a special favour to me, in a moment of creativity and with an ingenious matching touch, had set off the white of the full-blown corollas by flanking each of them with extra little buds of pink. I would sit and gaze at them, posing them under my lamp, spending so long with them that I was often still there when dawn tinged them with the same red with which it must have been tingeing Balbec, striving to see them with the eyes of imagination as they might have been along that road, multiplying them, setting them within the prepared frame and on the waiting canvas of those little orchards and fields, which were familiar to me as a mere drawing, but which I longed to see again, which one day I was actually to see again, when springtime, with the rapture of genius, had coloured in this bare sketch.
Before getting into the carriage, I had composed the seascape which I was looking forward to seeing, full of Baudelaire’s ‘sunbeams gleaming on the sea’ which, down in Balbec itself, I only ever
saw in patches among a vulgar clutter of bathers, their bathing-machines and yachts, from which my fancy averted its disgruntled eye. Each time Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage came to the brow of a hill, I caught sight of the sea through the branches of trees; and the distance separating me from it cancelled out the contemporary features which had as it were removed it from the world of nature and history, so that as I gazed down on the waves I could try to tell myself they were the ones which Leconte de Lisle had described in his version of the Oresteia, when he shows the shaggy warriors of heroic Hellas coming down ‘like a flight of raptors in the dawn’ and ‘flailing the sounding flood with their hundred thousand oars’.28 But now I was too far away from it; it no longer seemed to be a living thing, but more like a still life; and I could sense no power behind its spread of colours, which looked painted between the leaves and as insubstantial as the sky, differing from it only in that it was a deeper blue.
Mme de Villeparisis, who had noted my liking for churches, told me we would go one day to see this one, another day to see that one, and stressed especially the church at Carqueville. Saying it was ‘cosily clad in its old ivy’, she gestured in a way which seemed to enfold the absent façade in a delicate drapery of invisible foliage. This little descriptive hand movement would often accompany some striking thing she said, as she defined the charm and character of a building; and though she always eschewed technical terms, she could not conceal the fact that she was an expert on the things she spoke of. It was as though she felt she must apologize for this expertise, putting it down to the fact that one of the châteaux belonging to her father, where she had spent her childhood, stood in a part of the country where there were churches of the same style as those in the vicinity of Balbec, and that it would thus have been inexcusable for her not to have taken an interest in architecture, if only because the château itself was the finest example of the architecture of the Renaissance. But since it was also a veritable museum, where Chopin and Liszt had played, and Lamartine had recited poetry, where every celebrated artist for a century had left a thought, a tune or a sketch in the visitors’ book, Mme de Villeparisis preferred, whether because of good breeding, graciousness, genuine modesty or even an unphilosophical cast of mind, to explain her familiarity with all the arts by that purely material circumstance, managing to let it appear that she looked on painting, music, literature and philosophy as merely the unavoidable accomplishments of any young girl given an aristocratic upbringing and happening to live in a building famous enough to figure on the list of national monuments. She gave the impression of believing that the only paintings worth anything are the ones you inherit. It was a pleasure to her one day when my grandmother admired a necklace she was wearing, which showed above the neckline of her dress. It was to be seen in a portrait of one of her forebears, by Titian, which had been in the family ever since. This was how the painting was known to be genuine. She had no interest in hearing about pictures bought up by some immensely wealthy man, being quite convinced they would be forgeries and that it would not be worth the trouble to look at them. We were aware that she did water-colours of flowers; and my grandmother, who had heard praise of them, mentioned them to her. Mme de Villeparisis’s modesty made her change the subject, but with no greater show of surprise, or even of pleasure, than if she had been an established artist whose head is not to be turned by compliments. All she said was that it was a pleasant hobby, since, though painted flowers might not be as good as the real thing, at least one had to live in the company of natural blooms in order to paint them; and when one was obliged to examine them closely for the purpose of imitation, there was an inexhaustible delight in their beauty. However, in Balbec, Mme de Villeparisis intended to do none of this, as she needed to rest her eyes.
My grandmother and I were astonished to discover how left-of-centre her views were, much more so than those of most middle-class people. She in her turn was astonished that anyone could be shocked by the expulsions of the Jesuits, saying that there was nothing new in it, that it had been done in the time of the monarchy, and even in Spain. She was in favour of the Republic; and her only objection against its anti-clericalism she expressed as follows: ‘I should be as much against being prevented from going to Mass if I wanted to go as I should be against being made to go to Mass if I didn’t want to go!’ She even said things like, ‘The nobility nowadays, I ask you, what are they worth?’ and ‘If you ask me, a man who doesn’t work is beyond the pale!’ Of course, her reason for speaking like this may only have been that she sensed how strikingly paradoxical and provocative it would sound, coming from her.
The overt and frequent advocacy of such advanced opinions – they fell short of socialism, however, which was Mme de Villeparisis’s pet aversion – by the very sort of person whose fine mind one esteems to the point of being reluctant, in one’s sedulously diffident impartiality, to condemn the ideas of conservatives, brought my grandmother and myself close to believing that in our pleasant companion were to be found the measure and model of truth in all things. When she was pronouncing upon her Titians, the colonnade at her château or Louis-Philippe’s calibre as a conversationalist, we took her word for it. But – like those scholars who can astound listeners when they hold forth on Egyptian painting or Etruscan inscriptions, while having nothing but shallow platitudes to deliver on literary works from nearer our own time, making us wonder whether we have not been mistaken in thinking their academic speciality interesting, since we have noticed in it none of the mediocrity of mind which they must have brought to it, just as they brought it to their vapid studies of Baudelaire – Mme de Villeparisis, when I asked her about Chateaubriand, Balzac or Victor Hugo, all of whom had been guests in her parents’ house and whom she herself had even glimpsed, found my admiration of them laughable, told me anecdotes about them which were just as mordant as any she had recounted about great nobles or statesmen, and frowned on them as writers, because they had been immoderate, full of themselves, deficient in that sobriety of manner which achieves its art in a single true stroke, without ever overdoing anything, which shuns especially the tomfooleries of grandiloquence, because they had lacked the deftness of touch and certain qualities of measured judgment and simplicity in which she had been taught to see the mark of genuine worth; and it was clear she had no hesitation in seeing them as inferior to men who, by virtue of those very qualities, might well have outshone the Balzacs, Hugos and Vignys, in a salon, an Academy or a cabinet, men like Molé, Fontanes, Vitrolles, Bersot, Pasquier, Lebrun, Salvandy, Daru.29
‘I mean, take the novels of Stendhal, whom you seem to think so highly of. He would have been excessively surprised to be told of any such thing. My father, who used to see him at the house of M. Mérimée – now, there was a man of talent, I can assure you! – my father often told me that Beyle (his real name) was a man of the most frightful vulgarity. But he was a witty fellow to have at a dinner, and he never went in for bragging about his books. You’ve presumably read for yourself the piece with which he shrugged off the inordinate praise heaped on him by M. de Balzac. So at least in that respect he knew how to behave.’ She possessed pieces in the handwriting of every one of these great men; and she appeared to believe, on the strength of the personal acquaintance her family had enjoyed with them, that her judgment of their value was more accurate than that of people who, like myself, were too young to have known them.
‘You can take it from me. Because the fact is they were in and out of my father’s house. As M. Sainte-Beuve used to say, and he was a fine judge of wit, one should take the word of people who knew them at first hand and could size them up properly.’30
At times, as we climbed a rise with ploughed land on either side, hesitant cornflowers, reminiscent of those in Combray, came straggling after the carriage, making the fields more real, adding a touch of genuineness, like the precious little flower used by certain old masters as a signature on their canvases. The horses soon outdistanced them; but a few paces further on, there would be anothe
r one waiting for us, twinkling its blue star in the grass. Some even dared to stand right beside the roadway; and these tame flowers clustered together with my remote memories into a nebula.
As we drove down the other side of the rise, we would come upon some other lovely creature who was walking up the hill, climbing it on her bicycle, sitting on a cart or in a carriage, one of those flowers of the bright and beautiful day, but unlike the wild flowers sprinkled about the fields in that each of them showed some feature which none of the others had, and which would create a desire for her that it would be for ever impossible to satisfy with any of them except herself, whether she was a farm-girl leading a cow or sprawled on a waggon, a shop-girl out for a walk, or some smart young lady perched opposite her parents in their barouche. Bloch had, of course, opened a whole new era for me and had given a new point to life by informing me that the solitary dreams I had once dramatized during my walks along the Méséglise way, starring a peasant girl who would fall into my arms, were not just idle fancies unrelated to the world outside me, but that every single one of these girls, from the village girl to the smart young lady, was ready and willing to oblige me. Though I was now in ill-health and did not go out alone, and though I might never aspire to making love with them, it still gladdened me to know this, as though I was a child who, having been born in prison or hospital, and having come to believe that the human organism can digest nothing but dry bread and medicines, suddenly learns that peaches, apricots and grapes are not just pretty things that grow in the countryside, but mouthwatering delicacies on which one may feed. Even though the gaoler or the nurse may prevent him from picking such fine fruit, the world seems a better place, and life itself more worth living. Any desire we may feel seems to us a finer thing, and we have an impression of it as a more reliable thing, when we know that external reality is in conformity with it, even if its fulfilment remains out of our personal reach. So, on condition that we avert our mind’s eye for a moment from the small accidental impediment standing between such a desire and ourselves, the thought of living gives us greater joy now that we can imagine the enjoyment of it. As soon as I knew that each beautiful girl I happened to see would welcome my kiss on her cheek, I became curious about her soul; and the whole universe had begun to seem more interesting.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 36
