In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage went too quickly for me to do more than glimpse the girl coming up towards us; and yet, since beauty in a human being is different from the beauty of a thing, since we feel it belongs to a unique person with an awareness of the world and a will, no sooner had the girl’s individuality, a vague hint of soul, a will unknown to me, taken shape in a microscopic image, minute but complete, caught from her passing glance, than I could feel quickening within myself, like a mysterious replica of pollens ready for the pistils, the equally vague and minute embryo of the desire not to let this girl go on her way without her consciousness registering my presence, without my intervening between her and her desire for somebody else, without my being able to intrude upon her idle mood and take possession of her heart. The carriage passed the beautiful girl, leaving her behind us; and since her eyes, which had barely glimpsed me, had gathered nothing of the person in me, she had forgotten me already. Had I thought her so lovely only because I had caught a mere glimpse of her? Perhaps. For one thing, the impossibility of stopping and accosting a woman, the likelihood of not being able to find her again some other day, gives her the same sudden charm as is acquired by a place when illness or poverty prevents one from visiting it, or by the succession of drab days of one’s unlived future when it is forfeit to death in battle. Were it not for habit, life should seem delightful to beings constantly under threat of dying, in other words to all humankind. And for another thing, though the imagination is easily teased by the desire for something we cannot possess, its wings are never clipped as they would be by a closer glimpse of reality, in these encounters where the charm of the passing beauty is generally in direct relation to their brevity. Nightfall and a coach travelling fast, in the country or in town, are all that any female torso requires, mutilated like an ancient marble by our speeding departure and the concealing dusk, standing at a road-junction and in every lighted shop, shooting the arrows of Beauty at our heart, and making us wonder at times whether Beauty in this world is ever anything other than the makeweight which our imagination, overwrought by regret, adds to a fragmentary and fleeting passer-by.

  If I had been able to get out and speak to one of these girls we passed, I might well have been disillusioned by some flaw in her complexion which I had been unaware of from the carriage. (In that case, it would suddenly have felt impossible for me to make any effort to become part of her life. For beauty is a succession of hypotheses, and ugliness restricts these by blocking the way which seemed to be already leading us into the heart of the unknown.) A single word from her, a smile, might have given me an unsuspected key or clue, enabling me to read the expression on her face or the way she walked, and I might then have recognized these as nondescript. That would have been possible, for I have never met in real life any girls as desirable as the ones I saw when in the company of some important personage who baffled all my ingenious attempts to get rid of him. One evening in Paris, some years after this first visit to Balbec, I was on an errand with a friend of my father’s, when from the carriage I caught sight of a woman walking away into the dark: the thought struck me that it was absurd to forfeit, for a reason of mere propriety, a share of happiness in this life, it being no doubt the only one we are to have, and so I jumped out without so much as a by-your-leave, ran after the intriguing creature, lost her at a crossing of two streets, saw her again in another street and eventually ran her to ground under a lamp-post, where I found I was out of breath and face to face with the ageing Mme Verdurin, whom I usually avoided like the plague and who now cried in delight and surprise, ‘Oh, how nice of you to chase after me just to say good evening!’

  That year in Balbec, when we passed these girls on the road, I told my grandmother and Mme de Villeparisis that I had a bad headache, but that I would feel much better if I could get out of the carriage and walk home unaccompanied. They never agreed to my suggestion. So the lovely girl, like a famous building (though much more difficult to see again than any building, being nameless and of no fixed location), was added to the collection of all those I had been promising myself to have a closer look at. There was one, however, whom I did catch sight of a second time, in circumstances which made me think it might be possible to get to know her properly. She was a milk-maid; and she came down one day from her farm to deliver an extra supply of cream to the hotel. The way she looked at me made me think she had recognized me too, though her interest may only have been caused by her surprise at the way I was looking at her. The following day, when Françoise came to open my bedroom curtains about midday, I having spent the whole morning resting, she brought me a letter which had been left for me by hand. Knowing no one in Balbec, I was sure it must be from the milk-maid! But, sad to say, it was only from Bergotte: he had been passing through and had called at the hotel to see me; but when they told him I was still asleep, he had left a charming note, which the ‘lift’ had slipped into an envelope and addressed in a hand which I had taken for the milk-maid’s. I was dreadfully disappointed; and the idea that it was much more difficult, as well as more flattering, to have a letter from Bergotte than from a milk-maid was no consolation. And I was to see no more of the girl than of the others only glimpsed from Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage. These glimpses, and the loss of every girl glimpsed, aggravated the state of agitation in which I spent my days; and I wished for the wisdom of the philosophers who counsel the curbing of desires (assuming they mean one’s desire for another person, as that is the only mode of desire which can lead to anxiety, focussing as it does on a world beyond our ken but within our awareness – to assume they mean desire for wealth would be too absurd). At the same time I was inclined to find something lacking in this wisdom, sensing well enough that these glimpsed encounters made for greater beauty in a world which sows such flowers, rare though common, along every country roadside, a new spice being added to life by the untried treasures of each day, by every outing with its unkept promises, my enjoyment of which had hitherto been prevented only by contingent circumstances which might not always be present.

  Of course, it may be that, in looking forward to a freer day when I might meet similar girls along different roads, I had already begun to adulterate the exclusive desire to share one’s life with an individual woman whom one has seen as pretty; and the mere act of entertaining the possibility of artificially fostering it was an implicit acknowledgement that it was an illusion.

  On the day Mme de Villeparisis took us to Carqueville, to see the church she had described as ‘clad in old ivy’, which stands on a knoll above the village with its river still running under the little bridge from the Middle Ages, my grandmother, so that I could enjoy the pleasure of going on alone to view the building, suggested to her friend that they stay in the village square, which stood out clearly under an old-gold patina making it look like just one part among others of a single object of great antiquity, to sample the pastry-cook’s tea and cakes. We agreed that I would come back down to meet them. To make out the shape of a church in the lump of greenery in front of which I stood required an effort that made me re-examine the very notion of a church: as can happen to a schoolboy who, by being made to translate a sentence into another language, divests it of shapes with which he is familiar and comes to grasp its meaning more clearly, the concept of a church, which I hardly ever needed when faced with most of the steeples I looked at, was now indispensable to me; and so as not to overlook the fact that an arch shaped from growing ivy was actually the top of an ogival stained-glass window, and that a projection of leaves was really the contour of a cornice, I had to keep it constantly in mind. When a breeze sprang up, it sent a thrill through the movable porch, eddying and rippling all over it like light, turning it into a tremulous cascade of leaves; and as the façade of vegetation swayed and shivered under the caress, it warped its shimmering pillars.

  As I left the church, I noticed a few village girls in their garish Sunday finery, standing about down by the old bridge and bantering with the local lads. One of the tall
er of the girls, less showily dressed than the others, but apparently superior to them in some way (she paid little attention to what they said to her), with a more solemn and bolder look to her, was half-sitting on the parapet of the bridge, dangling her legs, beside a little jar full of fish which she had presumably just caught. Her face was tanned; her eyes, though gentle, were full of disdain for her surroundings; and the line of her neat little nose was delicate and charming. My eyes rested on her skin and my lips could almost believe they had done likewise. It was not only her body I was after, it was the person living inside it, with whom there can only be one mode of touching, which is to attract her attention, and one mode of penetration, which is to put an idea into her mind.

  But the inner self of the beautiful fishergirl seemed to remain closed against me; and I doubted that I had managed to gain entry to her, even after I had seen my own image furtively reflected by the mirror of a look she gave me, which was affected by a refractive index as unfamiliar to me as though I stood within the field of vision of a deer. But just as it would not have been enough for me, in kissing her, to take pleasure from her lips without giving her any in return, so I wished that the idea of me, in entering her, in becoming part of her, might attract not only her attention, but her admiration, her desire, and might force it to keep a memory of me against the day when I might be able to benefit from it. Not far away I could see the little square where I was supposed to rejoin Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage. There was not a moment to waste; I could already sense that these girls were on the point of starting to giggle at seeing me stand there. I had a five-franc piece in my pocket, which I took out; and before explaining to the lovely girl what it was I wanted her to do, I held up the coin so that she could see it and in the hope that it would make her listen to me:

  ‘You appear to belong here, I said. Would you please do me a small favour? There’s a carriage waiting for me somewhere about here – I’m not quite sure where, actually, outside some cake-shop in a square, I believe – and if you could just find it for me … Now, before you go, just to be sure it’s the right one, do make sure you inquire whether it’s the carriage of the Marquise de Villeparisis. But you can’t really mistake it – it’s got two horses.’

  That was what I wanted her to know about me, so that she could be impressed. No sooner had I spoken the words ‘Marquise’ and ‘two horses’ than I felt a sudden great calm spread through me: knowing that the fishergirl would remember me, I was simultaneously aware that I had lost not only my anxiety at perhaps not being able to see her again, but with it part of my desire to do so. It felt as though I had touched her person with invisible lips and that she had liked it. As happens with physical possession, this forcible insertion of myself into her mind, this disembodied possession of her, had taken away some of her mystery.

  We drove down towards Hudimesnil, and suddenly I was filled with a feeling of profound bliss, which I associated with Combray but had seldom felt since those days, rather like the feeling I had once had from things such as the steeples of Martinville. This time, however, nothing came of it. It was just three trees which I had noticed, set back a little from the steeply cambered road we were on, looking as though they stood at the entrance to a covered drive, and making a pattern which I knew I had seen somewhere before. I could not manage to recognize the place they had, as it were, been separated from; but I sensed that it must have been somewhere familiar to me, long ago; and as my mind stumbled about between a former year and the present moment, the countryside round Balbec shifted and faltered, and I had to ask myself whether this whole outing was not just some figment, Balbec merely a place where I might once have been in my imagination, Mme de Villeparisis someone out of a novel, and the three old trees nothing but the solid reality that meets the eye of a reader who glances up from a book, his mind still held by the spell of a fictional setting.

  I gazed at the three trees, which I could see quite clearly; but my mind suspected they hid something on which it could have no purchase, as our fingertips at the full stretch of our arm may from time to time barely touch but not quite grasp objects which lie just out of reach. So one rests for a moment before trying harder, with the arm outstretched, in the hope of catching hold at last. However, for my mind to be able to pause and summon up the effort required, I would have had to be unaccompanied. How I wished I could leave the others behind, as I used to along the Guermantes Way, wandering away from my parents! I even had the feeling that I ought to do so now. I could sense in this moment the presence of one of those pleasures which, though they require the mind to work upon itself, reduce to insipidity the sweets of the mental idleness which makes one prefer to abandon the effort. It was a pleasure which came to me seldom, and its object always lay beyond my mental scope, requiring me to create it myself; but on each occasion when it did come, I would have the feeling that all the things which had happened to me since the last time were more or less devoid of significance, and that, for my real life to begin at last, I must now attend to nothing but this unique reality. I put my hand briefly over my eyes, so as to be able to close them without Mme de Villeparisis noticing. I sat there for a moment thinking of nothing; then, with the fresher impetus of pent-up consciousness, I managed to leap further in the direction of the trees, or rather towards the inner part of me where I could see them. Once again I could detect, just behind them, the same familiar but imprecise object, which I could not quite take hold of. Meanwhile, as the carriage rolled on, I could see them coming nearer. Where had I set eyes on them before? In the countryside near Combray, there was no such place with an opening to a drive. Nor did the place they reminded me of fit anywhere into the countryside round a German spa where I had gone one year with my grandmother. Did this mean they belonged to years of my past life which were so distant that the landscape surrounding them had been utterly wiped out, and that, like those passages one recognizes with sudden excitement in a text one fancied one had never read, they were the only scrap left from the forgotten story-book of my early childhood? Or did they belong to one of those places one glimpses in dreams, always the same places, or so they were in my dreams, where their strange aspect was only sleep’s translation of the efforts I kept making while awake, either to see through the appearance of a place to a mystery which I sensed lay beyond it (which had so often happened along the Guermantes Way), or to restore mystery to a place which I had longed to see and which, once I had been there, had turned into something quite superficial, as Balbec had? Were they perhaps a very recent image, a small fragment from a dream of only the night before, but already so faded that it seemed to derive from much longer ago? Or perhaps I had never seen them anywhere; and though I thought they were a memory to be recalled, were they in fact only an invitation to comprehend an idea, concealing behind themselves, like certain trees or clumps of grass glimpsed along the Guermantes Way, a meaning which was every bit as obscure and ungraspable as a distant past? Or else, might it actually be that they concealed no idea at all, and that it was only an impairment of my eyesight, making me see double in time as one can see double in space? I could not tell. Still coming towards me, they might have been some mythological apparition, a coven of witches, a group of Norns propounding oracles. But I saw them as ghosts from my past, beloved companions from childhood, sometime friends reminding me of shared moments. Like risen shades, they seemed to be asking me to take them with me, to bring them back to the realm of the living. In their naïve and passionate gesticulations, I read the impotent regret of a loved one who, having lost the power of speech, knows that he will never be able to let us know what he wants, and that we can never deduce his meaning. Soon, at a crossroads, the carriage left them behind. Like my life itself, it was carrying me away from what seemed the only truth, from what would have made me truly happy.

  I watched the trees as they disappeared, waving at me in despair and seeming to say, ‘Whatever you fail to learn from us today you will never learn. If you let us fall by this wayside where we stood stri
ving to reach you, a whole part of your self which we brought for you will return for ever to nothing.’ And it is true that, though the same mode of pleasure and disquiet which I had just experienced once more was to come back to me in later years, though I did attend to it at last one evening – too late, but for ever – I never did find out what it was these particular trees had attempted to convey to me, or where it was that I had once seen them. When the carriage went round a corner, I lost sight of them somewhere behind me; and when Mme de Villeparisis asked me why I looked so forlorn, I was as sad as though I had just lost a friend or felt something die in myself, as though I had broken a promise to a dead man or failed to recognize a god.

  It was time to think of turning for home. Mme de Villeparisis, who had a certain feeling for nature, albeit one which was less warm than my grandmother’s, and whose capacity for the appreciation of simple grandiose beauty in certain ancient things was not limited to the contents of museums and the houses of the aristocracy, told the coachman to return to Balbec by the back road, which was lined with old elm trees that we thought very fine, and where one rarely saw anyone.