In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  I knew none of the women who were at Rivebelle and who, because they were part of my drunkenness, as reflections are part of a mirror, seemed infinitely more desirable than the more and more non-existent Mlle Simonet. A young blonde with a forlorn air, sitting alone, wearing her straw-hat with wild flowers about its brim, gave me a brief wistful glance and seemed attractive to me. I noticed another one, then a third; she was replaced by a brunette with a magnificent complexion. Almost all of them were known, if not to me, to Saint-Loup.

  Before meeting his present mistress, he had in fact been so familiar with the small world of debauchery that, of all the women who dined on those evenings at Rivebelle, many of whom were there quite by chance, some having come to the coast at the behest of their present lover, others in the hope of finding a new lover, there were very few whom he did not know, either he or one or other of his friends having spent at least a night with most of them. If they were in the company of a man, he did not greet them; and though the women glanced at him more than at other men, since the indifference they knew he felt towards any woman who was not his actress gave him a strange prestige in the eyes of the others, they too gave the appearance of not knowing him. One of them would murmur, ‘There’s young Saint-Loup. It seems he still loves his little trollop. It’s the great love of his life! What a handsome chap, though! I think he’s just lovely. And what style! Some women have all the luck. He’s a good sort in all other ways, too. I knew him well when I was with d’Orléans – they were inseparable. Mind you, he burned the candle at both ends in those days! He’s stopped all that now, though: he’s only got eyes for her. I wonder if she knows how lucky she is. And I wonder what he sees in her. He must be a bit of a fool, though: she’s got feet like barges and a walrus moustache – and her undies are just filthy! Even a factory-girl wouldn’t have drawers like hers! Take a look at those eyes – a girl could really go for a man like him. Not a word, now, he’s recognized me, he’s laughing – he knew a thing or two about me! Just ask him about me!’ I caught knowing glances passing between him and them. I wished he would introduce me to these women, so that I could ask them for an appointment and they agree to one, even though I might not be able to keep it. For otherwise, in my memory, a particular part would be for ever missing from the face of each of them – as though she was wearing a veil – a part which varies from woman to woman, which we cannot imagine on an individual face when we have never seen it there, as it appears only in eyes looking at ours, accepting our desire and promising that it will be satisfied. However, even in this unfinished form, the faces of these women meant much more to me than those of women I suspected of being virtuous, having none of the flatness and emptiness of theirs, which were made out of a single piece and without depth. For me, of course, these faces were not what they must have been for Saint-Loup: in his memory, through the transparent indifference of impassive features which feigned not to know him, under the ordinariness of a greeting which could have been exchanged with anyone else, he could see the tumbled hair, the gasping mouth, the half-closed eyes, all the detail of a silent scene which a painter, wishing not to offend visitors to his studio, conceals behind a more seemly canvas. For me, aware as I was that nothing of my life had penetrated these women’s, and that, whichever roads they might take in the future, nothing of me would go with them, their faces remained closed. But the simple knowledge that they could open was enough to make me see them as prizes worth winning, which they would not have seemed if they had been mere medals, however fine, rather than lockets with mementoes of love hidden inside. As for Robert, who became restless as soon as he had to sit for a while, concealing behind the smile of the courtier the warrior’s zest for action, I only had to look at him closely to realize how similar the emphatic bone-structure of his triangular face must be to that of his ancestors, more that of the ardent archer than of the sensitive bookman. Through the fine skin, the strong shapes of feudal architecture were visible. His head reminded one of an ancient castle keep, with its unmanned battlements still preserved, but its interior transformed into a library.

  All the way back to Balbec, if it happened that Robert had introduced me to one or other of these unfamiliar women, I kept repeating to myself, as though singing over a remembered refrain, without a second’s pause, but almost without noticing what I was doing, ‘What a delightful woman!’ The words, rather than expressing a lasting judgment, were prompted by a state of nervous excitement. Nevertheless, if I had had 1,000 francs on me, and if any jewellers had been open at that hour, I would have bought a ring for her. When the compartments in which we live parts of our lives are too different from one another, we can expend ourselves on a person who, by the following day, may come to seem uninteresting. But we feel responsible for what we may have said the night before, and wish to honour it.

  As I was back late to the hotel on those nights, it was a pleasure to walk into the bedroom, which had stopped being hostile, and find the bed, in which I had been sure on first arriving that I could never go to sleep, and which was now a comfort to my weary limbs; and one after the other, my thighs, my hips, my shoulders tried to imprint their every feature in the sheets enveloping the mattress, as though my tiredness were a sculptor moulding a cast of the whole human body. However, sleep evaded me: I was aware of the imminence of the morning; peace of mind and well-being of body were no longer in me. In my distress, I felt I had lost them for ever. To enjoy them again, I would have needed to sleep for a long time. But even if I had fallen asleep, I would still have been wakened a couple of hours later by the symphony concert. Then suddenly I was unconscious, submerged in the dense sleep which reveals to us mysteries such as youth regained, the rediscovery of years past and emotions once felt, disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the summoning-up of the dead, the illusions of the mad, travel in time back to the most primitive stages of nature (for it is said we often see animals in our dreams, forgetting that, almost always when we dream, we ourselves are animals deprived of the clarity of certainty shed on all things by our faculty of reason; instead of it, all we can turn on the spectacle of life is an infirm gaze which is abolished by oblivion at every successive moment, each reality no sooner glimpsed than vanishing in the face of the next one, as the slides projected by a magic lantern succeed one another), mysteries which we think are closed to us, yet which we are admitted to almost every night, just as we are to the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection. The difficulty of digesting the Rivebelle dinner meant that it was in a more fitful light that I visited in incoherent succession the darkened zones of my past life, and that I became a creature for whom supreme happiness would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just had a dream conversation.

  In addition, even my own daily life would be completely hidden from me by new scenery, like the décor set out near the edge of the stage, in front of which, while the scene-shifting is going on behind it, actors present a divertissement. The one in which I was cast to play a part was after the manner of Oriental tales: I had no knowledge of my past life or of myself, because of the extreme nearness of the intervening scenery; I was just a character getting a good flogging, being punished in various ways for an unexplained misdemeanour, which was that I had drunk too much port. Suddenly awake, I would realize that a long sleep had prevented me from hearing the symphony concert. It was already the afternoon, as I would see from my watch, after attempts to sit up, unsuccessful at first and interrupted by collapses on to the pillow, brief collapses of the sort which follow sleep, the drunkenness caused by wine, or that other intoxication one experiences in convalescence; but in any case, before I had looked at the time, I knew for certain that it was after midday. The night before, I had been a creature without substance, weightless and unable to stop moving or talking (as in order to sit up, it is necessary to have been lying down, and in order to stop talking, it is necessary to have been asleep); I had had neither consistency nor centre of gravity, I was unstoppable, I felt my monotonous trajectory could
have taken me as far as the moon. But in sleeping, though my eyes had been incapable of telling the time, my body had known how to, measuring it not according to the surface markings of a clockface, but by its continuous hefting of all my refreshed energies which, cog by cog, like the mechanism of a powerful timepiece, it had gradually lowered, moving them from my brain down into the rest of my body, where they were now stocked, the unused abundance of their supply reaching already above my knees. If it is true that the sea was once our life-giving environment, in which we must reimmerse our blood so as to restore our strength, the same can be said of forgetting, of mental oblivion: for some hours, we seem to live outside time; but the energy accumulated unspent during that period measures it by itself, as accurately as the weights of a clock or the trickling little sand-hill in an hour-glass. Such a sleep is no easier to leave than a period of prolonged wakefulness, all things tending to endure; and if it is true that some narcotics make one sleep, sleep itself, if long, is a more powerful narcotic, from which we have great difficulty in waking. Like a sailor who can see the pier where he must moor, but whose boat is still rocked by the waves, I had a clear impression of looking at the time and getting up; but my body was tossed back again and again into sleep; my landing was a difficult one, and before I could stand up and reach for my watch, so as to compare its time with the time indicated by the wealth of materials stored in my once-weary legs, I fell back two or three more times on the pillow.

  Able at last to make out the time – ‘Two o’clock in the afternoon!’ – I rang; but then I immediately fell into another sleep which, to judge by the feeling I had on waking from it, of being fully rested, and the vision I had of having slept through an immense length of night, must have been infinitely longer than the previous one. But since what woke me was Françoise coming in, in answer to my ring, this sleep which had seemed so much longer than the earlier one, and had afforded me such a depth of beneficent relief from consciousness, had lasted no more than half a minute.

  My grandmother was opening my bedroom door: I asked her some questions about the Legrandins.

  I had done more than just return to mental repose and well-being: between them and me, the night before, there had been more than a slight distance, and I had had to struggle all night long against a torrent of foreignness; yet now here they were, not only back within my reach, but inside me. My ideas had taken up their former places in precise and as yet rather painful corners of my empty head, which would one day be split open, scattering them to the winds and ending an existence which they had so far put, alas, to little profit.

  Once more I had escaped the impossibility of sleeping, and the ravages and the havoc of nervous disorder which it brought. Everything which had been a menace to me the night before, when I was without rest, was now incapable of alarming me. A new life stretched before me: without making a single movement, since I still felt crippled though already alert, I revelled in my exhaustion; it had dismembered me and broken the bones in my arms and legs, which I could feel lying there close by, ready to be reassembled, and which I was going to bring together again, with a mere song, like the builder in the fable.86

  I suddenly remembered the young blonde with the wistful look who had glanced at me at Rivebelle. During the evening at the restaurant, many other women had seemed just as nice, yet she was the one who now stood alone in my memory. I had the feeling that she must have noticed me: one of the waiters from Rivebelle might even now be bringing me a note from her! She was not known to Saint-Loup, who had thought she was respectable. It would be difficult to see her, and to go on seeing her. But I was prepared to do anything that would make it possible; I could think of nothing but her. Philosophy talks of free acts and necessary acts. Perhaps none is so completely inescapable as the one which, on the release of a hitherto compressed elevating force, brings up to the surface of the idling mind a memory which was weighted down at the same level as others by the ballast of activity and preoccupation, and makes it spring to the mind’s eye because, unknown to us, it contains a charm which the others lack, and which we notice only twenty-four hours later. But perhaps none is so completely free either, since such an act is still unaffected by habit, that type of mental obsessiveness which, under the aggravation of love, becomes the exclusive rehearsal of the memory of a certain person.

  It was the day after I had seen my group of girls profiled in beautiful procession against the sea. I asked several of the hotel-guests about them, people who often spent their summers at Balbec, but they could tell me nothing. Some time later, a photograph was to explain why: in the group as it was now, in these girls who had barely, but definitively, left behind the age at which we change for ever, could anyone have recognized the delightful, amorphous mass of little girls, still children, who only a few years before were to be seen sitting in a circle on the sand, by a tent, a white blur of a constellation, in which a pair of eyes finer than any other pair, a mischievous face, a head of fair hair, once noticed, would soon have gone unnoticed, blended back into the milky, indistinct nebula?

  No doubt, at that time, so few years before, it was not the vision of the group which lacked clarity, as it had been the day before when they first appeared to me, but the group itself. In those days, the girls were too young to have gone beyond the elementary degree of formation of self, when personality has not yet stamped its seal on each face. Like primitive organisms in which the individual hardly exists, or rather in which it is constituted more by the polypary than by each of its component polyps, they lived in a close conglomerate, huddled together. One of them would suddenly push another one over, and a fit of the giggles, which seemed to be the only manifestation in them of personal life, convulsed them all at once, masking and unifying the undefined, grimacing faces in the sparkle and translucency of a single, quivering cluster. In an old photograph which they subsequently gave me, and which I have kept, their pack of children numbers no fewer of them than were to figure later in their feminine company; it suggests that even then the blur of colour they made on the beach was remarkable enough to make eyes turn towards them, but in order to recognize any of them individually, one must resort to deduction, try to imagine the whole range of their possible transformations during later childhood, up to the point at which their remodelled forms started to coincide with another individual set of features, which one must attempt to identify also in the beautiful face (now accompanied by full height and hair that is waved) that might once have belonged to the photo’s wizened and grimacing gnome; and the distance covered in so short a time by the physical characteristics of each of the girls was such an unreliable criterion – in addition to which, their collectiveness, so to speak, and the things they had in common, were already so marked – that even their best friends could look at that photograph and mistake them for one another; with the result that the uncertainty could be dispelled only by the presence of some article of clothing which one of them knew without a doubt that she, and not one of the others, had worn. Different though those earlier days were from the day when I had seen them on the esplanade – different, yet so close to it – the girls still enjoyed laughing with gusto, as I had noticed the day before; but this laughter was not the intermittent and almost automatic sort indulged in by children, the spasmodic release which had once made the whole group of heads duck down as one, as a block of minnows in the Vivonne used to dive and disintegrate, before reforming a moment later; their individual faces had now become capable of self-mastery, their eyes remaining fixed throughout on the aim they pursued; and the day before, it had been only my indecision and the vacillation of my initial perception which, like their former hilarity and the old photo, had fused into an indistinct whole the now individualized and separated sister stars of the pale madrepore.

  Of course, when I saw pretty girls pass by, I often promised myself I would make a point of seeing them again. Usually, such girls make no reappearance in one’s life; and memory, quickly mislaying their existence, would be hard put to remember th
eir features; perhaps our eyes would not even recognize them again, and before long we see others passing by, whom we shall not see again either. However, on other occasions – and this was what was to happen with this little gang of impudent girls – further chance encounters bring them back into our field of vision. In such chance there is seeming beauty, for we see in it an incipient intent or effort to organize our life, to give it shape; and it is this same chance which can make it easy for us, inevitable and sometimes even cruel – after intermissions which may have made us hope for a cessation of such memories – for us to acquire a sort of fidelity to mental images which we may come to believe we were predestined to acquire, yet which, had it not been for that chance, we could have forgotten at the very beginning, like so many others, so easily.