In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  Saint-Loup’s stay at Balbec was soon to come to an end. I had not seen any of the girls on the beach again. He could spend too few afternoons at Balbec to be able to busy himself with getting to know them on my behalf. In the evenings, he had more time and often took me out to Rivebelle. In those sorts of restaurants, as in public parks and trains, one comes across people enclosed in an ordinary appearance, and whose name astonishes us if, having asked by chance what they are called, we discover them to be, not the nondescript nobody we had supposed, but none other than the minister or the duke whom we have so often heard of. In the Rivebelle restaurant, Saint-Loup and I had several times noticed a tall man, very well-built, with regular features and a beard turning grey, who, having arrived when most other diners were leaving, would sit at a table resolutely staring at nothing with pensive, unfocussed eyes. When we asked the owner one night who this unknown, solitary, belated diner was, he replied, ‘What? Don’t you know the famous painter Elstir?’ Swann had once spoken the name of Elstir in my presence, though I had completely forgotten in what connection; but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty. ‘He’s a friend of Swann’s, a very well-known artist, among the best,’ I said to Saint-Loup. The immediate thought that thrilled through the mind of each of us was that Elstir was a great artist, a famous man; and the next was that he must look on us as he looked on the other diners, and be quite unaware of the excitement that filled us at the knowledge of his brilliance. Had we not been at the seaside, we would not have been irked to realize he knew nothing of our admiration for him or our acquaintance with Swann. But we were still at an age when enthusiasm cries out to be known of; and with a sudden conviction that our incognito was intolerable, we wrote a letter, which we both signed, telling Elstir that the two diners sitting not far away were ardent admirers of his ability and friends of his great friend Swann, and asking his permission to present our compliments. We got a waiter to take our message to the famous man.

  To tell the truth, Elstir may not have been quite as famous at that time as the owner of the restaurant claimed, or as he became not many years later. He had been one of the first to live in the restaurant, at a time when it was still little more than a farm-house, to which he had brought a colony of artists (all of whom had later migrated elsewhere, once the farm-house, where they had eaten out of doors under a simple canopy, had become a fashionable rendezvous; the only reason Elstir himself had come back to eat at that time at Rivebelle was that his wife, with whom he lived not far from there, was briefly away from home). But a great talent, even when it goes largely unrecognized, is bound to give rise to certain manifestations of admiration, such as those the owner of the farm-house had seen in the questions of more than one visiting Englishwoman, eager for information on the life led by Elstir, and in the number of letters the artist received from abroad. The owner had also noticed that Elstir disliked being interrupted while he was working, that when the moonlight was good, he got up in the middle of the night, so as to take a young model down to pose in the nude by the sea; and on recognizing in one of Elstir’s paintings a wooden cross which stood just outside Rivebelle, he had decided that such self-imposed discipline was not wasted, and the admiration of the tourists not unjustified. ‘It’s the very same cross, I tell you!’ he would say in amazement. ‘You can see the four bits of it! Mind you, he really goes at it.’

  And he wondered whether a little Sunrise on the Sea, given to him by Elstir, might not be worth a fortune.

  We saw Elstir read our letter, slip it into his pocket, go on with his dinner, then ask for his things and leave the table. By now we were so sure that by writing to him we had given offence that we would have preferred (as much as before we would have been reluctant) to leave the restaurant without being noticed by him. We gave not the slightest thought to a thing which should have seemed the most important of all: that our enthusiasm for Elstir, the sincerity of which we would not have allowed anyone to doubt (and in its support we could, of course, have alleged our bated breath and our wish to do anything for the great man, as long as it was difficult or heroic), was not, as we believed it was, admiration, since we had never seen any of his canvases; it was possible for such a feeling to be inspired by the empty idea of ‘a great artist’, but not by work which was completely unknown to us. At best, it was theoretical admiration, the nervous framework and emotional skeleton of an admiration without object, that is to say, something as inseparably linked to childhood as certain organs which no longer exist in the body of a grown man: we were still boys. Elstir had almost reached the door, when he turned and came towards us. I felt myself flooded with a feeling of delicious terror, the like of which I would have been incapable of experiencing a few years later, for not only does age diminish the ability, but habituation to society takes away all impulse, to bring about such strange occasions and the sort of feelings that accompany them.

  Elstir sat with us at our table and spoke a few words; but he did not pursue any of the allusions I made during the conversation to Swann. I could easily have believed he did not know him. He did, however, invite me to go and see him at his studio in Balbec, an invitation which did not include Saint-Loup, and which I owed to the fact that I had said a few things which made him think I had an interest in the arts (an invitation, be it said, which might never have been issued in response to a recommendation from Swann, if Elstir had been a close friend of his, as the influence of disinterest on the feelings of men is greater than is commonly believed). He treated me in a markedly friendly manner, which outdid Saint-Loup’s as much as Saint-Loup’s outdid the affability of a person from the lower middle classes. However charming the kindness of a lord may be, compared to the kindness of a great artist, it always suggests play-acting, pretence. Saint-Loup’s aim was to please; Elstir’s was to give, and to give himself: he would have gladly given whatever he possessed, ideas, works and all the rest that he valued much less highly, to anyone who understood him. But he found something lacking in the company of most people, and lived in a state of isolation and unsociability which fashionable people saw as ill-mannered and affected, the powers-that-be as wrong-headed, his neighbours as mad, and his family as arrogant and inconsiderate.

  To begin with, even in his solitude, he must have taken pleasure in the thought that, through his works, he was addressing, albeit at a remove, those who had misunderstood or offended him, and giving them a better opinion of himself. Perhaps his choice of the solitary life was motivated not by indifference towards others, but by love for them; and, much as I had given up Gilberte in the hope of being able to appear to her in the future in a more lovable guise, perhaps he painted with certain people in mind, in a sort of gesture of reconciliation towards them, so that, without ever meeting again, they would love him, admire him, speak about him; renunciation is not always total from the very first moment – the self which commits us to it is a former self, one which has not yet been acted upon by the fact of renunciation itself, whether it be the renunciation of the invalid, the monk, the artist or the hero. However, even if Elstir’s intention had been to work with a view to impressing certain people, in working he had lived only for himself, turning his back on the society to which he had become indifferent: the practice of solitude had given him a love for it, which is what happens with any important thing that we have ever begun by fearing, because we knew it was incompatible with pettier things to which we were attached, and from which it must sever us for ever, rather than just distract us from them. Before we have committed ourselves to it, our whole concern is to know how we may be able to reconcile it with certain pleasures, which will cease being pleasures as soon as we have experience of it.

  Elstir did not sit talking with us for very long. I told myself I would go to his studio at some time over the next two or three days; but then, the very next afternoon, my grandmother and I having been for a walk to the cliffs of Canapville, right at the far end of the e
splanade, we were on our way back when we passed a young girl, at the corner of one of the side-streets which run perpendicular to the beach: hanging her head, like an animal being forced back to the stable, and carrying golf-clubs, she was walking in front of an authoritative-looking personage, presumably her English governess, or the English governess of one of her friends, who looked like John Jeffreys in the portrait by Hogarth, with a complexion so red as to make one think she drank gin rather than tea, and a black trace of tobacco adding its curl to a grey moustache which was quite pronounced. The girl walking in front of her bore some resemblance to the one in the group whose chubby, motionless face, with its laughing eyes, had been topped by a black toque: this girl also wore a black toque, but she seemed much prettier than the other one, the line of her nose being straighter and the wings of her nostrils wider and more fleshy. The first one had looked like a pale and proud young lady; this one was more like a pink-faced child, grudgingly submissive. However, as she was pushing a similar bicycle along, and wearing the same reindeer-skin gloves, I deduced that the differences might have to do with my angle of vision and the circumstances, since it was unlikely there would be a second young girl in Balbec whose face looked so much like hers, and with so many other similarities in articles of dress and equipment. She sidled a quick glance towards me; and over the following days, each time I caught sight of the little gang of girls on the beach, and even later, after I had come to know all of them, I could never be absolutely sure whether any of them, including the first one with the bicycle, who looked more like her than any of the others, was in fact this one I had seen that evening, at the far end of the beach, by the street-corner, this one who was hardly any different, but who was actually a little bit different, from the one I had noticed in their procession.

  From that moment on, although until then I had been thinking mostly about the tall one, it was once more the girl with the golf-clubs, whom I assumed to be Mlle Simonet, who preoccupied me. Walking along with the others, she would often stop, making her friends, who seemed to respect her greatly, also come to a standstill. That is how I see her to this day: standing there, her eyes shining under her toque, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sea, and separated from me by the transparent sky-blue stretch of time elapsed since that moment, the first glimpse of her in my memory, a very slight image of a face first desired and pursued, then forgotten, then found again, a face which since then I have often projected into the past, so as to say to myself, of a girl with me in my bedroom, ‘That was her!’

  But I was not really sure whether the girl I would have preferred to know was not perhaps the one with the green eyes and the cheeks suggesting geraniums. And whichever one of them I chose to look out for on different days, the presence of the others, even without her, was enough to fill me with excitement: even if my desire bore on one of them some of the time and on another at other times, it went on seeing them all, as on the first day of my indistinct vision of them, as one, as a little world apart, living a single life, which was probably how they liked to see themselves; and if I could have become friends with only one of them, I would have gained access – like a refined pagan, or a Christian full of scruples, fallen among barbarians – to a whole society with powers of rejuvenation, a society based on rude health, recklessness, bodily pleasure, cruelty, non-intellectuality and joy.

  My grandmother, whom I had told of my encounter with Elstir, and who was pleased to think of all the intellectual advantage there could be for me in the friendship of such a man, thought I was absurd and impolite not to have gone and visited him before this. But I could think of nothing other than the little band of girls; and unsure as I was of when they might appear, I did not dare to leave the esplanade. My grandmother was also surprised at how elegantly I dressed, as I had suddenly remembered suits which till then had remained in my trunk. Now I wore a different one every day and had even written to Paris to ask for new hats and ties to be sent down.

  The life we lead in a seaside resort such as Balbec can acquire much charm if the sight of a pretty face, a seller of sea-shells, a florist, a girl in a cake-shop, painted in its vivid colours in our morning memory, becomes the aim of each of the sunlit days we idle away on the sands. It is this aim which makes them, though holidays, as busy as working-days, marked by directions and destinations, tending always towards the coming moment, when in buying our ammonites, our shortbread or our roses, we can delight in the colours of a feminine face, as pure and clear as those of a flower. But with shop-girls, at least one can chat, which avoids the necessity of filling in by imagination all the aspects of them not directly perceptible to the eye, of inventing a life for them and exaggerating the charm of it, as though extrapolating from a mere portrait; and for another thing, for the very reason that they can be chatted with, one can learn where and when to meet them. This, of course, was nothing like the position I was in with the girls of the little gang. On days when I did not see them, as their habits were unknown to me, I was in total ignorance of the possible cause of their non-appearance: did they only come every second day, or in certain weather, or were there days when they were never to be seen? I imagined being their future friend and being able to say, ‘But you didn’t come on such-and-such a day? – True, because it was a Saturday, and we never come on Saturdays because …’ Not that it was as simple as just knowing that on sad Saturdays it was futile to hope against hope, that I could walk up and down the beach, sit in the window-seat of the cake-shop, pretend to eat an eclair, wander into the curiosity shop, moon about waiting for it to be time to go for a bathe, listen to the concert, watch the fishing-boats come in, see the sunset, then nightfall, and still not have seen the little group I longed for. For it was possible the dreaded day did not come round once a week. Nor might it be a Saturday. Certain atmospheric conditions might have an influence on it – or conversely, might have nothing at all to do with it. How many patient, but not dispassionate, observations must be recorded about the apparently erratic movements of these unknown worlds, before one can be sure of having ruled out misleading coincidences, of having confirmed one’s predictions, and being able to draw up the infallible laws, arrived at through cruel experience, of this passionate astronomy! I would remember that I had not seen them on this day last week, and concluded that they would not appear, that it was pointless to stay down on the beach. And then I would see them! But then, on another day which, in so far as I could detect the functioning of laws in the recurrences of their constellation, I had calculated must be an auspicious one, they did not appear. Then my initial uncertainty about whether I would see them or not on a particular day was aggravated by another, much more serious one, whether I would see them ever again – for all I knew, they might be leaving for America or returning to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to fall in love with them. Having a liking for someone is one thing; but to be afflicted with the sadness, the feeling of something irreparable having happened, the anguish which all accompany the onset of love, what is necessary is the risk – which may even be the object to which passion in its fretfulness tries to cling, rather than to a person – of an impossibility. These forces were already working within me, and they revive each time one falls in love (they can in fact attach themselves, though usually this only happens in town life, to working-class girls, if one is unaware of their day off and fails to see them leaving the factory at the end of the day’s work), or at least that is what happened with my successive love affairs. Perhaps such forces are inseparable from all love: it may be that whatever particularities were present in our first experience of it become incorporated into the following ones, by the workings of memory, suggestion or habit, and that, throughout the consecutive periods of our existence, they give a common character to its different phases.

  On all possible pretexts, I went down to the beach at any hour when I hoped they might be expected. Having seen them once while we were having lunch, I became very unpunctual at that meal-time, waiting about on the esplanade in case they
came along; for the short time I sat in the dining-room, my stare questioned the blue of the glass doors; I went without dessert, so as not to miss them if they had been out for their walk at some different hour; and I was annoyed at my grandmother’s unintentional unkindness, when she made me sit there with her after the time which I thought the most propitious. I tried to lengthen the horizon by setting my chair at an angle to the table; and if by some chance I caught sight of any one of the girls, it suddenly felt, since all of them had a share in the same special essence, as though a fickle and diabolical hallucination had projected before my eyes a scene from the latent dream, baleful yet ardently desired, which a moment before had existed only in my mind, where it always lay in readiness.

  Loving them all, I was in love with none of them; and yet the possibility of meeting them was the only element of delight in my days, the only source of those hopes which make one feel capable of overcoming all obstacles, and which for me, if I did not see them, were often dashed and turned to rage. The girls eclipsed my grandmother: I would gladly have left for a long journey, if it had promised to lead me to where they were. They were what was always hovering agreeably in my thoughts, whenever I thought I was thinking of something else, or of nothing. And even when I was unaware of thinking about them, at a deeper level of unconsciousness they were the towering blue waves or the shapes of a parade passing in front of the sea. If I went to another town where I might meet them, it was the sea I looked forward to seeing. The most exclusive love for any person is always love for something else.