In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  I had to rejoin Elstir. A mirror showed me my reflection: in addition to the disaster of not having been introduced, I noticed that my tie was crooked and that my hair, which was too long, was sticking out from under my hat. Still, it was a good thing that they had at least seen me with Elstir, even in such a state, and would not be able to forget me; and it was lucky that I had heeded my grandmother’s suggestion that I put on my handsome waistcoat, when I had all but decided to wear an awful one instead, and that I carry my best cane: no event which we look forward to ever turns out quite as we wish it to, but in the absence of the advantages we had hoped to be able to count on, others arise unexpectedly, and there are compensations; we so dreaded the worst that we are ultimately inclined, taking one thing with another, to think that chance was, on balance, on our side. ‘I would have been so happy to meet them,’ I said to Elstir as I came up with him. ‘Well, in that case what did you stand miles away for?’ Those were the words he spoke, not because they expressed his own mind, since if he had intended to grant my unspoken wish, it would have been easy for him to call me over; but possibly because they were one of those phrases he had heard, used by vulgar people who think they are in the wrong, and because even great men are like vulgar people in some things, taking their everyday excuses from the same repertoire, as they buy their daily bread from the same baker; or possibly because such words, which must in a sense be read back to front, since the letter of them means the opposite of their truth, are the necessary effect, the negative graph, as it were, of a reflex. ‘Anyway, they were in a hurry.’ I was sure they must have prevented him from introducing someone they saw as dislikable: otherwise he would have been bound to call me over, after all the questions I had asked about them, and the interest he could see I took in them. ‘I was talking to you about Carquethuit, he said, before I left him at his front door. I once did a little sketch which catches much better the neat loop of the shore-line. The painting’s not bad, but it’s not the same thing. If you like, I could give you the sketch, as a memento of our friendship,’ he added, for the people who decline to give you the things you desire give you other things.

  ‘I would very much have liked to have a photo of your little portrait of Miss Sacripant,90 if you have such a thing. Where does the name come from? – It was the name of a character acted by the model in a stupid little operetta. – But you’re aware that I’ve no idea who she is – though you seem to believe the opposite.’ Elstir said nothing. ‘You’re not going to tell me it’s Mme Swann before her marriage?’ I said, leaping in a sudden fluke to the truth, one of those fortuitous discoveries which are really quite rare occurrences, but of which there are enough to give a sort of basis to the theory of presentiments – after the event, that is, and on condition that one also discounts all the errors which invalidate it. Elstir still said nothing. It was in fact a portrait of Odette de Crécy, which she had not wished to keep, for many reasons, some of which are perfectly obvious. There were others. The painting dated from before the time when Odette, taking to designing her own appearance, had made of her face and figure the creation from which, over the years, in its broad lines, for her dressmakers, her hairdressers and for Odette herself, in her ways of standing, speaking, smiling, holding her hands, casting her glances, or even of thinking, there could now be no departure. It required the degeneration of taste in the sated lover for Swann to reject the numerous photographs of his beautiful wife in her ne varietur mode, in favour of the little photo of her which he kept in his bedroom, showing a thinnish young woman wearing a straw-hat adorned with pansies, rather plain, with puffed-out hair and drawn features.

  But even if the portrait had belonged, not to a time (like Swann’s favourite photograph) before the definitive redesign of Odette’s features into their new pattern, full of majesty and charm, but to a later period, Elstir’s vision would have sufficed to disorganize that pattern too. An artist’s genius functions like the extremely high temperatures which can dissociate combinations of atoms and reshape them into a totally opposite order, one which corresponds to a different pattern. The whole factitious harmony which a woman imposes on her features, checking the continuity of it in her mirror each day before she goes out, making sure that it inheres in the angle of the hat, the smoothness of the hair, the vivacity of her expression, can be dismantled in a second by the eye of a great painter, who puts in its stead a rearrangement of her features more in accordance with a certain feminine and pictorial ideal of his own. Similarly, it often happens that after a certain age, the eye of the great researcher, wherever it looks, notices elements essential to the establishing of the only relationships which interest him. Such men, like versatile workers or card-players who do not mind turning their hand to any job or game, could say of any material: This will do. In this connection, a cousin of the Princess of Luxembourg, a woman of great beauty and arrogance, having taken a fancy to a form of art which was new at the time, commissioned a portrait of herself from the most prominent of the painters of the Naturalist school. The artist’s eye had instantly detected what it sought everywhere: on the completed canvas, instead of the grand lady, there was a dressmaker’s errand-girl, against a broad inclined background of violet which called to mind the place Pigalle. But even without going to those lengths, not only will the portrait of a woman by a great artist not try to satisfy any of its subject’s requirements – such as those which make a woman who is beginning to age want to be photographed wearing things more suited to young girls, which flatter her with a youthful figure and make her look like the sister, or even the daughter, of her daughter, whom she may even have stand beside her in a suitably dowdy dress for the occasion – but it will underscore unfavourable features of her which she tries to conceal (such as a feverish, vaguely greenish flush to the face) and which the artist will find interesting because they have ‘character’, but which will eventually disgust the vulgar viewer, as they reduce to nothing the feminine ideal of which her person was once the impressive embodiment and which had seemed to place her, in her unique, irreducible form, beyond and far above the rest of humanity. Deposed, expelled from her own pattern, over which she had once reigned supreme, she has become a mere woman like any other, a sometime paragon in whom all faith has been lost. In our minds, the pattern constituted by an Odette de Crécy used to consist not just in her beauty, but also in her personality, her identity, so much so that, faced with the portrait which strips her of that pattern, we are tempted to exclaim not only, ‘How ugly he’s made her!’ but, ‘He can’t even paint a likeness!’ We have difficulty in believing it is the same woman; we cannot recognize her. Despite which, we sense perfectly well the presence of someone we have already seen, but it is someone who is not Odette. Yet the face, the body, the appearance are very familiar to us. They remind us, not of this woman, who has never stood like that, whose habitual posture never traces such a strange and provocative outline, but of other women, all those whom Elstir has painted and whom, however different they may be from one another, he has always liked to pose in full face like that, one arched foot showing under the skirt, the large round hat hanging from one hand, a symmetrical reminder, at the level of the knee which it conceals, of the other full round disk of the face. A brilliant portrait not only disassembles the pattern of the woman, as her pride in her appearance and her self-centred conception of beauty had defined it, but if it is an old portrait it also ages the original in the same way as photographs do, by showing her in her old-fashioned finery. In a portrait, however, it is not just a woman’s style of dress that dates, it is also the painter’s style of painting. And Elstir’s earliest style, from his first period, gave Odette her most merciless birth certificate, not just because, like photographs of her from that time, it made her a junior among well-known courtesans, but because it showed that the painting dated from the period of the many portraits by Manet or Whistler of sitters long vanished, consigned to history, gone to oblivion.

  These thoughts, which I ruminated silently as we walk
ed back towards the villa, were inspired by the discovery I had just made about the identity of Elstir’s model for ‘Miss Sacripant’; and they were to lead me to a second discovery, even more thought-provoking for me, about the identity of Elstir himself. He had painted a portrait of Odette de Crécy – could such a brilliant man, a solitary, a philosopher, who had accumulated wisdom, who stood above all things, whose conversation was so enthralling, possibly be the painter, vacuous and devious, adopted long ago by the Verdurins? I asked him if he had known them, and whether they had not nicknamed him ‘Monsieur Biche’. He answered, in a very simple manner, that this was indeed the case, as though speaking of a part of his life which was rather remote, as though not realizing that his answer caused me an acute disappointment. Then, glancing at my expression, he did realize it; and this brought an expression of displeasure to his own face. A lesser man, a man less proficient in things of the mind and heart, now that we were nearing the house, might have just taken his leave of me without ceremony, and avoided me thereafter. However, this was not Elstir’s way: like the true master he was (and to be a master, at least in this sense of the word, may have been, from the point of view of pure creativeness, his sole defect, since an artist, if he is to live in tune with the truth of the spirit, must shun company, even that of disciples, and so avoid frittering himself away in such things), he endeavoured to draw from every circumstance, whether relative to himself or to others, and for the benefit of those younger than himself, whatever element of truth it might contain. So, instead of venting hurt pride, he preferred to speak in a way that would be of some profit for me. ‘There is no such thing, he said, as a man, however clever he may be, who has never at some time in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory. He should not find this absolutely a matter for regret, as he cannot be sure he would ever have become as wise as he is, if indeed getting wisdom is a possibility for any of us, had he not traversed all the silly or detestable incarnations that are bound to precede that final one. I know there are young men, sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose tutors, since their earliest high-school years, have taught them every nobility of soul and excellent precept of morality. The lives of such men may contain nothing they would wish to abolish; they may be happy to endorse every word they have ever uttered. But they are the poor in spirit, the effete descendants of doctrinarians, whose only wisdoms are negative and sterile. Wisdom cannot be inherited – one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course which no one can follow in your stead; no one can spare you that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things. The lives of men you admire, attitudes you think are noble, haven’t been laid down by their fathers or their tutors – they were preceded by very different beginnings, and were influenced by whatever surrounded them, whether it was good, bad or indifferent. Each of them is the outcome of a struggle, each of them is a victory. I can understand that the image of what we were in an earlier time might be unrecognizable and always irksome to behold. It should not be rejected for all that, as it is testimony to the fact that we have lived, that in accordance with the laws of life and the spirit, we have managed to derive, from the common constituents of life, from the life of the studio and artists’ cliques, if we’re talking of painters, something which surpasses them.’91 We had reached his door. I was disappointed not to have met the girls. But at least there was now a possible opening into their lives; the days when they did nothing but pass across a horizon, when I could believe they might never appear on it again, were over. They were no longer surrounded by the great turbid swirl which kept us apart, which was nothing but the translation of the desire – perpetually ablaze, mobile, urgent, constantly fuelled by worry – ignited in me by their inaccessibility, their possible disappearance from my life for ever. This desire for them could now be turned down, kept in reserve, alongside so many others the fulfilment of which, once I knew this was a possibility, I postponed. I left Elstir and was alone. Despite my disappointment, I could see in my mind all the unforeseeable improbability of what had taken place: that he in particular should turn out to be known to the girls; that they who had been, only that morning, figures in a picture against a background of the sea, had now set eyes on me; that they had seen me in the company of a great painter; that he now knew of my wish to know them, and would help to bring this about. All of this had given me pleasure, but it was a pleasure which had remained hidden from me: it was one of those visitors who do not approach us till all the others have gone, and we can be alone together; that is when we notice them, when we can say, ‘I’m all yours’ and give them our full attention. Sometimes, between the moment when such pleasures have entered our mind and the moment when we too can withdraw into it, so many hours have elapsed, and we have seen so many people in the meantime, that we fear they may not have waited. But they are patient, they do not weary, and when the last visitor has gone, there they are looking at us. And sometimes it is we who are so tired out that we feel we cannot find the strength in our weary mind to entertain these memories, these impressions for which our feeble self is the only habitable place, the sole medium of their realization. But this we would regret, for almost the only interest in existence lies in those days when a pinch of magic sand is mixed with the dust of reality, when a trite incident can become the spur of romance. An entire promontory of the inaccessible world takes sudden shape, lit by a dream, and becomes part of our life, that life in which, like a sleeper awakened, we can see the people of whom we had dreamed with such longing that we had become convinced that it was only ever in dreams that we would see them.

  The relief brought by the likelihood that I could come to know the girls whenever I wanted to was precious to me, especially because I would have been unable to stay on the look-out for them over the next few days, which were taken up with the preparations for Saint-Loup’s departure. My grandmother wished to show my friend how much she had appreciated his many kindnesses towards us. I told her he was a great admirer of Proudhon, and gave her the idea to send for a number of letters written by the thinker, which she had bought. When they arrived, the day before his departure, Saint-Loup came to the hotel to see them. He read them eagerly, handling each page with respect and trying to memorize phrases from them. When he stood up to go, excusing himself for having stayed so long, he heard my grandmother say:

  ‘You must take them with you. They’re for you – I sent for them so that you could have them.’

  Saint-Loup, overjoyed, was no more able to control his reaction than if it had been a bodily state produced without the intervention of the will: he turned scarlet, like a child who has been punished; and my grandmother was much more touched by the sight of all the efforts he made, unsuccessful as they were, to contain the joy that surged through him than by all the thanks he could have expressed. The following day, doubting whether he had shown enough gratitude, he was still asking me to excuse him as he leaned out of the window of the little local train which was to take him back to his garrison, which was not far away. He had originally thought he might drive over, as he often did when he had to return there in the evening, when he was to be away from Balbec for only a short time. But he had so much luggage this time that it would have had to go by train; so he had thought it more convenient to take the train himself, a view confirmed by the manager of the hotel, who, when asked about the respective merits of carriage or train, replied that either of these modes of travel would be ‘more or less equitable to the other’. By which he meant ‘equivalent’, roughly what Françoise would have expressed as ‘it’s all the same as one or the other’. ‘Right, Saint-Loup had said, I’ll take the little Slowcoach.’ I would have taken it too and accompanied my friend to Doncières, if I had not been tired out; but during the time the little train spent in the station at Balbec – that is, the time the driver spent waiting for friends who were late and without whom he did want to start, and having a drink – I promised Saint-Loup I would visit him several t
imes a week. Bloch had also come to see him off, to Saint-Loup’s great displeasure; and having noticed that Bloch had overheard him urging me to come to Doncières for lunch or dinner, or even to stay, he eventually said to him, in a tone of great coldness, intended to counter the forced politeness of the invitation, and to prevent Bloch from thinking he meant it: ‘If you should ever happen to be passing through Doncières some afternoon when I’m off duty, you could ask for me at the barracks, but I’m hardly ever off duty.’ Robert may also have feared that if left to myself I might not come; and in the belief that I was closer to Bloch than I had given him to understand, he may have thought the latter could be relied upon to make me bestir myself, to serve as a travelling companion.