In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  By now we were out of the little wood and into a network of rather deserted lanes, which Andrée followed without difficulty. ‘Well, here we are! she said all at once. Here are Les Creuniers for you! And you’re in luck – the weather today and the light are just as in Elstir’s water-colour.’ But the game of ring-on-a-string had knocked my high hopes from under me and I was too sad to take the pleasure I might otherwise have enjoyed in suddenly coming upon the sea-divinities whom Elstir had watched for and taken by surprise: there they were, directly beneath me, crouching among the rocks for protection against the rays of the sun, under the glow of a dark glaze as beautiful as any used by Leonardo, those wonderful furtively sheltering Shadows, nimble and soundless, ready at the slightest feint of light to slip under their stones or hide in a hole, and just as ready, once the threat from the rays had passed, to slip out again and lie awake beside the rocks or the seaweed, watching over them as they drowse drenched in the light of the cliff-corroding sun and the faded ocean, unmoving, insubstantial guardians, showing on the surface of the water the viscid shimmer of their bodies and the vigilant dark of their eyes.

  It was time to go home, and we walked back towards the other girls. I knew now that I loved Albertine, but I was in no hurry, alas, to tell her: the fact was that, since the time when I had played at the Champs-Élysées, my notion of love had undergone a change, while those to whom my love was addressed, though they were consecutive, remained unchanged. For one thing, the confession of love, the declaration of my tenderness to her whom I loved, no longer seemed to be one of love’s classic and indispensable scenes; and for another, love itself, instead of appearing to be a reality external to me, now seemed a subjective pleasure. I sensed that the less Albertine knew about this pleasure of mine, the more she would be likely to let me go on enjoying it.

  All the way back to Balbec, the image of Albertine, flooded by the glow from the other girls, was not the only one I could see. But just as the moon, after spending the daylight hours in the guise of a white cloudlet, more shaped and stable than others, begins to come into its own as soon as daylight fades, so by the time I was back in the hotel, it was Albertine’s image which rose to shine unrivalled above the horizon of my heart. My room suddenly seemed new to me. It had, of course, long since ceased to be the baleful bedroom it had been on my first night. We are tireless redesigners of the space we live in: gradually, as habit relieves us of the need to experience, we eliminate the pernicious elements of colour, dimension and smell which objectified our unease. By now, it was no longer even the room which retained power enough over my sensitivity, not to make me suffer, but to give me joy; it was not the reservoir of sunny days, like a swimming-bath half-way up the sides of which they dappled their azure, watery with light briefly blanked out by the fleeting reflection of a sail, as white and impalpable as a flash of heat; nor was it the purely aesthetic bedroom of the evening picture-displays; it was merely the room I had lived in for so many days that I had stopped seeing it. But now my eyes had just begun to open to it again, seeing it from the selfish viewpoint which is that of love. I fancied that, if Albertine should ever visit me here, the fine slanting cheval-glass and the handsome glass-fronted book-cases would give her a high opinion of me. Instead of being a mere place of transit, where I spent a moment or two before making my escape to the beach or over to Rivebelle, my room had once more become real and dear to me, had been renewed, because I could see and appreciate all its contents through the eyes of Albertine.

  A few days after our game of ring-on-a-string, we had gone for such a long walk that, having reached Maineville, we counted ourselves fortunate to come upon a couple of little two-seater governess-carts, which would enable us to get back in time for dinner. The effect of my love for Albertine, which was already acute, was to make me suggest, not to her, but first to Rosemonde, then to Andrée, that either of them should ride with me; and then, despite having expressed this preference for Andrée or Rosemonde, I raised certain secondary considerations related to the time of night, the road to be taken and the coats being worn, thus convincing everybody that, though it was quite against my will, it would be preferable for Albertine to come with me; and I pretended to make the best of a bad job by having to accept her as my passenger. The trouble was, though, as love tends always towards complete assimilation of the loved one, and as no one is eatable through mere conversation, Albertine’s being as pleasant as possible during our drive homewards was of no avail: after I had dropped her at her door, I was in a state of happiness, but also in a state of much greater hunger for her than before, and I saw the minutes we had just spent together as having no great importance in themselves, as being only a prelude to those which would follow. They did, however, have the charm there is in all beginnings, and which never comes back. So far I had made no demands on Albertine. Perhaps she imagined what I wanted of her; but, in her ignorance of what it really was, she could suppose I had no particular end in view, other than some undefined relationship, in which she must savour that sweet, indeterminate sense, rich in expected surprises, which is romantic readiness.

  Throughout the following week, I made little attempt to see Albertine. I pretended to prefer Andrée. With the beginning of love, one would like to go on being, in the eyes of the woman one loves, the lovable stranger; but we need her; and what we need of her, rather than the touch of her body, is to catch her attention, to impinge upon her heart. We sprinkle a little spite into a letter, to move her from indifference to a request for a favour; and the infallible logic of love, with its alternating arguments, locks us into its vicious circle, making it as impossible for us not to love as it is inevitable that we remain unloved. If the other girls went off to a matinée, I would spend the time with Andrée, knowing she gave up such things willingly, and would even have done so unwillingly, from a spirit of moral distinction, so as to avoid letting others, or even herself, suspect that she could see any point in participating in anything that smacked, however slightly, of society. In this way, I managed to monopolize her each evening, not with the aim of making Albertine jealous, but rather of rising in her estimation, or at least of not falling in it by letting her know it was herself I loved, and not Andrée. I said nothing of my love to Andrée either, in case she might repeat it to Albertine. When I spoke about her to Andrée, I feigned a cold demeanour, which may have fooled her less than her apparent credulity fooled me. She made a show of believing in my indifference towards Albertine; she made a show of wishing for the closest possible intimacy between Albertine and me. But it is much more likely that she doubted the indifference and had no desire for the intimacy. While I was assuring her of how little her friend meant to me, my mind was full of a single purpose: how to effect my introduction to Mme Bontemps, who had come to stay near Balbec for a few days, three of which Albertine was soon to spend with her. Naturally, I gave Andrée no hint of this purpose; and whenever I made a mention of Albertine’s relations, my manner was very absent-minded. In the words that Andrée spoke in reply, there was no semblance of a doubt about my sincerity. But if that was really the case, why did she happen to say one day, ‘I’ve actually just seen Albertine’s aunt’? Now, she had not said, ‘I know what you’re up to: you keep talking in that off-hand way, but you’re really thinking of getting in with Albertine’s aunt.’ Yet her use of the word ‘actually’ seemed to derive from some such idea, lurking in her mind, but suppressed by her as impolite. The word was of a piece with certain looks or gestures which, though they assume no logical or rational form designed to be communicable to the mind of the listener, contrive none the less to reach it with their true meaning, as human speech, having been converted into electricity by the telephone, turns back into speech for the purpose of being understood. From then on, so as to rid Andrée’s mind of the idea that I was interested in Mme Bontemps, I made sure of speaking of the lady not just absent-mindedly, but spitefully: claiming to have met her once, I said she was crazy and that I hoped never to have to renew the experience. Whe
reas I was really doing whatever I could to meet Mme Bontemps.

  I tried to persuade Elstir to recommend me and bring about a meeting with her (without letting anyone know that I had asked him to). He undertook to do this, though he expressed surprise that I should want him to, Mme Bontemps being, in his view, a scheming female beneath contempt, as uninteresting as she was self-interested. Realizing that, if I did meet Mme Bontemps, Andrée would hear of it sooner or later, I thought it prudent to tell her myself. ‘The things you most want to escape are the ones you end up being unable to avoid, I said. I can’t imagine anything more irksome than meeting Mme Bontemps, but I’m going to have to – Elstir has invited us to the same occasion. – I knew it all along!’ Andrée exclaimed bitterly, gazing away at some invisible point, her eyes enlarged and flawed by displeasure. Her words did not add up to the most coherent expression of the meaning, which can be stated as follows: ‘I am aware that you love Albertine and that you’re moving heaven and earth to get in with her relatives.’ But they were the shapeless fragments which could be reassembled into that meaning, which despite Andrée’s best efforts I had provoked into explosion. Just like her use of ‘actually’, the level of meaning of these words was at one remove from them: they were of the kind which, though unrelated to a person’s literal statements, may make us admire (or distrust) a person, or even bring about a falling-out between us.

  Since Andrée had disbelieved me when I said Albertine’s relations were a matter of indifference to me, it meant that she believed I was in love with Albertine, and very likely that this made her unhappy.

  She was usually present when Albertine and I were together. But there were other times when I was due to see Albertine without her, each of which I looked forward to in a fever of expectation, then looked back on with the knowledge that it had brought about nothing of significance, that it had not been the great day I had hoped for, a hope I immediately transferred to the next one, which would not live up to it either; and so, one after the other, like waves, these pinnacles of promise rose, then broke, and were replaced by others.

  About a month after the day when we played ring-on-a-string, I heard that Albertine was leaving the following morning, to go and spend two days at Mme Bontemps’s, and that, because she was taking an early train, she would be spending the night at the Grand-Hôtel, so as to be able to take the bus to the station and catch the first train without disturbing the friends with whom she was staying. I spoke to Andrée about it. ‘No, I don’t think so, she said, looking discontented. Anyway, it would get you nowhere, because I’m pretty sure Albertine won’t want to see you if she’s spending the night alone at the hotel. It wouldn’t be protocol.’ (This was an expression Andrée had been using freely for some time, with the sense of ‘It’s not the done thing’.) ‘I’m only telling you this because I know how Albertine’s mind works. I mean, for all I care, you can see her as much as you like. It’s all one to me.’

  Octave the golfer soon came along and was glad to tell Andrée how many strokes he had gone round in the day before, then Albertine, who, as she walked, was as engrossed in playing with her diabolo as a nun might be in telling her beads. This game could keep her happily occupied for hours. No sooner had she joined us than the impertinent tip of her nose became apparent, having been omitted from my mental image of her over the previous few days; below the black hair, her forehead was vertical, as it had been more than once before, contradicting the indistinct shape of it left in my mind, while its whiteness was an eye-opener to me: Albertine, emerging from the dusty haze of memory, was once more taking shape. Golf encourages the development of solitary pleasures; and the pleasure of a diabolo is undoubtedly a solitary one. Yet, even though she was standing there chatting with us, Albertine went on playing with hers, after the manner of a lady who, despite the presence of visitors, does not lay aside her crochet-work. ‘I’m told, she said to Octave, Mme de Villeparisis has complained to your father,’ (and behind her way of saying ‘I’m told’ I could hear one of those tones which were peculiar to her: every time I noticed I had forgotten them, I simultaneously remembered having already glimpsed through them the set French face of Albertine. Even if I had been blind, they would have informed me, as accurately as did the tip of her nose, of some of her lively and slightly provincial qualities. In this, her nose and these tones were equal, interchangeable; and her voice was like the one which it is said will be part of the photo-telephone of the future: the sound of it gave a vivid picture of her). ‘And she hasn’t just written to your father, but to the Mayor of Balbec too, to get diabolos prohibited on the esplanade, because she got hit in the face by a ball.

  – Yes, I heard about that complaint. It’s ridiculous, when you think of how little there is here in the way of entertainment.’

  Andrée took no part in this conversation, not being acquainted with Mme de Villeparisis, which was of course also the case with Albertine and Octave. However, she did say, ‘I can’t see why she had to make such a fuss. I mean, old Mme de Cambremer got hit by a ball too and she didn’t complain. – I’ll tell you the difference, Octave said in a serious tone, as he struck a match. If you ask me, Mme de Cambremer is a real lady and Mme de Villeparisis is just a vulgar upstart. You on for golf this afternoon, then?’ And he went off, accompanied by Andrée, leaving me alone with Albertine. ‘As you can see, she said, I’m doing my hair now the way you like it – look at this ringlet. Everybody makes fun of it and nobody knows who it is I’m doing it for. My aunt’ll probably laugh at it too. And I won’t tell her the reason either.’ Her cheeks often looked pale; but seen from the side, as I could see them now, they were suffused and brightened by blood which gave them the glow of those brisk winter mornings when, out for a walk, we see stone touched and ruddied by the sun, looking like pink granite and filling us with joy. The joy that the sight of Albertine’s cheeks gave me at that moment was just as keen, though the desire it induced was not for a walk, but for a kiss. I asked her whether what I had heard about her plans was true. ‘Yes, she said, I’m to sleep tonight at your hotel – and actually I’ll be going to bed before dinner, because I’ve got a bit of a cold. So you can come up and sit by my bedside while I’m having my dinner. Then we can play at something, whatever you like. I’d’ve liked you to come and see me off in the morning, too, but it might look a bit funny – not to Andrée, mind you, she’s too sensible, but to the others who’ll be at the station. And if it got back to my aunt, there could be trouble. But at least we can have an evening together – and my aunt won’t know a thing about that. I’m just off to say cheerio to Andrée. So I’ll see you shortly. Come soon, so’s we can have a nice long time all to ourselves,’ she added with a smile. Her words carried me back further than the time when I had been in love with Gilberte, to the days when love had seemed to be a thing that was not only external to myself, but achievable. While the Gilberte I had known at the Champs-Élysées was a very different girl from the one I knew so well in the privacy of my solitary heart, here suddenly, the real Albertine, the one I saw every day, who I thought was hidebound in bourgeois prejudices and was so open with her aunt, had lent her form to the imaginary Albertine, the one who, at a time when I did not even know her, I had thought was taking furtive looks at me on the esplanade, the one who, when she saw me walking off, had seemed to be wending so reluctantly her own way home.

  When I went in to dinner with my grandmother, I was full of the secret I carried within me and that she knew nothing about. Albertine too, the following morning, would be with her girl-friends, none of whom would know what was new between her and me; and when Mme Bontemps kissed her niece on the forehead, she would be unaware that I stood between them, that I was in that hair-style, the purpose of which, hidden to all eyes, was that I should be pleased, I who until then could only envy Mme Bontemps for being related to the same people as her niece, for having to wear mourning when she did and make the same round of family visits; yet here I was, meaning more now to Albertine than this same aunt. She w
ould be with her aunt, but she would be thinking of me. As for what might take place between us later in the evening, I had no clear idea. But the Grand-Hôtel, and the evening before me, no longer seemed empty: they were the repository of my happiness. I rang the ‘lift’, to go up to the room Albertine had taken, which overlooked the valley. The slightest motions, the mere act of sitting down on the little seat inside the lift, were full of sweetness, because they were in direct touch with my heart; in the cables which hauled the lift upwards, and in the few stairs still to be climbed, I saw nothing but the workings of my joy and the steps towards it, materialized. In the corridor, I was only a few paces away from the bedroom inside which lay the precious substance of her pink body – the room which, however delightful the acts to take place in it, would go on being its unchanging self, would continue to seem, for the eyes of any unsuspecting passer-by, identical to all the other rooms, which is the way things have of becoming the stubbornly unconfessing witnesses, the conscientious confidants, the inviolable trustees of our pleasure. From the landing to Albertine’s room it was a few steps, a few steps that no one could now prevent me from taking, and which, as though I was walking in a new element, as though what moved slowly aside to let me through was happiness itself, I took in a mood of utmost bliss and attentiveness, with an unfamiliar feeling of being all-powerful, of at last coming to claim an inheritance which had always been meant for me. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I was wrong to harbour any doubts: she had told me to come up after she had gone to bed. There could be no doubt! I could barely contain myself; I jostled past Françoise, who was in my way; I ran, with shining eyes, to the room where my sweetheart awaited me. I found Albertine in bed. Her white nightgown bared her throat and altered the proportions of her face, which seemed of a deeper pink, because of the warmth of the bed, or her cold, or her recent dinner; I thought of the colours which I had seen close at hand a few hours before on the esplanade, and which were now going to reveal their taste; her cheek was bisected from top to bottom by a lock of her long black wavy hair, which to please me she had completely undone. She smiled at me. Beside her, through the window, the valley was bright with moonlight. The sight of her naked throat and her excessively pink cheeks had so intoxicated me (that is, had so transferred reality from the world of nature into the deluge of my own sensations, which I could barely contain) as to have upset the balance between the tumultuous and indestructible immensity of the life surging through me and the paltry life of the universe. The sea, which through the window could be seen beside the valley, the swelling breasts of the closest of the Maineville cliffs, the sky where the moon had not yet reached the zenith, all of this seemed to lie as light as feathers between my eyelids, at rest upon eyeballs in which I felt the pupils had expanded and become strong enough, and ready, to hold much heavier burdens, all the mountains in the world, on their delicate surface. Even the whole sphere of the horizon did not suffice to fill their orbits. Any impingement of the natural world upon my consciousness, however mighty, would have seemed insubstantial to me; a gust of air off the sea would have seemed short-winded for the vast breaths filling my breast. I leaned over to kiss Albertine. Had death chosen that instant to strike me down, it would have been a matter of indifference to me, or rather it would have seemed impossible, for life did not reside somewhere outside me: all of life was contained within me. A pitying smile would have been my only response, had a philosopher put the view that, however remote it might be now, a day was bound to come when I would die, that the everlasting forces of nature would outlive me, those forces with their divine tread grinding me like a grain of dust, that after my own extinction there would continue to be swelling-breasted cliffs, a sea, a sky and moonlight! How could such a thing be possible? How could the world outlive me, given that I was not a mere speck lost in it – it was wholly contained within me, and it came nowhere near filling me, since, somewhere among so much unoccupied space, where other vast treasures could have been stored, I could casually toss the sky, the sea and the cliffs! ‘If you don’t stop that, I’ll ring!’ Albertine cried, realizing that I was attempting to kiss her. But I was convinced that any girl who entertains a young man in secret, after making sure that her aunt knows nothing of the assignation, must have an ulterior motive, and that in any case success lies in taking advantage of whatever opportunities are on offer; in my state of fevered excitement, Albertine’s round face, glowing as though from an inner night-light, had acquired such relief that, in imitation of a rotating fiery sphere, it appeared to be turning like those figures by Michelangelo being carried away by a motionless, vertiginous whirlwind.115 I was about to find out the scent and the flavour of this unknown pink fruit. I heard a sudden noise, jarring and long drawn out – Albertine was pulling the bell for all she was worth.