In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  With any one member of my little gang of girls, was I not bound to recall only the most recently glimpsed of her possible faces, given that the mind eliminates from our memories of anyone whatever does not contribute in an immediately useful way to our daily dealings with them, even if– especially if! – these dealings are coloured by a tincture of love, which, by being perpetually unsatisfied, lives for ever in the coming moment? The chain of past days runs through the memory, which only holds fast to the nearest end of it, and the metal of which this end is forged is often very different from the metal of the earlier links, which have already slipped away into the dark; in our journey through life, the only country the mind sees as real is the one in which we live the present instant. My very first impressions, which were now at such a remove, could find no ally in my memory against their day-by-day deforming; throughout the long hours which I spent among the girls, chatting, going on picnics, playing, I never once remembered that they were the same ruthless, sensual virgins whom I had once seen, like figures in a fresco, filing past against the sea.

  Geographers or archaeologists may well take us to Calypso’s island or unearth the true palace of King Minos. Unfortunately, though, Calypso then turns into a mere woman; and Minos is no more than a king, shorn of divinity. Even the qualities and defects which history can show to have been those of these very real people are often extremely unlike the ones we used to imagine in the creatures of fable who once bore their names. So it was that all my charming oceanic mythology, lovingly composed by me during the very first days, had faded away to nothing. However, time spent in close familiarity with those we once thought inaccessible, those we have longed for, is not, at least on occasion, time spent to no purpose. Even amid the factitious enjoyments we may eventually find in our later dealings with people whom we at first found unlikeable, there always remains the sour after-taste of the failings they have contrived to conceal; whereas in relationships such as those I had with Albertine and her friends, the genuine delight in which they have originated always leaves a trace of the fragrance that no artifice can ever give to fruit that is forced, to grapes that have never ripened in the sunshine. The supernatural creatures they had briefly been for me could still, even without my knowing it, sprinkle a spice of wonder into the tritest things I did with them, or rather they for ever banished the trite from the vicinity of such things. My desire had yearned so helplessly after the meaning in those eyes which now knew me and smiled upon me, but which, at first sight, had met my own like light radiating from another universe, it had so broadly and so intricately distributed colours and scents on all the flesh-tinted surfaces of these girls who lay on the cliff-top, handed me a simple sandwich or played their guessing-games, that often, as I sprawled there of an afternoon, I was like a painter who seeks the grandeur of antiquity in modern life, giving a woman cutting her toe-nail the nobility of the Spinario,119 or like Rubens, using women of his acquaintance to figure as goddesses in a scene from mythology: I gazed on the loveliness of their bodies, the fair and the dark, so varied in their styles, as they lay about me in the grass, and I neither ignored all the mediocre contents with which daily life had filled them, nor recalled expressly their celestial origin, as though, like Hercules or Telemachus, I was disporting myself among the nymphs.

  Then the concerts came to an end, the weather turned bad and my girls left Balbec, not all at once, as the swallows leave, but within the same week. Albertine was the first to go, without warning, without any of the others being able to understand, either then or later, why she had suddenly gone back to Paris, where her presence was required neither for business nor for pleasure. ‘Without even a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave,’ grumbled Françoise, ‘she just up and went.’ Françoise would have preferred us to do likewise. Her view was that we were being inconsiderate towards the employees of the hotel, of whom there were in fact few remaining to serve the needs of the by now sparse population of residents, and towards the manager, who was ‘wasting money like water’. It was a fact that for a long time the hotel, which was soon to close, had been bidding farewell to almost all those who had spent the summer there – never had it been so pleasant to live in! Not that the manager shared this view: one came upon him in corridors and in lounges which were now freezing cold and had no pages standing by their doors, as he strode past wearing a new frock-coat and so nattily barbered that his drab face seemed to be a blend made up of one part flesh and three parts cosmetics, for ever changing his tie (these attentions to self cost less than making sure the heating works and keeping on staff; like the man who, having decided he can no longer afford to donate 10,000 francs to a charity, finds it easy to appear generous by giving a princely five-franc piece to the telegram-boy who brings him a cable). He looked as though he was conducting an inspection-tour of nowhere, as though the purpose of his show of elegance was to give an air of temporariness to the dismal atmosphere of a hotel which had had a poor season; and he called to mind the ghost of a king haunting the ruins of what was once his palace. His displeasure was aggravated when a dearth of passengers made the local branch-line close down until the following spring. ‘What’s missing round here,’ he said, ‘is proper means of commotion.’ Despite his current deficit, he already had grandiose plans for future seasons. Being actually quite capable of using fine words properly, especially when they were suited to the hotel business and had the effect of aggrandizing it, he would say, ‘I was let down by my supporting troops, though I did have a fine squad in my dining-room. Mind you, the pages left a little to be desired – but you’ll see, next year, I’ll have a first-class phalanx of them!’ Meanwhile, the suspension of services on the Balbec–Caen–Balbec line obliged him to send someone out to fetch the mail and even at times to have departing guests taken away by waggonette. I often asked the coachman to let me sit beside him and in this way I went out and about in all weathers, as I had done during the winter I once spent in Combray.

  At times, however, the rain was too heavy and my grandmother and I had to stay indoors; the Casino having closed, we spent our days in sitting-rooms which were almost completely deserted, like a ship’s passengers keeping below decks out of the wind, where every day, as happens on a voyage, one or other of the people among whom we had spent three months without having made their acquaintance, the First President from Rennes,120 the bâtonnier from Caen, an American lady with her daughters, came to sit with us, struck up conversation, devised a way of making the hours seem less slow to pass, revealed a talent, taught us a game, invited us to tea, to make music with them, to foregather at a particular time of day, to collaborate with them in one of these diversions that have the happy knack of affording us true enjoyment, which consists not in being striven after, but in merely helping us to while away our boredom, and formed friendships with us right at the end of our stay which would be broken off the very next day by their successive departures. I even came to know the very wealthy young man, one of his two aristocratic friends and the actress (who had come back down to spend a few days in Balbec); but their little closed group now contained only the three of them, as their other friend had returned to Paris. They asked me to go and have dinner with them at their special restaurant. I think they were quite relieved that I declined the invitation. Still, it had been issued in the nicest possible manner: though the inviter was really the wealthy young man, the other two being just his guests, when the actress asked me whether I would go with them, she automatically phrased it so as to flatter me: ‘Maurice would love you to come’ – Maurice being the friend, the Marquis de Vaudémont, a man of exceptionally noble descent.

  When I met all three of them in the vestibule, it was M. de Vaudémont who said, as the wealthy young man hung back:

  ‘So we’re not to have us the pleasure of your company at dinner?’

  Altogether, I had derived little benefit from being in Balbec, for which reason I was all the more determined to come back one day. I felt I had spent too short a time there. My friends took a d
ifferent view, and had been writing to ask whether I intended to settle there for good. In the knowledge that the place-name they had to write on their envelopes was that of Balbec, and since the view from my window was not of the countryside or a streetscape, but of the wide wilderness of the sea, since I could hear its restless echoes during the hours of darkness and entrusted my own rest to them each night as I fell asleep, as though venturing out in a boat, I harboured the illusion that this close relationship with the waves must imbue my mind unawares with the sense of their charm, as though it was one of those lessons you can learn in your sleep.

  For next year, the manager promised me better rooms; but by now I was attached to mine: I could walk into it without noticing the slightest smell of vetiver; and my mind, which had once had such difficulty in occupying its upper reaches, had fitted itself so accurately into the room’s dimensions that I had to train it to do the opposite, once I was back in Paris and getting ready for bed in my old room, which had a low ceiling.

  For eventually we had been obliged to leave Balbec, where the cold and the damp had become too penetrating for us to stay on in a hotel without fireplaces or heating system. Our final weeks there I forgot almost immediately. When I thought of Balbec, what came to mind almost invariably was the morning moments, at the height of summer, when, because I was going out with Albertine and the other girls in the afternoons, my grandmother made sure I obeyed the doctor’s instructions that I should stay in bed and lie there in complete darkness. The manager ordered that no noise must be made on my floor and personally ensured that these instructions were obeyed. Because the daylight was so bright, I kept the curtains closed as long as possible, those tall violet curtains which, on the first evening, had received me with such hostility. However, since Françoise never managed to close them completely and exclude every speck of light, despite the pins she stuck in them each evening, and which no one else could get out again, despite the blankets, the red cretonne table-cover, the odds and ends of cloth which she patched on, the darkness was in fact not complete, and they allowed a sprinkle of scarlet, as of a scatter of anemone petals, to dapple the carpet, in which I could not resist paddling for a moment with my bare feet. Opposite the window, on the wall which was partly illuminated, a golden cylinder stood upright, supported by thin air and slowly moving, like the pillar of fire which gave light to the Children of Israel as it led them through the way of the wilderness. Then I would go back to bed: obliged as I was to take all my pleasures simultaneously in imagination, without moving – playing, bathing, walking, whatever the morning sun advised – happiness made my heart beat louder, like a motor turning at full power, but motionless and out of gear, so that it can only discharge its power into the empty air as it idles at full speed.

  I knew that my gang of girls were already out there on the esplanade, but I could not see them as they walked past the uneven ranges of the sea, beyond which, perched amid its bluish peaks like an Italian hilltop village, the little town of Rivebelle appeared in an occasional sunny glimpse, vivid and detailed. I could not see the girls: but as the shouts of the newspaper-boys – ‘Those journalists,’ as Françoise called them – floated up to my belvedere, along with the cries of bathers and children at their play, punctuating the quiet breaking of the waves along the shore like the calls of the sea-birds, I could imagine their presence and hear their laughter, lapping like the laughter of Nereids among the gentle hush of tide-swell that rose to my ears. ‘We stopped to see whether you were going to come down, Albertine would say that evening, but your shutters were still closed, even after the concert started.’ The concert always broke out at ten o’clock, under my windows. If the tide was in, one’s ear caught the smooth legato of a wave sliding in among the instruments, blending the tones of the violin into its own ripples of crystal and splashing its foam all over the broken echoes of underwater melodies. My things had not been laid out, and the impossibility of getting up and dressing began to make me lose patience. Then the clock struck twelve and at last Françoise came up. For months on end, in Balbec, the place I had so yearned to visit because my imagination had lashed it with gales and shrouded it in fog, the summer weather had been so unvaryingly bright that whenever Françoise came in to open my window, my expectation, never wavering and never disappointed, had been to see the same expanse of sunlight folded into the angle of the outside wall, so unchanging in its colour as to be not so much a thrilling indicator of summer, but rather a drab enamel, inert and artificial. And as Françoise pulled her pins out of the transom and peeled off the extra layers of cloth, then drew back the curtains, the summer’s day that she uncovered seemed as dead and immemorial as a mummy, magnificent and millennial, carefully divested by our old servant of all its wrappings and laid bare, embalmed in its vestments of gold.

  Notes

  PART I: At Mme Swann’s

  1. Twickenham: the place of residence of Louis-Philippe Albert d’Orléans, the exiled pretender to the French throne.

  2. On dit … Seigneur, etc.: Racine, Phèdre, V, 584: ‘It is said, Sire, that a prompt departure must take you away.’

  3. three portentous strokes: in the French theatrical tradition, the raising of the curtain is preceded by les trois coups, a loud hammering culminating in three strokes of the stage-manager’s brigadier, a staff.

  4. was to jeopardize his own interests … innocent man: if this comparison was suggested to Proust by the actions of Colonel Picquart, then this is the first reflection in the novel of the Dreyfus Affair.

  5. Vatel: François Vatel, the Prince de Condé’s butler, has become a byword for the perfectionist in cooking: in 1671, the fish having failed to arrive for a dinner which he was preparing for Louis XIV, he committed suicide.

  6. the Consulta … Carracci gallery: the Consulta was the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Farnese Palace was the French Embassy at Rome, containing a gallery of frescoes by Agostino and Annibale Carracci dating from about 1600.

  7. Wilhelmstrasse: the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin.

  8. At Pevchesky Bridge … Ballhausplatz: Pevchesky Bridge: literally the Singers’ (or the Choristers’) Bridge, Tsarist Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St Petersburg; Montecitorio: the lower house of the Italian parliament; Ballhausplatz: the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna.

  9. It was worse than a crime – it was a mistake!: Norpois’s paradox was coined, it is said, by Talleyrand (or perhaps Fouché) describing Napoleon’s execution of the Duc d’Enghien in 1804.

  10. Admiral de Tourville: Anne de Cotentin, comte de Tourville (1642–1701); his tomb can be seen, not in fictional Balbec, but in the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris.

  11. Panurge’s sheep: Rabelais tells, in chapters 5–8 of his fourth book of the adventures of Pantagruel (1552), how Panurge avenges himself on an objectionable merchant by throwing one of the man’s sheep into the sea; the whole flock jump in after it.

  12. Molière’s word, you understand: the word, cocu (= ‘cuckold’), figures in Molière’s comedy Sganarelle, ou le Cocu imaginaire (1660).

  13. Comte de Paris: the title given to the pretender to the throne of France.

  14. that clever fellow … through their books: the ‘clever fellow’ is Proust, who here refers to the theory of his essay Contre Sainte-Beuve.

  15. said of Alfred de Vigny by Loménie – or was it Sainte-Beuve: Alfred de Vigny: historical novelist, Romantic poet and dramatist (1797–1863); Loménie: Louis-Léonard de Loménie (1815–78), a biographer and man of letters (who spoke of Vigny, but not in such terms); Sainte-Beuve: Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69), the best-known literary critic of the nineteenth century. In Contre Sainte-Beuve and in parts of In Search of Lost Time, Proust taxes him with ‘blindness’ towards the most important writers of his day, such as Stendhal and Baudelaire, a defect which, Proust says, derived from his focus on writers’ lives instead of on the originality of their works.

  16. Assurbanipal: also known as Sardana
palus, King of Assyria (669–640 BC). Proust, in saying ‘ten centuries before Christ’, is misreading his source.

  17. L’Aventurière … Le Gendre de M. Poirier: Comedies by Émile Augier (1820–89).

  18. Weber’s: a restaurant once frequented by artists, men of letters and politicians. Proust was a regular in the early 1900s.

  19. Café Anglais: once the haunt of wealthy foreigners and crowned heads.

  20. Raspail: a revolutionary, doctor and journalist, François Raspail (1794–1878) has little in common with Pius IX (1792–1878), save the date of his death.

  21. ‘haunts the heart of the evening woods’: the allusion is to the opening and closing lines of Alfred de Vigny’s poem Cor (‘Horn’).

  22. the palaces of Gabriel: the two buildings by Gabriel, separated by the rue Royale, date from the 1760s.

  23. Palais de l’Industrie … Palais du Trocadéro: both the Palais de l’Industrie, modelled on the Crystal Palace, and the Palais du Trocadéro, of Moorish design, were built for nineteenth-century exhibitions and later demolished.

  24. Orpheus in the Underworld: Offenbach’s comic opera, Orphée aux enfers, dates from 1858.

  25. lavabo: the French word means a wash-hand basin. The OED does not confirm that it has ever been used in English in the modern sense of lavatory.

  26. Saint-Simon’s: the Mémoires of Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), largely observe life at the court of Louis XIV.

  27. olé! au lait!: a pun on the French au lait (= ‘with milk’).

  28. the Candlestick in Scripture: in Exodus, XXV, 31–40, Moses’ candlestick has six branches (but seven lamps).