When, some days after our dinner with the Blochs, my grandmother told me

with a joyful air that Saint-Loup had just been asking her whether,

before he left Balbec, she would not like him to take a photograph of

her, and when I saw that she had put on her nicest dress on purpose, and

was hesitating between several of her best hats, I felt a little annoyed

by this childishness, which surprised me coming from her. I even went

the length of asking myself whether I had not been mistaken in my

grandmother, whether I did not esteem her too highly, whether she was as

unconcerned as I had always supposed in the adornment of her person,

whether she had not indeed the very weakness that I believed most alien

to her temperament, namely coquetry.

Unfortunately, this displeasure that I derived from the prospect of a

photographic "sitting", and more particularly from the satisfaction with

which my grandmother appeared to be looking forward to it, I made so

apparent that Françoise remarked it and did her best, unintentionally,

to increase it by making me a sentimental, gushing speech, by which I

refused to appear moved.

"Oh, Master; my poor Madame will be so pleased at having her likeness

taken, she is going to wear the hat that her old Françoise has trimmed

for her, you must allow her, Master."

I acquired the conviction that I was not cruel in laughing at

Françoise's sensibility, by reminding myself that my mother and

grandmother, my models in all things, often did the same. But my

grandmother, noticing that I seemed cross, said that if this plan of her

sitting for her photograph offended me in any way she would give it up.

I would not let her; I assured her that I saw no harm in it, and left

her to adorn herself, but, thinking that I shewed my penetration and

strength of mind, I added a few stinging words of sarcasm, intended to

neutralise the pleasure which she seemed to find in being photographed,

so that if I was obliged to see my grandmother's magnificent hat, I

succeeded at least in driving from her face that joyful expression which

ought to have made me glad; but alas, it too often happens, while the

people we love best are still alive, that such expressions appear to us

as the exasperating manifestation of some unworthy freak of fancy rather

than as the precious form of the happiness which we should dearly like

to procure for them. My ill-humour arose more particularly from the fact

that, during the last week, my grandmother had appeared to be avoiding

me, and I had not been able to have her to myself for a moment, either

by night or day. When I came back in the afternoon to be alone with her

for a little I was told that she was not in the hotel; or else she would

shut herself up with Françoise for endless confabulations which I was

not permitted to interrupt. And when, after being out all evening with

Saint-Loup, I had been thinking on the way home of the moment at which I

should be able to go to my grandmother and to kiss her, in vain might I

wait for her to knock on the partition between us the three little taps

which would tell me to go in and say good night to her; I heard nothing;

at length I would go to bed, a little resentful of her for depriving me,

with an indifference so new and strange in her, of a joy on which I had

so much counted, I would lie still for a while, my heart throbbing as in

my childhood, listening to the wall which remained silent, until I cried

myself to sleep.

*

* *

_SEASCAPE,

WITH FRIEZE OF GIRLS_

That day, as for some days past, Saint-Loup had been obliged to go to

Doncières, where, until his leave finally expired, he would be on duty

now until late every afternoon. I was sorry that he was not at Balbec. I

had seen alight from carriages and pass, some into the ball-room of the

Casino, others into the ice-cream shop, young women who at a distance

had seemed to me lovely. I was passing through one of those periods of

our youth, unprovided with any one definite love, vacant, in which at

all times and in all places--as a lover the woman by whose charms he is

smitten--we desire, we seek, we see Beauty. Let but a single real

feature--the little that one distinguishes of a woman seen from afar or

from behind--enable us to project the form of beauty before our eyes, we

imagine that we have seen her before, our heart beats, we hasten in

pursuit, and will always remain half-persuaded that it was she, provided

that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her

that we realise our mistake.

Besides, as I grew more and more delicate, I was inclined to overrate

the simplest pleasures because of the difficulties that sprang up in the

way of my attaining them. Charming women I seemed to see all round me,

because I was too tired, if it was on the beach, too shy if it was in

the Casino or at a pastry-cook's, to go anywhere near them. And yet if I

was soon to die I should have liked first to know the appearance at

close quarters, in reality of the prettiest girls that life had to

offer, even although it should be another than myself or no one at all

who was to take advantage of the offer. (I did not, in fact, appreciate

the desire for possession that underlay my curiosity.) I should have had

the courage to enter the ball-room if Saint-Loup had been with me. Left

by myself, I was simply hanging about in front of the Grand Hotel until

it was time for me to join my grandmother, when, still almost at the far

end of the paved "front" along which they projected in a discordant spot

of colour, I saw coming towards me five or six young girls, as different

in appearance and manner from all the people whom one was accustomed to

see at Balbec as could have been, landed there none knew whence, a

flight of gulls which performed with measured steps upon the sands--the

dawdlers using their wings to overtake the rest--a movement the purpose

of which seems as obscure to the human bathers, whom they do not appear

to see, as it is clearly determined in their own birdish minds.

One of these strangers was pushing as she came, with one hand, her

bicycle; two others carried golf-clubs; and their attire generally was

in contrast to that of the other girls at Balbec, some of whom, it was

true, went in for games, but without adopting any special outfit.

It was the hour at which ladies and gentlemen came out every day for a

turn on the "front", exposed to the merciless fire of the long glasses

fastened upon them, as if they had each borne some disfigurement which

she felt it her duty to inspect in its minutest details, by the chief

magistrate's wife, proudly seated there with her back to the band-stand,

in the middle of that dread line of chairs on which presently they too,

actors turned critics, would come and establish themselves, to

scrutinise in their turn those others who would then be filing past

them. All these people who paced up and down the "front", tacking as

violently as if it had been the deck of a ship (for they could not lift

a leg without at the same time waving their arms, turning their heads

and eyes, settling their shoulders, compensating by a balancing movement

on one side for the movement they had just made on the other, and

puffing out their faces), and who, pretending not to see so as to let it

be thought that they were not interested, but covertly watching, for

fear of running against the people who were walking beside or coming

towards them, did, in fact, butt into them, became entangled with them,

because each was mutually the object of the same secret attention veiled

beneath the same apparent disdain; their love--and consequently their

fear--of the crowd being one of the most powerful motives in all men,

whether they seek to please other people or to astonish them, or to shew

them that they despise them. In the case of the solitary, his seclusion,

even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as

its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overrules

every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the

admiration of his hall porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he

hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object

abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.

Among all these people, some of whom were pursuing a train of thought,

but if so betrayed its instability by spasmodic gestures, a roving gaze

as little in keeping as the circumspect titubation of their neighbours,

the girls whom I had noticed, with that mastery over their limbs which

comes from perfect bodily condition and a sincere contempt for the rest

of humanity, were advancing straight ahead, without hesitation or

stiffness, performing exactly the movements that they wished to perform,

each of their members in full independence of all the rest, the greater

part of their bodies preserving that immobility which is so noticeable

in a good waltzer. They were now quite near me. Although each was a type

absolutely different from the others, they all had beauty; but to tell

the truth I had seen them for so short a time, and without venturing to

look them straight in the face, that I had not yet individualised any of

them. Save one, whom her straight nose, her dark complexion pointed in

contrast among the rest, like (in a renaissance picture of the Epiphany)

a king of Arab cast, they were known to me only, one by a pair of eyes

hard, set and mocking; another by cheeks in which the pink had that

coppery tint which makes one think of geraniums; and even of these

points I had not yet indissolubly attached any one to one of these girls

rather than to another; and when (according to the order in which their

series met the eye, marvellous because the most different aspects came

next one another, because all scales of colours were combined in it, but

confused as a piece of music in which I should not have been able to

isolate and identify at the moment of their passage the successive

phrases, no sooner distinguished than forgotten) I saw emerge a pallid

oval, black eyes, green eyes, I knew not if these were the same that had

already charmed me a moment ago, I could not bring them home to any one

girl whom I might thereby have set apart from the rest and so

identified. And this want, in my vision, of the demarcations which I

should presently establish between them sent flooding over the group a

wave of harmony, the continuous transfusion of a beauty fluid,

collective and mobile.

It was not perhaps, in this life of ours, mere chance that had, in

forming this group of friends, chosen them all of such beauty; perhaps

these girls (whose attitude was enough to reveal their nature, bold,

frivolous and hard), extremely sensitive to everything that was

ludicrous or ugly, incapable of yielding to an intellectual or moral

attraction, had naturally felt themselves, among companions of their own

age, repelled by all those in whom a pensive or sensitive disposition

was betrayed by shyness, awkwardness, constraint, by what, they would

say, "didn't appeal" to them, and from such had held aloof; while they

attached themselves, on the other hand, to others to whom they were

drawn by a certain blend of grace, suppleness, and physical neatness,

the only form in which they were able to picture the frankness of a

seductive character and the promise of pleasant hours in one another's

company. Perhaps, too, the class to which they belonged, a class which I

should not have found it easy to define, was at that point in its

evolution at which, whether thanks to its growing wealth and leisure, or

thanks to new athletic habits, extended now even to certain plebeian

elements, and a habit of physical culture to which had not yet been

added the culture of the mind, a social atmosphere, comparable to that

of smooth and prolific schools of sculpture, which have not yet gone in

for tortured expressions, produces naturally and in abundance fine

bodies with fine legs, fine hips, wholesome and reposeful faces, with an

air of agility and guile. And were they not noble and calm models of

human beauty that I beheld there, outlined against the sea, like statues

exposed to the sunlight upon a Grecian shore?

Just as if, in the heart of their band, which progressed along the

"front" like a luminous comet, they had decided that the surrounding

crowd was composed of creatures of another race whose sufferings even

could not awaken in them any sense of fellowship, they appeared not to

see them, forced those who had stopped to talk to step aside, as though

from the path of a machine that had been set going by itself, so that it

was no good waiting for it to get out of their way, their utmost sign of

consciousness being when, if some old gentleman of whom they did not

admit the existence and thrust from them the contact, had fled with a

frightened or furious, but a headlong or ludicrous motion, they looked

at one another and smiled. They had, for whatever did not form part of

their group, no affectation of contempt; their genuine contempt was

sufficient. But they could not set eyes on an obstacle without amusing

themselves by crossing it, either in a running jump or with both feet

together, because they were all filled to the brim, exuberant with that

youth which we need so urgently to spend that even when we are unhappy

or unwell, obedient rather to the necessities of our age than to the

mood of the day, we can never pass anything that can be jumped over or

slid down without indulging ourselves conscientiously, interrupting,

interspersing our slow progress--as Chopin his most melancholy

phrase--with graceful deviations in which caprice is blended with

virtuosity. The wife of an elderly banker, after hesitating between

various possible exposures for her husband, had settled him on a folding

chair, facing the "front", sheltered from wind and sun by the

band-stand. Having seen him comfortably installed there, she had gone to

buy a newspaper which she would read aloud to him, to distract him, one

of her little absences which she never prolonged for more than five

minutes, which seemed long enough to him but which she repeated at

frequent intervals so that this old husband on whom she lavished an

attention that she took care to conceal, should have the impression that

he was still quite alive and like other people and was in no need of

protection. The platform of the band-stand provided, above his head, a

natural and tempting springboard, across which, without a moment's

hesitation, the eldest of the little band began to run; she jumped over

the terrified old man, whose yachting cap was brushed by the nimble

feet, to the great delight of the other girls, especially of a pair of

green eyes in a "dashing" face, which expressed, for that bold act, an

admiration and a merriment in which I seemed to discern a trace of

timidity, a shamefaced and blustering timidity which did not exist in

the others. "Oh, the poor old man; he makes me sick; he looks half

dead;" said a girl with a croaking voice, but with more sarcasm than

sympathy. They walked on a little way, then stopped for a moment in the

middle of the road, with no thought whether they were impeding the

passage of other people, and held a council, a solid body of irregular

shape, compact, unusual and shrill, like birds that gather on the ground

at the moment of flight; then they resumed their leisurely stroll along

the "front", against a background of sea.

By this time their charming features had ceased to be indistinct and

impersonal. I had dealt them like cards into so many heaps to compose

(failing their names, of which I was still ignorant) the big one who had

jumped over the old banker; the little one who stood out against the

horizon of sea with her plump and rosy cheeks, her green eyes; the one

with the straight nose and dark complexion, in such contrast to all the

rest, another, with a white face like an egg on which a tiny nose

described an arc of a circle like a chicken's beak; yet another, wearing

a hooded cape (which gave her so poverty-stricken an appearance, and so

contradicted the smartness of the figure beneath that the explanation

which suggested itself was that this girl must have parents of high

position who valued their self-esteem so far above the visitors to

Balbec and the sartorial elegance of their own children that it was a

matter of the utmost indifference to them that their daughter should

stroll on the "front" dressed in a way which humbler people would have

considered too modest); a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump,

colourless cheeks, a black polo-cap pulled down over her face, who was

pushing a bicycle with so exaggerated a movement of her hips, with an

air borne out by her language, which was so typically of the gutter and

was being shouted so loud, when I passed her (although among her

expressions I caught that irritating "live my own life") that,

abandoning the hypothesis which her friend's hooded cape had made me

construct, I concluded instead that all these girls belonged to the

population which frequents the racing-cracks, and must be the very

juvenile mistresses of professional bicyclists. In any event, in none of

my suppositions was there any possibility of their being virtuous. At

first sight--in the way in which they looked at one another and smiled,

in the insistent stare of the one with the dull cheeks--I had grasped

that they were not. Besides, my grandmother had always watched over me

with a delicacy too timorous for me not to believe that the sum total of

the things one ought not to do was indivisible or that girls who were

lacking in respect for their elders would suddenly be stopped short by

scruples when there were pleasures at stake more tempting than that of

jumping over an octogenarian.

Though they were now separately identifiable, still the mutual response

which they gave one another with eyes animated my self-sufficiency and

the spirit of comradeship, in which were kindled at every moment now the

interest now the insolent indifference with which each of them sparkled

according as her glance fell on one of her friends or on passing

strangers, that consciousness, moreover, of knowing one another

intimately enough always to go about together, by making them a 'band

apart' established between their independent and separate bodies, as

slowly they advanced, a bond invisible but harmonious, like a single

warm shadow, a single atmosphere making of them a whole as homogeneous

in its parts as it was different from the crowd through which their

procession gradually wound.

For an instant, as I passed the dark one with the fat cheeks who was

wheeling a bicycle, I caught her smiling, sidelong glance, aimed from

the centre of that inhuman world which enclosed the life of this little

tribe, an inaccessible, unknown world to which the idea of what I was

could certainly never attain nor find a place in it. Wholly occupied

with what her companions were saying, this young girl in her polo-cap,

pulled down very low over her brow, had she seen me at the moment in

which the dark ray emanating from her eyes had fallen on me? In the

heart of what universe did she distinguish me? It would have been as

hard for me to say as, when certain peculiarities are made visible,

thanks to the telescope, in a neighbouring planet, it is difficult to

arrive at the conclusion that human beings inhabit it, that they can see

us, or to say what ideas the sight of us can have aroused in their

minds.

If we thought that the eyes of a girl like that were merely two

glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and to

unite her life to ours. But we feel that what shines in those reflecting

discs is not due solely to their material composition; that it is,

unknown to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that the creature is

conceiving, relative to the people and places that she knows--the turf

of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedalling on past

fields and woods, she would have drawn me after her, that little peri,

more seductive to me than she of the Persian paradise--the shadows, too,

of the home to which she will presently return, of the plans that she is

forming or that others have formed for her; and above all that it is

she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and

incessant will. I knew that I should never possess this young cyclist if

I did not possess also what there was in her eyes. And it was

consequently her whole life that filled me with desire; a sorrowful

desire because I felt that it was not to be realised, but exhilarating,

because what had hitherto been my life, having ceased of a sudden to be

my whole life, being no more now than a little part of the space

stretching out before me, which I was burning to cover and which was

composed of the lives of these girls, offered me that prolongation, that

possible multiplication of oneself which is happiness. And no doubt the

fact that we had, these girls and I, not one habit--as we had not one

idea--in common, was to make it more difficult for me to make friends

with them and to please them. But perhaps, also, it was thanks to those

differences, to my consciousness that there did not enter into the

composition of the nature and actions of these girls a single element

that I knew or possessed, that there came in place of my satiety a

thirst--like that with which a dry land burns--for a life which my soul,

because it had never until now received one drop of it, would absorb all

the more greedily in long draughts, with a more perfect imbibition.

I had looked so closely at the dark cyclist with the bright eyes that

she seemed to notice my attention, and said to the biggest of the girls

something that I could not hear. To be honest, this dark one was not the

one that pleased me most, simply because she was dark and because (since

the day on which, from the little path by Tansonville, I had seen

Gilberte) a girl with reddish hair and a golden skin had remained for me

the inaccessible ideal. But Gilberte herself, had I not loved her

principally because she had appeared to me haloed with that aureole of

being the friend of Bergotte, of going with him to look at old

cathedrals? And in the same way could I not rejoice at having seen this

dark girl look at me (which made me hope that it would be easier for me

to get to know her first), for she would introduce me to the others, to

the pitiless one who had jumped over the old man's head, to the cruel

one who had said "He makes me sick, poor old man!" to all of them in

turn, among whom, moreover, she had the distinction of being their

inseparable companion? And yet the supposition that I might some day be

the friend of one or other of these girls, that their eyes, whose

incomprehensible gaze struck me now and again, playing upon me unawares,

like the play of sunlight upon a wall, might ever, by a miraculous

alchemy, allow to interpenetrate among their ineffable particles the

idea of my existence, some affection for my person, that I myself might

some day take my place among them in the evolution of their course by

the sea's edge--that supposition appeared to me to contain within it a

contradiction as insoluble as if, standing before some classical frieze

or a fresco representing a procession, I had believed it possible for

me, the spectator, to take my place, beloved of them, among the god-like

hierophants.

The happiness of knowing these girls was, then, not to be realised.

Certainly it would not have been the first of its kind that I had

renounced. I had only to recall the numberless strangers whom, even at

Balbec, the carriage bowling away from them at full speed had forced me

for ever to abandon. And indeed the pleasure that was given me by the

little band, as noble as if it had been composed of Hellenic virgins,

came from some suggestion that there was in it of the flight of passing

figures along a road. This fleetingness of persons who are not known to

us, who force us to put out from the harbour of life, in which the women

whose society we frequent have all, in course of time, laid bare their

blemishes, urges us into that state of pursuit in which there is no

longer anything to arrest the imagination. But to strip our pleasures of

imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to

nothing. Offered me by one of those procuresses (whose good offices, all

the same, the reader has seen that I by no means scorned), withdrawn

from the element which gave them so many fine shades and such vagueness,

these girls would have enchanted me less. We must have imagination,

awakened by the uncertainty of being able to attain our object, to

create a goal which hides our other goal from us, and by substituting

for sensual pleasures the idea of penetrating into a life prevents us

from recognising that pleasure, from tasting its true savour, from

restricting it to its own range.

There must be, between us and the fish which, if we saw it for the first

time cooked and served on a table, would not appear worth the endless

trouble, craft and stratagem that are necessary if we are to catch it,

interposed, during our afternoons with the rod, the ripple to whose

surface come wavering, without our quite knowing what we intend to do

with them, the burnished gleam of flesh, the indefiniteness of a form,

in the fluidity of a transparent and flowing azure.

These girls benefited also by that alteration of social values

characteristic of seaside life. All the advantages which, in our

ordinary environment, extend and magnify our importance, we there find

to have become invisible, in fact to be eliminated; while on the other

hand the people whom we suppose, without reason, to enjoy similar

advantages appear to us amplified to artificial dimensions. This made it

easy for strange women generally, and to-day for these girls in

particular, to acquire an enormous importance in my eyes, and impossible

to make them aware of such importance as I might myself possess.

But if there was this to be said for the excursion of the little band,

that it was but an excerpt from the innumerable flight of passing women,

which had always disturbed me, their flight was here reduced to a

movement so slow as to approach immobility. Now, precisely because, in a

phase so far from rapid, faces, no longer swept past me in a whirlwind,

but calm and distinct, still appeared beautiful, I was prevented from

thinking as I had so often thought when Mme. de Villeparisis's carriage

bore me away that, at closer quarters, if I had stopped for a moment,

certain details, a pitted skin, drooping nostrils, a silly gape, a

grimace of a smile, an ugly figure might have been substituted, in the

face and body of the woman, for those that I had doubtless imagined; for

there had sufficed a pretty outline, a glimpse of a fresh complexion,

for me to add, in entire good faith, a fascinating shoulder, a delicious

glance of which I carried in my mind for ever a memory or a preconceived

idea, these rapid decipherings of a person whom we see in motion

exposing us thus to the same errors as those too rapid readings in

which, on a single syllable and without waiting to identify the rest, we

base instead of the word that is in the text a wholly different word

with which our memory supplies us. It could not be so with me now. I had

looked well at them all; each of them I had seen, not from every angle

and rarely in full face, but all the same in two or three aspects

different enough to enable me to make either the correction or the

verification, to take a "proof" of the different possibilities of line

and colour that are hazarded at first sight, and to see persist in them,

through a series of expressions, something unalterably material. I could

say to myself with conviction that neither in Paris nor at Balbec, in

the most favourable hypotheses of what might have happened, even if I

had been able to stop and talk to them, the passing women who had caught

my eye, had there ever been one whose appearance, followed by her

disappearance without my having managed to know her, had left me with

more regret than would these, had given me the idea that her friendship

might be a thing so intoxicating. Never, among actresses nor among

peasants nor among girls from a convent school had I beheld anything so

beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so inestimably

precious, so apparently inaccessible. They were, of the unknown and

potential happiness of life, an illustration so delicious and in so

perfect a state that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I was

desperate with the fear that I might not be able to make, in unique

conditions which left no room for any possibility of error, proper trial

of what is the most mysterious thing that is offered to us by the beauty

which we desire and console ourselves for never possessing, by demanding

pleasure--as Swann had always refused to do before Odette's day--from

women whom we have not desired, so that, indeed, we die without having

ever known what that other pleasure was. No doubt it was possible that

it was not in reality an unknown pleasure, that on a close inspection

its mystery would dissipate and vanish, that it was no more than a

projection, a mirage of desire. But in that case I could blame only the

compulsion of a law of nature,--which if it applied to these girls would

apply to all--and not the imperfection of the object. For it was that

which I should have chosen above all others, feeling quite certain, with

a botanist's satisfaction, that it was not possible to find collected

anywhere rarer specimens than these young flowers who were interrupting

at this moment before my eyes the line of the sea with their slender

hedge, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorning a garden on the brink

of a cliff, between which is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed

by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue and horizontal line

that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly,

dawdling in the cup of a flower which the moving hull has long since

passed, can, if it is to fly and be sure of arriving before the vessel,

wait until nothing but the tiniest slice of blue still separates the

questing prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is

steering.

I went indoors because I was to dine at Rivebelle with Robert, and my

grandmother insisted that on those evenings, before going out, I must

lie down for an hour on my bed, a rest which the Balbec doctor presently

ordered me to extend to the other evenings also.

However, there was no need, when one went indoors, to leave the "front"

and to enter the hotel by the hall, that is to say from behind. By

virtue of an alteration of the clock which reminded me of those

Saturdays when, at Combray, we used to have luncheon an hour earlier,

now with summer at the full the days had become so long that the sun was

still high in the heavens, as though it were only tea-time, when the

tables were being laid for dinner in the Grand Hotel. And so the great

sliding windows were kept open from the ground. I had but to step across

a low wooden sill to find myself in the dining-room, through which I

walked and straight across to the lift.

As I passed the office I addressed a smile to the manager, and with no

shudder of disgust gathered one for myself from his face which, since I

had been at Balbec, my comprehensive study of it was injecting and

transforming, little by little, like a natural history preparation. His

features had become familiar to me, charged with a meaning that was of

no importance but still intelligible, like a script which one can read,

and had ceased in any way to resemble these queer, intolerable

characters which his face had presented to me on that first day, when I

had seen before me a personage now forgotten, or, if I succeeded in

recalling him, unrecognisable, difficult to identify with this

insignificant and polite personality of which the other was but a

caricature, a hideous and rapid sketch. Without either the shyness or

the sadness of the evening of my arrival I rang for the attendant, who

no longer stood in silence while I rose by his side in the lift as in a

mobile thoracic cage propelled upwards along its ascending pillar, but

repeated:

"There aren't the people now there were a month back. They're beginning

to go now; the days are drawing in." He said this not because there was

any truth in it but because, having an engagement, presently, for a

warmer part of the coast, he would have liked us all to leave, so that

the hotel could be shut up and he have a few days to himself before

"rejoining" in his new place. "Rejoin" and "new" were not, by the way,

incompatible terms, since, for the lift-boy, "rejoin" was the usual form

of the verb "to join". The only thing that surprised me was that he

condescended to say "place", for he belonged to that modern proletariat

which seeks to efface from our language every trace of the rule of

domesticity. A moment later, however, he informed me that in the

"situation" which he was about to "rejoin", he would have a smarter

"tunic" and a better "salary", the words "livery" and "wages" sounding

to him obsolete and unseemly. And as, by an absurd contradiction, the

vocabulary has, through thick and thin, among us "masters", survived the

conception of inequality, I was always failing to understand what the

lift-boy said. For instance, the only thing that interested me was to

know whether my grandmother was in the hotel. Now, forestalling my

questions, the lift-boy would say to me: "That lady has just gone out

from your rooms." I was invariably taken in; I supposed that he meant my

grandmother. "No, that lady; I think she's an employee of yours." As in

the old speech of the middle classes, which ought really to be done away

with, a cook is not called an employee, I thought for a moment: "But he

must be mistaken. We don't own a factory; we haven't any employees."

Suddenly I remembered that the title of "employee" is, like the wearing

of a moustache among waiters, a sop to their self-esteem given to

servants, and realised that this lady who had just gone out must be

Françoise (probably on a visit to the coffee-maker, or to watch the

Belgian lady's little maid at her sewing), though even this sop did not

satisfy the lift-boy, for he would say quite naturally, speaking

pityingly of his own class, "with the working man" or "the small

person", using the same singular form as Racine when he speaks of "the

poor". But as a rule, for my zeal and timidity of the first evening were

now things of the past, I no longer spoke to the lift-boy. It was he now

who stood there and received no answer during the short journey on which

he threaded his way through the hotel, hollowed out inside like a toy,

which extended round about us, floor by floor, the ramifications of its

corridors in the depths of which the light grew velvety, lost its tone,

diminished the communicating doors, the steps of the service stairs

which it transformed into that amber haze, unsubstantial and mysterious

as a twilight, in which Rembrandt picks out here and there a window-sill

or a well-head. And on each landing a golden light reflected from the

carpet indicated the setting sun and the lavatory window.

I asked myself whether the girls I had just seen lived at Balbec, and

who they could be. When our desire is thus concentrated upon a little

tribe of humanity which it singles out from the rest, everything that

can be associated with that tribe becomes a spring of emotion and then

of reflexion. I had heard a lady say on the "front": "She is a friend of

the little Simonet girl" with that self-important air of inside

knowledge, as who should say: "He is the inseparable companion of young

La Rochefoucauld." And immediately she had detected on the face of the

person to whom she gave this information a curiosity to see more of the

favoured person who was "a friend of the little Simonet". A privilege,

obviously, that did not appear to be granted to all the world. For

aristocracy is a relative state. And there are plenty of inexpensive

little holes and corners where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter

of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales. I

have often since then sought to recall how it first sounded for me there

on the beach, that name of Simonet, still quite indefinite as to its

form, which I had failed to distinguish, and also as to its

significance, to the designation by it of such and such a person, or

perhaps of some one else; imprinted, in fact, with that vagueness, that

novelty which we find so moving in the sequel, when the name whose

letters are every moment engraved more deeply on our hearts by our

incessant thought of them has become (though this was not to happen to

me with the name of the "little Simonet" until several years had passed)

the first coherent sound that comes to our lips, whether on waking from

sleep or on recovering from a swoon, even before the idea of what

o'clock it is or of where we are, almost before the word "I", as though

the person whom it names were more "we" even than we ourself, and as

though after a brief spell of unconsciousness the phase that is the

first of all to dissolve is that in which we were not thinking of her. I

do not know why I said to myself from the first that the name Simonet

must be that of one of the band of girls; from that moment I never

ceased to ask myself how I could get to know the Simonet family, get to

know them, moreover, through people whom they considered superior to

themselves (which ought not to be difficult if the girls were only

common little "bounders") so that they might not form a disdainful idea

of me. For one cannot have a perfect knowledge, one cannot effect the

complete absorption of a person who disdains one, so long as one has not

overcome her disdain. And since, whenever the idea of women who are so

different from us penetrates our senses, unless we are able to forget it

or the competition of other ideas eliminates it, we know no rest until

we have converted those aliens into something that is compatible with

ourself, our heart being in this respect endowed with the same kind of

reaction and activity as our physical organism, which cannot abide the

infusion of any foreign body into its veins without at once striving to

digest and assimilate it: the little Simonet must be the prettiest of

them all--she who, I felt moreover, might yet become my mistress, for

she was the only one who, two or three times half-turning her head, had

appeared to take cognisance of my fixed stare. I asked the lift-boy

whether he knew of any people at Balbec called Simonet. Not liking to

admit that there was anything which he did not know, he replied that he

seemed to have heard the name somewhere. As we reached the highest

landing I told him to have the latest lists of visitors sent up to me.

I stepped out of the lift, but instead of going to my room I made my way

farther along the corridor, for before my arrival the valet in charge of

the landing, despite his horror of draughts, had opened the window at

the end, which instead of looking out to the sea faced the hill and

valley inland, but never allowed them to be seen, for its panes, which

were made of clouded glass, were generally closed. I made a short

"station" in front of it, time enough just to pay my devotions to the

view which for once it revealed over the hill against which the back of

the hotel rested, a view that contained but a solitary house, planted in

the middle distance, though the perspective and the evening light in

which I saw it, while preserving its mass, gave it a sculptural beauty

and a velvet background, as though to one of those architectural works

in miniature, tiny temples or chapels wrought in gold and enamels, which

serve as reliquaries and are exposed only on rare and solemn days for

the veneration of the faithful. But this moment of adoration had already

lasted too long, for the valet, who carried in one hand a bunch of keys

and with the other saluted me by touching his verger's skull-cap, though

without raising it, on account of the pure, cool evening air, came and

drew together, like those of a shrine, the two sides of the window, and

so shut off the minute edifice, the glistening relic from my adoring

gaze. I went into my room. Regularly, as the season advanced, the

picture that I found there in my window changed. At first it was broad

daylight, and dark only if the weather was bad: and then, in the

greenish glass which it distended with the curve of its round waves, the

sea, set among the iron uprights of my window like a piece of stained

glass in its leads, ravelled out over all the deep rocky border of the

bay little plumed triangles of an unmoving spray delineated with the

delicacy of a feather or a downy breast from Pisanello's pencil, and

fixed in that white, unalterable, creamy enamel which is used to depict

fallen snow in Gallé's glass.

Presently the days grew shorter and at the moment when I entered my room

the violet sky seemed branded with the stiff, geometrical, travelling,

effulgent figure of the sun (like the representation of some miraculous

sign, of some mystical apparition) leaning over the sea from the hinge

of the horizon as a sacred picture leans over a high altar, while the

different parts of the western sky exposed in the glass fronts of the

low mahogany bookcases that ran along the walls, which I carried back in

my mind to the marvellous painting from which they had been detached,

seemed like those different scenes which some old master executed long

ago for a confraternity upon a shrine, whose separate panels are now

exhibited side by side upon the wall of a museum gallery, so that the

visitor's imagination alone can restore them to their place on the

predella of the reredos. A few weeks later, when I went upstairs, the

sun had already set. Like the one that I used to see at Combray, behind

the Calvary, when I was coming home from a walk and looking forward to

going down to the kitchen before dinner, a band of red sky over the sea,

compact and clear-cut as a layer of aspic over meat, then, a little

later, over a sea already cold and blue like a grey mullet, a sky of the

same pink as the salmon that we should presently be ordering at

Rivebelle reawakened the pleasure which I was to derive from the act of

dressing to go out to dinner. Over the sea, quite near the shore, were

trying to rise, one beyond another, at wider and wider intervals,

vapours of a pitchy blackness but also of the polish and consistency of

agate, of a visible weight, so much so that the highest among them,

poised at the end of their contorted stem and overreaching the centre of

gravity of the pile that had hitherto supported them, seemed on the

point of bringing down in ruin this lofty structure already half the

height of the sky, and of precipitating it into the sea. The sight of a

ship that was moving away like a nocturnal traveller gave me the same

impression that I had had in the train of being set free from the

necessity of sleep and from confinement in a bedroom. Not that I felt

myself a prisoner in the room in which I now was, since in another hour

I should have left it and be getting into the carriage. I threw myself

down on the bed; and, just as if I had been lying in a berth on board

one of those steamers which I could see quite near to me and which, when

night came, it would be strange to see stealing slowly out into the

darkness, like shadowy and silent but unsleeping swans, I was on all

sides surrounded by pictures of the sea.

But as often as not they were, indeed, only pictures; I forgot that

below their coloured expanse was hollowed the sad desolation of the

beach, travelled by the restless evening breeze whose breath I had so

anxiously felt on my arrival at Balbec; besides, even in my room, being

wholly taken up with thoughts of the girls whom I had seen go past, I

was no longer in a state of mind calm or disinterested enough to allow

the formation of any really deep impression of beauty. The anticipation

of dinner at Rivebelle made my mood more frivolous still, and my mind,

dwelling at such moments upon the surface of the body which I was going

to dress up so as to try to appear as pleasing as possible in the

feminine eyes which would be scrutinising me in the brilliantly lighted

restaurant, was incapable of putting any depth behind the colour of

things. And if, beneath my window, the unwearying, gentle flight of

sea-martins and swallows had not arisen like a playing fountain, like

living fireworks, joining the intervals between their soaring rockets

with the motionless white streaming lines of long horizontal wakes of

foam, without the charming miracle of this natural and local phenomenon,

which brought into touch with reality the scenes that I had before my

eyes, I might easily have believed that they were no more than a

selection, made afresh every day, of paintings which were shewn quite

arbitrarily in the place in which I happened to be and without having

any necessary connexion with that place: At one time it was an

exhibition of Japanese colour-prints: beside the neat disc of sun, red

and round as the moon, a yellow cloud seemed a lake against which black

swords were outlined like the trees upon its shore; a bar of a tender

pink which I had never seen again after my first paint-box swelled out

into a river on either bank of which boats seemed to be waiting high and

dry for some one to push them down and set them afloat. And with the

contemptuous, bored, frivolous glance of an amateur or a woman hurrying

through a picture gallery between two social engagements, I would say to

myself: "Curious sunset, this; it's different from what they usually are

but after all I've seen them just as fine, just as remarkable as this."

I had more pleasure on evenings when a ship, absorbed and liquefied by

the horizon so much the same in colour as herself (an Impressionist

exhibition this time) that it seemed to be also of the same matter,

appeared as if some one had simply cut out with a pair of scissors her

bows and the rigging in which she tapered into a slender filigree from

the vaporous blue of the sky. Sometimes the ocean filled almost the

whole of my window, when it was enlarged and prolonged by a band of sky

edged at the top only by a line that was of the same blue as the sea, so

that I supposed it all to be still sea, and the change in colour due

only to some effect of light and shade. Another day the sea was painted

only in the lower part of the window, all the rest of which was so

filled with innumerable clouds, packed one against another in horizontal

bands, that its panes seemed to be intended, for some special purpose or

to illustrate a special talent of the artist, to present a "Cloud

Study", while the fronts of the various bookcases shewing similar clouds

but in another part of the horizon and differently coloured by the

light, appeared to be offering as it were the repetition--of which

certain of our contemporaries are so fond--of one and the same effect

always observed at different hours but able now in the immobility of art

to be seen all together in a single room, drawn in pastel and mounted

under glass. And sometimes to a sky and sea uniformly grey a rosy touch

would be added with an exquisite delicacy, while a little butterfly that

had gone to sleep at the foot of the window seemed to be attaching with

its wings at the corner of this "Harmony in Grey and Pink" in the

Whistler manner the favourite signature of the Chelsea master. The pink

vanished; there was nothing now left to look at. I rose for a moment and

before lying down again drew close the inner curtains. Above them I

could see from my bed the ray of light that still remained, growing

steadily fainter and thinner, but it was without any feeling of sadness,

without any regret for its passing that I thus allowed to die above the

curtains the hour at which, as a rule, I was seated at table, for I knew

that this day was of another kind than ordinary days, longer, like those

arctic days which night interrupts for a few minutes only; I knew that

from the chrysalis of the dusk was preparing to emerge, by a radiant

metamorphosis, the dazzling light of the Rivebelle restaurant. I said to

myself: "It is time"; I stretched myself on the bed, and rose, and

finished dressing; and I found a charm in these idle moments, lightened

of every material burden, in which while down below the others were

dining I was employing the forces accumulated during the inactivity of

this last hour of the day only in drying my washed body, in putting on a

dinner jacket, in tying my tie, in making all those gestures which were

already dictated by the anticipated pleasure of seeing again some woman

whom I had noticed, last time, at Rivebelle, who had seemed to be

watching me, had perhaps left the table for a moment only in the hope

that I would follow her; it was with joy that I enriched myself with all

these attractions so as to give myself, whole, alert, willing, to a new

life, free, without cares, in which I would lean my hesitations upon the

calm strength of Saint-Loup, and would choose from among the different

species of animated nature and the produce of every land those which,

composing the unfamiliar dishes that my companion would at once order,

might have tempted my appetite or my imagination. And then at the end of

the season came the days when I could no longer pass indoors from the

"front" through the dining-room; its windows stood open no more, for it

was night now outside and the swarm of poor folk and curious idlers,

attracted by the blaze of light which they might not reach, hung in

black clusters chilled by the north wind to the luminous sliding walls

of that buzzing hive of glass.

There was a knock at my door; it was Aimé who had come upstairs in

person with the latest lists of visitors.

Aimé could not go away without telling me that Dreyfus was guilty a

thousand times over. "It will all come out," he assured me, "not this

year, but next. It was a gentleman who's very thick with the General

Staff, told me. I asked him if they wouldn't decide to bring it all to

light at once, before the year is out. He laid down his cigarette,"

Aimé went on, acting the scene for my benefit, and shaking his head and

his forefinger as his informant had done, as much as to say: "We mustn't

expect too much!"--"'Not this year, Aimé,' those were his very words,

putting his hand on my shoulder, 'It isn't possible. But next Easter,

yes!'" And Aimé tapped me gently on my shoulder, saying, "You see, I'm

letting you have it exactly as he told me," whether because he was

flattered at this act of familiarity by a distinguished person or so

that I might better appreciate, with a full knowledge of the facts, the

worth of the arguments and our grounds for hope.

It was not without a slight throb of the heart that on the first page of

the list I caught sight of the words "Simonet and family." I had in me a

store of old dream-memories which dated from my childhood, and in which

all the tenderness (tenderness that existed in my heart, but, when my

heart felt it, was not distinguishable from anything else) was wafted to

me by a person as different as possible from myself. This person, once

again I fashioned her, utilising for the purpose the name Simonet and

the memory of the harmony that had reigned between the young bodies

which I had seen displaying themselves on the beach, in a sportive

procession worthy of Greek art or of Giotto. I knew not which of these

girls was Mlle. Simonet, if indeed any of them were so named, but I did

know that I was loved by Mlle. Simonet and that I was going, with

Saint-Loup's help, to attempt to know her. Unfortunately, having on that

condition only obtained an extension of his leave, he was obliged to

report for duty every day at Doncières: but to make him forsake his

military duty I had felt that I might count, more even than on his

friendship for myself, on that same curiosity, as a human naturalist,

which I myself had so often felt--even without having seen the person

mentioned, and simply on hearing some one say that there was a pretty

cashier at a fruiterer's--to acquaint myself with a new variety of

feminine beauty. But that curiosity I had been wrong in hoping to excite

in Saint-Loup by speaking to him of my band of girls. For it had been

and would long remain paralysed in him by his love for that actress

whose lover he was. And even if he had felt it lightly stirring him he

would have repressed it, from an almost superstitious belief that on his

own fidelity might depend that of his mistress. And so it was without

any promise from him that he would take an active interest in my girls

that we started out to dine at Rivebelle.

At first, when we arrived there, the sun used just to have set, but it

was light still; in the garden outside the restaurant, where the lamps

had not yet been lighted, the heat of the day fell and settled, as

though in a vase along the sides of which the transparent, dusky jelly

of the air seemed of such consistency that a tall rose-tree fastened

against the dim wall which it streaked with pink veins, looked like the

arborescence that one sees at the heart of an onyx. Presently night had

always fallen when we left the carriage, often indeed before we started

from Balbec if the evening was wet and we had put off sending for the

carriage in the hope of the weather's improving. But on those days it

was without any sadness that I listened to the wind howling, I knew that

it did not mean the abandonment of my plans, imprisonment in my bedroom;

I knew that in the great dining-room of the restaurant, which we would

enter to the sound of the music of the gipsy band, the innumerable lamps

would triumph easily over darkness and chill, by applying to them their

broad cauteries of molten gold, and I jumped light-heartedly after

Saint-Loup into the closed carriage which stood waiting for us in the

rain. For some time past the words of Bergotte, when he pronounced

himself positive that, in spite of all I might say, I had been created

to enjoy, pre-eminently, the pleasures of the mind, had restored to me,

with regard to what I might succeed in achieving later on, a hope that

was disappointed afresh every day by the boredom that I felt on setting

myself down before a writing-table to start work on a critical essay or

a novel. "After all," I said to myself, "possibly the pleasure that its

author has found in writing it is not the infallible test of the

literary value of a page; it may be only an accessory, one that is often

to be found superadded to that value, but the want of which can have no

prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were

written yawning." My grandmother set my doubts at rest by telling me

that I should be able to work and should enjoy working as soon as my

health improved. And, our doctor having thought it only prudent to warn

me of the grave risks to which my state of health might expose me, and

having outlined all the hygienic precaution that I ought to take to

avoid any accident--I subordinated all my pleasures to an object which I

judged to be infinitely more important than them, that of becoming

strong enough to be able to bring into being the work which I had,

possibly, within me; I had been exercising over myself, ever since I had

come to Balbec, a scrupulous and constant control. Nothing would have

induced me, there, to touch the cup of coffee which would have robbed me

of the night's sleep that was necessary if I was not to be tired next

day. But as soon as we reached Rivebelle, immediately, what with the

excitement of a new pleasure, and finding myself in that different zone

into which the exception to our rule of life takes us after it has cut

the thread, patiently spun throughout so many days, that was guiding us

towards wisdom--as though there were never to be any such thing as

to-morrow, nor any lofty aims to be realised, vanished all that exact

machinery of prudent hygienic measures which had been working to

safeguard them. A waiter was offering to take my coat, whereupon

Saint-Loup asked: "You're sure you won't be cold? Perhaps you'ld better

keep it: it's not very warm in here."

"No, no," I assured him; and perhaps I did not feel the cold; but

however that might be, I no longer knew the fear of falling ill, the

necessity of not dying, the importance of work. I gave up my coat; we

entered the dining-room to the sound of some warlike march played by the

gipsies, we advanced between two rows of tables laid for dinner as along

an easy path of glory, and, feeling a happy glow imparted to our bodies

by the rhythms of the orchestra which rendered us its military honours,

gave us this unmerited triumph, we concealed it beneath a grave and

frozen mien, beneath a languid, casual gait, so as not to be like those

music-hall "mashers" who, having wedded a ribald verse to a patriotic

air, come running on to the stage with the martial countenance of a

victorious general.

From that moment I was a new man, who was no longer my grandmother's

grandson and would remember her only when it was time to get up and go,

but the brother, for the time being, of the waiters who were going to

bring us our dinner.

The dose of beer--all the more, that of champagne--which at Balbec I

should not have ventured to take in a week, albeit to my calm and lucid

consciousness the flavour of those beverages represented a pleasure

clearly appreciable, since it was also one that could easily be

sacrificed, I now imbibed at a sitting, adding to it a few drops of port

wine, too much distracted to be able to taste it, and I gave the

violinist who had just been playing the two louis which I had been

saving up for the last month with a view to buying something, I could

not remember what. Several of the waiters, set going among the tables,

were flying along at full speed, each carrying on his outstretched palms

a dish which it seemed to be the object of this kind of race not to let

fall. And in fact the chocolate _soufflés_ arrived at their destination

unspilled, the potatoes _à l'anglaise_, in spite of the pace which

ought to have sent them flying, came arranged as at the start round the

Pauilhac lamb. I noticed one of these servants, very tall, plumed with

superb black locks, his face dyed in a tint that suggested rather

certain species of rare birds than a human being, who, running without

pause (and, one would have said, without purpose) from one end of the

room to the other, made me think of one of those macaws which fill the

big aviaries in zoological gardens with their gorgeous colouring and

incomprehensible agitation. Presently the spectacle assumed an order, in

my eyes at least, growing at once more noble and more calm. All this

dizzy activity became fixed in a quiet harmony. I looked at the round

tables whose innumerable assemblage filled the restaurant like so many

planets, as planets are represented in old allegorical pictures.

Moreover, there seemed to be some irresistibly attractive force at work

among these divers stars, and at each table the diners had eyes only for

the tables at which they were not sitting, except perhaps some wealthy

amphitryon who, having managed to secure a famous author, was

endeavouring to extract from him, thanks to the magic properties of the

turning table, a few unimportant remarks at which the ladies marvelled.

The harmony of these astral tables did not prevent the incessant

revolution of the countless servants who, because instead of being

seated like the diners they were on their feet, performed their

evolutions in a more exalted sphere. No doubt they were running, one to

fetch the _hors d'œuvre_, another to change the wine or with clean

glasses. But despite these special reasons, their perpetual course among

the round tables yielded, after a time, to the observer the law of its

dizzy but ordered circulation. Seated behind a bank of flowers, two

horrible cashiers, busy with endless calculations, seemed two witches

occupied in forecasting by astrological signs the disasters that might

from time to time occur in this celestial vault fashioned according to

the scientific conceptions of the middle ages.

And I rather pitied all the diners because I felt that for them the

round tables were not planets and that they had not cut through the

scheme of things one of those sections which deliver us from the bondage

of appearances and enable us to perceive analogies. They thought that

they were dining with this or that person, that the dinner would cost

roughly so much, and that to-morrow they would begin all over again. And

they appeared absolutely unmoved by the progress through their midst of

a train of young assistants who, having probably at that moment no

urgent duty, advanced processionally bearing rolls of bread in baskets.

Some of them, the youngest, stunned by the cuffs which the head waiters

administered to them as they passed, fixed melancholy eyes upon a

distant dream and were consoled only if some visitor from the Balbec

hotel in which they had once been employed, recognising them, said a few

words to them, telling them in person to take away the champagne which

was not fit to drink, an order that filled them with pride.

I could hear the twingeing of my nerves, in which there was a sense of

comfort independent of the external objects that might have produced it,

a comfort which the least shifting of my body or of my attention was

enough to make me feel, just as to a shut eye a slight pressure gives

the sensation of colour. I had already drunk a good deal of port wine,

and if I now asked for more it was not so much with a view to the

comfort which the additional glasses would bring me as an effect of the

comfort produced by the glasses that had gone before. I allowed the

music itself to guide to each of its notes my pleasure which, meekly

following, rested on each in turn. If, like one of those chemical

industries by means of which are prepared in large quantities bodies

which in a state of nature come together only by accident and very

rarely, this restaurant at Rivebelle united at one and the same moment

more women to tempt me with beckoning vistas of happiness than the

hazard of walks and drives would have made me encounter in a year; on

the other hand, this music that greeted our ears,--arrangements of

waltzes, of German operettas, of music-hall songs, all of them quite new

to me--was itself like an ethereal resort of pleasure superimposed upon

the other and more intoxicating still. For these tunes, each as

individual as a woman, were not keeping, as she would have kept, for

some privileged person, the voluptuous secret which they contained: they

offered me their secrets, ogled me, came up to me with affected or

vulgar movements, accosted me, caressed me as if I had suddenly become

more seductive, more powerful and more rich; I indeed found in these

tunes an element of cruelty; because any such thing as a disinterested

feeling for beauty, a gleam of intelligence was unknown to them; for

them physical pleasures alone existed. And they are the most merciless

of hells, the most gateless and imprisoning for the jealous wretch to

whom they present that pleasure--that pleasure which the woman he loves

is enjoying with another--as the only thing that exists in the world for

her who is all the world to him. But while I was humming softly to

myself the notes of this tune, and returning its kiss, the pleasure

peculiar to itself which it made me feel became so dear to me that I

would have left my father and mother, to follow it through the singular

world which it constructed in the invisible, in lines instinct with

alternate languor and vivacity. Although such a pleasure as this is not

calculated to enhance the value of the person to whom it comes, for it

is perceived by him alone, and although whenever, in the course of our

life, we have failed to attract a woman who has caught sight of us, she

could not tell whether at that moment we possessed this inward and

subjective felicity which, consequently, could in no way have altered

the judgment that she passed on us, I felt myself more powerful, almost

irresistible. It seemed to me that my love was no longer something

unattractive, at which people might smile, but had precisely the

touching beauty, the seductiveness of this music, itself comparable to a

friendly atmosphere in which she whom I loved and I were to meet,

suddenly grown intimate.

This restaurant was the resort not only of light women; it was

frequented also by people in the very best society, who came there for

afternoon tea or gave big dinner-parties. The tea-parties were held in a

long gallery, glazed and narrow, shaped like a funnel, which led from

the entrance hall to the dining-room and was bounded on one side by the

garden, from which it was separated (save for a few stone pillars) only

by its wall of glass, in which panes would be opened here and there. The

result of which, apart from ubiquitous draughts, was sudden and

intermittent bursts of sunshine, a dazzling light that made it almost

impossible to see the tea-drinkers, so that when they were installed

there, at tables crowded pair after pair the whole way along the narrow

gully, as they were shot with colours at every movement they made in

drinking their tea or in greeting one another, you would have called it

a reservoir, a stewpond in which the fisherman has collected all his

glittering catch, and the fish, half out of water and bathed in

sunlight, dazzle the eye as they mirror an ever-changing iridescence.

A few hours later, during dinner, which, naturally, was served in the

dining-room, the lights would be turned on, although it was still quite

light out of doors, so that one saw before one's eyes, in the garden,

among summer-houses glimmering in the twilight, like pale spectres of

evening, alleys whose greyish verdure was pierced by the last rays of

the setting sun and, from the lamp-lit room in which we were dining,

appeared through the glass--no longer, as one would have said of the

ladies who had been drinking tea there in the afternoon, along the blue

and gold corridor, caught in a glittering and dripping net--but like the

vegetation of a pale and green aquarium of gigantic size seen by a

supernatural light. People began to rise from table; and if each party

while their dinner lasted, albeit they spent the whole time examining,

recognising, naming the party at the next table, had been held in

perfect cohesion about their own, the attractive force that had kept

them gravitating round their host of the evening lost its power at the

moment when, for coffee, they repaired to the same corridor that had

been used for the tea-parties; it often happened that in its passage

from place to place some party on the march dropped one or more of its

human corpuscles who, having come under the irresistible attraction of

the rival party, detached themselves for a moment from their own, in

which their places were taken by ladies or gentlemen who had come across

to speak to friends before hurrying off with an "I really must fly: I'm

dining with M. So-and-So." And for the moment you would have been

reminded, looking at them, of two separate nosegays that had exchanged a

few of their flowers. Then the corridor too began to empty. Often, since

even after dinner there was still a little light left outside, they left

this long corridor unlighted, and, skirted by the trees that overhung it

on the other side of the glass, it suggested a pleached alley in a

wooded and shady garden. Here and there, in the gloom, a fair diner

lingered. As I passed through this corridor one evening on my way out I

saw, sitting among a group of strangers, the beautiful Princesse de

Luxembourg. I raised my hat without stopping. She remembered me, and

bowed her head with a smile; in the air, far above her bowed head, but

emanating from the movement, rose melodiously a few words addressed to

myself, which must have been a somewhat amplified good evening, intended

not to stop me but simply to complete the gesture, to make it a spoken

greeting. But her words remained so indistinct and the sound which was

all that I caught was prolonged so sweetly and seemed to me so musical

that it seemed as if among the dim branches of the trees a nightingale

had begun to sing. If it so happened that, to finish the evening with a

party of his friends whom we had met, Saint-Loup decided to go on to the

Casino of a neighbouring village, and, taking them with him, put me in

a carriage by myself, I would urge the driver to go as fast as he

possibly could, so that the minutes might pass less slowly which I must

spend without having anyone at hand to dispense me from the obligation

myself to provide my sensibility--reversing the engine, to speak, and

emerging from the passivity in which I was caught and held as in the

teeth of a machine--with those modifications which, since my arrival at

Rivebelle, I had been receiving from other people. The risk of collision

with a carriage coming the other way along those lanes where there was

barely room for one and it was dark as pitch, the insecurity of the

soil, crumbling in many places, at the cliffs edge, the proximity of its

vertical drop to the sea, none of these things exerted on me the slight

stimulus that would have been required to bring the vision and the fear

of danger within the scope of my reasoning. For just as it is not the

desire to become famous but the habit of being laborious that enables us

to produce a finished work, so it is not the activity of the present

moment but wise reflexions from the past that help us to safeguard the

future. But if already, before this point, on my arrival at Rivebelle, I

had flung irretrievably away from me those crutches of reason and

self-control which help our infirmity to follow the right road, if I now

found myself the victim of a sort of moral ataxy, the alcohol that I had

drunk, by unduly straining my nerves, gave to the minutes as they came a

quality, a charm which did not have the result of leaving me more ready,

or indeed more resolute to inhibit them, prevent their coming; for while

it made me prefer them a thousand times to anything else in my life, my

exaltation made me isolate them from everything else; I was confined to

the present, as heroes are or drunkards; eclipsed for the moment, my

past no longer projected before me that shadow of itself which we call

our future; placing the goal of my life no longer in the realisation of

the dreams of that past, but in the felicity of the present moment, I

could see nothing now of what lay beyond it. So that, by a contradiction

which, however, was only apparent, it was at the very moment in which I

was tasting an unfamiliar pleasure, feeling that my life might yet be

happy, in which it should have become more precious in my sight; it was

at this very moment that, delivered from the anxieties which my life had

hitherto contrived to suggest to me, I unhesitatingly abandoned it to

the chance of an accident. After all, I was doing no more than

concentrate in a single evening the carelessness that, for most men, is

diluted throughout their whole existence, in which every day they face,

unnecessarily, the dangers of a sea-voyage, of a trip in an aeroplane or

motor-car, when there is waiting for them at home the creature whose

life their death would shatter, or when there is still stored in the

fragile receptacle of their brain that book the approaching publication

of which is their one object, now, in life. And so too in the Rivebelle

restaurant, on evenings when we just stayed there after dinner, if

anyone had come in with the intention of killing me, as I no longer saw,

save in a distant prospect too remote to have any reality, my

grandmother, my life to come, the books that I was going to write, as I

clung now, body and mind, wholly to the scent of the lady at the next

table, the politeness of the waiters, the outline of the waltz that the

band was playing, as I was glued to my immediate sensation, with no

extension beyond its limits, nor any object other than not to be

separated from it, I should have died in and with that sensation, I

should have let myself be strangled without offering any resistance,

without a movement, a bee drugged with tobacco smoke that had ceased to

take any thought for preserving the accumulation of its labours and the

hopes of its hive.

I ought here to add that this insignificance into which the most serious

matters subsided, by contrast with the violence of my exaltation, came

in the end to include Mlle. Simonet and her friends. The enterprise of

knowing them seemed to me easy now but hardly worth the trouble, for my

immediate sensation alone, thanks to its extraordinary intensity, to the

joy that its slightest modifications, its mere continuity provoked, had

any importance for me; all the rest, parents, work, pleasures, girls at

Balbec, weighed with me no more than does a flake of foam in a strong

wind that will not let it find a resting place, existed no longer save

in relation to this internal power: intoxication makes real for an hour

or two a subjective idealism, pure phenomenism; nothing is left now but

appearances, nothing exists save as a function of our sublime self. This

is not to say that a genuine love, if we have one, cannot survive in

such conditions. But we feel so unmistakably, as though in a new

atmosphere, that unknown pressures have altered the dimensions of that

sentiment that we can no longer consider it in the old way. It is indeed

still there and we shall find it, but in a different place, no longer

weighing upon us, satisfied by the sensation which the present affords

it, a sensation that is sufficient for us, since for what is not

actually present we take no thought. Unfortunately the coefficient which

thus alters our values alters them only in the hour of intoxication. The

people who had lost all their importance, whom we scattered with our

breath like soap-bubbles, will to-morrow resume their density; we shall

have to try afresh to settle down to work which this evening had ceased

to have any significance. A more serious matter still, these mathematics

of the morrow, the same as those of yesterday, in whose problems we

shall find ourselves inexorably involved, it is they that govern us even

in these hours, and we alone are unconscious of their rule. If there

should happen to be, near us, a woman, virtuous or inimical, that

question so difficult an hour ago--to know whether we should succeed in

finding favour with her--seems to us now a million times easier of

solution without having become easier in any respect, for it is only in

our own sight, in our own inward sight that we have altered. And she is

as much annoyed with us at this moment as we shall be next day at the

thought of our having given a hundred francs to the messenger, and for

the same reason which in our case has merely been delayed in its

operation, namely the absence of intoxication.

I knew none of the women who were at Rivebelle and, because they formed

a part of my intoxication just as its reflexions form part of a mirror,

appeared to me now a thousand times more to be desired than the less and

less existent Mlle. Simonet. One of them, young, fair, by herself, with

a sad expression on a face framed in a straw hat trimmed with

field-flowers, gazed at me for a moment with a dreamy air and struck me

as being attractive. Then it was the turn of another, and of a third;

finally of a dark one with glowing cheeks. Almost all of them were

known, if not to myself, to Saint-Loup.

He had, in fact, before he made the acquaintance of his present

mistress, lived so much in the restricted world of amorous adventure

that all the women who would be dining on these evenings at Rivebelle,

where many of them had appeared quite by chance, having come to the

coast some to join their lovers, others in the hope of finding fresh

lovers there, there was scarcely one that he did not know from having

spent--or if not he, one or other of his friends--at least one night in

their company. He did not bow to them if they were with men, and they,

albeit they looked more at him than at anyone else, for the indifference

which he was known to feel towards every woman who was not his actress

gave him in their eyes an exceptional interest, appeared not to know

him. But you could hear them whispering: "That's young Saint-Loup. It

seems he's still quite gone on that girl of his. Got it bad, he has.

What a dear boy! I think he's just wonderful; and what style! Some girls

do have all the luck, don't they? And he's so nice in every way. I saw a

lot of him when I was with d'Orléans. They were quite inseparable,

those two. He was going the pace, that time. But he's given it all up

now, she can't complain. She's had a good run of luck, that she can say.

And I ask you, what in the world can he see in her? He must be a bit of

a chump, when all's said and done. She's got feet like boats, whiskers

like an American, and her undies are filthy. I can tell you, a little

shop girl would be ashamed to be seen in her knickers. Do just look at

his eyes a moment; you would jump into the fire for a man like that.

Hush, don't say a word; he's seen me; look, he's smiling. Oh, he

remembers me all right. Just you mention my name to him, and see what he

says!" Between these girls and him I surprised a glance of mutual

understanding. I should have liked him to introduce me to them, so that

I might ask them for assignations and they give them to me, even if I

had been unable to keep them. For otherwise their appearance would

remain for all time devoid, in my memory, of that part of itself--just

as though it had been hidden by a veil--which varies in every woman,

which we cannot imagine in any woman until we have actually seen it in

her, and which is apparent only in the glance that she directs at us,

that acquiesces in our desire and promises that it shall be satisfied.

And yet, even when thus reduced, their aspect was for me far more than

that of women whom I should have known to be virtuous, and it seemed to

me not to be, like theirs, flat, with nothing behind it, fashioned in

one piece with no solidity. It was not, of course, for me what it must

be for Saint-Loup who, by an act of memory, beneath the indifference,

transparent to him, of the motionless features which affected not to

know him, or beneath the dull formality of the greeting that might

equally well have been addressed to anyone else, could recall, could

see, through dishevelled locks, a swooning mouth, a pair of half-closed

eyes, a whole silent picture like those that painters, to cheat their

visitors' senses, drape with a decent covering. Undoubtedly, for me who

felt that nothing of my personality had penetrated the surface of this

woman or that, or would be borne by her upon the unknown ways which she

would tread through life, those faces remained sealed. But it was quite

enough to know that they did open, for them to seem to me of a price

which I should not have set on them had they been but precious medals,

instead of lockets within which were hidden memories of love. As for

Robert, scarcely able to keep in his place at table, concealing beneath

a courtier's smile his warrior's thirst for action--when I examined him

I could see how closely the vigorous structure of his triangular face

must have been modelled on that of his ancestors' faces, a face devised

rather for an ardent bowman than for a delicate student. Beneath his

fine skin the bold construction, the feudal architecture were apparent.

His head made one think of those old dungeon keeps on which the disused

battlements are still to be seen, although inside they have been

converted into libraries.

On our way back to Balbec, of those of the fair strangers to whom he had

introduced me I would repeat to myself without a moment's interruption,

and yet almost unconsciously: "What a delightful woman!" as one chimes

in with the refrain of a song. I admit that these words were prompted

rather by the state of my nerves than by any lasting judgment. It was

nevertheless true that if I had had a thousand francs on me and if there

had still been a jeweller's shop open at that hour, I should have bought

the lady a ring. When the successive hours of our life are thus

displayed against too widely dissimilar backgrounds, we find that we

give away too much of ourselves to all sorts of people who next day will

not interest us in the least. But we feel that we are still responsible

for what we said to them overnight, and that we must honour our

promises.

As on these evenings I came back later than usual to the hotel, it was

with joy that I recognised, in a room no longer hostile, the bed on

which, on the day of my arrival, I had supposed that it would always be

impossible for me to find any rest, whereas now my weary limbs turned to

it for support; so that, in turn, thighs, hips, shoulders burrowed into,

trying to adhere at every angle to the sheets that covered its mattress,

as if my fatigue, like a sculptor, had wished to take a cast of an

entire human body. But I could not go to sleep; I felt the approach of

morning; peace of mind, health of body were no longer mine. In my

distress it seemed that never should I recapture them. I should have had

to sleep for a long time if I were to overtake them. But then, had I

begun to doze, I must in any event be awakened in a couple of hours by

the symphonic concert on the beach. Suddenly I was asleep, I had fallen

into that deep slumber in which are opened to us a return to childhood,

the recapture of past years, of lost feelings, the disincarnation, the

transmigration of the soul, the evoking of the dead, the illusions of

madness, retrogression towards the most elementary of the natural

kingdoms (for we say that we often see animals in our dreams, but we

forget almost always that we are ourself then an animal deprived of that

reasoning power which projects upon things the light of certainty; we

present on the contrary to the spectacle of life only a dubious vision,

destroyed afresh every moment by oblivion, the former reality fading

before that which follows it as one projection of a magic lantern fades

before the next as we change the slide), all those mysteries which we

imagine ourselves not to know and into which we are in reality initiated

almost every night, as we are into the other great mystery of

annihilation and resurrection. Rendered more vagabond by the difficulty

of digesting my Rivebelle dinner, the successive and flickering

illumination of shadowy zones of my past made of me a being whose

supreme happiness would have been that of meeting Legrandin, with whom I

had just been talking in my dream.

And then, even my own life was entirely hidden from me by a new setting,

like the "drop" lowered right at the front of the stage before which,

while the scene shifters are busy behind, actors appear in a fresh

"turn". The turn in which I was now cast for a part was in the manner of

an Oriental fairy tale; I retained no knowledge of my past or of myself,

on account of the intense proximity of this interpolated scenery; I was

merely a person who received the bastinado and underwent various

punishments for a crime the nature of which I could not distinguish,

though it was actually that of having taken too much port wine. Suddenly

I awoke and discovered that, thanks to a long sleep, I had not heard a

note of the concert. It was already afternoon; I verified this by my

watch after several efforts to sit up in bed, efforts fruitless at first

and interrupted by backward falls on to my pillow, but those short falls

which are a sequel of sleep as of other forms of intoxication, whether

due to wine or to convalescence; besides, before I had so much as looked

at the time, I was certain that it was past midday. Last night I had

been nothing more than an empty vessel, without weight, and (since I

must first have gone to bed to be able to keep still, and have been

asleep to be able to keep silent) had been unable to refrain from moving

about and talking; I had no longer any stability, any centre of gravity,

I was set in motion and it seemed that I might have continued on my

dreary course until I reached the moon. But if, while I slept, my eyes

had not seen the time, my body had nevertheless contrived to calculate

it; had measured the hours; not on a dial superficially marked and

figured, but by the steadily growing weight of all my replenished forces

which, like a powerful clockwork, it had allowed, notch by notch, to

descend from my brain into the rest of my body in which there had risen

now to above my knees the unbroken abundance of their store. If it is

true that the sea was once upon a time our native element, into which we

must plunge our cooling blood if we are to recover our strength, it is

the same with the oblivion, the mental non-existence of sleep; we seem then to

absent ourselves for a few hours from Time, but the forces which we have

gathered in that interval without expending them, measure it by their

quantity as accurately as the pendulum of the clock or the crumbling

pyramid of the sandglass. Nor does one emerge more easily from such

sleep than from a prolonged spell of wakefulness, so strongly does

everything tend to persist; and if it is true that certain narcotics

make us sleep, to have slept for any time is an even stronger narcotic,

after which we have great difficulty in making ourselves wake up. Like a

sailor who sees plainly the harbour in which he can moor his vessel,

still tossed by the waves, I had a quite definite idea of looking at the

time and of getting up, but my body was at every moment cast back upon

the tide of sleep; the landing was difficult, and before I attained a

position in which I could reach my watch and confront with its time that

indicated by the wealth of accumulated material which my stiffened limbs

had at their disposal, I fell back two or three times more upon my

pillow.

At length I could reach and read it: "Two o'clock in the afternoon!" I

rang; but at once I returned to a slumber which, this time, must have

lasted infinitely longer, if I was to judge by the refreshment, the

vision of an immense night overpassed, which I found on awakening. And

yet as my awakening was caused by the entry of Françoise, and as her

entry had been prompted by my ringing the bell, this second sleep which,

it seemed to me, must have been longer than the other, and had brought

me so much comfort and forgetfulness, could not have lasted for more

than half a minute.

My grandmother opened the door of my bedroom; I asked her various

questions about the Legrandin family.

It is not enough to say that I had returned to tranquillity and health,

for it was more than a mere interval of space that had divided them from

me yesterday, I had had all night long to struggle against a contrary

tide, and now I not only found myself again in their presence, they had

once more entered into me. At certain definite and still somewhat

painful points beneath the surface of my empty head which would one day

be broken, letting my ideas escape for all time, those ideas had once

again taken their proper places and resumed that existence by which

hitherto, alas, they had failed to profit.

Once again I had escaped from the impossibility of sleeping, from the

deluge, the shipwreck of my nervous storms. I feared now not at all the

menaces that had loomed over me the evening before, when I was

dismantled of repose. A new life was opening before me; without making a

single movement, for I was still shattered, although quite alert and

well, I savoured my weariness with a light heart; it had isolated and

broken asunder the bones of my legs and arms, which I could feel

assembled before me, ready to cleave together, and which I was to raise

to life merely by singing, like the builder in the fable.

Suddenly I thought of the fair girl with the sad expression whom I had

seen at Rivebelle, where she had looked at me for a moment. Many others,

in the course of the evening, had seemed to me attractive; now she alone

arose from the dark places of my memory. I had felt that she noticed me,

had expected one of the waiters to come to me with a whispered message

from her. Saint-Loup did not know her and fancied that she was

respectable. It would be very difficult to see her, to see her

constantly. But I was prepared to make any sacrifice, I thought now only

of her. Philosophy distinguishes often between free and necessary acts.

Perhaps there is none to the necessity of which we are more completely

subjected than that which, by virtue of an ascending power held in check

during the act itself, makes so unfailingly (once our mind is at rest)

spring up a memory that was levelled with other memories by the

distributed pressure of our indifference, and rush to the surface,

because unknown to us it contained, more than any of the others, a charm

of which we do not become aware until the following day. And perhaps

there is not, either, any act so free, for it is still unprompted by

habit, by that sort of mental hallucination which, when we are in love,

facilitates the invariable reappearance of the image of one particular

person.

This was the day immediately following that on which I had seen file

past me against a background of sea the beautiful procession of young

girls. I put questions about them to a number of the visitors in the

hotel, people who came almost every year to Balbec. They could tell me

nothing. Later on, a photograph shewed me why. Who could ever recognise

now in them, scarcely and yet quite definitely beyond an age in which

one changes so utterly, that amorphous, delicious mass, still wholly

infantine, of little girls who, only a few years back, might have been

seen sitting in a ring on the sand round a tent; a sort of white and

vague constellation in which one would have distinguished a pair of eyes

that sparkled more than the rest, a mischievous face, flaxen hair, only

to lose them again and to confound them almost at once in the indistinct

and milky nebula.

No doubt, in those earlier years that were still so recent, it was not,

as it had been yesterday when they appeared for the first time before

me, one's impression of the group, but the group itself that had been

lacking in clearness. Then those children, mere babies, had been still

at that elementary stage in their formation when personality has not set

its seal on every face. Like those primitive organisms in which the

individual barely exists by itself, consists in the reef rather than in

the coral insects that compose it, they were still pressed one against

another. Sometimes one pushed her neighbour over, and then a wild laugh,

which seemed the sole manifestation of their personal life, convulsed

them all at once, obliterating, confounding those indefinite, grinning

faces in the congealment of a single cluster, scintillating and

tremulous. In an old photograph of themselves, which they were one day

to give me, and which I have kept ever since, their infantile troop

already presents the same number of participants as, later, their

feminine procession; one can see from it that their presence must, even

then, have made on the beach an unusual mark which forced itself on the

attention; but one cannot recognise them individually in it save by a

process of reasoning, leaving a clear field to all the transformations

possible during girlhood, up to the point at which one reconstructed

form would begin to encroach upon another individuality, which must be

identified also, and whose handsome face, owing to the accessories of a

large build and curly hair, may quite possibly have been, once, that

wizened and impish little grin which the photograph album presents to

us; and the distance traversed in a short interval of time by the

physical characteristics of each of these girls making of them a

criterion too vague to be of any use, whereas what they had in common

and, so to speak, collectively, had at that early date been strongly

marked, it sometimes happened that even their most intimate friends

mistook one for another in this photograph, so much so that the question

could in the last resort be settled only by some detail of costume which

one of them could be certain that she herself, and not any of the

others, had worn. Since those days, so different from the day on which I

had just seen them strolling along the "front", so different and yet so

close in time, they still gave way to fits of laughter, as I had

observed that afternoon, but to laughter of a kind that was no longer

the intermittent and almost automatic laughter of childhood, a spasmodic

discharge which, in those days, had continually sent their heads dipping

out of the circle, as the clusters of minnows in the Vivonne used to

scatter and vanish only to gather again a moment later; each countenance

was now mistress of itself, their eyes were fixed on the goal towards

which they were marching; and it had taken, yesterday, the indecision

and tremulousness of my first impression to make me confuse vaguely (as

their childish hilarity and the old photograph had confused) the spores

now individualised and disjoined of the pale madrepore.

Repeatedly, I dare say, when pretty girls went by, I had promised myself

that I would see them again. As a rule, people do not appear a second

time; moreover our memory, which speedily forgets their existence, would

find it difficult to recall their appearance; our eyes would not

recognise them, perhaps, and in the mean time we have seen new girls go

by, whom we shall not see again either. But at other times, and this was

what was to happen with the pert little band at Balbec, chance brings

them back insistently before our eyes. Chance seems to us then a good

and useful thing, for we discern in it as it were rudiments of

organisation, of an attempt to arrange our life; and it makes easy to

us, inevitable, and sometimes--after interruptions that have made us

hope that we may cease to remember--cruel, the retention in our minds of

images to the possession of which we shall come in time to believe that

we were predestined, and which but for chance we should from the very

first have managed to forget, like so many others, with so little

difficulty.

Presently Saint-Loup's visit drew to an end. I had not seen that party

of girls again on the beach. He was too little at Balbec in the

afternoons to have time to bother about them, or to attempt, in my

interest, to make their acquaintance. In the evenings he was more free,

and continued to take me constantly to Rivebelle. There are, in those

restaurants, as there are in public gardens and railway trains, people

embodied in a quite ordinary appearance, whose name astonishes us when,

having happened to ask it, we discover that this is not the mere

inoffensive stranger whom we supposed but nothing less than the Minister

or Duke of whom we have so often heard. Two or three times already, in

the Rivebelle restaurant, we had--Saint-Loup and I--seen come in and sit

down at a table when everyone else was getting ready to go, a man of

large stature, very muscular, with regular features and a grizzled

beard, gazing, with concentrated attention, into the empty air. One

evening, on our asking the landlord who was this obscure, solitary and

belated diner, "What!" he exclaimed, "do you mean to say you don't know

the famous painter Elstir?" Swann had once mentioned his name to me, I

had entirely forgotten in what connexion; but the omission of a

particular memory, like that of part of a sentence when we are reading,

leads sometimes not to uncertainty but to a birth of certainty that is

premature. "He is a friend of Swann, a very well known artist, extremely

good," I told Saint-Loup. Whereupon there passed over us both, like a

wave of emotion, the thought that Elstir was a great artist, a

celebrated man, and that, confounding us with the rest of the diners, he

had no suspicion of the ecstasy into which we were thrown by the idea of

his talent. Doubtless, his unconsciousness of our admiration and of our

acquaintance with Swann would not have troubled us had we not been at

the seaside. But since we were still at an age when enthusiasm cannot

keep silence, and had been transported into a life in which not to be

known is unendurable, we wrote a letter, signed with both our names, in

which we revealed to Elstir in the two diners seated within a few feet

of him two passionate admirers of his talent, two friends of his great

friend Swann, and asked to be allowed to pay our homage to him in

person. A waiter undertook to convey this missive to the celebrity.

A celebrity Elstir was, perhaps, not yet at this period quite to the

extent claimed by the landlord, though he was to reach the height of his

fame within a very few years. But he had been one of the first to

frequent this restaurant when it was still only a sort of farmhouse, and

had brought to it a whole colony of artists (who had all, as it

happened, migrated elsewhere as soon as the farm-yard in which they used

to feed in the open air, under a lean-to roof, had become a fashionable

centre); Elstir himself had returned to Rivebelle this evening only on

account of a temporary absence of his wife, from the house which he had

taken in the neighbourhood. But great talent, even when its existence is

not yet recognised, will inevitably provoke certain phenomena of

admiration, such as the landlord had managed to detect in the questions

asked by more than one English lady visitor, athirst for information as

to the life led by Elstir, or in the number of letters that he received

from abroad. Then the landlord had further remarked that Elstir did not

like to be disturbed when he was working, that he would rise in the

middle of the night and take a little model down to the water's edge to

pose for him, nude, if the moon was shining; and had told himself that

so much labour was not in vain, nor the admiration of the tourists

unjustified when he had, in one of Elstir's pictures, recognised a

wooden cross which stood by the roadside as you came into Rivebelle.

"It's all right!" he would repeat with stupefaction, "there are all the

four beams! Oh, he does take a lot of trouble!"

And he did not know whether a little _Sunrise over the Sea_ which Elstir

had given him might not be worth a fortune.

We watched him read our letter, put it in his pocket, finish his dinner,

begin to ask for his things, get up to go; and we were so convinced that

we had shocked him by our overture that we would now have hoped (as

keenly as at first we had dreaded) to make our escape without his

noticing us. We did not bear in mind for a single instant a

consideration which should, nevertheless, have seemed to us most

important, namely that our enthusiasm for Elstir, on the sincerity of

which we should not have allowed the least doubt to be cast, which we

could indeed have supported with the evidence of our breathing arrested

by expectancy, our desire to do no matter what that was difficult or

heroic for the great man, was not, as we imagined it to be, admiration,

since neither of us had ever seen anything that he had painted; our

feeling might have as its object the hollow idea of a "great artist",

but not a body of work which was unknown to us. It was, at the most,

admiration in the abstract, the nervous envelope, the sentimental

structure of an admiration without content, that is to say a thing as

indissolubly attached to boyhood as are certain organs which have ceased

to exist in the adult man; we were still boys. Elstir meanwhile was

reaching the door when suddenly he turned and came towards us. I was

transported by a delicious thrill of terror such as I could not have

felt a few years later, because, while age diminishes our capacity,

familiarity with the world has meanwhile destroyed in us any inclination

to provoke such strange encounters, to feel that kind of emotion.

In the course of the few words that Elstir had come back to say to us,

sitting down at our table, he never gave any answer on the several

occasions on which I spoke to him of Swann. I began to think that he did

not know him. He asked me, nevertheless, to come and see him at his

Balbec studio, an invitation which he did not extend to Saint-Loup, and

which I had earned (as I might not, perhaps, from Swann's

recommendation, had Elstir been intimate with him, for the part played

by disinterested motives is greater than we are inclined to think in

peopled lives) by a few words which made him think that I was devoted to

the arts. He lavished on me a friendliness which was as far above that

of Saint-Loup as that was above the affability of a mere tradesman.

Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness of a great

gentleman, charming as it may be, has the effect of an actor's playing a

part, of being feigned. Saint-Loup sought to please; Elstir loved to

give, to give himself. Everything that he possessed, ideas, work, and

the rest which he counted for far less, he would have given gladly to

anyone who could understand him. But, failing society that was

endurable, he lived in an isolation, with a savagery which fashionable

people called pose and ill breeding, public authorities a recalcitrant

spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride.