And no doubt at first he had thought, even in his solitude, with

enjoyment that, thanks to his work, he was addressing, in spite of

distance, he was giving a loftier idea of himself to those who had

misunderstood or hurt him. Perhaps, in those days, he lived alone not

from indifference but from love of his fellows, and, just as I had

renounced Gilberte to appear to her again one day in more attractive

colours, dedicated his work to certain people as a way of approaching

them again, by which without actually seeing him they would be made to

love him, admire him, talk about him; a renunciation is not always

complete from the start, when we decide upon it in our original frame of

mind and before it has reacted upon us, whether it be the renunciation

of an invalid, a monk, an artist or a hero. But if he had wished to

produce with certain people in his mind, in producing he had lived for

himself, remote from the society to which he had become indifferent; the

practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as happens with every

big thing which we have begun by fearing, because we knew it to be

incompatible with smaller things to which we clung, and of which it does

not so much deprive us as it detaches us from them. Before we experience

it, our whole preoccupation is to know to what extent we can reconcile

it with certain pleasures which cease to be pleasures as soon as we have

experienced it.

Elstir did not stay long talking to us. I made up my mind that I would

go to his studio during the next few days, but on the following

afternoon, when I had accompanied my grandmother right to the point at

which the "front" ended, near the cliffs of Canapville, on our way back,

at the foot of one of the little streets which ran down at right angles

to the beach, we came upon a girl who, with lowered head like an animal

that is being driven reluctant to its stall, and carrying golf-clubs,

was walking in front of a person in authority, in all probability her or

her friends' "Miss", who suggested a portrait of Jeffreys by Hogarth,

with a face as red as if her favourite beverage were gin rather than

tea, on which a dried smear of tobacco at the corner of her mouth

prolonged the curve of a moustache that was grizzled but abundant. The

girl who preceded her was like that one of the little band who, beneath

a black polo-cap, had shewn in an inexpressive chubby face a pair of

laughing eyes. Now, the girl who was now passing me had also a black

polo-cap, but she struck me as being even prettier than the other, the

line of her nose was straighter, the curve of nostril at its base fuller

and more fleshy. Besides, the other had seemed a proud, pale girl, this

one a child well-disciplined and of rosy complexion. And yet, as she was

pushing a bicycle just like the other's, and was wearing the same

reindeer gloves, I concluded that the differences arose perhaps from the

angle and circumstances in which I now saw her, for it was hardly likely

that there could be at Balbec a second girl, with a face that, when all

was said, was so similar and with the same details in her accoutrements.

She cast a rapid glance in my direction; for the next few days, when I

saw the little band again on the beach, and indeed long afterwards when

I knew all the girls who composed it, I could never be absolutely

certain that any of them--even she who among them all was most like her,

the girl with the bicycle--was indeed the one that I had seen that

evening at the end of the "front", where a street ran down to the beach,

a girl who differed hardly at all, but was still just perceptibly

different from her whom I had noticed in the procession.

From that moment, whereas for the last few days my mind had been

occupied chiefly by the tall one, it was the one with the golf-clubs,

presumed to be Mlle. Simonet, who began once more to absorb my

attention. When walking with the others she would often stop, forcing

her friends, who seemed greatly to respect her, to stop also. Thus it

is, calling a halt, her eyes sparkling beneath her polo-cap, that I see

her again to-day, outlined against the screen which the sea spreads out

behind her, and separated from me by a transparent, azure space, the

interval of time that has elapsed since then, a first impression, faint

and fine in my memory, desired, pursued, then forgotten, then found

again, of a face which I have many times since projected upon the cloud

of the past to be able to say to myself, of a girl who was actually in

my room: "It is she!"

But it was perhaps yet another, the one with geranium cheeks and green

eyes, whom I should have liked most to know. And yet, whichever of them

it might be, on any given day, that I preferred to see, the others,

without her, were sufficient to excite my desire which, concentrated now

chiefly on one, now on another, continued--as, on the first day, my

confused vision--to combine and blend them, to make of them the little

world apart, animated by a life in common, which for that matter they

doubtless imagined themselves to form; and I should have penetrated, in

becoming a friend of one of them--like a cultivated pagan or a

meticulous Christian going among barbarians--into a rejuvenating society

in which reigned health, unconsciousness of others, sensual pleasures,

cruelty, unintellectuality and joy.

My grandmother, who had been told of my meeting with Elstir, and

rejoiced at the thought of all the intellectual profit that I might

derive from his friendship, considered it absurd and none too polite of

me not to have gone yet to pay him a visit. But I could think only of

the little band, and being uncertain of the hour at which the girls

would be passing along the front, I dared not absent myself. My

grandmother was astonished, too, at the smartness of my attire, for I

had suddenly remembered suits which had been lying all this time at the

bottom of my trunk. I put on a different one every day, and had even

written to Paris ordering new hats and neckties.

It adds a great charm to life in a watering-place like Balbec if the

face of a pretty girl, a vendor of shells, cakes or flowers, painted in

vivid colours in our mind, is regularly, from early morning, the purpose

of each of those leisured, luminous days which we spend upon the beach.

They become then, and for that reason, albeit unoccupied by any

business, as alert as working-days, pointed, magnetised, raised slightly

to meet an approaching moment, that in which, while we purchase

sand-cakes, roses, ammonites, we will delight in seeing upon a feminine

face its colours displayed as purely as on a flower. But at least, with

these little traffickers, first of all we can speak to them, which saves

us from having to construct with our imagination their aspects other

than those with which the mere visual perception of them furnishes us,

and to recreate their life, magnifying its charm, as when we stand

before a portrait; moreover, just because we speak to them, we can learn

where and at what time it will be possible to see them again. Now I had

none of these advantages with respect to the little band. Their habits

were unknown to me; when on certain days I failed to catch a glimpse of

them, not knowing the cause of their absence I sought to discover

whether it was something fixed and regular, if they were to be seen only

every other day, or in certain states of the weather, or if there were

days on which no one ever saw them. I imagined myself already friends

with them, and saying: "But you weren't there the other day?" "Weren't

we? Oh, no, of course not; that was because it was a Saturday. On

Saturdays we don't ever come, because . . ." If it were only as simple

as that, to know that on black Saturday it was useless to torment

oneself, that one might range the beach from end to end, sit down

outside the pastry-cook's and pretend to be nibbling an eclair, poke

into the curiosity shop, wait for bathing time, the concert, high tide,

sunset, night, all without seeing the longed-for little band. But the

fatal day did not, perhaps, come once a week. It did not, perhaps, of

necessity fall on Saturdays. Perhaps certain atmospheric conditions

influenced it or were entirely unconnected with it. How many

observations, patient but not at all serene, must one accumulate of the

movements, to all appearance irregular, of those unknown worlds before

being able to be sure that one has not allowed oneself to be led astray

by mere coincidence, that one's forecasts will not be proved wrong,

before one elucidates the certain laws, acquired at the cost of so much

painful experience, of that passionate astronomy. Remembering that I had

not yet seen them on some particular day of the week, I assured myself

that they would not be coming, that it was useless to wait any longer on

the beach. And at that very moment I caught sight of them. And yet on

another day which, so far as I could suppose that there were laws that

guided the return of those constellations, must, I had calculated, prove

an auspicious day, they did not come. But to this primary uncertainty

whether I should see them or not that day, there was added another, more

disquieting: whether I should ever set eyes on them again, for I had no

reason, after all, to know that they were not about to sail for America,

or to return to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to love them.

One can feel an attraction towards a particular person. But to release

that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which

prepare the way for love, there must be--and this is, perhaps, more than

any person can be, the actual object which our passion seeks so

anxiously to embrace--the risk of an impossibility. Thus there were

acting upon me already those influences which recur in the course of our

successive love-affairs, which can, for that matter, be provoked, (but

then rather in the life of cities) by the thought of little working

girls whose half-holiday is we know not on what day, and whom we are

afraid of having missed as they came out of the factory; or which at

least have recurred in mine. Perhaps they are inseparable from love;

perhaps everything that formed a distinctive feature of our first love

attaches itself to those that come after, by recollection, suggestion,

habit, and through the successive periods of our life gives to its

different aspects a general character.

I seized every pretext for going down to the beach at the hours when I

hoped to succeed in finding them there. Having caught sight of them once

while we were at luncheon, I now invariably came in late for it, waiting

interminably upon the "front" for them to pass; devoting all the short

time that I did spend in the dining-room to interrogating with my eyes

its azure wall of glass; rising long before the dessert, so as not to

miss them should they have gone out at a different hour, and chafing

with irritation at my grandmother, when, with unwitting malevolence, she

made me stay with her past the hour that seemed to me propitious. I

tried to prolong the horizon by setting my chair aslant; if, by chance,

I did catch sight of no matter which of the girls, since they all

partook of the same special essence, it was as if I had seen projected

before my face in a shifting, diabolical hallucination, a little of the

unfriendly and yet passionately coveted dream which, but a moment ago,

had existed only--where it lay stagnant for all time--in my brain.

I was in love with none of them, loving them all, and yet the

possibility of meeting them was in my daily life the sole element of

delight, alone made to burgeon in me those high hopes by which every

obstacle is surmounted, hopes ending often in fury if I had not seen

them. For the moment, these girls eclipsed my grandmother in my

affection; the longest journey would at once have seemed attractive to

me had it been to a place in which they might be found. It was to them

that my thoughts comfortably clung when I supposed myself to be thinking

of something else or of nothing. But when, even without knowing it, I

thought of them, they, more unconsciously still, were for me the

mountainous blue undulations of the sea, a troop seen passing in outline

against the waves. Our most intensive love for a person is always the

love, really, of something else as well.

Meanwhile my grandmother was shewing, because now I was keenly

interested in golf and lawn-tennis and was letting slip an opportunity

of seeing at work and hearing talk an artist whom she knew to be one of

the greatest of his time, a disapproval which seemed to me to be based

on somewhat narrow views. I had guessed long ago in the Champs-Elysées,

and had since established to my own satisfaction, that when we are in

love with a woman we simply project into her a state of our own soul,

that the important thing is, therefore, not the worth of the woman but

the depth of the state; and that the emotions which a young girl of no

kind of distinction arouses in us can enable us to bring to the surface

of our consciousness some of the most intimate parts of our being, more

personal, more remote, more essential than would be reached by the

pleasure that we derive from the conversation of a great man or even

from the admiring contemplation of his work.

I was to end by complying with my grandmother's wishes, all the more

reluctantly in that Elstir lived at some distance from the "front" in

one of the newest of Balbec's avenues. The heat of the day obliged me to

take the tramway which passed along the Rue de la Plage, and I made an

effort (so as still to believe that I was in the ancient realm of the

Cimmerians, in the country it might be, of King Mark, or upon the site

of the Forest of Broceliande) not to see the gimcrack splendour of the

buildings that extended on either hand, among which Elstir's villa was

perhaps the most sumptuously hideous, in spite of which he had taken it,

because, of all that there were to be had at Balbec, it was the only one

that provided him with a really big studio.

It was also with averted eyes that I crossed the garden, which had a

lawn--in miniature, like any little suburban villa round Paris--a

statuette of an amorous gardener, glass balls in which one saw one's

distorted reflexion, beds of begonias and a little arbour, beneath which

rocking chairs were drawn up round an iron table. But after all these

preliminaries hall-marked with philistine ugliness, I took no notice of

the chocolate mouldings on the plinths once I was in the studio; I felt

perfectly happy, for, with the help of all the sketches and studies that

surrounded me, I foresaw the possibility of raising myself to a poetical

understanding, rich in delights, of many forms which I had not,

hitherto, isolated from the general spectacle of reality. And Elstir's

studio appeared to me as the laboratory of a sort of new creation of the

world in which, from the chaos that is all the things we see, he had

extracted, by painting them on various rectangles of canvas that were

hung everywhere about the room, here a wave of the sea crushing angrily

on the sand its lilac foam, there a young man in a suit of white linen,

leaning upon the rail of a vessel. His jacket and the spattering wave

had acquired fresh dignity from the fact that they continued to exist,

even although they were deprived of those qualities in which they might

be supposed to consist, the wave being no longer able to splash nor the

jacket to clothe anyone.

At the moment at which I entered, the creator was just finishing, with

the brush which he had in his hand, the form of the sun at its setting.

The shutters were closed almost everywhere round the studio, which was

fairly cool and, except in one place where daylight laid against the

wall its brilliant but fleeting decoration, dark; there was open only

one little rectangular window embowered in honeysuckle, which, over a

strip of garden, gave on an avenue; so that the atmosphere of the

greater part of the studio was dusky, transparent and compact in the

mass, but liquid and sparkling at the rifts where the golden clasp of

sunlight banded it, like a lump of rock crystal of which one surface,

already cut and polished, here and there, gleams like a mirror with

iridescent rays. While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I

wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture,

then another.

Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have

liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art journal which

lay about on the reading-room table in the Grand Hotel called his first

and second manners, the mythological manner and the manner in which he

shewed signs of Japanese influence, both admirably exemplified, the

article said, in the collection of Mme. de Guermantes. Naturally enough,

what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at

Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of

them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it,

analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the

Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their

names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. The

names which denote things correspond invariably to an intellectual

notion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate

from them everything that is not in keeping with itself.

Sometimes in my window in the hotel at Balbec, in the morning when

Françoise undid the fastenings of the curtains that shut out the light,

in the evening when I was waiting until it should be time to go out with

Saint-Loup, I had been led by some effect of sunlight to mistake what

was only a darker stretch of sea for a distant coast-line, or to gaze at

a belt of liquid azure without knowing whether it belonged to sea or

sky. But presently my reason would re-establish between the elements

that distinction which in my first impression I had overlooked. In the

same way I used, in Paris, in my bedroom, to hear a dispute, almost a

riot, in the street below, until I had referred back to its cause--a

carriage for instance that was rattling towards me--this noise, from

which I now eliminated the shrill and discordant vociferations which my

ear had really heard but which my reason knew that wheels did not

produce. But the rare moments in which we see nature as she is, with

poetic vision, it was from those that Elstir's work was taken. One of

his metaphors that occurred most commonly in the seascapes which he had

round him was precisely that which, comparing land with sea, suppressed

every line of demarcation between them. It was this comparison, tacitly

and untiringly repeated on a single canvas, which gave it that multiform

and powerful unity, the cause (not always clearly perceived by

themselves) of the enthusiasm which Elstir's work aroused in certain

collectors.

It was, for instance, for a metaphor of this sort--in a picture of the

harbour of Carquethuit, a picture which he had finished a few days

earlier and at which I now stood gazing my fill--that Elstir had

prepared the mind of the spectator by employing, for the little town,

only marine terms, and urban terms for the sea. Whether its houses

concealed a part of the harbour, a dry dock, or perhaps the sea itself

came cranking in among the land, as constantly happened on the Balbec

coast, on the other side of the promontory on which the town was built

the roofs were overtopped (as it had been by mill-chimneys or

church-steeples) by masts which had the effect of making the vessels to

which they belonged appear town-bred, built on land, an impression which

was strengthened by the sight of other boats, moored along the jetty but

in such serried ranks that you could see men talking across from one

deck to another without being able to distinguish the dividing line, the

chink of water between them, so that this fishing fleet seemed less to

belong to the water than, for instance, the churches of Criquebec which,

in the far distance, surrounded by water on every side because you saw

them without seeing the town, in a powdery haze of sunlight and

crumbling waves, seemed to be emerging from the waters, blown in

alabaster or in sea-foam, and, enclosed in the band of a particoloured

rainbow, to form an unreal, a mystical picture. On the beach in the

foreground the painter had arranged that the eye should discover no

fixed boundary, no absolute line of demarcation between earth and ocean.

The men who were pushing down their boats into the sea were running as

much through the waves as along the sand, which, being wet, reflected

their hulls as if they were already in the water. The sea itself did not

come up in an even line but followed the irregularities of the shore,

which the perspective of the picture increased still further, so that a

ship actually at sea, half-hidden by the projecting works of the

arsenal, seemed to be sailing across the middle of the town; women who

were gathering shrimps among the rocks had the appearance, because they

were surrounded by water and because of the depression which, after the

ringlike barrier of rocks, brought the beach (on the side nearest the

land) down to sea-level, of being in a marine grotto overhung by ships

and waves, open yet unharmed in the path of a miraculously averted tide.

If the whole picture gave this impression of harbours in which the sea

entered into the land, in which the land was already subaqueous and the

population amphibian, the strength of the marine element was everywhere

apparent; and round about the rocks, at the mouth of the harbour, where

the sea was rough, you felt from the muscular efforts of the fishermen

and the obliquity of the boats leaning over at an acute angle, compared

with the calm erectness of the warehouse on the harbour, the church, the

houses of the town to which some of the figures were returning while

others were coming out to fish, that they were riding bareback on the

water, as it might be a swift and fiery animal whose rearing, but for

their skill, must have unseated them. A party of holiday makers were

putting gaily out to sea in a boat that tossed like a jaunting-car on a

rough road; their boatman, blithe but attentive, also, to what he was

doing, trimmed the bellying sail, every one kept in his place, so that

the weight should not be all on one side of the boat, which might

capsize, and so they went racing over sunlit fields into shadowy places,

dashing down into the troughs of waves. It was a fine morning in spite

of the recent storm. Indeed, one could still feel the powerful

activities that must first be neutralised in order to attain the easy

balance of the boats that lay motionless, enjoying sunshine and breeze,

in parts where the sea was so calm that its reflexions had almost more

solidity and reality than the floating hulls, vaporised by an effect of

the sunlight, parts which the perspective of the picture dovetailed in

among others. Or rather you would not have called them other parts of

the sea. For between those parts there was as much difference as there

was between one of them and the church rising from the water, or the

ships behind the town. Your reason then set to work and made a single

element of what was here black beneath a gathering storm, a little

farther all of one colour with the sky and as brightly burnished, and

elsewhere so bleached by sunshine, haze and foam, so compact, so

terrestrial, so circumscribed with houses that you thought of some white

stone causeway or of a field of snow, up the surface of which it was

quite frightening to see a ship go climbing high and dry, as a carriage

climbs dripping from a ford, but which a moment later, when you saw on

the raised and broken surface of the solid plain boats drunkenly

heaving, you understood, identical in all these different aspects, to be

still the sea.

Although we are justified in saying that there can be no progress, no

discovery in art, but only in the sciences, and that the artist who

begins afresh upon his own account an individual effort cannot be either

helped or hindered by the efforts of all the others, we must

nevertheless admit that, in so far as art brings into prominence certain

laws, once an industry has taken those laws and vulgarised them, the art

that was first in the field loses, in retrospect, a little of its

originality. Since Elstir began to paint, we have grown familiar with

what are called "admirable" photographs of scenery and towns. If we

press for a definition of what their admirers mean by the epithet, we

shall find that it is generally applied to some unusual picture of a

familiar object, a picture different from those that we are accustomed

to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that reason doubly

impressive to us because it startles us, makes us emerge from our habits

and at the same time brings us back to ourselves by recalling to us an

earlier impression. For instance, one of these "magnificent" photographs

will illustrate a law of perspective, will shew us some cathedral which

we are accustomed to see in the middle of a town, taken instead from a

selected point of view from which it will appear to be thirty times the

height of the houses and to be thrusting a spur out from the bank of the

river, from which it is actually a long way off. Now the effort made by

Elstir to reproduce things not as he knew them to be but according to

the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed, had

led him exactly to this point; he gave special emphasis to certain of

these laws of perspective, which were thus all the more striking, since

his art had been their first interpreter. A river, because of the

windings of its course, a bay because of the apparent contact of the

cliffs on either side of it, would look as though there had been

hollowed out in the heart of the plain or of the mountains a lake

absolutely landlocked on every side. In a picture of a view from Balbec

painted upon a scorching day in summer an inlet of the sea appeared to

be enclosed in walls of pink granite, not to be the sea, which began

farther out. The continuity of the ocean was suggested only by the gulls

which, wheeling over what, when one looked at the picture, seemed to be

solid rock, were as a matter of fact inhaling the moist vapour of the

shifting tide. Other laws were discernible in the same canvas, as, at

the foot of immense cliffs, the lilliputian grace of white sails on the

blue mirror on whose surface they looked like butterflies asleep, and

certain contrasts between the depth of the shadows and the pallidity of

the light. This play of light and shade, which also photography has

rendered common-place, had interested Elstir so much that at one time he

had painted what were almost mirages, in which a castle crowned with a

tower appeared as a perfect circle of castle prolonged by a tower at its

summit, and at its foot by an inverted tower, whether because the

exceptional purity of the atmosphere on a fine day gave the shadow

reflected in the water the hardness and brightness of the stone, or

because the morning mists rendered the stone as vaporous as the shadow.

And similarly, beyond the sea, behind a line of woods, began another sea

roseate with the light of the setting sun, which was, in fact, the sky.

The light, as it were precipitating new solids, thrust back the hull of

the boat on which it fell behind the other hull that was still in

shadow, and rearranged like the steps of a crystal staircase what was

materially a plane surface, but was broken up by the play of light and

shade upon the morning sea. A river running beneath the bridges of a

town was caught from a certain point of view so that it appeared

entirely dislocated, now broadened into a lake, now narrowed into a

rivulet, broken elsewhere by the interruption of a hill crowned with

trees among which the burgher would repair at evening to taste the

refreshing breeze; and the rhythm of this disintegrated town was assured

only by the inflexible uprightness of the steeples which did not rise

but rather, following the plumb line of the pendulum marking its cadence

as in a triumphal march, seemed to hold in suspense beneath them all the

confused mass of houses that rose vaguely in the mist along the banks of

the crushed, disjointed stream. And (since Elstir's earliest work

belonged to the time in which a painter would make his landscape

attractive by inserting a human figure), on the cliff's edge or among

the mountains, the road, that half human part of nature, underwent, like

river or ocean, the eclipses of perspective. And whether a sheer wall of

mountain, or the mist blown from a torrent, or the sea prevented the eye

from following the continuity of the path, visible to the traveller but

not to us, the little human personage in old-fashioned attire seemed

often to be stopped short on the edge of an abyss, the path which he had

been following ending there, while, a thousand feet above him in those

pine-forests, it was with a melting eye and comforted heart that we saw

reappear the threadlike whiteness of its dusty surface, hospitable to

the wayfaring foot, whereas from us the side of the mountain had hidden,

where it turned to avoid waterfall or gully, the intervening bends.

The effort made by Elstir to strip himself, when face to face with

reality, of every intellectual concept, was all the more admirable in

that this man who, before sitting down to paint, made himself

deliberately ignorant, forgot, in his honesty of purpose, everything

that he knew, since what one knows ceases to exist by itself, had in

reality an exceptionally cultivated mind. When I confessed to him the

disappointment that I had felt upon seeing the porch at Balbec: "What!"

he had exclaimed, "you were disappointed by the porch! Why, it's the

finest illustrated Bible that the people have ever had. That Virgin, and

all the bas-reliefs telling the story of her life, they are the most

loving, the most inspired expression of that endless poem of adoration

and praise in which the middle ages extolled the glory of the Madonna.

If you only knew, side by side with the most scrupulous accuracy in

rendering the sacred text, what exquisite ideas the old carver had, what

profound thoughts, what delicious poetry!

"A wonderful idea, that great sheet in which the angels are carrying the

body of the Virgin, too sacred for them to venture to touch it with

their hands"; (I mentioned to him that this theme had been treated also

at Saint-André-des-Champs; he had seen photographs of the porch there,

and agreed, but pointed out that the bustling activity of those little

peasant figures, all hurrying at once towards the Virgin, was not the

same thing as the gravity of those two great angels, almost Italian, so

springing, so gentle) "the angel who is carrying the Virgin's soul, to

reunite it with her body; in the meeting of the Virgin with Elizabeth,

Elizabeth's gesture when she touches the Virgin's Womb and marvels to

feel that it is great with child; and the bandaged arm of the midwife

who had refused, unless she touched, to believe the Immaculate

Conception; and the linen cloth thrown by the Virgin to Saint Thomas to

give him a proof of the Resurrection; that veil, too, which the Virgin

tears from her own bosom to cover the nakedness of her Son, from Whose

Side the Church receives in a chalice the Wine of the Sacrament, while,

on His other side the Synagogue, whose kingdom is at an end, has its

eyes bandaged, holds a half-broken sceptre and lets fall, with the crown

that is slipping from its head, the tables of the old law; and the

husband who, on the Day of Judgment, as he helps his young wife to rise

from her grave, lays her hand against his own heart to reassure her, to

prove to her that it is indeed beating, is that such a trumpery idea, do

you think, so stale and common-place? And the angel who is taking away

the sun and the moon, henceforth useless, since it is written that the

Light of the Cross shall be seven times brighter than the light of the

firmament; and the one who is dipping his hand in the water of the

Child's bath, to see whether it is warm enough; and the one emerging

from the clouds to place the crown upon the Virgin's brow, and all the

angels who are leaning from the vault of heaven, between the balusters

of the New Jerusalem, and throwing up their arms with terror or joy at

the sight of the torments of the wicked or the bliss of the elect! For

it is all the circles of heaven, a whole gigantic poem full of theology

and symbolism that you have before you there. It is fantastic, mad,

divine, a thousand times better than anything you will see in Italy,

where for that matter this very tympanum has been carefully copied by

sculptors with far less genius. There never was a time when genius was

universal; that is all nonsense; it would be going beyond the age of

gold. The fellow who carved that front, you may make up your mind that

he was every bit as great, that he had just as profound ideas as the men

you admire most at the present day. I could shew you what I mean if we

went there together. There are certain passages from the Office of the

Assumption which have been rendered with a subtilty of expression that

Redon himself has never equalled."

This vast celestial vision of which he spoke to me, this gigantic

theological poem which, I understood, had been inscribed there in stone,

yet when my eyes, big with desire, had opened to gaze upon the front of

Balbec church, it was not these things that I had seen. I spoke to him

of those great statues of saints, which, mounted on scaffolds, formed a

sort of avenue on either side.

"It starts from the mists of antiquity to end in Jesus Christ," he

explained. "You see on one side His ancestors after the spirit, on the

other the Kings of Judah, His ancestors after the flesh. All the ages

are there. And if you had looked more closely at what you took for

scaffolds you would have been able to give names to the figures standing

on them. At the feet of Moses you would have recognised the calf of

gold, at Abraham's the ram and at Joseph's the demon counselling

Potiphar's wife."

I told him also that I had gone there expecting to find an almost

Persian building, and that this had doubtless been one of the chief

factors in my disappointment. "Indeed, no," he assured me, "it is

perfectly true. Some parts of it are quite oriental; one of the capitals

reproduces so exactly a Persian subject that you cannot account for it

by the persistence of Oriental traditions. The carver must have copied

some casket brought from the East by explorers." And he did indeed shew

me, later on, the photograph of a capital on which I saw dragons that

were almost Chinese devouring one another, but at Balbec this little

piece of carving had passed unnoticed by me in the general effect of the

building which did not conform to the pattern traced in my mind by the

words, "an almost Persian church".

The intellectual pleasures which I enjoyed in this studio did not in the

least prevent me from feeling, although they enveloped us as it were in

spite of ourselves, the warm polish, the sparkling gloom of the place

itself and, through the little window framed in honeysuckle, in the

avenue that was quite rustic, the resisting dryness of the sun-parched

earth, screened only by the diaphanous gauze woven of distance and of a

tree-cast shade. Perhaps the unaccountable feeling of comfort which this

summer day was giving me came like a tributary to swell the flood of joy

that had surged in me at the sight of Elstir's _Carquethuit Harbour._

I had supposed Elstir to be a modest man, but I realised my mistake on

seeing his face cloud with melancholy when, in a little speech of

thanks, I uttered the word "fame". Men who believe that their work will

last--as was the case with Elstir--form the habit of placing that work

in a period when they themselves will have crumbled into dust. And thus,

by obliging them to reflect on their own extinction, the thought of fame

saddens them because it is inseparable from the thought of death. I

changed the conversation in the hope of driving away the cloud of

ambitious melancholy with which unwittingly I had loaded Elstir's brow.

"Some one advised me once," I began, thinking of the conversation we had

had with Legrandin at Combray, as to which I was glad of an opportunity

of learning Elstir's views, "not to visit Brittany, because it would not

be wholesome for a mind with a natural tendency to dream." "Not at all;"

he replied. "When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to

keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract

your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you

will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you

will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is

dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to

dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one's

dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of

separating one's dreams from one's life which so often produces good

results that I ask myself whether one ought not, at all costs, to try

it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we

ought, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on, to have all our

appendices taken out when we are children."

Elstir and I had meanwhile been walking about the studio, and had

reached the window that looked across the garden on to a narrow avenue,

a side-street that was almost a country lane. We had gone there to

breathe the cooler air of the late afternoon. I supposed myself to be

nowhere near the girls of the little band, and it was only by

sacrificing for once the hope of seeing them that I had yielded to my

grandmother's prayers and had gone to see Elstir. For where the thing is

to be found that we are seeking we never know, and often we steadily,

for a long time, avoid the place to which, for quite different reasons,

everyone has been asking us to go. But we never suspect that we shall

there see the very person of whom we are thinking. I looked out vaguely

over the country road which, outside the studio, passed quite close to

it but did not belong to Elstir. Suddenly there appeared on it, coming

along it at a rapid pace, the young bicyclist of the little band, with,

over her dark hair, her polo-cap pulled down towards her plump cheeks,

her eyes merry and almost importunate; and on that auspicious path,

miraculously filled with promise of delights, I saw her beneath the

trees throw to Elstir the smiling greeting of a friend, a rainbow that

bridged the gulf for me between our terraqueous world and regions which

I had hitherto regarded as inaccessible. She even came up to give her

hand to the painter, though without stopping, and I could see that she

had a tiny beauty spot on her chin. "Do you know that girl, sir?" I

asked Elstir, realising that he could if he chose make me known to her,

could invite us both to the house. And this peaceful studio with its

rural horizon was at once filled with a surfeit of delight such as a

child might feel in a house where he was already happily playing when he

learned that, in addition, out of that bounteousness which enables

lovely things and noble hosts to increase their gifts beyond all

measure, there was being prepared for him a sumptuous repast. Elstir

told me that she was called Albertine Simonet, and gave me the names

also of her friends, whom I described to him with sufficient accuracy

for him to identify them almost without hesitation. I had, with regard

to their social position, made a mistake, but not the mistake that I

usually made at Balbec. I was always ready to take for princes the sons

of shopkeepers when they appeared on horseback. This time I had placed

in an interloping class the daughters of a set of respectable people,

extremely rich, belonging to the world of industry and business. It was

the class which, on first thoughts, interested me least, since it held

for me neither the mystery of the lower orders nor that of a society

such as the Guermantes frequented. And no doubt if an inherent quality,

a rank which they could never forfeit had not been conferred on them, in

my dazzled eyes, by the glaring vacuity of the seaside life all round

them, I should perhaps not have succeeded in resisting and overcoming

the idea that they were the daughters of prosperous merchants. I could

not help marvelling to see how the French middle class was a wonderful

studio full of sculpture of the noblest and most varied kind. What

unimagined types, what richness of invention in the character of their

faces, what firmness, what freshness, what simplicity in their features.

The shrewd old money-changers from whose loins these Dianas and these

nymphs had sprung seemed to me to have been the greatest of statuaries.

Before I had time to register the social metamorphosis of these

girls--so are these discoveries of a mistake, these modifications

of the notion one has of a person instantaneous as a chemical

combination--there was already installed behind their faces, so

street-arab in type that I had taken them for the mistresses of racing

bicyclists, of boxing champions, the idea that they might easily be

connected with the family of some lawyer or other whom we knew. I was

barely conscious of what was meant by Albertine Simonet; she had

certainly no conception of what she was one day to mean to me. Even the

name, Simonet, which I had already heard spoken on the beach, if I had

been asked to write it down I should have spelt with a double 'n' never

dreaming of the importance which this family attached to there being but

one in their name. In proportion as we descend the social scale our

snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null

than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more

obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.

Possibly there had been Simonets who had done badly in business, or

something worse still even. The fact remains that the Simonets never

failed, it appeared, to be annoyed if anyone doubled their 'n'. They

wore the air of being the only Simonets in the world with one 'n'

instead of two, and were as proud of it, perhaps, as the Montmorency

family were of being the premier barons of France. I asked Elstir

whether these girls lived at Balbec; yes, he told me, some of them at

any rate. The villa in which one of them lived was at that very spot,

right at the end of the beach, where the cliffs of Canapville began. As

this girl was a great friend of Albertine Simonet, this was another

reason for me to believe that it was indeed the latter whom I had met

that day when I was with my grandmother. There were of course so many of

those little streets running down to the beach, and all at the same

angle, that I could not have pointed out exactly which of them it had

been. One would like always to remember a thing accurately, but at the

time one's vision was clouded. And yet that Albertine and the girl whom

I had seen going to her friend's house were one and the same person was

a practical certainty. In spite of which, whereas the countless images

that have since been furnished me by the dark young golfer, however

different they may have been from one another, have overlaid one another

(because I now know that they all belong to her), and if I retrace the

thread of my memories I can, under cover of that identity, and as though

along a tunnelled passage, pass through all those images in turn without

losing my consciousness of the same person behind them all, if, on the

other hand, I wish to revert to the girl whom I passed that day when I

was with my grandmother, I must escape first into freer air. I am

convinced that it is Albertine whom I find there, the same girl as her

who would often stop dead among her moving comrades, in her walk along

the foreground of the sea; but all those more recent images remain

separate from that earlier one because I am unable to confer on her

retrospectively an identity which she had not for me at the moment in

which she caught my eye; whatever assurance I may derive from the law of

probabilities, that girl with plump cheeks who stared at me so boldly

from the angle of the little street and the beach, and by whom I believe

that I might have been loved, I have never, in the strict sense of the

words, seen again.

My hesitation between the different girls of the little band, all of

whom retained something of the collective charm which had at first

disturbed me, combined with the reasons already given to allow me later

on, even at the time of my greater--my second--passion for Albertine, a

sort of intermittent and very brief liberty to abstain from loving her.

From having strayed among all her friends before it finally concentrated

itself on her, my love kept, now and then, between itself and the image

of Albertine a certain "play" of light and shade which enabled it, like

a badly fitted lamp, to flit over the surface of each of the others

before settling its focus upon her; the connexion between the pain which

I felt in my heart and the memory of Albertine did not seem to me

necessary; I might perhaps have managed to coordinate it with the image

of another person. Which enabled me, in a momentary flash, to banish

reality altogether, not only external reality, as in my love for

Gilberte (which I had recognised to be an internal state in which I drew

from myself alone the particular quality, the special character of the

person whom I loved, everything that rendered her indispensable to my

happiness), but even the other reality, internal and purely subjective.

"Not a day passes but one or the other of them comes by here, and looks

in for a minute or two," Elstir told me, plunging me in despair when I

thought that if I had gone to see him at once, when my grandmother had

begged me to do so, I should, in all probability, long since have made

Albertine's acquaintance.

She had passed on; from the studio she was no longer in sight. I

supposed that she had gone to join her friends on the "front". Could I

have appeared there suddenly with Elstir, I should have got to know them

all. I thought of endless pretexts for inducing him to take a turn with

me on the beach. I had no longer the same peace of mind as before the

apparition of the girl in the frame of the little window; so charming

until then in its fringe of honeysuckle, and now so drearily empty.

Elstir caused me a joy that was tormenting also when he said that he

would go a little way with me, but that he must first finish the piece

of work on which he was engaged. It was a flower study but not one of

any of the flowers, portraits of which I would rather have commissioned

him to paint than the portrait of a person, so that I might learn from

the revelation of his genius what I had so often sought in vain from the

flowers themselves--hawthorn white, and pink, cornflowers,

apple-blossom. Elstir as he worked talked botany to me, but I scarcely

listened; he was no longer sufficient in himself, he was now only the

necessary intermediary between these girls and me; the distinction

which, only a few moments ago, his talent had still given him in my eyes

was now worthless save in so far as it might confer a little on me also

in the eyes of the little band to whom I should be presented by him.

I paced up and down the room, impatient for him to finish what he was

doing; I picked up and examined various sketches, any number of which

were stacked against the walls. In this way I happened to bring to light

a water-colour which evidently belonged to a much earlier period in

Elstir's life, and gave me that particular kind of enchantment which is

diffused by works of art not only deliciously executed but representing

a subject so singular and so seductive that it is to it that we

attribute a great deal of their charm, as if the charm were something

that the painter had merely to uncover, to observe, realised already in

a material form by nature, and to reproduce in art. That such objects

can exist, beautiful quite apart from the painter's interpretation of

them, satisfies a sort of innate materialism in us, against which our

reason contends and acts as a counterpoise to the abstractions of

aesthetics. It was--this water-colour--the portrait of a young woman, by

no means beautiful but of a curious type, in a close-fitting mob-cap not

unlike a "billy-cock" hat, trimmed with a ribbon of cherry-coloured

silk; in one of her mittened hands was a lighted cigarette, while the

other held, level with her knee, a sort of broad-brimmed garden hat,

nothing more than a fire-screen of plaited straw to keep off the sun. On

a table by her side, a tall vase filled with pink carnations. Often (and

it was the case here) the singularity of such works is due principally

to their having been executed in special conditions for which we do not

at first sight make proper allowance, if, for instance, the strange

attire of a feminine model is her costume for a masked ball, or

conversely the scarlet cloak which an elderly man looks as though he had

put on to humour some whim in the painter is his gown as a professor or

alderman or his cardinal's cassock. The ambiguous character of the

person whose portrait now confronted me arose, without my understanding

it, from the fact that she was a young actress of an earlier generation

half dressed for a part. But the cap or hat, beneath which the hair

stuck out but was cut short, the velvet coat opening without lapels over

a white shirt-front, made me hesitate as to the period of the clothes

and the sex of the model, so that I did not know what it was exactly

that I was holding before my eyes, unless simply the brightest coloured

of these scraps of painting. And the pleasure which it afforded me was

disturbed only by the fear that Elstir, by delaying further, would make

me miss the girls, for the sun was now declining and hung low in the

little window. Nothing in this water-colour was merely stated there as a

fact and painted because of its utility to the composition, the costume

because the young woman must be wearing something, the vase to hold the

flowers. The glass of the vase, cherished for its own sake, seemed to be

holding the water in which the stems of the carnations were dipped in

something as limpid, almost as liquid as itself; the woman's dress

encompassed her in a manner that had an independent, a brotherly charm,

and, if the works of man can compete in charm with the wonders of

nature, as delicate, as pleasing to the touch of the eye, as freshly

painted as the fur of a cat, the petals of a flower, the feathers of a

dove. The whiteness of the shirt-front, fine as driven rain, with its

gay pleats gathered into little bells like lilies of the valley, was

starred with bright gleams of light from the room, as sharply edged and

as finely shaded as though they had been posies of flowers stitched on

the woven lawn. And the velvet of the coat, brilliant with a milky

sheen, had here and there a roughness, a scoring, a shagginess on its

surface which made one think of the crumpled brightness of the

carnations in the vase. But above all one felt that Elstir, sublimely

indifferent to whatever immoral suggestion there might be in this

disguise of a young actress for whom the talent with which she would

play her part on the stage was doubtless of less importance than the

irritant attraction which she would offer to the jaded or depraved

senses of some of her audience, had on the contrary fastened upon those

ambiguous points as on an aesthetic element which deserved to be brought

into prominence, and which he had done everything in his power to

emphasise. Along the lines of the face, the latent sex seemed to be on

the point of confessing itself to be that of a somewhat boyish girl,

then vanished and farther on reappeared with a suggestion rather of an

effeminate youth, vicious and pensive, then fled once more to remain

uncapturable. The dreamy sadness in the expression of her eyes, by the

mere fact of its contrast with the accessories belonging to the world of

love-making and play-acting, was not the least disturbing element in the

picture. One imagined moreover that it must be feigned, and that the

young person who seemed ready to submit to caresses in this provoking

costume had probably thought it effective to enhance the provocation

with this romantic expression of a secret longing, an unspoken grief. At

the foot of the picture was inscribed "_Miss Sacripant_: October, 1872."

I could not contain my admiration. "Oh, it's nothing, only a rough

sketch I did when I was young; it was a costume for a variety show. It's

all ages ago now." "And what has become of the model?" A bewilderment

provoked by my words preceded on Elstir's face the indifferent,

absent-minded air which, a moment later, he displayed there. "Quick,

give it to me!" he cried, "I hear Madame Elstir coming, and, though, I

assure you, the young person in the billy-cock hat never played any part

in my life, still there's no point in my wife's coming in and finding it

staring her in the face. I have kept it only as an amusing sidelight on

the theatre of those days." And, before putting it away behind the pile,

Elstir, who perhaps had not set eyes on the sketch for years, gave it

his careful scrutiny. "I must keep just the head," he murmured, "the

lower part is really too shockingly bad, the hands are a beginner's

work." I was miserable at the arrival of Mme. Elstir, who could only

delay us still further. The window-sill was already aglow. Our excursion

would be a pure waste of time. There was no longer the slightest chance

of our seeing the girls, consequently it mattered now not at all how

soon Mme. Elstir left us or how long she stayed. Not that she did stay

for any length of time. I found her most tedious; she might have been

beautiful, once, at twenty, driving an ox in the Roman Campagna, but her

dark hair was streaked with grey and she was common without being

simple, because she believed that a pompous manner and majestic

attitudes were required by her statuesque beauty, which, however,

advancing age had robbed of all its charm. She was dressed with the

utmost simplicity. And it was touching, but at the same time surprising

to hear Elstir, whenever he opened his mouth, and with a respectful

gentleness, as if merely uttering the words moved him to tenderness and

veneration, repeat: "My beautiful Gabrielle!" Later on, when I had

become familiar with Elstir's mythological paintings, Mme. Elstir

acquired beauty in my eyes also. I understood then that to a certain

ideal type illustrated by certain lines, certain arabesques which

reappeared incessantly throughout his work, to a certain canon of art he

had attributed a character that was almost divine, since the whole of

his time, all the mental effort of which he was capable, in a word his

whole life he had consecrated to the task of distinguishing those lines

as clearly and of reproducing them as faithfully as possible. What such

an ideal inspired in Elstir was indeed a cult so solemn, so exacting

that it never allowed him to be satisfied with what he had achieved; was

the most intimate part of himself; and so he had never been able to look

at it from a detached standpoint, to extract emotion from it, until the

day on which he encountered it realised outside, apart from himself, in

the body of a woman, the body of her who in due course became Mme.

Elstir and in whom he had been able (as one is able only with something

that is not oneself) to find it meritorious, moving, god-like. How

comforting, moreover, to let his lips rest upon that Beauty which

hitherto he had been obliged with so great labour to extract from within

himself, whereas now, mysteriously incarnate, it offered itself to him

in a series of communions, filled with saving grace. Elstir at this

period was no longer in that early youth in which we look only to the

power of our own mind for the realisation of our ideal. He was nearing

the age at which we count on bodily satisfactions to stimulate the

forces of the brain, at which the exhaustion of the brain inclining us

to materialism and the diminution of our activity to the possibility of

influences passively received, begin to make us admit that there may

indeed be certain bodies, Certain callings, certain rhythms that are

privileged, realising so naturally our ideal that even without genius,

merely by copying the movement of a shoulder, the tension of a throat,

we can achieve a masterpiece, it is the age at which we like to caress

Beauty with our eyes objectively, outside ourselves, to have it near us,

in a tapestry, in a lovely sketch by Titian picked up in a second-hand

shop, in a mistress as lovely as Titian's sketch. When I understood this

I could no longer look without pleasure at Mme. Elstir, and her body

began to lose its heaviness, for I filled it with an idea, the idea that

she was an immaterial creature, a portrait by Elstir. She was one for

me, and for him also I dare say. The facts of life have no meaning for

the artist, they are to him merely an opportunity for exposing the naked

blaze of his genius. One feels unmistakably, when one sees side by side

ten portraits of different people painted by Elstir, that they are all,

first and foremost, Elstirs. Only, after this rising tide of genius,

which sweeps over and submerges a man's life, when the brain begins to

tire, gradually the balance is upset and, like a river that resumes its

course after the counterflow of a spring tide, it is life that once more

takes the upper hand. While the first period lasted, the artist has

gradually evolved the law, the formula of his unconscious gift. He knows

what situations, should he be a novelist--if a painter, what scenes

furnish him with the subject matter, which may be anything in the world

but, whatever it is, is essential to his researches as a laboratory

might be or a workshop. He knows that he has created his masterpieces

out of effects of attenuated light, the action of remorse upon

consciousness of guilt, out of women posed beneath trees or

half-immersed in water, like statues. A day will come when, owing to the

exhaustion of his brain, he will no longer have the strength, when

provided with those materials which his genius was wont to use, to make

the intellectual effort which alone can produce his work, and will yet

continue to seek them out, happy when he finds himself in their

presence, because of the spiritual pleasure, the allurement to work that

they arouse in him; and, surrounding them besides with a kind of hedge

of superstition as if they were superior to all things else, as if in

them already dwelt a great part of the work of art which they might be

said to carry within them ready made, he will confine himself to the

company, to the adoration of his models. He will hold endless

conversations with the repentant criminals whose remorse, their

regeneration formed, when he still wrote, the subject of his novels; he

will buy a country house in a district where mists attentuate the light,

he will spend long hours gazing at the limbs of bathing women; will

collect sumptuous stuffs. And thus the beauty of life, a phase that has

to some extent lost its meaning, a stage beyond the boundaries of art at

which I had already seen Swann come to rest, was that also which, by a

slackening of the creative ardour, idolatry of the forms which had

inspired it, desire to avoid effort, must ultimately arrest an Elstir's

progress.

At last he had applied the final brush-stroke to his flowers; I

sacrificed a minute to look at them; I acquired no merit by the act, for

I knew that there was no chance now of our finding the girls on the

beach; and yet, had I believed them to be still there, and that these

wasted moments would make me miss them, I should have stopped to look

none the less, for I should have told myself that Elstir was more

interested in his flowers than in my meeting with the girls. My

grandmother's nature, a nature that was the exact counterpart of my

complete egoism; was nevertheless reflected in certain aspects of my

own. In circumstances in which someone to whom I was indifferent, for

whom I had always made a show of affection or respect, ran the risk

merely of some unpleasantness whereas I was in real danger, I could not

have done otherwise than commiserate with him on his annoyance as though

it had been something important, and treat my own danger as nothing,

because I would feel that these were the proportions in which he must

see things. To be quite accurate, I would go even farther, and not only

not complain of the danger in which I myself stood but go half-way to

meet it, and with that which involved other people try, on the contrary,

were I to increase the risk of my being caught myself, to avert it from

them. The reasons for this are several, none of which does me the

slightest credit. One is that if, while only my reason was employed, I

have always believed in self-preservation, whenever in the course of my

existence I have found myself obsessed by moral anxieties, or merely by

nervous scruples, so puerile often that I dare not enumerate them here,

if an unforeseen circumstance then arose, involving for me the risk of

being killed, this new preoccupation was so trivial in comparison with

the others that I welcomed it with a sense of relief, almost of

hilarity. Thus I find myself, albeit the least courageous of men, to

have known that feeling which has always seemed to me, in my reasoning

moods, so foreign to my nature, so inconceivable, the intoxication of

danger. But even although I were, when any, even a deadly peril

threatened me, passing through an entirely calm and happy phase, I could

not, were I with another person, refrain from sheltering him behind me

and choosing for myself the post of danger. When a sufficient store of

experience had taught me that I invariably acted, and enjoyed acting

thus, I discovered--and was deeply ashamed by the discovery--that it was

because, in contradiction of what I had always believed and asserted, I

was extremely sensitive to the opinions of others. Not that this kind of

unconfessed self-esteem is in any sense vanity or conceit. For what

might satisfy one or other of those failings would give me no pleasure,

and I have always refrained from indulging them. But with the people in

whose company I have succeeded in concealing most effectively the slight

advantages a knowledge of which might have given them a less derogatory

idea of myself, I have never been able to deny myself the pleasure of

shewing them that I take more trouble to avert the risk of death from

their path than from my own. As my motive is then self-esteem and not

valour, I find it quite natural that in any crisis they should act

differently. I am far from blaming them for it, as I should perhaps if I

had been moved by a sense of duty, a duty which would seem to me, in

that case, to be as incumbent upon them as upon myself. On the contrary,

I feel that it is eminently sensible of them to safeguard their lives,

though at the same time I cannot prevent my own safety from receding

into the background, which is particularly silly and culpable of me

since I have come to realise that the lives of many of the people in

front of whom I plant myself when a bomb bursts are more valueless even

than my own. However, on the day of this first visit to Elstir, the time

was still distant at which I was to become conscious of this difference

in value, and there was no question of danger, but simply--a harbinger

this of that pernicious self-esteem--the question of my not appearing to

attach to the pleasure which I so ardently desired more importance than

to the work which the painter had still to finish. It was finished at

last. And, once we were out of doors, I discovered that--so long were

the days still at this season--it was not so late as I had supposed; we

strolled down to the "front". What stratagems I employed to keep Elstir

standing at the spot where I thought that the girls might still come

past. Pointing to the cliffs that towered beside us, I kept on asking

him to tell me about them, so as to make him forget the time and stay

there a little longer. I felt that we had a better chance of waylaying

the little band if we moved towards the end of the beach. "I should like

to look at those cliffs with you from a little nearer," I said to him,

having noticed that one of the girls was in the habit of going in that

direction. "And as we go, do tell me about Carquethuit. I should so like

to see Carquethuit," I went on, without thinking that the so novel

character which manifested itself with such force in Elstir's

Carquethuit Harbour, might belong perhaps rather to the painter's vision

than to any special quality in the place itself. "Since I've seen your

picture, I think that is where I should most like to go, there and to

the Pointe du Raz, but of course that would be quite a journey from

here." "Yes, and besides, even if it weren't nearer, I should advise you

perhaps all the same to visit Carquethuit," he replied. "The Pointe du

Raz is magnificent, but after all it is simply the high cliff of

Normandy or Brittany which you know already. Carquethuit is quite

different, with those rocks bursting from a level shore. I know nothing

in France like it, it reminds me rather of what one sees in some parts

of Florida. It is most interesting, and for that matter extremely wild

too. It is between Clitourps and Nehomme; you know how desolate those

parts are; the sweep of the coast-line is delicious. Here, the

coast-line is like anywhere else; but along there I can't tell you what

charm it has, what softness."

Night was falling; it was time to be turning homewards; I was escorting

Elstir in the direction of his villa when suddenly, as it were

Mephistopheles springing up before Faust, there appeared at the end of

the avenue--like simply an objectification, unreal, diabolical, of the

temperament diametrically opposed to my own, of the semi-barbarous and

cruel vitality of which I, in my weakness, my excess of tortured

sensibility and intellectuality was so destitute--a few spots of the

essence impossible to mistake for anything else in the world, a few

spores of the zoophytic band of girls, who wore an air of not having

seen me but were unquestionably, for all that, proceeding as they

advanced to pass judgment on me in their ironic vein. Feeling that a

collision between them and us was now inevitable, and that Elstir would

be certain to call me, I turned my back, like a bather preparing to meet

the shock of a wave; I stopped dead and, leaving my eminent companion to

pursue his way, remained where I was, stooping, as if I had suddenly

become engrossed in it, towards the window of the curiosity shop which

we happened to be passing at the moment, I was not sorry to give the

appearance of being able to think of something other than these girls,

and I was already dimly aware that when Elstir did call me up to

introduce me to them I should wear that sort of challenging expression

which betokens not surprise but the wish to appear as though one were

surprised--so far is every one of us a bad actor, or everyone else a

good thought-reader;--that I should even go so far as to point a finger

to my breast, as who should ask "It is me, really, that you want?" and

then run to join him, my head lowered in compliance and docility and my

face coldly masking my annoyance at being torn from the study of old

pottery in order to be introduced to people whom I had no wish to know.

Meanwhile I explored the window and waited for the moment in which my

name, shouted by Elstir, would come to strike me like an expected and

innocuous bullet. The certainty of being introduced to these girls had

had the result of making me not only feign complete indifference to

them, but actually to feel it. Inevitable from this point, the pleasure

of knowing them began at once to shrink, became less to me than the

pleasure of talking to Saint-Loup, of dining with my grandmother, of

making, in the neighbourhood of Balbec, excursions which I would regret

the probability, in consequence of my having to associate with people

who could scarcely be much interested in old buildings, of my being

forced to abandon. Moreover, what diminished the pleasure which I was

about to feel was not merely the imminence but the incoherence of its

realisation. Laws as precise as those of hydrostatics maintain the

relative position of the images which we form in a fixed order, which

the coming event at once upsets. Elstir was just about to call me. This

was not at all the fashion in which I had so often, on the beach, in my

bedroom, imagined myself making these girls' acquaintance. What was

about to happen was a different event, for which I was not prepared. I

recognised neither my desire nor its object; I regretted almost that I

had come out with Elstir. But, above all, the shrinking of the pleasure

that I expected to feel was due to the certainty that nothing, now,

could take that pleasure from me. And it resumed, as though by some

latent elasticity in itself, its whole extent when it ceased to be

subjected to the pressure of that certainty, at the moment when, having

decided to turn my head, I saw Elstir, standing where he had stopped a

few feet away with the girls, bidding them good-bye. The face of the

girl who stood nearest to him, round and plump and glittering with the

light in her eyes, reminded me of a cake on the top of which a place has

been kept for a morsel of blue sky. Her eyes, even when fixed on an

object, gave one the impression of motion, just as on days of high wind

the air, although invisible, lets us perceive the speed with which it

courses between us and the unchanging azure. For a moment her gaze

intersected mine, like those travelling skies on stormy days which hurry

after a rain-cloud that moves less rapidly than they, overtake, touch,

cover, pass it and are gone; but they do not know one another, and are

soon driven far apart. So our eyes were for a moment confronted, neither

pair knowing what the celestial continent that lay before their gaze

held of future blessing or disaster. Only at the moment when her gaze

was directly coincident with mine, without slackening its movement it

grew perceptibly duller. So on a starry night the wind-swept moon passes

behind a cloud and veils her brightness for a moment, but soon will

shine again. But Elstir had already said good-bye to the girls, and had

never summoned me. They disappeared down a cross street; he came towards

me. My whole plan was spoiled.

I have said that Albertine had not seemed to me that day to be the same

as on previous days and that afterwards, each time I saw her, she was to

appear different. But I felt at that moment that certain modifications

in the appearance, the importance, the stature of a person may also be

due to the variability of certain states of consciousness interposed

between that person and us. One of those that play an important part in

such transformations is belief (that evening my belief, then the

vanishing of my belief that I was about to know Albertine had, with a

few seconds' interval only, rendered her almost insignificant then

infinitely precious in my sight; some years later, the belief, then the

disappearance of the belief that Albertine was faithful to me brought

about similar changes.)

Of course, long ago, at Combray, I had seen shrink or stretch, according

to the time of day, according as I was entering one or the other of the

two dominant moods that governed my sensibility in turn, my grief at not

having my mother with me, as imperceptible all afternoon as is the

moon's light when the sun is shining, and then, when night had come,

reigning alone in my anxious heart in the place of recent memories now

obliterated. But on that day at Balbec, when I saw that Elstir was

leaving the girls and had not called me, I learned for the first time

that the variations in the importance which a pleasure or a pain has in

our eyes may depend not merely on this alternation of two moods, but on

the displacement of invisible beliefs, such, for example, as make death

seem to us of no account because they bathe it in a glow of unreality,

and thus enable us to attach importance to our attending an evening

party, which would lose much of its charm for if, on the announcement

that we were sentenced to die by the guillotine, the belief that had

bathed the party in its warm glow was instantly shattered; and this part

that belief plays, it is true that something in me was aware of it; this

was my will; but its knowledge is vain if the mind, the heart continue

in ignorance; these last act in good faith when they believe that we are

anxious to forsake a mistress to whom our will alone knows that we are

still attached. This is because they are clouded by the belief that we

shall see her again at any moment. But let this belief be shattered, let

them suddenly become aware that this mistress is gone from us for ever,

then the mind and heart, having lost their focus, are driven like mad

things, the meanest pleasure becomes infinitely great.

Variance of a belief, annulment also of love, which, pre-existent and

mobile, comes to rest at the image of any one woman simply because that

woman will be almost impossible of attainment. Thenceforward we think

not so much of the woman of whom we find difficulty in forming an exact

picture, as of the means of getting to know her. A whole series of

agonies develops and is sufficient to fix our love definitely upon her

who is its almost unknown object. Our love becomes immense; we never

dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies. And if suddenly,

as at the moment when I had seen Elstir stop to talk to the girls, we

cease to be uneasy, to suffer pain, since it is this pain that is the

whole of our love, it seems to us as though love had abruptly vanished

at the moment when at length we grasp the prey to whose value we had not

given enough thought before. What did I know of Albertine? One or two

glimpses of a profile against the sea, less beautiful, assuredly, than

those of Veronese's women whom I ought, had I been guided by purely

aesthetic reasons, to have preferred to her. By what other reasons could

I be guided, since, my anxiety having subsided, I could recapture only

those mute profiles; I possessed nothing of her besides. Since my first

sight of Albertine I had meditated upon her daily, a thousandfold, I had

carried on with what I called by her name an interminable unspoken

dialogue in which I made her question me, answer me, think and act, and

in the infinite series of imaginary Albertines who followed one after

the other in my fancy, hour after hour, the real Albertine, a glimpse

caught on the beach, figured only at the head, just as the actress who

creates a part, the star, appears, out of a long series of performances,

in the few first alone. That Albertine was scarcely more than a

silhouette, all that was superimposed being of my own growth, so far

when we are in love does the contribution that we ourself make

outweigh--even if we consider quantity only--those that come to us from

the beloved object. And the same is true of love that is given its full

effect. There are loves that manage not only to be formed but to subsist

around a very little core--even among those whose prayer has been

answered after the flesh. An old drawing-master who had taught my

grandmother had been presented by some obscure mistress with a daughter.

The mother died shortly after the birth of her child, and the

drawing-master was so broken-hearted that he did not long survive her.

In the last months of his life my grandmother and some of the Combray

ladies, who had never liked to make any allusion in the drawing-master's

presence to the woman, with whom, for that matter, he had not officially

"lived" and had had comparatively slight relations, took it into their

heads to ensure the little girl's future by combining to purchase an

annuity for her. It was my grandmother who suggested this; several of

her friends made difficulties; after all was the child really such a

very interesting case, was she even the child of her reputed father;

with women like that, it was never safe to say. Finally, everything was

settled. The child came to thank the ladies. She was plain, and so

absurdly like the old drawing-master as to remove every shadow of doubt;

her hair being the only nice thing about her, one of the ladies said to

her father, who had come with her: "What pretty hair she has." And

thinking that now, the woman who had sinned being dead and the old man

only half alive, a discreet allusion to that past of which they had

always pretended to know nothing could do no harm, my grandmother added:

"It runs in families. Did her mother have pretty hair like that?" "I

don't know," was the old man's quaint answer "I never saw her except

with a hat on."

But I must not keep Elstir waiting. I caught sight of myself in a glass.

To add to the disaster of my not having been introduced to the girls, I

noticed that my necktie was all crooked, my hat left long wisps of hair

shewing, which did not become me; but it was a piece of luck, all the

same, that they should have seen me, even thus attired, in Elstir's

company and so could not forget me; also that I should have put on, that

morning, at my grandmother's suggestion, my smart waistcoat, when I

might so easily have been wearing one that was simply hideous, and be

carrying my best stick. For while an event for which we are longing

never happens quite in the way we have been expecting, failing the

advantages on which we supposed that we might count, others present

themselves for which we never hoped, and make up for our disappointment;

and we have been so dreading the worst that in the end we are inclined

to feel that, taking one thing with another, chance has, on the whole,

been rather kind to us.

"I did so much want to know them," I said as I reached Elstir. "Then why

did you stand a mile away?" These were his actual words, not that they

expressed what was in his mind, since, if his desire had been to grant

mine, to call me up to him would have been quite easy, but perhaps

because he had heard phrases of this sort, in familiar use among common

people when they are in the wrong, and because even great men are in

certain respects much the same as common people, take their every day

excuses from the same common stock just as they get their daily bread

from the same baker; or it may be that such expressions (which ought,

one might almost say, to be read "backwards", since their literal

interpretation is the opposite of the truth) are the instantaneous

effect, the negative exposure of a reflex action. "They were in a

hurry." It struck me that of course they must have stopped him from

summoning a person who did not greatly attract them; otherwise he would

not have failed, after all the questions that I had put to him about

them, and the interest which he must have seen that I took in them, to

call me. "We were speaking just now of Carquethuit," he began, as we

walked towards his villa. "I have done a little sketch, in which you can

see much better how the beach curves. The painting is not bad, but it is

different. If you will allow me, just to cement our friendship, I would

like to give you the sketch," he went on, for the people who refuse us

the objects of our desire are always ready to offer us something else.

"I should very much like, if you have such a thing, a photograph of the

little picture of Miss Sacripant. 'Sacripant'--that's not a real name,

surely?" "It is the name of a character the sitter played in a stupid

little musical comedy." "But, I assure you, sir, I have never set eyes

on her; you look as though you thought that I knew her." Elstir was

silent. "It isn't Mme. Swann, before she was married?" I hazarded, in

one of those sudden fortuitous stumblings upon the truth, which are rare

enough in all conscience, and yet give, in the long run, a certain

cumulative support to the theory of presentiments, provided that one

takes care to forget all the wrong guesses that would invalidate it.

Elstir did not reply. The portrait was indeed that of Odette de Crécy.

She had preferred not to keep it for many reasons, some of them obvious.

But there were others less apparent. The portrait dated from before the

point at which Odette, disciplining her features, had made of her face

and figure that creation the broad outlines of which her hairdressers,

her dressmakers, she herself--in her way of standing, of speaking, of

smiling, of moving her hands, her eyes, of thinking--were to respect

throughout the years to come. It required the vitiated tastes of a

surfeited lover to make Swann prefer to all the countless photographs of

the "sealed pattern" Odette which was his charming wife the little

photographs which he kept in his room and in which, beneath a straw hat

trimmed with pansies, you saw a thin young woman, not even good-looking,

with bunched out hair and drawn features.

But apart from this, had the portrait been not anterior, like Swann's

favourite photograph, to the systematisation of Odette's features in a

fresh type, majestic and charming, but subsequent to it, Elstir's vision

would alone have sufficed to disorganise that type. Artistic genius in

its reactions is like those extremely high temperatures which have the

power to disintegrate combinations of atoms which they proceed to

combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, following another

type. All that artificially harmonious whole into which a woman has

succeeded in bringing her limbs and features, the persistence of which

every day, before going out, she studies in her glass, changing the

angle of her hat, smoothing her hair, exercising the sprightliness in

her eyes, so as to ensure its continuity, that harmony the keen eye of

the great painter instantly destroys, substituting for it a

rearrangement of the woman's features such as will satisfy a certain

pictorial ideal of femininity which he carries in his head. Similarly it

often happens that, after a certain age, the eye of a great seeker after

truth will find everywhere the elements necessary to establish those

relations which alone are of interest to him. Like those craftsmen,

those players who, instead of making a fuss and asking for what they

cannot have, content themselves with the instrument that comes to their

hand, the artist might say of anything, no matter what, that it would

serve his purpose. Thus a cousin of the Princesse de Luxembourg, a

beauty of the most queenly type, having succumbed to a form of art which

was new at that time, had asked the leading painter of the naturalist

school to do her portrait. At once the artist's eye had found what he

sought everywhere in life. And on his canvas there appeared, in place of

the proud lady, a street-boy, and behind him a vast, sloping, purple

background which made one think of the Place Pigalle. But even without

going so far as that, not only will the portrait of a woman by a great

artist not seek in the least to give satisfaction to various demands on

the woman's part--such as for instance, when she begins to age, make her

have herself photographed in dresses that are almost those of a young

girl, which bring out her still youthful figure and make her appear like

the sister, or even the daughter of her own daughter, who, if need be,

is tricked out for the occasion as a "perfect fright" by her side--it

will, on the contrary, emphasise those very drawbacks which she seeks to

hide, and which (as for instance a feverish, that is to say a livid

complexion) are all the more tempting to him since they give his picture

"character"; they are quite enough, however, to destroy all the

illusions of the ordinary man who, when he sees the picture, sees

crumble into dust the ideal which the woman herself has so proudly

sustained for him, which has placed her in her unique, her unalterable

form so far apart, so far above the rest of humanity. Fallen now,

represented otherwise than in her own type in which she sat unassailably

enthroned, she is become nothing more than just an ordinary woman, in

the legend of whose superiority we have lost all faith. In this type we

are so accustomed to regard as included not only the beauty of an Odette

but her personality, her identity, that standing before the portrait

which has thus transposed her from it we are inclined to protest not

simply "How plain he has made her!" but "Why, it isn't the least bit

like her!" We find it hard to believe that it can be she. We do not

recognise her. And yet there is a person there on the canvas whom we are

quite conscious of having seen before. But that person is not Odette;

the face of the person, her body, her general appearance seem familiar.

They recall to us not this particular woman who never held herself like

that, whose natural pose had no suggestion of any such strange and

teasing arabesque in its outlines, but other women, all the women whom

Elstir has ever painted, women whom invariably, however they may differ

from one another, he has chosen to plant thus on his canvas facing you,

with an arched foot thrust out from under the skirt, a large round hat

in one hand, symmetrically corresponding at the level of the knee which

it hides to what also appears as a disc, higher up in the picture, the

face. And furthermore, not only does a portrait by the hand of genius

disintegrate and destroy a woman's type, as it has been defined by her

coquetry and her selfish conception of beauty, but if it is also old, it

is not content with ageing the original in the same way as a photograph

ages its sitter, by shewing her dressed in the fashions of long ago. In

a portrait, it is not only the manner the woman then had of dressing

that dates it, there is also the manner the artist had of painting. And

this, Elstir's earliest manner, was the most damaging of birth

certificates for Odette because it not only established her, as did her

photographs of the same period, as the younger sister of various

time-honoured courtesans, but made her portrait contemporary with the

countless portraits that Manet or Whistler had painted of all those

vanished models, models who already belonged to oblivion or to history.

It was along this train of thought, meditated in silence by the side of

Elstir, as I accompanied him to his door, that I was being led by the

discovery that I had just made of the identity of his model, when this

original discovery caused me to make a second, more disturbing still,

involving the identity of the artist. He had painted the portrait of

Odette de Crécy. Could it possibly be that this man of genius, this

sage, this eremite, this philosopher with his marvellous flow of

conversation, who towered over everyone and everything, was the foolish,

corrupt little painter who had at one time been "taken up" by the

Verdurins? I asked him if he had known them, whether by any chance it

was he that they used to call M. Biche. He answered me in the

affirmative, with no trace of embarrassment, as if my question referred

to a period in his life that was ended and already somewhat remote, with

no suspicion of what a cherished illusion his words were shattering in

me, until looking up he read my disappointment upon my face. His own

assumed an expression of annoyance. And, as we were now almost at the

gate of his house, a man of less outstanding eminence, in heart and

brain, might simply have said "good-bye" to me, a trifle dryly, and

taken care to avoid seeing me again. This however was not Elstir's way

with me; like the master that he was--and this was, perhaps, from the

point of view of sheer creative genius, his one fault, that he was a

master in that sense of the word, for an artist if he is to live the

true life of the spirit in its full extent, must be alone and not bestow

himself with profusion, even upon disciples--from every circumstance,

whether involving himself or other people, he sought to extract, for the

better edification of the young, the element of truth that it contained.

He chose therefore, rather than say anything that might have avenged the

injury to his pride, to say what he thought would prove instructive to

me. "There is no man," he began, "however wise, who has not at some

period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of

which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he

could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to

regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise

man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has

passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that

ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows,

the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into

them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They

have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to

retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of

everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures,

feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and

sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for

ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can

take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the

point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives

that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result

of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have

sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the

influence of everything evil or common-place that prevailed round about

them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the

picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable

and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we

must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really

lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind

that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios,

of artistic groups--assuming that one is a painter--extracted something

that goes beyond them." Meanwhile we had reached his door. I was

disappointed at not having met the girls. But after all there was now

the possibility of meeting them again later on; they had ceased to do no

more than pass beyond a horizon on which I had been ready to suppose

that I should never see them reappear. Around them no longer swirled

that sort of great eddy which had separated me from them, which had been

merely the expression of the perpetually active desire, mobile,

compelling, fed ever on fresh anxieties, which was aroused in me by

their inaccessibility, their flight from me, possibly for ever. My

desire for them, I could now set it at rest, hold it in reserve, among

all those other desires the realisation of which, as soon as I knew it

to be possible, I would cheerfully postpone. I took leave of Elstir; I

was alone once again. Then all of a sudden, despite my recent

disappointment, I saw in my mind's eye all that chain of coincidence

which I had not supposed could possibly come about, that Elstir should

be a friend of those very girls, that they who only that morning had

been to me merely figures in a picture with the sea for background had

seen me, had seen me walking in friendly intimacy with a great painter,

who was now informed of my secret longing and would no doubt do what he

could to assuage it. All this had been a source of pleasure to me, but

that pleasure had remained hidden; it was one of those visitors who wait

before letting us know that they are in the room until all the rest have

gone and we are by ourselves. Then only do we catch sight of them, and

can say to them, "I am at your service," and listen to what they have to

tell us. Sometimes between the moment at which these pleasures have

entered our consciousness and the moment at which we are free to

entertain them, so many hours have passed, we have in the interval seen

so many people that we are afraid lest they should have grown tired of

waiting. But they are patient, they do not grow tired, and as soon as

the crowd has gone we find them there ready for us. Sometimes it is then

we who are so exhausted that it seems as though our weary mind will not

have the strength left to seize and retain those memories, those

impressions for which our frail self is the one habitable place, the

sole means of realisation. And we should regret that failure, for

existence to us is hardly interesting save on the days on which the dust

of realities is shot with magic sand, on which some trivial incident of

life becomes a spring of romance. Then a whole promontory of the

inaccessible world rises dear in the light of our dream, and enters into

our life, our life in which, like the sleeper awakened, we actually see

the people of whom we have been so ardently dreaming that we came to

believe that we should never behold them save in our dreams.

The sense of comfort that I drew from the probability of my now being

able to meet the little band whenever I chose was all the more precious

to me because I should not have been able to keep watch for them during

the next few days, which would be taken up with preparations for

Saint-Loup's departure. My grandmother was anxious to offer my friend

some proof of her gratitude for all the kindnesses that he had shewn to

her and myself. I told her that he was a great admirer of Proudhon, and

this put it into her head to send for a collection of autograph letters

by that philosopher which she had once bought; Saint-Loup came to her

room to look at them on the day of their arrival, which was also his

last day at Balbec. He read them eagerly, fingering each page with

reverence, trying to get the sentences by heart; and then, rising from

the table, was beginning to apologise to my grandmother for having

stayed so long, when he heard her say: "No, no; take them with you; they

are for you to keep; that was why I sent for them, to give them to you."

He was overpowered by a joy which he could no more control than we can a

physical condition that arises without the intervention of our will. He

blushed scarlet as a child who has just been whipped, and my grandmother

was a great deal more touched to see all the efforts that he was making

(without success) to control the joy that convulsed him than she would

have been to hear any words of thanks that he could have uttered. But

he, fearing that he had failed to shew his gratitude properly, begged me

to make his excuses to her again, next day, leaning from the window of

the little train of the local railway company which was to take him back

to his regiment. The distance was, as a matter of fact, nothing. He had

thought of going, as he had frequently done that summer, when he was to

return the same evening and was not encumbered with luggage, by road.

But this time he would have had, anyhow, to put all his heavy luggage in

the train. And he found it simpler to take the train himself also,

following the advice of the manager who, on being consulted, replied

that "Carriage or train, it was more or less equivocal." He meant us to

understand that they were equivalent (in fact, very much what Françoise

would have expressed as "coming to as near as made no difference").

"Very well," Saint-Loup had decided, "I will take the 'little crawler'."

I should have taken it too, had I not been tired, and gone with my

friend to Doncières; failing this I kept on promising, all the time

that we waited in the Balbec station--the time, that is to say, which

the driver of the little train spent in waiting for unpunctual friends,

without whom he refused to start, and also in seeking some refreshment

for himself--to go over there and see him several times a week. As Bloch

had come to the station also--much to Saint-Loup's disgust--the latter,

seeing that our companion could hear him begging me to come to luncheon,

to dinner, to stay altogether at Doncières, finally turned to him and,

in the most forbidding tone, intended to counteract the forced civility

of the invitation and to prevent Bloch from taking it seriously: "If you

ever happen to be passing through Doncières any afternoon when I am off

duty, you might ask for me at the barracks; but I hardly ever am off

duty." Perhaps, also, Robert feared lest, if left to myself, I might not

come, and, thinking that I was more intimate with Bloch than I made out,

was providing me in this way with a travelling companion, one who would

urge me on.

I was afraid that this tone, this way of inviting a person while warning

him not to come, might have wounded Bloch, and felt that Saint-Loup

would have done better, saying nothing. But I was mistaken, for after

the train had gone, while we were walking back together as far as the

cross-roads at which we should have to part, one road going to the

hotel, the other to the Blochs' villa, he never ceased from asking me on

what day we should go to Doncières, for after "all the civilities that

Saint-Loup had shewn" him, it would be "too unmannerly" on his part not

to accept the invitation. I was glad that he had not noticed, or was so

little displeased as to wish to let it be thought that he had not

noticed on how far from pressing, how barely polite a note the

invitation had been sounded. At the same time I should have liked Bloch,

for his own sake, to refrain from making a fool of himself by going over

at once to Doncières. But I dared not offer a piece of advice which

could only have offended him by hinting that Saint-Loup had been less

pressing than himself impressed. He was a great deal too ready to

respond, and even if all his faults of this nature were atoned for by

remarkable qualities which others, with more reserve than he, would not

possess, he carried indiscretion to a pitch that was almost maddening.

The week must not, to hear him speak, pass without our going to

Doncières (he said "our" for I think that he counted to some extent on

my presence there as an excuse for his own). All the way home, opposite

the gymnasium, in its grove of trees, opposite the lawn-tennis courts,

the mayor's office, the shell-fish stall, he stopped me, imploring me to

fix a day, and, as I did not, left me in a towering rage, saying: "As

your lordship pleases. For my part, I am obliged to go since he has

invited me."

Saint-Loup was still so much afraid of not having thanked my grandmother

properly that he charged me once again to express his gratitude to her a

day or two later in a letter I received from him from the town in which

he was quartered, a town which seemed, on the envelope where the

post-mark had stamped its name, to be hastening to me across country, to

tell me that within its walls, in the Louis XVI cavalry barracks, he was

thinking of me. The paper was embossed with the arms of Marsantes, in

which I could make out a lion, surmounted by a coronet formed by the cap

of a Peer of France.

"After a journey which," he wrote, "passed pleasantly enough, with a

book I bought at the station, by Arvède Barine (a Russian author, I

fancy; it seemed to me remarkably well written for a foreigner, but you

shall give me your critical opinion, you are bound to know all about it,

you fount of knowledge who have read everything), here I am again in the

thick of this debased existence, where, alas, I feel a sad exile, not

having here what I had to leave at Balbec; this life in which I cannot

discover one affectionate memory, any intellectual attraction; an

environment on which you would probably look with contempt--and yet it

has a certain charm. Everything seems to have changed since I was last

here, for in the interval one of the most important periods in my life,

that from which our friendship dates, has begun. I hope that it may

never come to an end. I have spoken of our friendship, of you, to one

person only, to the friend I told you of, who has just paid me a

surprise visit here. She would like immensely to know you, and I feel

that you would get on well together, for she too is extremely literary.

I, on the other hand, to go over in my mind all our talk, to live over

again those hours which I never shall forget, have shut myself off from

my comrades, excellent fellows, but altogether incapable of

understanding that sort of thing. This remembrance of moments spent with

you I should almost have preferred, on my first day here, to call up for

my own solitary enjoyment, without writing. But I was afraid lest you,

with your subtle mind and ultra-sensitive heart, might, if you did not

hear from me, needlessly torment yourself, if, that is to say, you still

condescend to occupy your thoughts with this blunt trooper whom you will

have a hard task to polish and refine, and make a little more subtle and

worthier of your company."

On the whole this letter, in its affectionate spirit, was not at all

unlike those which, when I did not yet know Saint-Loup, I had imagined

that he would write to me, in those daydreams from which the coldness of

his first greeting had shaken me by bringing me face to face with an icy

reality which was not, however, to endure. Once I had received this

letter, whenever, at luncheon-time, the post was brought in, I could

tell at once when it was from him that a letter came, for it had always

that second face which a person assumes when he is absent, in the

features of which (the characters of his script) there is no reason why

we should not suppose that we are tracing an individual soul just as

much as in the line of a nose or the inflexions of a voice.

I would now gladly remain at the table while it was being cleared, and,

if it was not a moment at which the girls of the little band might be

passing, it was no longer solely towards the sea that I would turn my

eyes. Since I had seen such things depicted in water-colours by Elstir,

I sought to find again in reality, I cherished, as though for their

poetic beauty, the broken gestures of the knives still lying across one

another, the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin upon which the sun

would patch a scrap of yellow velvet, the half-empty glass which thus

shewed to greater advantage the noble sweep of its curved sides, and, in

the heart of its translucent crystal, clear as frozen daylight, a dreg

of wine, dusky but sparkling with reflected lights, the displacement of

solid objects, the transmutation of liquids by the effect of light and

shade, the shifting colour of the plums which passed from green to blue

and from blue to golden yellow in the half-plundered dish, the chairs,

like a group of old ladies, that came twice daily to take their places

round the white cloth spread on the table as on an altar at which were

celebrated the rites of the palate, where in the hollows of

oyster-shells a few drops of lustral water had gathered as in tiny holy

water stoups of stone; I tried to find beauty there where I had never

imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the

profundities of "still life".