When, some days after Saint-Loup's departure, I had succeeded in

persuading Elstir to give a small tea-party, at which I was to meet

Albertine, that freshness of appearance, that smartness of attire, both

(alas) fleeting, which were to be observed in me at the moment of my

starting out from the Grand Hotel, and were due respectively to a longer

rest than usual and to special pains over my toilet, I regretted my

inability to reserve them (and also the credit accruing from Elstir's

friendship) for the captivation of some other, more interesting person;

I regretted having to use them all up on the simple pleasure of making

Albertine's acquaintance. My brain assessed this pleasure at a very low

value now that it was assured me. But, inside, my will did not for a

moment share this illusion, that will which is the persevering and

unalterable servant of our successive personalities; hiding itself in

secret places, despised, downtrodden, untiringly faithful, toiling

without intermission and with no thought for the variability of the

self, its master, if only that master may never lack what he requires.

Whereas at the moment when we are just about to start on a long-planned

and eagerly awaited holiday, our brain, our nerves begin to ask

themselves whether it is really worth all the trouble involved, the

will, knowing that those lazy masters would at once begin to consider

their journey the most wonderful experience, if it became impossible for

them to take it, the will leaves them explaining their difficulties

outside the station, multiplying their hesitations; but busies itself

with taking the tickets and putting us into the carriage before the

train starts. It is as invariable as brain and nerves are fickle, but as

it is silent, gives no account of its actions, it seems almost

non-existent; it is by its dogged determination that the other

constituent parts of our personality are led, but without seeing it,

while they distinguish clearly all their own uncertainties. My nerves

and brain then started a discussion as to the real value of the pleasure

that there would be in knowing Albertine, while I studied in the glass

vain and perishable attractions which nerves and brain would have

preserved intact for use on some other occasion. But my will would not

let the hour pass at which I must start, and it was Elstir's address

that it called out to the driver. Brain and nerves were at liberty, now

that the die was cast, to think this "a pity." If my will had given the

man a different address, they would have been finely "sold".

When I arrived at Elstir's, a few minutes later, my first impression was

that Mlle. Simonet was not in the studio. There was certainly a girl

sitting there in a silk frock, bare-headed, but one whose marvellous

hair, her nose, meant nothing to me, in whom I did not recognise the

human entity that I had formed out of a young cyclist strolling past, in

a polo-cap, between myself and the sea. It was Albertine, nevertheless.

But even when I knew it to be her, I gave her no thought. On entering

any social gathering, when we are young, we lose consciousness of our

old self, we become a different man, every drawing-room being a fresh

universe, in which, coming under the sway of a new moral perspective, we

fasten our attention, as if they were to matter to us for all time, on

people, dances, card-tables, all of which we shall have forgotten by the

morning. Obliged to follow, if I was to arrive at the goal of

conversation with Albertine, a road in no way of my own planning, which

first brought me to a halt at Elstir, passed by other groups of guests

to whom I was presented, then along the table, at which I was offered,

and ate a strawberry tart or two, while I listened, motionless, to the

music that was beginning in another part of the room, I found myself

giving to these various incidents the same importance as to my

introduction to Mlle. Simonet, an introduction which was now nothing

more than one among several such incidents, having entirely forgotten

that it had been, but a few minutes since, my sole object in coming

there that day. But is it not ever thus in the bustle of daily life,

with every true happiness, every great sorrow. In a room full of other

people we receive from her whom we love the answer, propitious or fatal,

which we have been awaiting for the last year. But we must go on

talking, ideas come, one after another, forming a smooth surface which

is pricked, at the very most, now and then by a dull throb from within

of the memory, deep-rooted enough but of very slender growth, that

misfortune has come upon us. If, instead of misfortune, it is happiness,

it may be that not until many years have elapsed will we recall that the

most important event in our sentimental life occurred without our having

time to give it any prolonged attention, or even to become aware of it

almost, at a social gathering, it may have been, to which we had gone

solely in expectation of that event.

When Elstir asked me to come with him so that he might introduce me to

Albertine, who was sitting a little farther down the room, I first of

all finished eating a coffee éclair and, with a show of keen interest,

asked an old gentleman whose acquaintance I had just made (and thought

that I might, perhaps, offer him the rose in my buttonhole which he had

admired) to tell me more about the old Norman fairs. This is not to say

that the introduction which followed did not give me any pleasure, nor

assume a definite importance in my eyes. But so far as the pleasure was

concerned, I was not conscious of it, naturally, until some time later,

when, once more in the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself

again. Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in

the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we

develop it later, when we are at home, and have once again found at our

disposal that inner dark-room, the entrance to which is barred to us so

long as we are with other people.

If my consciousness of the pleasure it had brought me was thus retarded

by a few hours, the importance of this introduction I felt immediately.

At such moments of introduction, for all that we feel ourselves to have

been suddenly enriched, to have been furnished with a pass that will

admit us henceforward to pleasures which we have been pursuing for weeks

past, but in vain, we realise only too clearly that this acquisition

puts an end for us not merely to hours of toilsome search--a relief that

could only fill us with joy--but also to the very existence of a certain

person, her whom our imagination had wildly distorted, our anxious fear

that we might never become known to her enlarged. At the moment when our

name sounds on the lips of the person introducing us, especially if he

amplifies it, as Elstir was now doing, with a flattering account of

us--in that sacramental moment, as when in a fairy tale the magician

commands a person suddenly to become someone else, she to whose presence

we have been longing to attain vanishes; how could she remain the same

when, for one thing--owing to the attention which the stranger is

obliged to pay to the announcement of our name and the sight of our

person--in the eyes that only yesterday were situated at an infinite

distance (where we supposed that our eyes, wandering, uncontrolled,

desperate, divergent, would never succeed in meeting them) the conscious

gaze, the incommunicable thought which we have been seeking have been

miraculously and quite simply replaced by our own image, painted in them

as though behind the glass of a smiling mirror. If this incarnation of

ourself in the person who seems to differ most from us is what does most

to modify the appearance of the person to whom we have just been

introduced, the form of that person still remains quite vague; and we

are free to ask ourself whether she will turn out to be a god, a table

or a basin. But, as nimble as the wax-modellers who will fashion a bust

before our eyes in five minutes, the few words which the stranger is now

going to say to us will substantiate her form, will give her something

positive and final that will exclude all the hypotheses by which, a

moment ago, our desire, our imagination were being tempted. Doubtless,

even before her coming to this party, Albertine had ceased to be to me

simply that sole phantom worthy to haunt our life which is what remains

of a passing stranger, of whom we know nothing and have caught but the

barest glimpse. Her relation to Mme. Bontemps had already restricted the

scope of those marvellous hypotheses, by stopping one of the channels

along which they might have spread. As I drew closer to the girl, and

began to know her better, my knowledge of her underwent a process of

subtraction, all the factors of imagination and desire giving place to a

notion which was worth infinitely less, a notion to which, it must be

admitted, there was added presently what was more or less the

equivalent, in the domain of real life, of what joint stock companies

give one, after paying interest on one's capital, and call a bonus. Her

name, her family connexions had been the original limit set to my

suppositions. Her friendly greeting while, standing close beside her, I

saw once again the tiny mole on her cheek, below her eye, marked another

stage; last of all, I was surprised to hear her use the adverb

"perfectly" (in place of "quite") of two people whom she mentioned,

saying of one: "She is perfectly mad, but very nice for all that," and

of the other, "He is a perfectly common man, a perfect bore." However

little to be commended this use of "perfectly" may be, it indicates a

degree of civilisation and culture which I could never have imagined as

having been attained by the bacchante with the bicycle, the frenzied

muse of the golf-course. Nor did it mean that after this first

transformation Albertine was not to change again for me, many times. The

good and bad qualities which a person presents to us, exposed to view on

the surface of his or her face, rearrange themselves in a totally

different order if we approach them from another angle--just as, in a

town, buildings that appear strung irregularly along a single line, from

another aspect retire into a graduated distance, and their relative

heights are altered. To begin with, Albertine now struck me as not

implacable so much as almost frightened; she seemed to me rather

respectably than ill-bred, judging by the description, "bad style," "a

comic manner" which she applied to each in turn of the girls of whom I

spoke to her; finally, she presented as a target for my line of sight a

temple that was distinctly flushed and hardly attractive to the eye, and

no longer the curious gaze which I had always connected with her until

then. But this was merely a second impression and there were doubtless

others through which I was successively to pass. Thus it can be only

after one has recognised, not without having had to feel one's way, the

optical illusions of one's first impression that one can arrive at an

exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever

possible. But it is not; for while our original impression of him

undergoes correction, the person himself, not being an inanimate

object, changes in himself, we think that we have caught him, he moves,

and, when we imagine that at last we are seeing him clearly, it is only

the old impressions which we had already formed of him that we have

succeeded in making clearer, when they no longer represent him.

And yet, whatever the inevitable disappointments that it must bring in

its train, this movement towards what we have only half seen, what we

have been free to dwell upon and imagine at our leisure, this movement

is the only one that is wholesome for the senses, that whets the

appetite. How dreary a monotony must pervade those people's lives who,

from indolence or timidity, drive in their carriages straight to the

doors of friends whom they have got to know without having first dreamed

of knowing them, without ever daring, on the way, to stop and examine

what arouses their desire.

I returned home, my mind full of the party, the coffee _éclair_ which I

had finished eating before I let Elstir take me up to Albertine, the

rose which I had given the old gentleman, all the details selected

without our knowledge by the circumstances of the occasion, which

compose in a special and quite fortuitous order the picture that we

retain of a first meeting. But this picture, I had the impression that I

was seeing it from a fresh point of view, a long way remote from myself,

realising that it had not existed only for me, when some months later,

to my great surprise, on my speaking to Albertine on the day on which I

had first met her, she reminded me of the éclair, the flower that I had

given away, all those things which I had supposed to have been--I will

not say of importance only to myself but--perceived only by myself, and

which I now found thus transcribed, in a version the existence of which

I had never suspected, in the mind of Albertine. On this first day

itself, when, on my return to the hotel, I was able to visualise the

memory which I had brought away with me, I realised the consummate

adroitness with which the sleight of hand had been performed, and how I

had talked for a moment or two with a person who, thanks to the skill of

the conjurer, without actually embodying anything of that other person

whom I had for so long been following as she paced beside the sea, had

been effectively substituted for her. I might, for that matter, have

guessed as much in advance, since the girl of the beach was a

fabrication invented by myself. In spite of which, as I had, in my

conversations with Elstir, identified her with this other girl, I felt

myself in honour bound to fulfil to the real the promises of love made

to the imagined Albertine. We betroth ourselves by proxy, and think

ourselves obliged, in the sequel, to marry the person who has

intervened. Moreover, if there had disappeared, provisionally at any

rate, from my life, an anguish that found adequate consolation in the

memory of polite manners, of that expression "perfectly common" and of

the glowing temple, that memory awakened in me desire of another kind

which, for all that it was placid and not at all painful, resembling

rather brotherly love, might in the long run become fully as dangerous

by making me feel at every moment a compelling need to kiss this new

person, whose charming ways, her shyness, her unlooked-for

accessibility, arrested the futile process of my imagination but gave

birth to a sentimental gratitude. And then, since memory begins at once

to record photographs independent of one another, eliminates every link,

any kind of sequence from between the scenes portrayed in the collection

which it exposes to our view, the most recent does not necessarily

destroy or cancel those that came before. Confronted with the

common-place though appealing Albertine to whom I had spoken that

afternoon, I still saw the other, mysterious Albertine outlined against

the sea. These were now memories, that is to say pictures neither of

which now seemed to me any more true than the other. But, to make an end

of this first afternoon of my introduction to Albertine, when trying to

recapture that little mole on her cheek, just under the eye, I

remembered that, looking from Elstir's window, when Albertine had gone

by, I had seen the mole on her chin. In fact, whenever I saw her I

noticed that she had a mole, but my inaccurate memory made it wander

about the face of Albertine, fixing it now in one place, now in another.

Whatever my disappointment in finding in Mlle. Simonet a girl so little

different from those that I knew already, just as my rude awakening when

I saw Balbec church did not prevent me from wishing still to go to

Quimperlé, Pont-Aven and Venice, I comforted myself with the thought

that through Albertine at any rate, even if she herself was not all that

I had hoped, I might make the acquaintance of her comrades of the little

band.

I thought at first that I should fail. As she was to be staying (and I

too) for a long time still at Balbec, I had decided that the best thing

was not to make my efforts to meet her too apparent, but to wait for an

accidental encounter. But should this occur every day, even, it was

greatly to be feared that she would confine herself to acknowledging my

bow from a distance, and such meetings, repeated day after day

throughout the whole season, would benefit me not at all.

Shortly after this, one morning when it had been raining and was almost

cold, I was accosted on the "front" by a girl wearing a close-fitting

toque and carrying a muff, so different from the girl whom I had met at

Elstir's party that to recognise in her the same person seemed an

operation beyond the power of the human mind; mine was, nevertheless,

successful in performing it, but after a momentary surprise which did

not, I think, escape Albertine's notice. On the other hand, when I

instinctively recalled the good-breeding which had so impressed me

before, she filled me with a converse astonishment by her rude tone and

manners typical of the "little band". Apart from these, her temple had

ceased to be the optical centre, on which the eye might comfortably

rest, of her face, either because I was now on her other side, or

because her toque hid it, or else possibly because its inflammation was

not a constant thing. "What weather!" she began. "Really the perpetual

summer of Balbec is all stuff and nonsense. You don't go in for anything

special here, do you? We don't ever see you playing golf, or dancing at

the Casino. You don't ride, either. You must be bored stiff. You don't

find it too deadly, staying about on the beach all day. I see, you just

bask in the sun like a lizard; you enjoy that. You must have plenty of

time on your hands. I can see you're not like me; I simply adore all

sports. You weren't at the Sogne races! We went in the 'tram', and I can

quite believe you don't see the fun of going in an old 'tin-pot' like

that. It took us two whole hours! I could have gone there and back three

times on my bike." I, who had been lost in admiration of Saint-Loup when

he, in the most natural manner in the world, called the little local

train the "crawler", because of the ceaseless windings of its line, was

positively alarmed by the glibness with which Albertine spoke of the

"tram", and called it a "tin-pot". I could feel her mastery of a form of

speech in which I was afraid of her detecting and scorning my

inferiority. And yet the full wealth of the synonyms that the little

band possessed to denote this railway had not yet been revealed to me.

In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless, her nostrils closed,

allowing only the corners of her lips to move. The result of this was a

drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered

perhaps a provincial descent, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm,

the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the

mucus of the nose. This enunciation which, as it happened, soon

disappeared when she knew people better, giving place to a natural

girlish tone, might have been thought unpleasant. But it was peculiar to

herself, and delighted me. Whenever I had gone for several days without

seeing her, I would refresh my spirit by repeating to myself: "We don't

ever see you playing golf," with the nasal intonation in which she had

uttered the words, point blank, without moving a muscle of her face. And

I thought then that there could be no one in the world so desirable.

We formed that morning one of those couples who dotted the "front" here

and there with their conjunction, their stopping together for time

enough just to exchange a few words before breaking apart, each to

resume separately his or her divergent stroll. I seized the opportunity,

while she stood still, to look again and discover once and for all where

exactly the little mole was placed. Then, just as a phrase of Vinteuil

which had delighted me in the sonata, and which my recollection allowed

to wander from the andante to the finale, until the day when, having the

score in my hands, I was able to find it, and to fix it in my memory in

its proper place, in the scherzo, so this mole, which I had visualised

now on her cheek, now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper

lip, just below her nose. In the same way, too, do we not come with

amazement upon lines that we know by heart in a poem in which we never

dreamed that they were to be found.

At that moment, as if in order that against the sea there might multiply

in freedom, in the variety of its forms, all the rich decorative whole

which was the lovely unfolding of the train of maidens, at once golden

and rosy, baked by sun and wind, Albertine's friends, with their shapely

limbs, their supple figures, but so different one from another, came

into sight in a cluster that expanded as it approached, advancing

towards us, but keeping closer to the sea, along a parallel line. I

asked Albertine's permission to walk for a little way with her.

Unfortunately, all she did was to wave her hand to them in greeting.

"But your friends will be disappointed if you don't go with them," I

hinted, hoping that we might all walk together. A young man with regular

features, carrying a bag of golf-clubs, sauntered up to us. It was the

baccarat-player, whose fast ways so enraged the chief magistrate's wife.

In a frigid, impassive tone, which he evidently regarded as an

indication of the highest refinement, he bade Albertine good day. "Been

playing golf, Octave?" she asked. "How did the game go? Were you in

form?" "Oh, it's too sickening; I can't play for nuts," he replied. "Was

Andrée playing?" "Yes, she went round in seventy-seven." "Why, that's

a record!" "I went round in eighty-two yesterday." He was the son of an

immensely rich manufacturer who was to take an important part in the

organisation of the coming World's Fair. I was struck by the extreme

degree to which, in this young man and in the other by no means numerous

male friends of the band of girls, the knowledge of everything that

pertained to clothes and how to wear them, cigars, English drinks,

horses, a knowledge which he possessed in its minutest details with a

haughty infallibility that approached the reticent modesty of the true

expert, had been developed in complete isolation, unaccompanied by the

least trace of any intellectual culture. He had no hesitation as to the

right time and place for dinner jacket or pyjamas, but neither had he

any suspicion of the circumstances in which one might or might not

employ this or that word, or even of the simplest rules of grammar. This

disparity between the two forms of culture must have existed also in his

father, the President of the Syndicate that "ran" Balbec, for, in an

open letter to the electors which he had recently had posted on all the

walls, he announced: "I desired to see the Mayor, to speak to him of the

matter; he would not listen to my righteous plaint." Octave, at the

Casino, took prizes in all the dancing competitions, for bostons, tangos

and what-not, an accomplishment that would entitle him, if he chose, to

make a fine marriage in that seaside society where it is not

figuratively but in sober earnest that the young women "marry their

dancing-partners". He lighted a cigar with a "D'you mind?" to Albertine,

as one who asks permission to finish, while going on talking, an urgent

piece of work. For he was one of those people who can never be "doing

nothing", although there was nothing, for that matter, that he could

ever be said to do. And as complete inactivity has the same effect on

us, in the end, as prolonged overwork, and on the character as much as

on the life of body and muscles, the unimpaired nullity of intellect

that was enshrined behind Octave's meditative brow had ended by giving

him, despite his air of unruffled calm, ineffectual longings to think

which kept him awake at night, for all the world like an overwrought

philosopher.

Supposing that if I knew their male friends I should have more

opportunities of seeing the girls, I had been on the point of asking for

an introduction to Octave. I told Albertine this, as soon as he had left

us, still muttering, "I couldn't play for nuts!" I thought I would thus

put into her head the idea of doing it next time. "But I can't," she

cried, "introduce you to a tame cat like that. This place simply swarms

with them. But what on earth would they have to say to you? That one

plays golf quite well, and that's all there is to it. I know what I'm

talking about; you'ld find he wasn't at all your sort." "Your friends

will be cross with you if you desert them like this," I repeated, hoping

that she would then suggest my joining the party. "Oh, no, they don't

want me." We ran into Bloch, who directed at me a subtle, insinuating

smile, and, embarrassed by the presence of Albertine, whom he did not

know, or, rather, knew "without knowing" her, bent his head with a

stiff, almost irritated jerk. "What's he called, that Ostrogoth?"

Albertine asked. "I can't think why he should bow to me; he doesn't know

me. And I didn't bow to him, either." I had no time to explain to her,

for, bearing straight down upon us, "Excuse me," he began, "for

interrupting you, but I must tell you that I am going to Doncières

to-morrow. I cannot put it off any longer without discourtesy; indeed,

I ask myself, what must de Saint-Loup-en-Bray think of me. I just came

to let you know that I shall take the two o'clock train. At your

service." But I thought now only of seeing Albertine again, and of

trying to get to know her friends, and Doncières, since they were not

going there, and my going would bring me back too late to see them still

on the beach, seemed to me to be situated at the other end of the world.

I told Bloch that it was impossible. "Oh, very well, I shall go alone.

In the fatuous words of Master Arouet, I shall say to Saint-Loup, to

beguile his clericalism:"

'My duty stands alone, by his in no way bound;

Though he should choose to fail, yet faithful I'll be found.'

"I admit he's not a bad looking boy," was Albertine's comment, "but he

makes me feel quite sick." I had never thought that Bloch might be "not

a bad looking boy"; and yet, when one came to think of it, so he was.

With his rather prominent brow, very aquiline nose, and his air of

extreme cleverness and of being convinced of his cleverness, he had a

pleasing face. But he could not succeed in pleasing Albertine. This was

perhaps due, to some extent, to her own disadvantages, the harshness,

the want of feeling of the little band, its rudeness towards everything

that was not itself. And later on, when I introduced them, Albertine's

antipathy for him grew no less. Bloch belonged to a section of society

in which, between the free and easy customs of the "smart set" and the

regard for good manners which a man is supposed to shew who "does not

soil his hands", a sort of special compromise has been reached which

differs from the manners of the world and is nevertheless a peculiarly

unpleasant form of worldliness. When he was introduced to anyone he

would bow with a sceptical smile, and at the same time with an

exaggerated show of respect, and, if it was to a man, would say:

"Pleased to meet you, sir," in a voice which ridiculed the words that it

was uttering, though with a consciousness of belonging to some one who

was no fool. Having sacrificed this first moment to a custom which he at

once followed and derided (just as on the first of January he would

greet you with a "Many happy!") he would adopt an air of infinite

cunning, and would "proffer subtle words" which were often true enough

but "got on" Albertine's nerves. When I told her on this first day that

his name was Bloch, she exclaimed: "I would have betted anything he was

a Jew-boy. Trust them to put their foot in it!" Moreover, Bloch was

destined to give Albertine other grounds for annoyance later on. Like

many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a

simple way. He would find some precious qualification for every

statement, and would sweep from particular to general. It vexed

Albertine, who was never too well pleased at other people's shewing an

interest in what she was doing, that when she had sprained her ankle and

was keeping quiet, Bloch said of her: "She is outstretched on her chair,

but in her ubiquity has not ceased to frequent simultaneously vague

golf-courses and dubious tennis-courts." He was simply being "literary",

of course, but this, in view of the difficulties which Albertine felt

that it might create for her with friends whose invitations she had

declined on the plea that she was unable to move, was quite enough to

disgust her with the face, the sound of the voice of the young man who

could say such things about her. We parted, Albertine and I, after

promising to take a walk together later. I had talked to her without

being any more conscious of where my words were falling, of what became

of them, than if I were dropping pebbles into a bottomless pit. That our

words are, as a general rule, filled, by the person to whom we address

them, with a meaning which that person derives from her own substance, a

meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words

when we uttered them, is a fact which the daily round of life is

perpetually demonstrating. But if we find ourself as well in the company

of a person whose education (as Albertine's was to me) is inconceivable,

her tastes, her reading, her principles unknown, we cannot tell whether

our words have aroused in her anything that resembles their meaning, any

more than in an animal, although there are things that even an animal

may be made to understand. So that to attempt any closer friendship with

Albertine seemed to me like placing myself in contact with the unknown,

if not the impossible, an occupation as arduous as breaking a horse, as

reposeful as keeping bees or growing roses.

I had thought, a few hours before, that Albertine would acknowledge my

bow but would not speak to me. We had now parted, after planning to make

some excursion soon together. I vowed that when I next met Albertine I

would treat her with greater boldness, and I had sketched out in advance

a draft of all that I would say to her, and even (being now quite

convinced that she was not strait-laced) of all the favours that I would

demand of her. But the mind is subject to external influences, as plants

are, and cells and chemical elements, and the medium in which its

immersion alters it is a change of circumstances, or new surroundings.

Grown different by the mere fact of her presence, when I found myself

once again in Albertine's company, what I said to her was not at all

what I had meant to say. Remembering her flushed temple, I asked myself

whether she might not appreciate more keenly a polite attention which

she knew to be disinterested. Besides, I was embarrassed by certain

things in her look, in her smile. They might equally well signify a

laxity of morals and the rather silly merriment of a girl who though

full of spirits was at heart thoroughly respectable. A single

expression, on a face as in speech, is susceptible of divers

interpretations, and I stood hesitating like a schoolboy faced by the

difficulties of a piece of Greek prose.

On this occasion we met almost immediately the tall one, Andrée, the

one who had jumped over the old banker, and Albertine was obliged to

introduce me. Her friend had a pair of eyes of extraordinary brightness,

like, in a dark house, a glimpse through an open door of a room into

which the sun is shining with a greenish reflexion from the glittering

sea.

A party of five were passing, men whom I had come to know very well by

sight during my stay at Balbec. I had often wondered who they could be.

"They're nothing very wonderful," said Albertine with a sneering laugh.

"The little old one with dyed hair and yellow gloves has a fine touch;

he knows how to draw all right, he's the Balbec dentist; he's a good

sort. The fat one is the Mayor, not the tiny little fat one, you must

have seen him before, he's the dancing master; he's rather a beast, you

know; he can't stand us, because we make such a row at the Casino; we

smash his chairs, and want to have the carpet up when we dance; that's

why he never gives us prizes, though we're the only girls there who can

dance a bit. The dentist is a dear, I would have said how d'ye do to

him, just to make the dancing master swear, but I couldn't because

they've got M. de Sainte-Croix with them; he's on the General Council;

he comes of a very good family, but he's joined the Republicans, to make

more money. No nice people ever speak to him now. He knows my uncle,

because they're both in the Government, but the rest of my family always

cut him. The thin one in the waterproof is the bandmaster. You know him,

of course. You don't? Oh, he plays divinely. You haven't been to

_Cavalleria Rusticana?_ I thought it too lovely! He's giving a concert

this evening, but we can't go because it's to be in the town hall. In

the Casino it wouldn't matter, but in the town hall, where they've taken

down the crucifix, Andrée's mother would have a fit if we went there.

You're going to say that my aunt's husband is in the Government. But

what difference does that make? My aunt is my aunt. That's not why I'm

fond of her. The only thing she has ever wanted has been to get rid of

me. No, the person who has really been a mother to me, and all the more

credit to her because she's no relation at all, is a friend of mine whom

I love just as much as if she was my mother. I will let you see her

'photo'." We were joined for a moment by the golf champion and baccarat

plunger, Octave. I thought that I had discovered a bond between us, for

I learned in the course of conversation that he was some sort of

relative, and even more a friend of the Verdurins. But he spoke

contemptuously of the famous Wednesdays, adding that M. Verdurin had

never even heard of a dinner jacket, which made it a horrid bore when

one ran into him in a music-hall, where one would very much rather not

be greeted with "Well, you young rascal," by an old fellow in a frock

coat and black tie, for all the world like a village lawyer. Octave left

us, and soon it was Andrée's turn, when we came to her villa, into

which she vanished without having uttered a single word to me during the

whole of our walk. I regretted her departure, all the more in that,

while I was complaining to Albertine how chilling her friend had been

with me, and was comparing in my mind this difficulty which Albertine

seemed to find in making me know her friends with the hostility that

Elstir, when he might have granted my desire, seemed to have encountered

on that first afternoon, two girls came by to whom I lifted my hat, the

young Ambresacs, whom Albertine greeted also.

I felt that, in Albertine's eyes, my position would be improved by this

meeting. They were the daughters of a kinswoman of Mme. de Villeparisis,

who was also a friend of Mme. de Luxembourg. M. and Mme. d'Ambresac, who

had a small villa at Balbec and were immensely rich, led the simplest of

lives there, and always went about dressed he in an unvarying frock

coat, she in a dark gown. Both of them used to make sweeping bows to my

grandmother, which never led to anything further. The daughters, who

were very pretty, were dressed more fashionably, but in a fashion suited

rather to Paris than to the seaside. With their long skirts and large

hats, they had the look of belonging to a different race from Albertine.

She, I discovered, knew all about them.

"Oh, so you know the little d'Ambresacs, do you? Dear me, you have some

swagger friends. After all, they're very simple souls," she went on as

though this might account for it. "They're very nice, but so well

brought up that they aren't allowed near the Casino, for fear of

us--we've such a bad tone. They attract you, do they? Well, it all

depends on what you like. They're just little white rabbits, really.

There may be something in that, of course. If little white rabbits are

what appeals to you, they may supply a long-felt want. It seems, there

must be some attraction, because one of them has got engaged already to

the Marquis de Saint-Loup. Which is a cruel blow to the younger one, who

is madly in love with that young man. I'm sure, the way they speak to

you with their lips shut is quite enough for me. And then they dress in

the most absurd way. Fancy going to play golf in silk frocks! At their

age, they dress more showily than grown-up women who really know about

clothes. Look at Mme. Elstir; there's a well dressed woman if you like,"

I answered that she had struck me as being dressed with the utmost

simplicity. Albertine laughed. "She does put on the simplest things, I

admit, but she dresses wonderfully, and to get what you call simplicity

costs her a fortune." Mme. Elstir's gowns passed unnoticed by any one

who had not a sober and unerring taste in matters of attire. This was

lacking in me. Elstir possessed it in a supreme degree, or so Albertine

told me. I had not suspected this, nor that the beautiful but quite

simple objects which littered his studio were treasures long desired by

him which he had followed from sale room to sale room, knowing all their

history, until he had made enough money to be able to acquire them. But

as to this Albertine, being as ignorant as myself, could not enlighten

me. Whereas when it came to clothes, prompted by a coquettish instinct,

and perhaps by the regretful longing of a penniless girl who is able to

appreciate with greater disinterestedness, more delicacy of feeling, in

other, richer people the things that she will never be able to afford

for herself, she expressed herself admirably on the refinement of

Elstir's taste, so hard to satisfy that all women appeared to him badly

dressed, while, attaching infinite importance to right proportions and

shades of colour, he would order to be made for his wife, at fabulous

prices, the sunshades, hats and cloaks which he had learned from

Albertine to regard as charming, and which a person wanting in taste

would no more have noticed than myself. Apart from this, Albertine, who

had done a little painting, though without, she confessed, having any

"gift" for it, felt a boundless admiration for Elstir, and, thanks to

his precept and example, shewed a judgment of pictures which was in

marked contrast to her enthusiasm for _Cavalleria Rusticana._ The truth

was, though as yet it was hardly apparent, that she was highly

intelligent, and that in the things that she said the stupidity was not

her own but that of her environment and age. Elstir's had been a good

but only a partial influence. All the branches of her intelligence had

not reached the same stage of development. The taste for pictures had

almost caught up the taste for clothes and all forms of smartness, but

had not been followed by the taste for music, which was still a long way

behind.

Albertine might know all about the Ambresacs; but as he who can achieve

great things is not necessarily capable of small, I did not find her,

after I had bowed to those young ladies, any better disposed to make me

known to her friends. "It's too good of you to attach any importance to

them. You shouldn't take any notice of them; they don't count. What on

earth can a lot of kids like them mean to a man like you? Now Andrée,

I must say, is remarkably clever. She is a good girl, that, though she

is perfectly fantastic at times, but the others are really dreadfully

stupid." When I had left Albertine, I felt suddenly a keen regret that

Saint-Loup should have concealed his engagement from me and that he

should be doing anything so improper as to choose a wife before breaking

with his mistress. And then, shortly afterwards, I met Andrée, and as

she went on talking to me for some time I seized the opportunity to tell

her that I would very much like to see her again next day, but she

replied that this was impossible, because her mother was not at all

well, and she would have to stay beside her. The next day but one, when

I was at Elstir's, he told me how greatly Andrée had been attracted by

me; on my protesting: "But it was I who was attracted by her from the

start; I asked her to meet me again yesterday, but she could not." "Yes,

I know; she told me all about that," was his reply, "she was very sorry,

but she had promised to go to a picnic, somewhere miles from here. They

were to drive over in a break, and it was too late for her to get out of

it." Albeit this falsehood (Andrée knowing me so slightly) was of no

real importance, I ought not to have continued to seek the company of a

person who was capable of uttering it. For what people have once done

they will do again indefinitely, and if you go every year to see a

friend who, the first time, was not able to meet you at the appointed

place, or was in bed with a chill, you will find him in bed with another

chill which he has just caught, you will miss him again at another

meeting-place at which he has failed to appear, for a single and

unalterable reason in place of which he supposes himself to have various

reasons, drawn from the circumstances. One morning, not long after

Andrée's telling me that she would be obliged to stay beside her

mother, I was taking a short stroll with Albertine, whom I had found on

the beach tossing up and catching again on a cord an oddly shaped

implement which gave her a look of Giotto's "Idolatry"; it was called,

for that matter, "Diabolo", and is so fallen into disuse now that, when

they come upon the picture of a girl playing with one, the critics of

future generations will solemnly discuss, as it might be over one of the

allegorical figures in the Arena, what it is that she is holding. A

moment later their friend with the penurious and harsh appearance, the

same one who on that first day had sneered so malevolently: "I do feel

sorry for him, poor old man," when she saw the old gentlemen's head

brushed by the flying feet of Andrée, came up to Albertine with "Good

morning, 'm I disturbing you?" She had taken off her hat, for comfort,

and her hair, like a strange and fascinating plant, lay over her brow,

displaying all the delicate tracery of its foliation. Albertine, perhaps

because she resented seeing the other bare-headed, made no reply,

preserved a frigid silence in spite of which the girl stayed with us,

kept apart from myself by Albertine, who arranged at one moment to be

alone with her, at another to walk with me leaving her to follow. I was

obliged, to secure an introduction, to ask for it in the girl's hearing.

Then, as Albertine was uttering my name, on the face and in the blue

eyes of this girl, whose expression I had thought so cruel when I heard

her say: "Poor old man, I do feel so sorry for him", I saw gather and

gleam a cordial, friendly smile, and she held out her hand. Her hair was

golden, and not her hair only; for if her cheeks were pink and her eyes

blue it was like the still roseate morning sky which sparkles everywhere

with dazzling points of gold.

At once kindled by her flame, I said to myself that this was a child who

when in love grew shy, that it was for my sake, from love for me that

she had remained with us, despite Albertine's rebuffs, and that she must

have rejoiced in the opportunity to confess to me at last, by that

smiling, friendly gaze, that she would be as kind to me as she was

terrible to other people. Doubtless she had noticed me on the beach,

when I still knew nothing of her, and had been thinking of me ever

since; perhaps it had been to win my admiration that she mocked at the

old gentleman, and because she had not succeeded in getting to know me

that on the following days she appeared so morose. From the hotel I had

often seen her, in the evenings, walking by herself on the beach.

Probably in the hope of meeting me. And now, hindered as much by

Albertine's presence as she would have been by that of the whole band,

she had evidently attached herself to us, braving the increasing

coldness of her friend's attitude, only in the hope of outstaying her,

of being left alone with me, when she might make an appointment with me

for some time when she would find an excuse to slip away without either

her family's or her friends' knowing that she had gone, and would meet

me in some safe place before church or after golf. It was all the more

difficult to see her because Andrée had quarrelled with her and now

detested her. "I have put up far too long with her terrible dishonesty,"

she explained to me, "her baseness; I can't tell you all the vile

insults she has heaped on me. I have stood it all because of the others.

But her latest effort was really too much!" And she told me of some

foolish thing that this girl had done, which might indeed have injurious

consequences to Andrée herself.

But those private words promised me by Gisèle's confiding eyes for the

moment when Albertine should have left us by ourselves, were destined

never to be spoken, because after Albertine, stubbornly planted between

us, had answered with increasing curtness, and finally had ceased to

respond at all to her friend's remarks, Gisèle at length abandoned the

attempt and turned back. I found fault with Albertine for having been so

disagreeable. "It will teach her to be more careful how she behaves.

She's not a bad kid, but she'ld talk the head off a donkey. She's no

business, either, to go poking her nose into everything. Why should she

fasten herself on to us without being asked? In another minute I'ld have

told her to go to blazes. Besides I can't stand her going about with her

hair like that; it's such bad form." I gazed at Albertine's cheeks as

she spoke, and asked myself what might be the perfume, the taste of

them: this time they were not cool, but glowed with a uniform pink,

violet-tinted, creamy, like certain roses whose petals have a waxy

gloss. I felt a passionate longing for them such as one feels sometimes

for a particular flower. "I hadn't noticed it," was all that I said.

"You stared at her hard enough; anyone would have said you wanted to

paint her portrait," she scolded, not at all softened by the fact that

it was at herself that I was now staring so fixedly. "I don't believe

you would care for her, all the same. She's not in the least a flirt.

You like little girls who flirt with you, I know. Anyhow, she won't have

another chance of fastening on to us and being sent about her business;

she's going off to-day to Paris." "Are the rest of your friends going

too?" "No; only she and 'Miss', because she's got an exam, coming; she's

got to stay at home and swot for it, poor kid. It's not much fun for

her, I don't mind telling you. Of course, you may be set a good subject,

you never know. But it's a tremendous risk. One girl I know was asked:

_Describe an accident that you have witnessed._ That was a piece of

luck. But I know another girl who got: _State which you would rather

have as a friend, Alceste or Philinte._ I'm sure I should have dried up

altogether! Apart from everything else, it's not a question to set to

girls. Girls go about with other girls; they're not supposed to have

gentlemen friends." (This announcement, which shewed that I had but

little chance of being admitted to the companionship of the band, froze

my blood.) "But in any case, supposing it was set to boys, what on earth

would you expect them to say to a question like that? Several parents

wrote to the _Gaulois_, to complain of the difficult questions that were

being set. The joke of it is that in a collection of prize-winning

essays they gave two which treated the question in absolutely opposite

ways. You see, it all depends on which examiner you get. One would like

you to say that Philinte was a flatterer and a scoundrel, the other that

you couldn't help admiring Alceste, but that he was too cantankerous,

and that as a friend you ought to choose Philinte. How can you expect a

lot of unfortunate candidates to know what to say when the professors

themselves can't make up their minds. But that's nothing. They get more

difficult every year. Gisèle will want all her wits about her if she's

to get through." I returned to the hotel. My grandmother was not there.

I waited for her for some time; when at last she appeared, I begged her

to allow me, in quite unexpected circumstances, to make an expedition

which might keep me away for a couple of days. I had luncheon with her,

ordered a carriage and drove to the station. Gisèle would shew no

surprise at seeing me there. After we had changed at Doncières, in the

Paris train, there would be a carriage with a corridor, along which,

while the governess dozed, I should be able to lead Gisèle into dark

corners, and make an appointment to meet her on my return to Paris, which

I would then try to put forward to the earliest possible date. I would

travel with her as far as Caen or Evreux, whichever she preferred, and

would take the next train back to Balbec. And yet, what would she have

thought of me had she known that I had hesitated for a long time between

her and her friends, that quite as much as with her I had contemplated

falling in love with Albertine, with the bright-eyed girl, with

Rosemonde. I felt a pang of remorse now that a bond of mutual affection

was going to unite me with Gisèle. I could, moreover, truthfully have

assured her that Albertine no longer interested me. I had seen her that

morning as she swerved aside, almost turning her back on me, to speak to

Gisèle. On her head, which was bent sullenly over her bosom, the hair

that grew at the back, different from and darker even than the rest,

shone as though she had just been bathing. "Like a dying duck in a

thunderstorm!" I thought to myself, this view of her hair having let

into Albertine's body a soul entirely different from that implied

hitherto by her glowing complexion and mysterious gaze. That shining

cataract of hair at the back of her head had been for a moment or two

all that I was able to see of her, and continued to be all that I saw in

retrospect. Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed

now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the

most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen. While

the coachman whipped on his horse I sat there listening to the words of

gratitude and affection which Gisèle was murmuring in my ear, born, all

of them, of her friendly smile and outstretched hand, the fact being

that in those periods of my life in which I was not actually, but

desired to be in love, I carried in my mind not only an ideal form of

beauty once seen, which I recognised at a glance in every passing

stranger who kept far enough from me for her confused features to resist

any attempt at identification, but also the moral phantom--ever ready to

be incarnate--of the woman who was going to fall in love with me, to

take up her cues in the amorous comedy which I had had written out in my

mind from my earliest boyhood, and in which every nice girl seemed to me

to be equally desirous of playing, provided that she had also some of

the physical qualifications required. In this play, whoever the new star

might be whom I invited to create or to revive the leading part, the

plot, the incidents, the lines themselves preserved an unalterable form.

Within the next few days, in spite of the reluctance that Albertine had

shewn from introducing me to them, I knew all the little band of that

first afternoon (except Gisèle, whom, owing to a prolonged delay at the

level crossing by the station and a change in the time-table, I had not

succeeded in meeting on the train, which had been gone some minutes

before I arrived, and to whom as it happened I never gave another

thought), and two or three other girls as well to whom at my request

they introduced me. And thus, my expectation of the pleasure which I

should find in a new girl springing from another girl through whom I had

come to know her, the latest was like one of those new varieties of rose

which gardeners get by using first a rose of another kind. And as I

passed from blossom to blossom along this flowery chain, the pleasure of

knowing one that was different would send me back to her to whom I was

indebted for it, with a gratitude in which desire was mingled fully as

much as in my new expectation. Presently I was spending all my time

among these girls.

Alas! in the freshest flower it is possible to discern those just

perceptible signs which to the instructed mind indicate already what

will be, by the desiccation or fructification of the flesh that is

to-day in bloom, the ultimate form, immutable and already predestinate,

of the autumnal seed. The eye rapturously follows a nose like a wavelet

that deliciously curls the water's face at day-break and seems not to

move, to be capturable by the pencil, because the sea is so calm then

that one does not notice its tidal flow. Human faces seem not to change

while we are looking at them, because the revolution which they perform

is too slow for us to perceive it. But we have only to see, by the side

of any of those girls, her mother or her aunt, to realise the distance

over which, obeying the gravitation of a type that is, generally

speaking, deplorable, her features will have travelled in less than

thirty years, and must continue to travel until the sunset hour, until

her face, having vanished altogether below the horizon, catches the

light no more. I knew that, as deep, as ineluctable as is their Jewish

patriotism or Christian atavism in those who imagine themselves to be

the most emancipated of their race, there dwelt beneath the rosy

inflorescence of Albertine, Rosemonde, Andrée, unknown to themselves,

held in reserve until the circumstances should arise, a coarse nose, a

protruding jaw, a bust that would create a sensation when it appeared,

but was actually in the wings, ready to "come on", just as it might be a

burst of Dreyfusism, or clericalism, sudden, unforeseen, fatal, some

patriotic, some feudal form of heroism emerging suddenly when the

circumstances demand it from a nature anterior to that of the man

himself, by means of which he thinks, lives, evolves, gains strength

himself or dies, without ever being able to distinguish that nature from

the successive phases which in turn he takes for it. Even mentally, we

depend a great deal more than we think upon natural laws, and our mind

possesses already, like some cryptogamous plant, every little

peculiarity that we imagine ourselves to be selecting. For we can see

only the derived ideas, without detecting the primary cause (Jewish

blood, French birth or whatever it may be) that inevitably produced

them, and which at a given moment we expose. And perhaps, while the

former appear to us to be the result of deliberate thought, the latter

that of an imprudent disregard for our own health, we take from our

family, as the papilionaceae take the form of their seed, as well the

ideas by which we live as the malady from which we shall die.

As on a plant whose flowers open at different seasons, I had seen,

expressed in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those

shrivelled seed-pods, those flabby tubers which my friends would one day

be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering-time. And so

when Mme. de Villeparisis asked me to drive with her I sought an excuse

to be prevented. I never went to see Elstir unless accompanied by my new

friends. I could not even spare an afternoon to go to Doncières, to pay

the visit I had promised Saint-Loup. Social engagements, serious

discussions, even a friendly conversation, had they usurped the place

allotted to my walks with these girls, would have had the same effect on

me as if, when the luncheon bell rang, I had been taken not to a table

spread with food but to turn the pages of an album. The men, the youths,

the women, old or mature, whose society we suppose that we shall enjoy,

are borne by us only on an unsubstantial plane surface, because we are

conscious of them only by visual perception restricted to its own

limits; whereas it is as delegates from our other senses that our eyes

dart towards young girls; the senses follow, one after another, in

search of the various charms, fragrant, tactile, savoury, which they

thus enjoy even without the aid of fingers and lips; and able, thanks to

the art of transposition, the genius for synthesis in which desire

excels, to reconstruct beneath the hue of cheeks or bosom the feel, the

taste, the contact that is forbidden them, they give to these girls the

same honeyed consistency as they create when they stand rifling the

sweets of a rose-garden, or before a vine whose clusters their eyes

alone devour.

If it rained, although the weather had no power to daunt Albertine, who

was often to be seen in her waterproof spinning on her bicycle through

the driving showers, we would spend the day in the Casino, where on such

days it would have seemed to me impossible not to go. I had the greatest

contempt for the young Ambresacs, who had never set foot in it. And I

willingly joined my friends in playing tricks on the dancing master. As

a rule we had to listen to admonition from the manager, or from some of

his staff, usurping dictatorial powers, because my friends, even Andrée

herself, whom on that account I had regarded when I first saw her as so

dionysiac a creature, whereas in reality she was delicate, intellectual,

and this year far from well, in spite of which her actions were

controlled less by the state of her health than by the spirit of that

age which overcomes every other consideration and confounds in a general

gaiety the weak with the strong, could not enter the outer hall of the

rooms without starting to run, jumping over all the chairs, sliding back

along the floor, their balance maintained by a graceful poise of their

outstretched arms, singing the while, mingling all the arts, in that

first bloom of youth, in the manner of those poets of ancient days for

whom the different "kinds" were not yet separate, so that in an epic

poem they would introduce rules of agriculture with theological

doctrine.

This Andrée who had struck me when I first saw them as the coldest of

them all, was infinitely more refined, more loving, more sensitive than

Albertine, to whom she displayed the caressing, gentle affection of an

elder sister. At the Casino she would come across the floor to sit down

by me, and knew instinctively, unlike Albertine, to refuse my invitation

to dance, or even, if I was tired, to give up the Casino and come to me

instead at the hotel. She expressed her friendship for me, for

Albertine, in terms which were evidence of the most exquisite

understanding of the things of the heart, which may have been partly due

to the state of her health. She had always a merry smile of excuse for

the childish behaviour of Albertine, who expressed with a crude violence

the irresistible temptation held out to her by the parties and picnics

to which she had not the sense, like Andrée, resolutely to prefer

staying and talking with me. When the time came for her to go off to a

luncheon party at the golf-club, if we were all three together she would

get ready to leave us, then, coming up to Andrée: "Well, Andrée, what

are you waiting for now? You know we are lunching at the golf-club."

"No; I'm going to stay and talk to him," replied Andrée, pointing to

me. "But you know, Mme. Durieux invited you," cried Albertine, as if

Andrée's intention to remain with me could be explained only by

ignorance on her part where else and by whom she had been bidden. "Look

here, my good girl, don't be such an idiot," Andrée chid her. Albertine

did not insist, fearing a suggestion that she too should stay with me.

She tossed her head: "Just as you like," was her answer, uttered in the

tone one uses to an invalid whose self-indulgence is killing him by

inches, "I must fly; I'm sure your watch is slow," and off she went.

"She is a dear girl, but quite impossible," said Andrée, bathing her

friend in a smile at once caressing and critical. If in this craze for

amusement Albertine might be said to echo something of the old original

Gilberte, that is because a certain similarity exists, although the type

evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the

fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them,

eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our

complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our

heart. They are, these women, a product of our temperament, an image

inversely projected, a negative of our sensibility. So that a novelist

might, in relating the life of his hero, describe his successive

love-affairs in almost exactly similar terms, and thereby give the

impression not that he was repeating himself but that he was creating,

since an artificial novelty is never so effective as a repetition that

manages to suggest a fresh truth. He ought, moreover, to indicate in the

character of the lover a variability which becomes apparent as the story

moves into fresh regions, into different latitudes of life. And perhaps

he would be stating yet another truth if while investing all the other

persons of his story with distinct characters he refrained from giving

any to the beloved. We understand the characters of people who do not

interest us; how can we ever grasp that of a person who is an intimate

part of our existence, whom after a little we no longer distinguish in

any way from ourself, whose motives provide us with an inexhaustible

supply of anxious hypotheses which we perpetually reconstruct. Springing

from somewhere beyond our understanding, our curiosity as to the woman

whom we love overleaps the bounds of that woman's character, which we

might if we chose but probably will not choose to stop and examine. The

object of our uneasy investigation is something more essential than

those details of character comparable to the tiny particles of epidermis

whose varied combinations form the florid originality of human flesh.

Our intuitive radiography pierces them, and the images which it

photographs for us, so far from being those of any single face, present

rather the joyless universality of a skeleton.

Andrée, being herself extremely rich while the other was penniless and

an orphan, with real generosity lavished on Albertine the full benefit

of her wealth. As for her feelings towards Gisèle, they were not quite

what I had been led to suppose. News soon reached us of the young

student, and when Albertine handed round the letter she had received, a

letter intended by Gisèle to give an account of her journey and to

report her safe arrival to the little band, pleading laziness as an

excuse for not having written yet to the rest, I was surprised to hear

Andrée (for I imagined an irreparable breach between them) say: "I

shall write to her to-morrow, because if I wait for her to write I may

have to wait for years, she's such a slacker." And, turning to myself,

she added: "You saw nothing much in her, evidently; but she's a jolly

nice girl, and besides I'm really very fond of her." From which I

concluded that Andrée's quarrels were apt not to last very long.

Except on these rainy days, as we had always arranged to go on our

bicycles along the cliffs, or on an excursion inland, an hour or so

before it was time to start I would go upstairs to make myself smart and

would complain if Françoise had not laid out all the things that I

wanted. Now even in Paris she would proudly, angrily straighten a back

which the years had begun to bend, at the first word of reproach, she so

humble, she so modest and charming when her self-esteem was flattered.

As this was the mainspring of her life, her satisfaction, her good

humour were in direct ratio to the difficulty of the tasks imposed on

her. Those which she had to perform at Balbec were so easy that she

shewed almost all the time a discontent which was suddenly multiplied an

hundredfold, with the addition of an ironic air of offended dignity when

I complained, on my way down to join my friends, that my hat had not

been brushed or my ties sorted. She who was capable of taking such

endless pains, without in consequence assuming that she had done

anything at all, on my simply remarking that a coat was not in its

proper place, not only did she boast of the care with which she had "put

it past sooner than let it go gathering the dust," but, paying a formal

tribute to her own labours, lamented that it was little enough of a

holiday that she was getting at Balbec, and that we would not find

another person in the whole world who would consent to put up with such

treatment. "I can't think how anyone can leave things lying about the

way you do; you just try and get anyone else to find what you want in

such a mix-up. The devil himself would give it up as a bad job." Or else

she would adopt a regal mien, scorching me with her fiery glance, and

preserve a silence that was broken as soon as she had fastened the door

behind her and was outside in the passage, which would then reverberate

with utterances which I guessed to be insulting, though they remained as

indistinct as those of characters in a play whose opening lines are

spoken in the wings, before they appear on the stage. And even if

nothing was missing and Françoise was in a good temper, still she made

herself quite intolerable when I was getting ready to go out with my

friends. For, drawing upon a store of stale witticisms at their expense

which, in my need to be talking about the girls, I had made in her

hearing, she put on an air of being about to reveal to me things of

which I should have known more than she had there been any truth in her

statements, which there never was, Françoise having misunderstood what

she had heard. She had, like most people, her own ways; a person is never

like a straight highway, but surprises us with the strange, unavoidable

windings of his course through life, by which, though some people may

not notice them, we find it a perpetual annoyance to be stopped and

hindered. Whenever I arrived at the stage of "Where is my hat?" or

uttered the name of Andrée or Albertine, I was forced by Françoise to

stray into endless and absurd side-tracks which greatly delayed my

progress. So too when I asked her to cut me the sandwiches of cheese or

salad, or sent her out for the cakes which I was to eat while we rested

on the cliffs, sharing them with the girls, and which the girls "might

very well have taken turns to provide, if they had not been so close,"

declared Françoise, to whose aid there came at such moments a whole

heritage of atavistic peasant rapacity and coarseness, and for whom one

would have said that the soul of her late enemy Eulalie had been broken

into fragments and reincarnate, more attractively than it had ever been

in Saint-Eloi's, in the charming bodies of my friends of the little

band. I listened to these accusations with a dull fury at finding myself

brought to a standstill at one of those places beyond which the

well-trodden country path that was Françoise's character became

impassable, though fortunately never for very long. Then, my hat or coat

found and the sandwiches ready, I sallied out to find Albertine,

Andrée, Rosemonde, and any others there might be, and on foot or on our

bicycles we would start.

In the old days I should have preferred our excursion to be made in bad

weather. For then I still looked to find in Balbec the "Cimmerians'

land", and fine days were a thing that had no right to exist there, an

intrusion of the vulgar summer of seaside holiday makers into that

ancient region swathed in eternal mist. But now, everything that I had

hitherto despised, shut out of my field of vision, not only effects of

sunlight upon sea and shore, but even the regattas, the race-meetings, I

would have sought out with ardour, for the reason for which formerly I

had wanted only stormy seas, which was that these were now associated in

my mind, as the others had been, with an aesthetic idea. Because I had

gone several times with my new friends to visit Elstir, and, on the days

when the girls were there, what he had selected to shew us were drawings

of pretty women in yachting dress, or else a sketch made on a

race-course near Balbec. I had at first shyly admitted to Elstir that I

had not felt inclined to go to the meetings that were being held there.

"You were wrong," he told me, "it is such a pretty sight, and so well

worth seeing. For one thing, that peculiar animal, the jockey, on whom

so many eager eyes are fastened, who in the paddock there looks so grim,

a colourless face between his brilliant jacket and cap, one body and

soul with the prancing horse he rides, how interesting to analyse his

professional movements, the bright splash of colour he makes, with the

horse's coat blending in it, as they stream down the course. What a

transformation of every visible object in that luminous vastness of a

race-course where one is constantly surprised by fresh lights and shades

which one sees only there. How charming the women can look there, too!

The first day's racing was quite delightful, and there were women there

exquisitely dressed, in the misty light of a Dutch landscape, in which

one could feel rising to cloud the sun itself the penetrating coldness

of the water. Never have I seen women arriving in carriages, or standing

with glasses to their eyes in so extraordinary a light, which was due, I

suppose, to the moisture from the sea. I should simply have loved to

paint it. I came home from the races quite mad, and so keen to get to

work!" After which he became more enthusiastic still over the

yacht-races, and I realised that regattas, social fixtures where well

dressed women might be seen bathed in the greenish light of a marine

race-course, might be for a modern artist as interesting a subject as

were the revels which they so loved to depict for a Veronese or

Carpaccio. When I suggested this to Elstir, "Your comparison is all the

more true," he replied, "since, from the position of the city in which

they painted, those revels were to a great extent aquatic. Except that

the beauty of the shipping in those days lay as a rule in its solidity,

in the complication of its structure. They had water-tournaments, as we

have here, held generally in honour of some Embassy, such as Carpaccio

shews us in his _Legend of Saint Ursula._ The vessels were massive,

built up like architecture, and seemed almost amphibious, like lesser

Venices set in the heart of the greater, when, moored to the banks by

hanging stages decked with crimson satin and Persian carpets, they bore

their freight of ladies in cherry-red brocade and green damask close

under the balconies incrusted with many-coloured marbles from which

other ladies leaned to gaze at them, in gowns with black sleeves slashed

with white, stitched with pearls or bordered with lace. You cannot tell

where the land ends and the water begins, what is still the palace or

already the vessel, the caravel, the galeas, the Bucintoro." Albertine

had listened with the keenest interest to these details of costume,

these visions of elegance that Elstir was describing to us. "Oh, I

should so like to see that lace you speak of; it's so pretty, the

Venice-point," she cried, "Besides, I should love to see Venice." "You

may, perhaps, before very long, be able," Elstir informed her, "to gaze

upon the marvellous stuffs which they used to wear. Hitherto one has

seen them only in the works of the Venetian painters, or very rarely

among the treasures of old churches, except now and then when a specimen

has come into the sale room. But I hear that a Venetian artist, called

Fortuny, has recovered the secret of the craft, and that before many

years have passed women will be able to walk abroad, and better still to

sit at home in brocades as sumptuous as those that Venice adorned, for

her patrician daughters, with patterns brought from the Orient. But I

don't know that I should much care for that, that it wouldn't be too

much of an anachronism for the women of to-day, even when they parade at

regattas, for, to return to our modern pleasure-craft, the times have

completely changed since 'Venice, Queen of the Adriatic'. The great

charm of a yacht, of the furnishings of a yacht, of yachting dress, is

their simplicity, as just things for the sea, and I do so love the sea.

I must confess to you that I prefer the fashions of to-day to those of

Veronese's and even of Carpaccio's time. What there is so attractive

about our yachts--and the smaller yachts especially, I don't like the

huge ones, they're too much like ships; yachts are like women's hats,

you must keep within certain limits--is the unbroken surface, simple,

gleaming, grey, which under a cloudy, leaden sky takes on a creamy

softness. The cabin in which we live ought to make us think of a little

café. And women's clothes on board a yacht are the same sort of thing;

what really are charming are those light garments, uniformly white, of

cloth or linen or nankeen or drill, which in the sunlight and against

the blue of the sea shew up with as dazzling a whiteness as a spread

sail. You very seldom see a woman, for that matter, who knows how to

dress, and yet some of them are quite wonderful. At the races, Mlle.

Léa had a little white hat and a little white sunshade, simply

enchanting. I don't know what I wouldn't give for that little sunshade."

I should have liked very much to know in what respect this little

sunshade differed from any other, and for other reasons, reasons of

feminine vanity, Albertine was still more curious. But, just as

Françoise used to explain the excellence of her soufflés by "It's the

way you do them," so here the difference lay in the cut. "It was,"

Elstir explained, "quite tiny, quite round, like a Chinese umbrella," I

mentioned the sunshades carried by various ladies, but it was not like

any of them. Elstir found them all quite hideous. A man of exquisite

taste, singularly hard to please, he would isolate some minute detail

which was the whole difference between what was worn by three-quarters

of the women he saw, and horrified him, and a thing which enchanted him

by its prettiness; and--in contrast to its effect on myself, whose mind

any display of luxury at once sterilised--stimulated his desire to paint

"so as to make something as attractive." "Here you see a young lady who

has guessed what the hat and sunshade were like," he said to me,

pointing to Albertine whose eyes shone with envy. "How I should love to

be rich, to have a yacht!" she said to the painter. "I should come to

you to tell me how to run it. What lovely trips I'ld take. And what fun

it would be to go to Cowes for the races. And a motor-car! Tell me, do

you think the ladies' fashions for motoring pretty?" "No;" replied

Elstir, "but that will come in time. You see, there are very few firms

at present, one or two only, Callot--although they go in rather too

freely for lace--Doucet, Cheruit, Paquin sometimes. The others are all

horrible." "Then, is there a vast difference between a Callot dress and

one from any ordinary shop?" I asked Albertine. "Why, an enormous

difference, my little man! I beg your pardon! Only, alas! what you get

for three hundred francs in an ordinary shop will cost two thousand

there. But there can be no comparison; they look the same only to people

who know nothing at all about it." "Quite so," put in Elstir; "though I

should not go so far as to say that it is as profound as the difference

between a statue from Rheims Cathedral and one from Saint-Augustin. By

the way, talking of cathedrals," he went on, addressing himself

exclusively to me, because what he was saying had reference to an

earlier conversation in which the girls had not taken part, and which

for that matter would not have interested them at all, "I spoke to you

the other day of Balbec church as a great cliff, a huge breakwater built

of the stone of the country; now look at this;" he handed me a

water-colour. "Look at these cliffs (it's a sketch I did close to here,

at the Creuniers); don't these rocks remind you of a cathedral?" And

indeed one would have taken them for soaring red arches. But, painted on

a roasting hot day, they seemed to have crumbled into dust, made

volatile by the heat which had drunk up half the sea, distilled over the

whole surface of the picture almost into a gaseous state. On this day on

which the sunlight had, so to speak, destroyed reality, reality

concentrated itself in certain dusky and transparent creatures which, by

contrast, gave a more striking, a closer impression of life: the

shadows. Ravening after coolness, most of them, deserting the scorched

open spaces, had fled for shelter to the foot of the rocks, out of reach

of the sun; others, swimming gently upon the tide, like dolphins, kept

close under the sides of the moving vessels, whose hulls they extended

upon the pale surface of the water with their glossy blue forms. It was

perhaps the thirst for coolness which they conveyed that did most to

give me the sensation of the heat of this day and made me exclaim how

much I regretted not knowing the Creuniers. Albertine and Andrée were

positive that I must have been there hundreds of times. If so I had been

there without knowing it, never suspecting that one day the sight of

these rocks was to inspire me with such a thirst for beauty, not perhaps

exactly natural beauty such as I had been seeking hitherto among the

cliffs of Balbec, but rather architectural. Above all, I who, having

come here to visit the kingdom of the storm, had never found, on any of

my drives with Mme. de Villeparisis, when often we saw it only from

afar, painted in a gap between the trees, the ocean sufficiently real,

sufficiently liquid, giving a sufficient impression that it was hurling

its massed forces against the shore, and would have liked to see it lie

motionless only under a wintry shroud of fog, I could never have

believed that I should now be dreaming of a sea which was nothing more

than a whitish vapour that had lost both consistency and colour. But of

such a sea Elstir, like the people who sat musing on board those vessels

drowsy with the heat, had so intensely felt the enchantment that he had

succeeded in transcribing, in fixing for all time upon the painted sheet

the imperceptible reflux of the tide, the throb of one happy moment; and

one suddenly became so enamoured, at the sight of this magic portrait,

that one could think of nothing else than to range the world over,

seeking to recapture the vanished day in its instantaneous, slumbering

beauty.

So that if before these visits to Elstir, before I had set eyes on one

of his sea-pictures in which a young woman in a dress of white serge or

linen, on the deck of a yacht flying the American flag, had duplicated a

white linen dress and coloured flag in my imagination which at once bred

in me an insatiable desire to visit the spot and see there with my own

eyes white linen dresses and flags against the sea, as though no such

experience had ever yet befallen me, always until then I had taken care

when I stood by the sea to expel from my field of vision, as well as the

bathers in the foreground, the yachts with their too dazzling sails that

were like seaside costumes, everything that prevented me from persuading

myself that I was contemplating the immemorial flood of ocean which had

been moving with the same mysterious life before the appearance of the

human race; and had grudged even the days of radiant sunshine which

seemed to me to invest with the trivial aspect of the world's universal

summer this coast of fog and tempest, to mark simply an interruption,

equivalent to what in music is known as a rest; now on the other hand it

was the bad days that appeared to me to be some disastrous accident, a

thing that could no longer find any place for itself in the world of

beauty; I felt a keen desire to go out and recapture in reality what had

so powerfully aroused my imagination, and I hoped that the weather would

be propitious enough for me to see from the summit of the cliff the same

blue shadows as were in Elstir's picture.

Nor, as I went along, did I still make a frame about my eyes with my

hands as in the days when, conceiving nature to be animated by a life

anterior to the first appearance of man, and inconsistent with all those

wearisome perfections of industrial achievement which had hitherto made

me yawn with boredom at Universal Exhibitions or in the milliners'

windows, I endeavoured to include only that section of the sea over

which there was no steamer passing, so that I might picture it to myself

as immemorial, still contemporary with the ages in which it had been set

apart from the land, or at least with the first dawn of life in Greece,

which enabled me to repeat in their literal meaning the lines of "Father

Leconte" of which Bloch was so fond:

'Gone are the Kings, gone are their towering prows,

Vanished upon the raging deep, alas,

The long-haired warrior heroes of Hellas.'

I could no longer despise the milliners, now that Elstir had told me

that the delicate touches by which they give a last refinement, a

supreme caress to the ribbons or feathers of a hat after it is finished

would be as interesting to him to paint as the muscular action of the

jockeys themselves (a statement which had delighted Albertine). But I

must wait until I had returned--for milliners, to Paris--for regattas

and races to Balbec, where there would be no more now until next year.

Even a yacht with women in white linen garments was not to be found.

Often we encountered Bloch's sisters, to whom I was obliged to bow since

I had dined with their father. My new friends did not know them. "I am

not allowed to play with Israelites," Albertine explained. Her way of

pronouncing the word--"Issraelites" instead of "Izraelites"--would in

itself have sufficed to show, even if one had not heard the rest of the

sentence, that it was no feeling of friendliness towards the chosen race

that inspired these young Frenchwomen, brought up in God-fearing homes,

and quite ready to believe that the Jews were in the habit of massacring

Christian children. "Besides, they're shocking bad form, your friends,"

said Andrée with a smile which implied that she knew very well that

they were no friends of mine. "Like everything to do with the tribe,"

went on Albertine, in the sententious tone of one who spoke from

personal experience. To tell the truth, Bloch's sisters, at once

overdressed and half naked, with their languishing, bold, blatant,

sluttish air did not create the best impression. And one of their

cousins, who was only fifteen, scandalised the Casino by her unconcealed

admiration for Mlle. Léa, whose talent as an actress M. Bloch senior

rated very high, but whose tastes were understood to lead her not

exactly in the direction of the gentlemen.

Some days we took our refreshment at one of the outlying farms which

catered for visitors. These were the farms known as Les Ecorres,

Marie-Thérèse, La Croix d'Heuland, Bagatelle, Californie and Marie

Antoinette. It was the last that had been adopted by the little band.

But at other times, instead of going to a farm, we would climb to the

highest point of the cliff, and, when we had reached it and were seated

on the grass, would undo our parcel of sandwiches and cakes. My friends

preferred the sandwiches, and were surprised to see me eat only a single

chocolate cake, sugared with gothic tracery, or an apricot tart. This

was because, with the sandwiches of cheese or of green-stuff, a form of

food that was novel to me and knew nothing of the past, I had nothing in

common. But the cakes understood, the tarts were gossips. There were in

the former an insipid taste of cream, in the latter a fresh taste of

fruit which knew all about Combray, and about Gilberte, not only the

Gilberte of Combray but her too of Paris, at whose tea-parties I had

found them again. They reminded me of those cake-plates of the Arabian

Nights pattern, the subjects on which were such a distraction to my aunt

Léonie when Françoise brought her up, one day, Aladdin or the

Wonderful Lamp, another day Ali-Baba, or the Sleeper Awakes or Sinbad

the Sailor embarking at Bassorah with all his treasure. I should dearly

have liked to see them again, but my grandmother did not know what had

become of them, and thought moreover that they were just common plates

that had been bought in the village. No matter, in that grey, midland

Combray scene they and their pictures were set like many-coloured

jewels, as in the dark church were the windows with their shifting

radiance, as in the dusk of my bedroom were the projections cast by the

magic lantern, as in the foreground of the view of the railway station

and the little local line the buttercups from the Indies and the Persian

lilacs, as were my great-aunt's shelves of old porcelain in the sombre

dwelling of an elderly lady in a country town.

Stretched out on the cliff I would see before me nothing but grassy

meadows and beyond them not the seven heavens of the Christian cosmogony

but two stages only, one of a deeper blue, the sea, and over it another

more pale. We ate our food, and if I had brought with me also some

little keepsake which might appeal to one or other of my friends, joy

sprang with such sudden violence into her translucent face, flushed in

an instant, that her lips had not the strength to hold it in, and to

allow it to escape parted in a shout of laughter. They had gathered

close round me, and between their faces which were almost touching one

another the air that separated them traced azure pathways such as might

have been cut by a gardener wishing to clear the ground a little so as

to be able himself to move freely through a thicket of roses.

When we had finished eating we would play games which until then I

should have thought boring, sometimes such childish games as King of the

Castle, or Who Laughs First; not for a kingdom would I have renounced

them now; the rosy dawn of adolescence, with which the faces of these

girls were still aglow, and from which I, young as I was, had already

emerged, shed its light on everything round about them and, like the

fluid painting of some of the Primitives, brought out the most

insignificant details of their daily lives in relief against a golden

background. Even the faces of the girls were, for the most part, clouded

with this misty effulgence of a dawn from which their actual features

had not yet emerged. One saw only a charming sheet of colour beneath

which what in a few years' time would be a profile was not discernible.

The profile of to-day had nothing definite about it, and could be only a

momentary resemblance to some deceased member of the family to whom

nature had paid this commemorative courtesy. It comes so soon, the

moment when there is nothing left to wait for, when the body is fixed in

an immobility which holds no fresh surprise in store, when one loses all

hope on seeing--as on a tree in the height of summer leaves already

brown--round a face still young hair that is growing thin or turning

grey; it is so short, that radiant morning time that one comes to like

only the very youngest girls, those in whom the flesh, like a precious

leaven, is still at work. They are no more yet than a stream of ductile

matter, moulded ever afresh by the fleeting impression of the moment.

You would say that each of them was in turn a little statuette of

childish gaiety, of a child grown earnest, coaxing, surprised, taking

its pattern from an expression frank and complete, but fugitive. This

plasticity gives a wealth of variety and charm to the pretty attentions

which a little girl pays to us. Of course, such attentions are

indispensable in the woman also, and she whom we do not attract, or who

fails to let us see that we have attracted her, tends to assume in our

eyes a somewhat tedious uniformity. But even these pretty attentions,

after a certain age, cease to send gentle ripples over a face which the

struggle for existence has hardened, has rendered unalterably militant

or ecstatic. One--owing to the prolonged strain of the obedience that

subjects wife to husband--will seem not so much a woman's face as a

soldier's; another, carved by the sacrifices which a mother has

consented to make, day after day, for her children, will be the face of

an apostle. A third is, after a stormy passage through the years, the

face of an ancient mariner, upon a body of which its garments alone

indicate the sex. Certainly the attentions that a woman pays us can

still, so long as we are in love with her, scatter fresh charms over the

hours that we spend in her company. But she is not then for us a series

of different women. Her gaiety remains external to an unchanging face.

Whereas adolescence is anterior to this complete solidification; and

from this it follows that we feel, in the company of young girls, the

refreshing sense that is afforded us by the spectacle of forms

undergoing an incessant process of change, a play of unstable forces

which makes us think of that perpetual re-creation of the primordial

elements of nature which we contemplate when we stand by the sea.

It was not merely a social engagement, a drive with Mme. de

Villeparisis, that I would have sacrificed to the "Ferret" or "Guessing

Games" of my friends. More than once, Robert de Saint-Loup had sent word

that, since I was not coming to see him at Doncières, he had applied

for twenty-four hours' leave, which he would spend at Balbec. Each time

I wrote back that he was on no account to come, offering the excuse that

I should be obliged to be away myself that very day, when I had some

duty call to pay with my grandmother on family friends in the

neighbourhood. No doubt I fell in his estimation when he learned from

his aunt in what the "duty call" consisted, and who the persons were who

combined to play the part of my grandmother. And yet I had not been

wrong, perhaps, after all, in sacrificing not only the vain pleasures of

the world but the real pleasure of friendship to that of spending the

whole day in this green garden. People who enjoy the capacity--it is

true that such people are artists, and I had long been convinced that I

should never be that--are also under an obligation to live for

themselves. And friendship is a dispensation from this duty, an

abdication of self. Even conversation, which is the mode of expression

of friendship, is a superficial digression which gives us no new

acquisition. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than

indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute, whereas the march of

thought in the solitary travail of artistic creation proceeds downwards,

into the depths, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along

which we are free to advance--though with more effort, it is

true--towards a goal of truth. And friendship is not merely devoid of

virtue, like conversation, it is fatal to us as well. For the sense of

boredom which it is impossible not to feel in a friend's company (when,

that is to say, we must remain exposed on the surface of our

consciousness, instead of pursuing our voyage of discovery into the

depths) for those of us in whom the law of development is purely

internal--that first impression of boredom our friendship impels us to

correct when we are alone again, to recall with emotion the words

uttered by our friend, to look upon them as a valuable addition to our

substance, albeit we are not like buildings to which stones can be added

from without, but like trees which draw from their own sap the knot that

duly appears on their trunks, the spreading roof of their foliage. I was

lying to myself, I was interrupting the process of growth in that

direction in which I could indeed really be enlarged and made happy,

when I congratulated myself on being liked, admired, by so good, so

clever, so rare a creature as Saint-Loup, when I focussed my mind, not

upon my own obscure impressions which duty bade me unravel, but on the

words uttered by my friend, in which, when I repeated them to

myself--when I had them repeated to me by that other self who dwells in

us and on to whom we are always so ready to transfer the burden of

taking thought,--I strove to make myself find a beauty very different

from that which I used to pursue in silence when I was really alone, but

one that would enhance the merit of Robert, of myself, of my life. In

the life which a friend like this provided for me, I seemed to myself to

be comfortably preserved from solitude, nobly desirous of sacrificing

myself for him, in fact quite incapable of realising myself. Among the

girls, on the other hand, if the pleasure which I enjoyed was selfish,

at least it was not based on the lie which seeks to make us believe that

we are not irremediably alone, and which, when we talk to another

person, prevents us from admitting that it is no longer we who speak,

that we are fashioning ourself in the likeness of strangers and not of

our own ego, which is quite different from them. The words that passed

between the girls of the little band and myself were not of any

interest; they were, moreover, but few, broken by long spells of silence

on my part. All of which did not prevent me from finding, in listening

to them when they spoke to me, as much pleasure as in gazing at them, in

discovering in the voice of each one of them a brightly coloured

picture. It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings. Love helps us

to discern things, to discriminate. Standing in a wood, the lover of

birds at once distinguishes the notes of the different species, which to

ordinary people sound the same. The lover of girls knows that human

voices vary even more. Each one possesses more notes than the richest

instrument of music. And the combinations in which the voice groups

those notes are as inexhaustible as the infinite variety of

personalities. When I talked with any one of my friends I was conscious

that the original, the unique portrait of her individuality had been

skilfully traced, tyrannically imposed on my mind as much by the

inflexions of her voice as by those of her face, and that these were two

separate spectacles which rendered, each in its own plane, the same

single reality. No doubt the lines of the voice, like those of the face,

were not yet definitely fixed; the voice had still to break, as the face

to change. Just as children have a gland the secretion in which enables

them to digest milk, a gland which is not found in grown men and women,

so there were in the twitterings of these girls notes which women's

voices no longer contain. And on this instrument with its greater

compass they played with their lips, shewing all the application, the

ardour of Bellini's little angel musicians, qualities which also are an

exclusive appanage of youth. Later on these girls would lose that note

of enthusiastic conviction which gave a charm to their simplest

utterances, whether it were Albertine who, in a tone of authority,

repeated puns to which the younger ones listened with admiration, until

that wild impulse to laugh caught them all with the irresistible

violence of a sneeze, or Andrée who began to speak of their work in the

schoolroom, work even more childish seemingly than the games they

played, with a gravity essentially puerile; and their words changed in

tone, like the lyrics of ancient times when poetry, still hardly

differentiated from music, was declaimed upon the different notes of a

scale. In spite of which, the girls' voices already gave a quite clear

indication of the attitude that each of these little people had adopted

towards life, an attitude so personal that it would be speaking in far

too general terms to say of one: "She treats everything as a joke," of

another: "She jumps from assertion to assertion," of a third: "She lives

in a state of expectant hesitation." The features of our face are hardly

more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent. Nature, like

the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a

tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement. Similarly, our

intonations embody our philosophy of life, what a person says to himself

about things at any given moment. No doubt these peculiarities were to

be found not only in the girls. They were those of their parents. The

individual is a part of something that is more generally diffused than

himself. By this reckoning, our parents furnish us not only with those

habitual gestures which are the outlines of our face and voice, but also

with certain mannerisms in speech, certain favourite expressions, which,

almost as unconscious as an intonation, almost as profound, indicate

likewise a definite point of view towards life. It is quite true, since

we are speaking of girls, that there are certain of these expressions

which their parents do not hand on to them until they have reached a

certain age, as a rule not before they are women. These are kept in

reserve. Thus, for instance, if you were to speak of the pictures of one

of Elstir's friends, Andrée, whose hair was still "down", could not yet

make use, personally, of the expression which her mother and elder

sister employed: "It appears, the man is quite charming!" But that would

come in due course, when she was allowed to go to the Palais-Royal. And

already, since her first communion, Albertine had begun to say, like a

friend of her aunt: "I'm sure I should find that simply terrible!" She

had also had given to her, as a little present, the habit of repeating

whatever you had just been saying to her, so as to appear to be

interested, and to be trying to form an opinion of her own. If you said

that an artist's work was good, or his house nice, "Oh, his work is

good, is it?" "Oh, his house is nice, is it?" Last of all, and even more

general than the family heritage, was the rich layer imposed by the

native province from which they derived their voices and of which indeed

their intonations smacked. When Andrée sharply struck a solemn note she

could not prevent the Perigordian string of her vocal instrument from

giving back a resonant sound quite in harmony, moreover, with the

Meridional purity of her features; while to the incessant pranks of

Rosemonde the substance of her North-Country face and voice responded,

whatever her mood at the time, in the accent of their province. Between

that province and the temperament of the little girl who dictated these

inflexions, I caught a charming dialogue. A dialogue, not in any sense a

discord. It would not have been possible to separate the girl herself

and her native place. She was herself; she was still it also. Moreover

this reaction of locally procured materials on the genius who utilises

them and to whose work their reaction imparts an added freshness, does

not make the work any less individual, and whether it be that of an

architect, a cabinet-maker or a composer, it reflects no less minutely

the most subtle shades of the artist's personality, because he has been

compelled to work in the millstone of Senlis or the red sandstone of

Strasbourg, has respected the knots peculiar to the ash-tree, has borne

in mind, when writing his score, the resources, the limitations, the

volume of sound, the possibilities of flute or alto voice.

All this I realised, and yet we talked so little. Whereas with Mme. de

Villeparisis or Saint-Loup I should have displayed by my words a great

deal more pleasure than I should actually have felt, for I used always

to be worn out when I parted from them; when, on the other hand, I was

lying on the grass among all these girls, the plentitude of what I was

feeling infinitely outweighed the paucity, the infrequency of our

speech, and brimmed over from my immobility and silence in floods of

happiness, the waves of which rippled up to die at the feet of these

young roses.

For a convalescent who rests all day long in a flower-garden or orchard,

a scent of flowers or fruit does not more completely pervade the

thousand trifles that compose his idle hours than did for me that

colour, that fragrance in search of which my eyes kept straying towards

the girls, and the sweetness of which finally became incorporated in me.

So it is that grapes grow sugary in sunshine. And by their slow

continuity these simple little games had gradually wrought in me also,

as in those who do nothing else all day but lie outstretched by the sea,

breathing the salt air and growing sunburned, a relaxation, a blissful

smile, a vague sense of dizziness that had spread from brain to eyes.

Now and then a pretty attention from one or another of them would stir

in me vibrations which dissipated for a time my desire for the rest.

Thus one day Albertine had suddenly asked: "Who has a pencil?" Andrée

had provided one, Rosemonde the paper; Albertine had warned them: "Now,

young ladies, you are not to look at what I write." After carefully

tracing each letter, supporting the paper on her knee, she had passed it

to me with: "Take care no one sees." Whereupon I had unfolded it and

read her message, which was: "I love you."

"But we mustn't sit here scribbling nonsense," she cried, turning

impetuously, with a sudden gravity of demeanour, to Andrée and

Rosemonde, "I ought to shew you the letter I got from Gisèle this

morning. What an idiot I am; I've had it all this time in my pocket--and

you can't think how important it may be to us." Gisèle had been moved

to copy out for her friend, so that it might be passed on to the others,

the essay which she had written in her certificate examination.

Albertine's fears as to the difficulty of the subjects set had been more

than justified by the two from which Gisèle had had to choose. The

first was: "Sophocles, from the Shades, writes to Racine to console him

for the failure of _Athalie_"; the other: "Suppose that, after the first

performance of _Esther_, Mme. de Sévigné is writing to Mme. de La

Fayette to tell her how much she regretted her absence." Now Gisèle, in

an excess of zeal which ought to have touched the examiners' hearts, had

chosen the former, which was also the more difficult of the two

subjects, and had handled it with such remarkable skill that she had

been given fourteen marks, and had been congratulated by the board. She

would have received her "mention" if she had not "dried up" in the

Spanish paper. The essay, a copy of which Gisèle had now sent her, was

immediately read aloud to us by Albertine, for, having presently to pass

the same examination, she was anxious to have an opinion from Andrée,

who was by far the cleverest of them all and might be able to give her

some good "tips". "She did have a bit of luck!" was Albertine's comment.

"It's the very subject her French mistress made her swot up while she

was here." The letter from Sophocles to Racine, as drafted by Gisèle,

ran as follows: "My dear friend, You must pardon me the liberty of

addressing you when I have not the honour of your personal acquaintance,

but your latest tragedy, _Athalie_ shews, does it not, that you have

made the most thorough study of my own modest works. You have not only

put poetry in the mouths of the protagonists, or principal persons of

the drama, but you have written other, and, let me tell you without

flattery, charming verses for the choruses, a feature which was not too

bad, according to all one hears, in Greek Tragedy, but is a complete

novelty in France. Nay more, your talent always so fluent, so finished,

so winning, so fine, so delicate, has here acquired an energy on which I

congratulate you. Athalie, Joad--these are figures which your rival

Corneille could have wrought no better. The characters are virile, the

plot simple and strong. You have given us a tragedy in which love is not

the keynote, and on this I must offer you my sincerest compliments. The

most familiar proverbs are not always the truest. I will give you an

example:

"This passion treat, which makes the poet's art

Fly, as on wings, straight to the listener's heart."