In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (34 page)

I had arrived at a state almost of complete indifference to Gilberte
when, two years later, I went with my grandmother to Balbec. When I
succumbed to the attraction of a strange face, when it was with the
help of some other girl that I hoped to discover gothic cathedrals,
the palaces and gardens of Italy, I said to myself sadly that this
love of ours, in so far as it is love for one particular creature, is
not perhaps a very real thing, since if the association of pleasant or
unpleasant trains of thought can attach it for a time to a woman so as
to make us believe that it has been inspired by her, in a necessary
sequence of effect to cause, yet when we detach ourselves,
deliberately or unconsciously, from those associations, this love, as
though it were indeed a spontaneous thing and sprang from ourselves
alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman. At the
time, however, of my departure for Balbec, and during the earlier part
of my stay there, my indifference was still only intermittent. Often,
our life being so careless of chronology, interpolating so many
anachronisms in the sequence of our days, I lived still among
those—far older days than yesterday or last week—in which I loved
Gilberte. And at once not seeing her became as exquisite a torture to
me as it had been then. The self that had loved her, which another
self had already almost entirely supplanted, rose again in me,
stimulated far more often by a trivial than by an important event. For
instance, if I may anticipate for a moment my arrival in Normandy, I
heard some one who passed me on the sea–front at Balbec refer to the
'Secretary to the Ministry of Posts and his family.' Now, seeing that
as yet I knew nothing of the influence which that family was to
exercise over my life, this remark ought to have passed unheeded;
instead, it gave me at once an acute twinge, which a self that had for
the most part long since been outgrown in me felt at being parted from
Gilberte. Because I had never given another thought to a conversation
which Gilberte had had with her father in my hearing, in which
allusion was made to the Secretary to the Ministry of Posts and to his
family. Now our love memories present no exception to the general
rules of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general
rules of Habit. And as Habit weakens every impression, what a person
recalls to us most vividly is precisely what we had forgotten, because
it was of no importance, and had therefore left in full possession of
its strength. That is why the better part of our memory exists outside
ourselves, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of
the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in
short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had
rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest,
that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the
source can make us weep again. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather
within ourselves, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less
prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time
to time recover the creature that we were, range ourselves face to
face with past events as that creature had to face them, suffer afresh
because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what
leaves us now indifferent. In the broad daylight of our ordinary
memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of
sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never find them again. Or
rather we should never find them again had not a few words (such as
this 'Secretary to the Ministry of Posts') been carefully locked away
in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy
of a book which might otherwise become unobtainable.

But this suffering and this recrudescence of my love for Gilberte
lasted no longer than such things last in a dream, and this time, on
the contrary, because at Balbec the old Habit was no longer there to
keep them alive. And if these two effects of Habit appear to be
incompatible, that is because Habit is bound by a diversity of laws.
In Paris I had grown more and more indifferent to Gilberte, thanks to
Habit. The change of habit, that is to say the temporary cessation of
Habit, completed Habit's task when I started for Balbec. It weakens,
but it stabilises; it leads to disintegration but it makes the
scattered elements last indefinitely. Day after day, for years past, I
had begun by modelling my state of mind, more or less effectively,
upon that of the day before. At Balbec, a strange bed, to the side of
which a tray was brought in the morning that differed from my Paris
breakfast tray, could not, obviously, sustain the fancies upon which
my love for Gilberte had fed: there are cases (though not, I admit,
commonly) in which, one's days being paralysed by a sedentary life,
the best way to save time is to change one's place of residence. My
journey to Balbec was like the first outing of a convalescent who
needed only that to convince him that he was cured.

The journey was one that would now be made, probably, in a motorcar,
which would be supposed to render it more interesting. We shall see
too that, accomplished in such a way, it would even be in a sense more
genuine, since one would be following more nearly, in a closer
intimacy, the various contours by which the surface of the earth is
wrinkled. But after all the special attraction of the journey lies not
in our being able to alight at places on the way and to stop
altogether as soon as we grow tired, but in its making the difference
between departure and arrival not as imperceptible but as intense as
possible, so that we are conscious of it in its totality, intact, as
it existed in our mind when imagination bore us from the place in
which we were living right to the very heart of a place we longed to
see, in a single sweep which seemed miraculous to us not so much
because it covered a certain distance as because it united two
distinct individualities of the world, took us from one name to
another name; and this difference is accentuated (more than in a form
of locomotion in which, since one can stop and alight where one
chooses, there can scarcely be said to be any point of arrival) by the
mysterious operation that is performed in those peculiar places,
railway stations, which do not constitute, so to speak, a part of the
surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality just as
upon their sign–boards they bear its painted name.

But in this respect as in every other, our age is infected with a
mania for shewing things only in the environment that properly belongs
to them, thereby suppressing the essential thing, the act of the mind
which isolated them from that environment. A picture is nowadays
'presented' in the midst of furniture, ornaments, hangings of the same
period, a second–hand scheme of decoration in the composition of which
in the houses of to–day excels that same hostess who but yesterday was
so crassly ignorant, but now spends her time poring over records and
in libraries; and among these the masterpiece at which we glance up
from the table while we dine does not give us that exhilarating
delight which we can expect from it only in a public gallery, which
symbolises far better by its bareness, by the absence of all
irritating detail, those innermost spaces into which the artist
withdrew to create it.

Unhappily those marvellous places which are railway stations, from
which one sets out for a remote destination, are tragic places also,
for if in them the miracle is accomplished whereby scenes which
hitherto have had no existence save in our minds are to become the
scenes among which we shall be living, for that very reason we must,
as we emerge from the waiting–room, abandon any thought of finding
ourself once again within the familiar walls which, but a moment ago,
were still enclosing us. We must lay aside all hope of going home to
sleep in our own bed, once we have made up our mind to penetrate into
the pestiferous cavern through which we may have access to the
mystery, into one of those vast, glass–roofed sheds, like that of
Saint–Lazare into which I must go to find the train for Balbec, and
which extended over the rent bowels of the city one of those bleak and
boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menaces, like
certain skies painted with an almost Parisian modernity by Mantegna or
Veronese, beneath which could be accomplished only some solemn and
tremendous act, such as a departure by train or the Elevation of the
Cross.

So long as I had been content to look out from the warmth of my own
bed in Paris at the Persian church of Balbec, shrouded in driving
sleet, no sort of objection to this journey had been offered by my
body. Its objections began only when it had gathered that it would
have itself to take part in the journey, and that on the evening of my
arrival I should be shewn to 'my' room which to my body would be
unknown. Its revolt was all the more deep–rooted in that on the very
eve of my departure I learned that my mother would not be coming with
us, my father, who would be kept busy at the Ministry until it was
time for him to start for Spain with M. de Norpois, having preferred
to take a house in the neighbourhood of Paris. On the other hand, the
spectacle of Balbec seemed to me none the less desirable because I
must purchase it at the price of a discomfort which, on the contrary,
I felt to indicate and to guarantee the reality of the impression
which I was going there to seek, an impression the place of which no
spectacle of professedly equal value, no 'panorama' which I might have
gone to see without being thereby precluded from returning home to
sleep in my own bed, could possibly have filled. It was not for the
first time that I felt that those who love and those who find pleasure
are not always the same. I believed myself to be longing fully as much
for Balbec as the doctor who was treating me, when he said to me,
surprised, on the morning of our departure, to see me look so unhappy,
"I don't mind telling you that if I could only manage a week to go
down and get a blow by the sea, I shouldn't wait to be asked twice.
You'll be having races, regattas; you don't know what all!" But I had
already learned the lesson—long before I was taken to hear
Berma—that, whatever it might be that I loved, it would never be
attained save at the end of a long and heart–rending pursuit, in the
course of which I should have first to sacrifice my own pleasure to
that paramount good instead of seeking it there.

My grandmother, naturally enough, looked upon our exodus from a
somewhat different point of view, and (for she was still as anxious as
ever that the presents which were made me should take some artistic
form) had planned, so that she might be offering me, of this journey,
a 'print' that was, at least, in parts 'old,' that we should repeat,
partly by rail and partly by road, the itinerary that Mme. de Sévigné
followed when she went from Paris to 'L'Orient' by way of Chaulnes
and 'the Pont–Audemer.' But my grandmother had been obliged to abandon
this project, at the instance of my father who knew, whenever she
organised any expedition with a view to extracting from it the utmost
intellectual benefit that it was capable of yielding, what a tale
there would be to tell of missed trains, lost luggage, sore throats
and broken rules. She was free at least to rejoice in the thought
that never, when the time came for us to sally forth to the beach,
should we be exposed to the risk of being kept indoors by the sudden
appearance of what her beloved Sévigné calls a 'beast of a coachload,'
since we should know not a soul at Balbec, Legrandin having refrained
from offering us a letter of introduction to his sister. (This
abstention had not been so well appreciated by my aunts Céline and
Flora, who, having known as a child that lady, of whom they had always
spoken until then, to commemorate this early intimacy, as 'Renée de
Cambremer,' and having had from her and still possessing a number of
those little presents which continue to ornament a room or a
conversation but to which the feeling between the parties no longer
corresponds, imagined that they were avenging the insult offered to us
by never uttering again, when they called upon Mme. Legrandin, the
name of her daughter, confining themselves to a mutual congratulation,
once they were safely out of the house: "I made no reference to you
know whom!" "I think that went home!")

And so we were simply to leave Paris by that one twenty–two train
which I had too often beguiled myself by looking out in the railway
timetable, where its itinerary never failed to give me the emotion,
almost the illusion of starting by it, not to feel that I already knew
it. As the delineation in our mind of the features of any form of
happiness depends more on the nature of the longings that it inspires
in us than on the accuracy of the information which we have about it,
I felt that I knew this train in all its details, nor did I doubt that
I should feel, sitting in one of its compartments, a special delight
as the day began to cool, should be contemplating this or that view as
the train approached one or another station; so much so that this
train, which always brought to my mind's eye the images of the same
towns, which I bathed in the sunlight of those post–meridian hours
through which it sped, seemed to me to be different from every other
train; and I had ended—as we are apt to do with a person whom we have
never seen but of whom we like to believe that we have won his
friendship—by giving a distinct and unalterable cast of countenance
to the traveller, artistic, golden–haired, who would thus have taken
me with him upon his journey, and to whom I should bid farewell
beneath the Cathedral of Saint–Lo, before he hastened to overtake the
setting sun.

As my grandmother could not bring herself to do anything so 'stupid' as
to go straight to Balbec, she was to break the journey half–way,
staying the night with one of her friends, from whose house I was to
proceed the same evening, so as not to be in the way there and also in
order that I might arrive by daylight and see Balbec Church, which, we
had learned, was at some distance from Balbec–Plage, so that I might
not have a chance to visit it later on, when I had begun my course of
baths. And perhaps it was less painful for me to feel that the
desirable goal of my journey stood between me and that cruel first
night on which I should have to enter a new habitation, and consent to
dwell there. But I had had first to leave the old; my mother had
arranged to 'move in,' that afternoon, at Saint–Cloud, and had made,
or pretended to make, all the arrangements for going there directly
after she had seen us off at the station, without needing to call
again at our own house to which she was afraid that I might otherwise
feel impelled at the last moment, instead of going to Balbec, to
return with her. In fact, on the pretext of having so much to see to
in the house which she had just taken and of being pressed for time,
but in reality so as to spare me the cruel ordeal of a long–drawn
parting, she had decided not to wait with us until that moment of the
signal to start at which, concealed hitherto among ineffective comings
and goings and preparations that lead to nothing definite, separation
is made suddenly manifest, impossible to endure when it is no longer
possibly to be avoided, concentrated in its entirety in one enormous
instant of impotent and supreme lucidity.