In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (4 page)

Then, at last, a sense of admiration did possess me, provoked by the
frenzied applause of the audience. I mingled my own with theirs,
endeavouring to prolong the general sound so that Berma, in her
gratitude, should surpass herself, and I be certain of having heard
her on one of her great days. A curious thing, by the way, was that
the moment when this storm of public enthusiasm broke loose was, as I
afterwards learned, that in which Berma reveals one of her richest
treasures. It would appear that certain transcendent realities emit
all around them a radiance to which the crowd is sensitive. So it is
that when any great event occurs, when on a distant frontier an army
is in jeopardy, or defeated, or victorious, the vague and conflicting
reports which we receive, from which an educated man can derive little
enlightenment, stimulate in the crowd an emotion by which that man is
surprised, and in which, once expert criticism has informed him of the
actual military situation, he recognises the popular perception of
that 'aura' which surrounds momentous happenings, and which
may be visible hundreds of miles away. One learns of a victory either
after the war is over, or at once, from the hilarious joy of one's
hall porter. One discovers the touch of genius in Berma's acting a
week after one has heard her, in the criticism of some review, or else
on the spot, from the thundering acclamation of the stalls. But this
immediate recognition by the crowd was mingled with a hundred others,
all quite erroneous; the applause came, most often, at wrong moments,
apart from the fact that it was mechanically produced by the effect of
the applause that had gone before, just as in a storm, once the sea is
sufficiently disturbed, it will continue to swell, even after the wind
has begun to subside. No matter; the more I applauded, the better, it
seemed to me, did Berma act. "I say," came from a woman sitting near
me, of no great social pretensions, "she fairly gives it you, she
does; you'd think she'd do herself an injury, the way she runs about.
I call that acting, don't you?" And happy to find these reasons for
Berma's superiority, though not without a suspicion that they no more
accounted for it than would for that of the Gioconda or of Benvenuto's
Perseus a peasant's gaping "That's a good bit of work. It's all gold,
look! Fine, ain't it?", I greedily imbibed the strong wine of this
popular enthusiasm. I felt, all the same, when the curtain had fallen
fer the last time, disappointed that the pleasure for which I had so
longed had been no greater, but at the same time I felt the need to
prolong it, not to depart for ever, when I left the theatre, from this
strange life of the stage which had, for a few hours, been my own,
from which I should be tearing myself away, as though I were going
into exile, when I returned to my own home, had I not hoped there to
learn a great deal more about Berma from her admirer, to whom I was
indebted already for the permission to go to
Phèdre
, M. de Norpois.
I was introduced to him before dinner by my father, who summoned me
into his study for the purpose. As I entered, the Ambassador rose,
held out his hand, bowed his tall figure and fixed his blue eyes
attentively on my face. As the foreign visitors who used to be
presented to him, in the days when he still represented France abroad,
were all more or less (even the famous singers) persons of note, with
regard to whom he could tell, when he met them, that he would be able
to say, later on, when he heard then—names mentioned in Paris or in
Petersburg, that he remembered perfectly the evening he had spent with
them at Munich or Sofia, he had formed the habit of impressing upon
them, by his affability, the pleasure with which he was making their
acquaintance; but in addition to this, being convinced that in the
life of European capitals, in contact at once with all the interesting
personalities that passed through them and with the manners and
customs of the native populations, one acquired a deeper insight than
could be gained from books into the intellectual movement throughout
Europe, he would exercise upon each newcomer his keen power of
observation, so as to decide at once with what manner of man he had to
deal. The Government had not for some time now entrusted to him a post
abroad, but still, as soon as anyone was introduced to him, his eyes,
as though they had not yet been informed of their master's retirement,
began their fruitful observation, while by his whole attitude he
endeavoured to convey that the stranger's name was not unknown to him.
And so, all the time, while he spoke to me kindly and with the air of
importance of a man who is conscious of the vastness of his own
experience, he never ceased to examine me with a sagacious curiosity,
and to his own profit, as though I had been some exotic custom, some
historic and instructive building or some 'star' upon his course. And
in this way he gave proof at once, in his attitude towards me, of the
majestic benevolence of the sage Mentor and of the zealous curiosity
of the young Anacharsis.

He offered me absolutely no opening to the
Revue des Deux–Mondes
,
but put a number of questions to me on what I had been doing and
reading; asked what were my own inclinations, which I heard thus
spoken of for the first time as though it might be a quite reasonable
thing to obey their promptings, whereas hitherto I had always supposed
it to be my duty to suppress them. Since they attracted me towards
Literature, he did not dissuade me from that course; on the contrary,
he spoke of it with deference, as of some venerable personage whose
select circle, in Rome or at Dresden, one remembers with pleasure, and
regrets only that one's multifarious duties in life enable one to
revisit it so seldom. He appeared to be envying me, with an almost
jovial smile, the delightful hours which, more fortunate than himself
and more free, I should be able to spend with such a Mistress. But
the very terms that he employed shewed me Literature as something
entirely different from the image that I had formed of it at Combray,
and I realised that I had been doubly right in abandoning my
intention. Until now, I had reckoned only that I had not the 'gift'
for writing; now M. de Norpois took from me the ambition also. I
wanted to express to him what had been my dreams; trembling with
emotion, I was painfully apprehensive that all the words which I could
utter would not be the sincerest possible equivalent of what I had
felt, what I had never yet attempted to formulate; that is to say that
my words had no clear significance. Perhaps by a professional habit,
perhaps by virtue of the calm that is acquired by every important
personage whose advice is commonly sought, and who, knowing that he
will keep the control of the conversation in his own hands, allows the
other party to fret, to struggle, to take his time; perhaps also to
emphasise the dignity of his head (Greek, according to himself,
despite his sweeping whiskers), M. de Norpois, while anything was
being explained to him, would preserve a facial immobility as absolute
as if you had been addressing some ancient and unhearing bust in a
museum. Until suddenly, falling upon you like an auctioneer's hammer,
or a Delphic oracle, the Ambassador's voice, as he replied to you,
would be all the more impressive, in that nothing in his face had
allowed you to guess what sort of impression you had made on him, or
what opinion he was about to express.

"Precisely;" he suddenly began, as though the case were now heard and
judged, and after allowing me to writhe in increasing helplessness
beneath those motionless eyes which never for an instant left my face.
"There is the case of the son of one of my friends, which,
mutatis
mutandis
, is very much like yours." He adopted in speaking of our
common tendency the same reassuring tone as if it had been a tendency
not to literature but to rheumatics, and he had wished to assure me
that it would not necessarily prove fatal. "He too has chosen to leave
the Quai d'Orsay, although the way had been paved for him there by his
father, and without caring what people might say, he has settled down
to write. And certainly, he's had no reason to regret it. He published
two years ago—of course, he's much older than you, you understand—a
book dealing with the Sense of the Infinite on the Western Shore of
Victoria Nyanza, and this year he has brought out a little thing, not
so important as the other, but very brightly, in places perhaps almost
too pointedly written, on the Repeating Rifle in the Bulgarian Army;
and these have put him quite in a class by himself. He's gone pretty
far already, and he's not the sort of man to stop half way; I happen
to know that (without any suggestion, of course, of his standing for
election) his name has been mentioned several times, in conversation,
and not at all unfavourably, at the Academy of Moral Sciences. And so,
one can't say yet, of course, that he has reached the pinnacle of
fame, still he has made his way, by sheer industry, to a very fine
position indeed, and success—which doesn't always come only to
agitators and mischief–makers and men who make trouble which is
usually more than they are prepared to take—success has crowned his
efforts."

My father, seeing me already, in a few years' time, an Academician,
was tasting a contentment which M. de Norpois raised to the supreme
pitch when, after a momentary hesitation in which he appeared to be
calculating the possible consequences of so rash an act, he handed me
his card and said: "Why not go and see him yourself? Tell him I sent
you. He may be able to give you some good advice," plunging me by his
words into as painful a state of anxiety as if he had told me that,
next morning, I was to embark as cabin–boy on board a sailing ship,
and to go round the world.

My Aunt Léonie had bequeathed to me, together with all sorts of other
things and much of her furniture, with which it was difficult to know
what to do, almost all her unsettled estate—revealing thus after her
death an affection for me which I had hardly suspected in her
lifetime. My father, who was trustee of this estate until I came of
age, now consulted M. de Norpois with regard to several of the
investments. He recommended certain stocks bearing a low rate of
interest, which he considered particularly sound, notably English
consols and Russian four per cents. "With absolutely first class
securities such as those," said M. de Norpois, "even if your income
from them is nothing very great, you may be certain of never losing
any of your capital." My father then told him, roughly, what else he
had bought. M. de Norpois gave a just perceptible smile of
congratulation; like all capitalists, he regarded wealth as an
enviable thing, but thought it more delicate to compliment people upon
their possessions only by a half–indicated sign of intelligent
sympathy; on the other hand, as he was himself immensely rich, he felt
that he shewed his good taste by seeming to regard as considerable the
meagre revenues of his friends, with a happy and comforting resilience
to the superiority of his own. He made amends for this by
congratulating my father, without hesitation, on the "composition" of
his list of investments, selected "with so sure, so delicate, so fine
a taste." You would have supposed, to hear him, that he attributed to
the relative values of investments, and even to investments
themselves, something akin to aesthetic merit. Of one, comparatively
recent and still little known, which my father mentioned, M. de
Norpois, like the people who have always read the books of which, you
imagine, you yourself alone have ever heard, said at once, "Ah, yes, I
used to amuse myself for some time with watching it in the papers; it
was quite interesting," with the retrospective smile of a regular
subscriber who has read the latest novel already, in monthly
instalments, in his magazine. "It would not be at all a bad idea to
apply for some of this new issue. It is distinctly attractive; they
are offering it at a most tempting discount." But when he came to some
of the older investments, my father, who could not remember their
exact names, which it was easy to confuse with others of the same
kind, opened a drawer and shewed the securities themselves to the
Ambassador. The sight of them enchanted me. They were ornamented with
cathedral spires and allegorical figures, like the old, romantic
editions that I had pored over as a child. All the products of one
period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry
of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big
financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts
of
Notre–Dame de Paris
, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that
used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its
rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river–gods, a
"personal share" in the Water Company.

The contempt which my father had for my kind of intelligence was so
far tempered by his natural affection for me that, in practice, his
attitude towards anything that I might do was one of blind indulgence.
And so he had no qualm about telling me to fetch a little 'prose poem'
which I had made up, years before, at Combray, while coming home from
a walk. I had written it down in a state of exaltation which must, I
felt certain, infect everyone who read it. But it was not destined to
captivate M. de Norpois, for he handed it back to me without a word.

My mother, who had the most profound respect for all my father's
occupations, came in now, timidly, to ask whether dinner might be
served. She was afraid to interrupt a conversation in which she
herself could have no part. And indeed my father was continually
reminding the Marquis of some useful suggestion which they had decided
to make at the next meeting of the Commission; speaking in the
peculiar tone always adopted, when in a strange environment by a pair
of colleagues—as exclusive, in this respect, as two young men from
the same college—whose professional routine has furnished them with a
common fund of memories to which the others present have no access,
and to which they are unwilling to refer before an audience.