In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (40 page)

Thenceforward, having placed between herself, on the one hand, and the
staff of the hotel and its decorators on the other the servants who
bore instead of her the shock of contact with all this strange
humanity, and kept up around their mistress her familiar atmosphere,
having set her prejudices between herself and the other visitors,
indifferent whether or not she gave offence to people whom her friends
would not have had in their houses, it was in her own world that she
continued to live, by correspondence with her friends, by memories, by
her intimate sense of and confidence in her own position, the quality
of her manners, the competence of her politeness. And every day, when
she came downstairs to go for a drive in her own carriage, the
lady's–maid who came after her carrying her wraps, the footman who
preceded her, seemed like sentries who, at the gate of an embassy,
flying the flag of the country to which she belonged, assured to her
upon foreign soil the privilege of extra–territoriality. She did not
leave her room until late in the afternoon on the day following our
arrival, so that we did not see her in the dining–room, into which the
manager, since we were strangers there, conducted us, taking us under
his wing, as a corporal takes a squad of recruits to the
master–tailor, to have them fitted; we did see however, a moment
later, a country gentleman and his daughter, of an obscure but very
ancient Breton family, M. and Mlle. de Stermaria, whose table had been
allotted to us, in the belief that they had gone out and would not be
back until the evening. Having come to Balbec only to see various
country magnates whom they knew in that neighbourhood, they spent in
the hotel dining–room, what with the invitations they accepted and the
visits they paid, only such time as was strictly unavoidable. It was
their stiffness that preserved them intact from all human sympathy,
from interesting at all the strangers seated round about them, among
whom M. de Stermaria kept up the glacial, preoccupied, distant, rude,
punctilious and distrustful air that we assume in a railway
refreshment–room, among fellow–passengers whom we have never seen
before and will never see again, and with whom we can conceive of no
other relations than to defend from their onslaught our 'portion' of
cold chicken and our corner seat in the train. No sooner had we begun
our luncheon than we were asked to leave the table, on the
instructions of M. de Stermaria who had just arrived and, without the
faintest attempt at an apology to us, requested the head waiter, in
our hearing, to "see that such a mistake did not occur again," for it
was repugnant to him that "people whom he did not know" should have
taken his table.

And certainly into the feeling which impelled a young actress (better
known, though, for her smart clothes, her smart sayings, her
collection of German porcelain, than in the occasional parts that she
had played at the Odéon), her lover, an immensely rich young man for
whose sake she had acquired her culture, and two sprigs of aristocracy
at that time much in the public eye to form a little band apart, to
travel only together, to come down to luncheon—when at Balbec—very
late, after everyone had finished; to spend the whole day in their
sitting–room playing cards, there entered no sort of ill–humour
against the rest of us but simply the requirements of the taste that
they had formed for a certain type of conversation, for certain
refinements of good living, which made them find pleasure in spending
their time, in taking their meals only by themselves, and would have
rendered intolerable a life in common with people who had not been
initiated into those mysteries. Even at a dinner or a card table, each
of them had to be certain that, in the diner or partner who sat
opposite to him, there was, latent and not yet made use of, a certain
brand of knowledge which would enable him to identify the rubbish with
which so many houses in Paris were littered as genuine mediaeval or
renaissance 'pieces' and, whatever the subject of discussion, to apply
the critical standards common to all their party whereby they
distinguished good work from bad. Probably it was only—at such
moments—by some infrequent, amusing interruption flung into the
general silence of meal or game, or by the new and charming frock
which the young actress had put on for luncheon or for poker, that the
special kind of existence in which these four friends desired, above
all things, to remain plunged was made apparent. But by engulfing them
thus in a system of habits which they knew by heart it sufficed to
protect them from the mystery of the life that was going on all round
them. All the long afternoon, the sea was suspended there before
their eyes only as a canvas of attractive colouring might hang on the
wall of a wealthy bachelor's flat and it was only in the intervals
between the 'hands' that one of the players, finding nothing better to
do, raised his eyes to it to seek from it some indication of the
weather or the time, and to remind the others that tea was ready. And
at night they did not dine in the hotel, where, hidden springs of
electricity flooding the great dining–room with light, it became as it
were an immense and wonderful aquarium against whose wall of glass the
working population of Balbec, the fishermen and also the tradesmen's
families, clustering invisibly in the outer darkness, pressed their
faces to watch, gently floating upon the golden eddies within, the
luxurious life of its occupants, a thing as extraordinary to the poor
as the life of strange fishes or molluscs (an important social
question, this: whether the wall of glass will always protect the
wonderful creatures at their feasting, whether the obscure folk who
watch them hungrily out of the night will not break in some day to
gather them from their aquarium and devour them). Meanwhile there may
have been, perhaps, among the gazing crowd, a motionless, formless
mass there in the dark, some writer, some student of human ichthyology
who, as he watched the jaws of old feminine monstrosities close over a
mouthful of food which they proceeded then to absorb, was amusing
himself by classifying them according to their race, by their innate
characteristics as well as by those acquired characteristics which
bring it about that an old Serbian lady whose buccal protuberance is
that of a great sea–fish, because from her earliest years she has
moved in the fresh waters of the Faubourg Saint–Germain, eats her
salad for all the world like a La Rochefoucauld.

At that hour one could see the three young men in dinner–jackets,
waiting for the young woman, who was as usual late but presently,
wearing a dress that was almost always different and one of a series
of scarves, chosen to gratify some special instinct in her lover,
after having from her landing rung for the lift, would emerge from it
like a doll coming out of its box. And then all four, because they
found that the international phenomenon of the 'Palace,' planted on
Balbec soil, had blossomed there in material splendour rather than in
food that was fit to eat, bundled into a carriage and went to dine, a
mile off, in a little restaurant that was well spoken of, where they
held with the cook himself endless discussions of the composition of
their meal and the cooking of its various dishes. During their drive,
the road bordered with apple–trees that led out of Balbec was no more
to them than the distance that must be traversed—barely
distinguishable in the darkness from that which separated their homes
in Paris from the Café Anglais or the Tour d'Argent—before they could
arrive at the fashionable little restaurant where, while the young
man's friends envied him because he had such a smartly dressed
mistress, the latter's scarves were spread about the little company
like a fragrant, flowing veil, but one that kept it apart from the
outer world.

Alas for my peace of mind, I had none of the detachment that all these
people shewed. To many of them I gave constant thought; I should have
liked not to pass unobserved by a man with a receding brow and eyes
that dodged between the blinkers of his prejudices and his education,
the great nobleman of the district, who was none other than the
brother–in–law of Legrandin, and came every now and then to see
somebody at Balbec and on Sundays, by reason of the weekly
garden–party that his wife and he gave, robbed the hotel of a large
number of its occupants, because one or two of them were invited to
these entertainments and the others, so as not to appear to have been
not invited, chose that day for an expedition to some distant spot. He
had had, as it happened, an exceedingly bad reception at the hotel on
the first day of the season, when the staff, freshly imported from the
Riviera, did not yet know who or what he was. Not only was he not
wearing white flannels, but, with old–fashioned French courtesy and in
his ignorance of the ways of smart hotels, on coming into the hall in
which there were ladies sitting, he had taken off his hat at the door,
the effect of which had been that the manager did not so much as raise
a finger to his own in acknowledgment, concluding that this must be
some one of the most humble extraction, what he called 'sprung from the
ordinary.' The solicitor's wife, alone, had felt herself attracted by
the stranger, who exhaled all the starched vulgarity of the really
respectable, and had declared, with the unerring discernment and the
indisputable authority of a person from whom the highest society of Le
Mans held no secrets, that one could see at a glance that one was in
the presence of a gentleman of great distinction, of perfect breeding,
a striking contrast to the sort of people one usually saw at Balbec,
whom she condemned as impossible to know so long as she did not know
them. This favourable judgment which she had pronounced on Legrandin's
brother–in–law was based perhaps on the spiritless appearance of a man
about whom there was nothing to intimidate anyone; perhaps also she
had recognised in this gentleman farmer with the gait of a sacristan
the Masonic signs of her own inveterate clericalism.

It made no difference my knowing that the young fellows who went past
the hotel every day on horseback were the sons of the questionably
solvent proprietor of a linen–drapery to whom my father would never
have dreamed of speaking; the glamour of 'seaside life' exalted them in
my eyes to equestrian statues of demi–gods, and the best thing that I
could hope for was that they would never allow their proud gaze to
fall upon the wretched boy who was myself, who left the hotel
dining–room only to sit humbly upon the sands. I should have been glad
to arouse some response even from the adventurer who had been king of
a desert island in the South Seas, even of the young consumptive, of
whom I liked to think that he was hiding beneath his insolent exterior
a shy and tender heart, which would perhaps have lavished on me, and
on me alone, the treasures of its affection. Besides (unlike what one
generally says of the people one meets when travelling) just as being
seen in certain company can invest us, in a watering–place to which we
shall return another year, with a coefficient that has no equivalent
in our true social life, so there is nothing—not which we keep so
resolutely at a distance, but—which we cultivate with such assiduity
after our return to Paris as the friendships that we have formed by
the sea. I was anxious about the opinion that might be held of me by
all these temporary or local celebrities whom my tendency to put
myself in the place of other people and to reconstruct what was in
their minds had made me place not in their true rank, that which they
would have held in Paris, for instance, and which would have been
quite low, but in that which they must imagine to be, and which indeed
was their rank at Balbec, where the want of a common denominator gave
them a sort of relative superiority and an individual interest. Alas,
none of these people's contempt for me was so unbearable as that of M.
de Stermaria.

For I had noticed his daughter, the moment she came into the room, her
pretty features, her pallid, almost blue complexion, what there was
peculiar in the carriage of her tall figure, in her gait, which
suggested to me—and rightly—her long descent, her aristocratic
upbringing, all the more vividly because I knew her name, like those
expressive themes composed by musicians of genius which paint in
splendid colours the glow of fire, the rush of water, the peace of
fields and woods, to audiences who, having first let their eyes run
over the programme, have their imaginations trained in the right
direction. The label 'Centuries of Breeding,' by adding to Mlle. de
Stermaria's charms the idea of their origin, made them more desirable
also, advertising their rarity as a high price enhances the value of a
thing that has already taken our fancy. And its stock of heredity gave
to her complexion, in which so many selected juices had been blended,
the savour of an exotic fruit or of a famous vintage.

And then mere chance put into our hands, my grandmother's and mine,
the means of giving ourselves an immediate distinction in the eyes of
all the other occupants of the hotel. On that first afternoon, at the
moment when the old lady came downstairs from her room, producing,
thanks to the footman who preceded her, the maid who came running
after her with a book and a rug that had been left behind, a marked
effect upon all who beheld her and arousing in each of them a
curiosity from which it was evident that none was so little immune as
M. de Stermaria, the manager leaned across to my grandmother and, from
pure kindness of heart (as one might point out the Shah, or Queen
Ranavalo to an obscure onlooker who could obviously have no sort of
connexion with so mighty a potentate, but might be interested, all the
same, to know that he had been standing within a few feet of one)
whispered in her ear, "The Marquise de Villeparisis!" while at the
same moment the old lady, catching sight of my grandmother,–could not
repress a start of pleased surprise.