In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (41 page)

It may be imagined that the sudden appearance, in the guise of a.
little old woman, of the most powerful of fairies would not have given
me so much pleasure, destitute as I was of any means of access to
Mlle. de Stermaria, in a strange place where I knew no one: no one,
that is to say, for any practical purpose. Aesthetically the number of
types of humanity is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever
we may be, have the pleasure of seeing people we know, even without
looking for them in the works of the old masters, like Swann. Thus it
happened that in the first few days of our visit to Balbec I had
succeeded in finding Legrandin, Swann's hall porter and Mme. Swann
herself, transformed into a waiter, a foreign visitor whom I never saw
again and a bathing superintendent. And a sort of magnetism attracts
and retains so inseparably, one after another, certain
characteristics, facial and mental, that when nature thus introduces a
person into a new body she does not mutilate him unduly. Legrandin
turned waiter kept intact his stature, the outline of his nose, part
of his chin; Mme. Swann, in the masculine gender and the calling of a
bathing superintendent, had been accompanied not only by familiar
features, but even by the way she had of speaking. Only, she could be
of little if any more use to me, standing upon the beach there in the
red sash of her office, and hoisting at the first gust of wind the
flag which forbade us to bathe (for these superintendents are prudent
men, and seldom know how to swim) than she would have been in that
fresco of the
Life of Moses
in which Swann had long ago identified
her in the portrait of Jethro's Daughter. Whereas this Mme. de
Villeparisis was her real self, she had not been the victim of an
enchantment which had deprived her of her power, but was capable, on
the contrary, of putting at the service of my power an enchantment
which would multiply it an hundredfold, and thanks to which, as though
I had been swept through the air on the wings of a fabulous bird, I
was to cross in a few moments the infinitely wide (at least, at
Balbec) social gulf which separated me from Mlle. de Stermaria.

Unfortunately, if there was one person in the world who, more than
anyone else, lived shut up in a little world of her own, it was my
grandmother. She would not, indeed, have despised me, she would
simply not have understood what I meant had she been told that I
attached importance to the opinions, that I felt an interest in the
persons of people the very existence of whom she had never noticed and
would, when the time came to leave Balbec, retain no impression of
their names. I dared not confess to her that if these same people had
seen her talking to Mme. de Villeparisis, I should have been immensely
gratified, because I felt that the Marquise counted for much in the
hotel and that her friendship would have given us a position in the
eyes of Mlle. de Stermaria. Not that my grandmother's friend
represented to me, in any sense of the word, a member of the
aristocracy: I was too well used to her name, which had been familiar
to my ears before my mind had begun to consider it, when as a child I
had heard it occur in conversation at home: while her title added to
it only a touch of quaintness—as some uncommon Christian name would
have done, or as in the names of streets, among which we can see
nothing more noble in the Rue Lord Byron, in the plebeian and even
squalid Rue Rochechouart, or in the Rue Grammont than in the Rue
Léonce Reynaud or the Rue Hyppolyte Lebas. Mme. de Villeparisis no
more made me think of a person who belonged to a special world than
did her cousin MacMahon, whom I did not clearly distinguish from M.
Carnot, likewise President of the Republic, or from Raspail, whose
photograph Françoise had bought with that of Pius IX. It was one of my
grandmother's principles that, when away from home, one should cease
to have any social intercourse, that one did not go to the seaside to
meet people, having plenty of time for that sort of thing in Paris,
that they would make one waste on being merely polite, in pointless
conversation, the precious time which ought all to be spent in the
open air, beside the waves; and finding it convenient to assume that
this view was shared by everyone else, and that it authorised, between
old friends whom chance brought face to face in the same hotel, the
fiction of a mutual
incognito
, on hearing her friend's name from the
manager she merely looked the other way, and pretended not to see Mme.
de Villeparisis, who, realising that my grandmother did not want to be
recognised, looked also into the void. She went past, and I was left
in my isolation like a shipwrecked mariner who has seen a vessel
apparently coming towards him which has then, without lowering a boat,
vanished under the horizon.

She, too, had her meals in the dining–room, but at the other end of
it. She knew none of the people who were staying in the hotel, or who
came there to call, not even M. de Cambremer; in fact, I noticed that
he gave her no greeting, one day when, with his wife, he had accepted
an invitation to take luncheon with the barrister, who drunken with
the honour of having the nobleman at his table avoided his friends of
every day, and confined himself to a distant twitch of the eyelid, so
as to draw their attention to this historic event but so discreetly
that his signal could not be interpreted by them as an invitation to
join the party.

"Well, I hope you've got on your best clothes; I hope you feel smart
enough," was the magistrate's wife's greeting to him that evening.

"Smart? Why should I?" asked the barrister, concealing his rapture in
an exaggerated astonishment. "Because of my guests, do you mean?" he
went on, feeling that it was impossible to keep up the farce any
longer. "But what is there smart about having a few friends in to
luncheon? After all, they must feed somewhere!"

"But it is smart! They are the
de
Cambremers, aren't they? I
recognised them at once. She is a Marquise. And quite genuine, too.
Not through the females."

"Oh, she's a very simple soul, she is charming, no stand–offishness
about her. I thought you were coming to join us. I was making signals
to you…I would have introduced you!" he asserted, tempering with a
hint of irony the vast generosity of the offer, like Ahasuerus when he
says to Esther:

"No, no, no, no! We lie hidden, like the modest violet."

"But you were quite wrong, I assure you," replied the barrister,
growing bolder now that the danger point was passed. "They weren't
going to eat you. I say, aren't we going to have our little game of
bezique?"

"Why, of course! We were afraid to suggest it, now that you go about
entertaining Marquises."

"Oh, get along with you; there's nothing so very wonderful about them,
Why, I'm dining there to–morrow. Would you care to go instead of me? I
mean it. Honestly, I'd just as soon stay here."

"No, no! I should be removed from the bench as a Reactionary," cried
the chief magistrate, laughing till the tears stood in his eyes at his
own joke. "But you go to Féterne too, don't you?" he went on, turning
to the solicitor.

"Oh, I go there on Sundays—in at one door and out at the other. But I
don't have them here to luncheon, like the Leader." M. de Stermaria
was not at Balbec that day, to the barrister's great regret. But he
managed to say a word in season to the head waiter:

"Aimé, you can tell M. de Stermaria that he's not the only nobleman
you've had in here. You saw the gentleman who was with me to–day at
luncheon? Eh? A small moustache, looked like a military man. Well,
that was the Marquis de Cambremer!"

"Was it indeed? I'm not surprised to hear it."

"That will shew him that he's not the only man who's got a title. That
will teach him! It's not a bad thing to take 'em down a peg or two,
those noblemen. I say, Aimé, don't say anything to him unless you
like: I mean to say, it's no business of mine; besides, they know each
other already."

And next day M. de Stermaria, who remembered that the barrister had
once held a brief for one of his friends, came up and introduced
himself.

"Our friends in common, the de Cambremers, were anxious that we should
meet; the days didn't fit; I don't know quite what went wrong—"
stammered the barrister, who, like most liars, imagined that other
people do not take the trouble to investigate an unimportant detail
which, for all that, may be sufficient (if chance puts you in
possession of the humble facts of the case, and they contradict it) to
shew the liar in his true colours and to inspire a lasting mistrust.

Then as at all times, but more easily now that her father had left
her and was talking to the barrister, I was gazing at Mlle. de
Stermaria. No less than the bold and always graceful originality of
her attitudes, as when, leaning her elbows on the table, she raised
her glass in both hands over her outstretched arms, the dry flame of a
glance at once extinguished, the ingrained, congenital hardness that
one could feel, ill–concealed by her own personal inflexions, in the
sound of her voice, which had shocked my grandmother; a sort of
atavistic starting point to which she recoiled whenever, by glance or
utterance, she had succeeded in expressing a thought of her own; all
of these qualities carried the mind of him who watched her back to the
line of ancestors who had bequeathed to her that inadequacy of human
sympathy, those blanks in her sensibility, that short measure of
humanity which was at every moment running out. But from a certain
look which flooded for a moment the wells—instantly dry again—of her
eyes, a look in which I could discern that almost obsequious docility
which the predominance of a taste for sensual pleasures gives to the
proudest of women, who will soon come to recognise but one form of
personal distinction, that namely which any man enjoys who can make
her feel those pleasures, an actor, an acrobat even, for whom,
perhaps, she will one day leave her husband;—from a certain rosy
tint, warm and sensual, which flushed her pallid cheeks, like the
colour that stained the hearts of the white water–lilies in the
Vivonne, I thought I could discern that she would readily have
consented to my coming to seek in her the savour of that life of
poetry and romance which she led in Brittany, a life to which, whether
from over–familiarity or from innate superiority, or from disgust at
the penury or the avarice of her family, she seemed not to attach any
great value, but which, for all that, she held enclosed in her body.
In the meagre stock of will–power that had been transmitted to her,
and gave an element of weakness to her expression, she would not
perhaps have found the strength to resist. And, crowned by a feather
that was a trifle old–fashioned and pretentious, the grey felt hat
which she invariably wore at meals made her all the more attractive to
me, not because it was in harmony with her pearly or rosy complexion,
but because, by making me suppose her to be poor, it brought her
closer to myself. Obliged by her father's presence to adopt a
conventional attitude, but already bringing to the perception and
classification of the people who passed before her eyes other
principles than his, perhaps she saw in me not my humble rank, but the
right sex and age. If one day M. de Stermaria had gone out leaving
her behind, if, above all, Mme. de Villeparisis, by coming to sit at
our table, had given her an opinion of me which might have emboldened
me to approach her, perhaps then we might have contrived to exchange a
few words, to arrange a meeting, to form a closer tie. And for a whole
month during which she would be left alone, without her parents, in
her romantic Breton castle, we should perhaps have been able to wander
by ourselves at evening, she and I together in the dusk which would
shew in a softer light above the darkening water pink briar roses,
beneath oak trees beaten and stunted by the hammering of the waves.
Together we should have roamed that isle impregnated with so intense a
charm for me because it had enclosed the everyday life of Mlle. de
Stermaria and lay at rest in her remembering eyes. For it seemed to me
that I should not really have possessed her save there, when I should
have traversed those regions which enveloped her in so many
memories—a veil which my desire sought to tear apart, one of those
veils which nature interposes between woman and her pursuers (with the
same intention as when, for all of us, she places the act of
reproduction between ourselves and our keenest pleasure, and for
insects, places before the nectar the pollen which they must carry
away with them) in order that, tricked by the illusion of possessing
her thus more completely, they may be forced to occupy first the
scenes among which she lives, and which, of more service to their
imagination than sensual pleasure can be, yet would not without that
pleasure have had the power to attract them.

But I was obliged to take my eyes from Mlle. de Stermaria, for
already, considering no doubt that making the acquaintance of an
important person was a brief, inquisitive act which was sufficient in
itself, and to bring out all the interest that was latent in it
required only a handshake and a penetrating stare, without either
immediate conversation or any subsequent relations, her father
had taken leave of the barrister and returned to sit down facing her,
rubbing his hands like a man who has just made a valuable acquisition.
As for the barrister, once the first emotion of this interview had
subsided, then, as on other days, he could be heard every minute
addressing the head waiter:

"But I am not a king, Aimé; go and attend to the king! I say, Chief,
those little trout don't look at all bad, do they? We must ask Aimé to
let us have some. Aimé, that little fish you have over there looks to
me highly commendable; will you bring us some, please, Aimé, and don't
be sparing with it?"