In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (58 page)

"There aren't the people now there were a month back. They're
beginning to go now; the days are drawing in." He said this not
because there was any truth in it but because, having an engagement,
presently, for a warmer part of the coast, he would have liked us all
to leave, so that the hotel could be shut up and he have a few days to
himself before 'rejoining' in his new place. 'Rejoin' and 'new' were
not, by the way, incompatible terms, since, for the lift–boy,'rejoin'
was the usual form of the verb 'to join.' The only thing that surprised
me was that he condescended to say 'place,' for he belonged to that
modern proletariat which seeks to efface from our language every trace
of the rule of domesticity. A moment later, however, he informed me
that in the 'situation' which he was about to 'rejoin,' he would have a
smarter 'tunic' and a better 'salary,' the words 'livery' and 'wages'
sounding to him obsolete and unseemly. And as, by an absurd
contradiction, the vocabulary has, through thick and thin, among
us 'masters,' survived the conception of inequality, I was always
failing to understand what the lift–boy said. For instance, the only
thing that interested me was to know whether my grandmother was in the
hotel. Now, forestalling my questions, the lift–boy would say to me:
"That lady has just gone out from your rooms." I was invariably taken
in; I supposed that he meant my grandmother. "No, that lady; I think
she's an employee of yours." As in the old speech of the middle
classes, which ought really to be done away with, a cook is not called
an employee, I thought for a moment: "But he must be mistaken. We
don't own a factory; we haven't any employees." Suddenly I remembered
that the title of 'employee' is, like the wearing of a moustache among
waiters, a sop to their self–esteem given to servants, and realised
that this lady who had just gone out must be Françoise (probably on a
visit to the coffee–maker, or to watch the Belgian lady's little maid
at her sewing), though even this sop did not satisfy the lift–boy, for
he would say quite naturally, speaking pityingly of his own class,
'with the working man' or 'the small person,' using the same singular
form as Racine when he speaks of 'the poor.' But as a rule, for my zeal
and timidity of the first evening were now things of the past, I no
longer spoke to the lift–boy. It was he now who stood there and
received no answer during the short journey on which he threaded his
way through the hotel, hollowed out inside like a toy, which extended
round about us, floor by floor, the ramifications of its corridors in
the depths of which the light grew velvety, lost its tone, diminished
the communicating doors, the steps of the service stairs which it
transformed into that amber haze, unsubstantial and mysterious as a
twilight, in which Rembrandt picks out here and there a window–sill or
a well–head. And on each landing a golden light reflected from the
carpet indicated the setting sun and the lavatory window.

I asked myself whether the girls I had just seen lived at Balbec, and
who they could be. When our desire is thus concentrated upon a little
tribe of humanity which it singles out from the rest, everything that
can be associated with that tribe becomes a spring of emotion and then
of reflexion. I had heard a lady say on the 'front': "She is a friend
of the little Simonet girl" with that self–important air of inside
knowledge, as who should say: "He is the inseparable companion of
young La Rochefoucauld." And immediately she had detected on the face
of the person to whom she gave this information a curiosity to see
more of the favoured person who was 'a friend of the little Simonet.'
A privilege, obviously, that did not appear to be granted to all the
world. For aristocracy is a relative state. And there are plenty of
inexpensive little holes and corners where the son of an upholsterer
is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young
Prince of Wales. I have often since then sought to recall how it first
sounded for me there on the beach, that name of Simonet, still quite
indefinite as to its form, which I had failed to distinguish, and also
as to its significance, to the designation by it of such and such a
person, or perhaps of some one else; imprinted, in fact, with that
vagueness, that novelty which we find so moving in the sequel, when
the name whose letters are every moment engraved more deeply on our
hearts by our incessant thought of them has become (though this was
not to happen to me with the name of the 'little Simonet' until
several years had passed) the first coherent sound that comes to our
lips, whether on waking from sleep or on recovering from a swoon, even
before the idea of what o'clock it is or of where we are, almost
before the word 'I,' as though the person whom it names were more 'we'
even than we ourselves, and as though after a brief spell of
unconsciousness the phase that is the first of all to dissolve is that
in which we were not thinking of her. I do not know why I said to
myself from the first that the name Simonet must be that of one of the
band of girls; from that moment I never ceased to ask myself how I
could get to know the Simonet family, get to know them, moreover,
through people whom they considered superior to themselves (which
ought not to be difficult if the girls were only common little
'bounders') so that they might not form a disdainful idea of me. For
one cannot have a perfect knowledge, one cannot effect the complete
absorption of a person who disdains one, so long as one has not
overcome her disdain. And since, whenever the idea of women who are so
different from us penetrates our senses, unless we are able to forget
it or the competition of other ideas eliminates it, we know no rest
until we have converted those aliens into something that is compatible
with ourself, our heart being in this respect endowed with the
same kind of reaction and activity as our physical organism, which
cannot abide the infusion of any foreign body into its veins without
at once striving to digest and assimilate it: the little Simonet must
be the prettiest of them all—she who, I felt moreover, might yet
become my mistress, for she was the only one who, two or three times
half–turning her head, had appeared to take cognisance of my fixed
stare. I asked the lift–boy whether he knew of any people at Balbec
called Simonet. Not liking to admit that there was anything which he
did not know, he replied that he seemed to have heard the name
somewhere. As we reached the highest landing I told him to have the
latest lists of visitors sent up to me.

I stepped out of the lift, but instead of going to my room I made my
way farther along the corridor, for before my arrival the valet in
charge of the landing, despite his horror of draughts, had opened the
window at the end, which instead of looking out to the sea faced the
hill and valley inland, but never allowed them to be seen, for its
panes, which were made of clouded glass, were generally closed. I made
a short 'station' in front of it, time enough just to pay my devotions
to the view which for once it revealed over the hill against which the
back of the hotel rested, a view that contained but a solitary house,
planted in the middle distance, though the perspective and the evening
light in which I saw it, while preserving its mass, gave it a
sculptural beauty and a velvet background, as though to one of those
architectural works in miniature, tiny temples or chapels wrought in
gold and enamels, which serve as reliquaries and are exposed only on
rare and solemn days for the veneration of the faithful. But this
moment of adoration had already lasted too long, for the valet, who
carried in one hand a bunch of keys and with the other saluted me by
touching his verger's skull–cap, though without raising it, on account
of the pure, cool evening air, came and drew together, like those of a
shrine, the two sides of the window, and so shut off the minute
edifice, the glistening relic from my adoring gaze. I went into my
room. Regularly, as the season advanced, the picture that I found
there in my window changed. At first it was broad daylight, and dark
only if the weather was bad: and then, in the greenish glass which it
distended with the curve of its round waves, the sea, set among the
iron uprights of my window like a piece of stained glass in its leads,
ravelled out over all the deep rocky border of the bay little plumed
triangles of an unmoving spray delineated with the delicacy of a
feather or a downy breast from Pisanello's pencil, and fixed in that
white, unalterable, creamy enamel which is used to depict fallen snow
in Gallé's glass.

Presently the days grew shorter and at the moment when I entered my
room the violet sky seemed branded with the stiff, geometrical,
travelling, effulgent figure of the sun (like the representation of
some miraculous sign, of some mystical apparition) leaning over the
sea from the hinge of the horizon as a sacred picture leans over a
high altar, while the different parts of the western sky exposed in
the glass fronts of the low mahogany bookcases that ran along the
walls, which I carried back in my mind to the marvellous painting from
which they had been detached, seemed like those different scenes which
some old master executed long ago for a. confraternity upon a shrine,
whose separate panels are now exhibited side by side upon the wall of
a museum gallery, so that the visitor's imagination alone can restore
them to their place on the predella of the reredos. A few weeks later,
when I went upstairs, the sun had already set. Like the one that I
used to see at Combray, behind the Calvary, when I was coming home
from a walk and looking forward to going down to the kitchen before
dinner, a band of red sky over the sea, compact and clear–cut as a
layer of aspic over meat, then, a little later, over a sea already
cold and blue like a grey mullet, a sky of the same pink as the salmon
that we should presently be ordering at Rivebelle reawakened the
pleasure which I was to derive from the act of dressing to go out to
dinner. Over the sea, quite near the shore, were trying to rise, one
beyond another, at wider and wider intervals, vapours of a pitchy
blackness but also of the polish and consistency of agate, of a
visible weight, so much so that the highest among them, poised at the
end of their contorted stem and overreaching the centre of gravity of
the pile that had hitherto supported them, seemed on the point of
bringing down in ruin this lofty structure already half the height of
the sky, and of precipitating it into the sea. The sight of a ship
that was moving away like a nocturnal traveller gave me the same
impression that I had had in the train of being set free from the
necessity of sleep and from confinement in a bedroom. Not that I felt
myself a prisoner in the room in which I now was, since in another
hour I should have left it and be getting into the carriage. I threw
myself down on the bed; and, just as if I had been lying in a berth on
board one of those steamers which I could see quite near to me and
which, when night came, it would be strange to see stealing slowly out
into the darkness, like shadowy and silent but unsleeping swans, I was
on all sides surrounded by pictures of the sea.

But as often as not they were, indeed, only pictures; I forgot that
below their coloured expanse was hollowed the sad desolation of the
beach, travelled by the restless evening breeze whose breath I had so
anxiously felt on my arrival at Balbec; besides, even in my room,
being wholly taken up with thoughts of the girls whom I had seen go
past, I was no longer in a state of mind calm or disinterested enough
to allow the formation of any really deep impression of beauty. The
anticipation of dinner at Rivebelle made my mood more frivolous still,
and my mind, dwelling at such moments upon the surface of the body
which I was going to dress up so as to try to appear as pleasing as
possible in the feminine eyes which would be scrutinising me in the
brilliantly lighted restaurant, was incapable of putting any depth
behind the colour of things. And if, beneath my window, the
unwearying, gentle flight of sea–martins and swallows had not arisen
like a playing fountain, like living fireworks, joining the intervals
between their soaring rockets with the motionless white streaming
lines of long horizontal wakes of foam, without the charming miracle
of this natural and local phenomenon, which brought into touch with
reality the scenes that I had before my eyes, I might easily have
believed that they were no more than a selection, made afresh every
day, of paintings which were shewn quite arbitrarily in the place in
which I happened to be and without having any necessary connexion with
that place. At one time it was an exhibition of Japanese
colour–prints: beside the neat disc of sun, red and round as the moon,
a yellow cloud seemed a lake against which black swords were outlined
like the trees upon its shore; a bar of a tender pink which I had
never seen again after my first paint–box swelled out into a river on
either bank of which boats seemed to be waiting high and dry for some
one to push them down and set them afloat. And with the contemptuous,
bored, frivolous glance of an amateur or a woman hurrying through a
picture gallery between two social engagements, I would say to myself:
"Curious sunset, this; it's different from what they usually are but
after all I've seen them just as fine, just as remarkable as this." I
had more pleasure on evenings when a ship, absorbed and liquefied by
the horizon so much the same in colour as herself (an Impressionist
exhibition this time) that it seemed to be also of the same matter,
appeared as if some one had simply cut out with a pair of scissors her
bows and the rigging in which she tapered into a slender filigree from
the vaporous blue of the sky. Sometimes the ocean filled almost the
whole of my window, when it was enlarged and prolonged by a band of
sky edged at the top only by a line that was of the same blue as the
sea, so that I supposed it all to be still sea, and the change in
colour due only to some effect of light and shade. Another day the sea
was painted only in the lower part of the window, all the rest of
which was so filled with innumerable clouds, packed one against
another in horizontal bands, that its panes seemed to be intended, for
some special purpose or to illustrate a special talent of the artist,
to present a 'Cloud Study,' while the fronts of the various bookcases
shewing similar clouds but in another part of the horizon and
differently coloured by the light, appeared to be offering as it were
the repetition—of which certain of our contemporaries are so fond—of
one and the same effect always observed at different hours but able
now in the immobility of art to be seen all together in a single room,
drawn in pastel and mounted under glass. And sometimes to a sky and
sea uniformly grey a rosy touch would be added with an exquisite
delicacy, while a little butterfly that had gone to sleep at the foot
of the window seemed to be attaching with its wings at the corner of
this 'Harmony in Grey and Pink' in the Whistler manner the favourite
signature of the Chelsea master. The pink vanished; there was nothing
now left to look at. I rose for a moment and before lying down again
drew dose the inner curtains. Above them I could see from my bed the
ray of light that still remained, growing steadily fainter and
thinner, but it was without any feeling of sadness, without any regret
for its passing that I thus allowed to die above the curtains the hour
at which, as a rule, I was seated at table, for I knew that this day
was of another kind than ordinary days, longer, like those arctic days
which night interrupts for a few minutes only; I knew that from the
chrysalis of the dusk was preparing to emerge, by a radiant
metamorphosis, the dazzling light of the Rivebelle restaurant. I said
to myself: "It is time"; I stretched myself on the bed, and rose, and
finished dressing; and I found a charm in these idle moments,
lightened of every material burden, in which while down below the
others were dining I was employing the forces accumulated during the
inactivity of this last hour of the day only in drying my washed body,
in putting on a dinner jacket, in tying my tie, in making all those
gestures which were already dictated by the anticipated pleasure of
seeing again some woman whom I had noticed, last time, at Rivebelle,
who had seemed to be watching me, had perhaps left the table for a
moment only in the hope that I would follow her; it was with joy that
I enriched myself with all these attractions so as to give myself,
whole, alert, willing, to a new life, free, without cares, in which I
would lean my hesitations upon the calm strength of Saint–Loup, and
would choose from among the different species of animated nature and
the produce of every land those which, composing the unfamiliar dishes
that my companion would at once order, might have tempted my appetite
or my imagination. And then at the end of the season came the days
when I could no longer pass indoors from the 'front' through the
dining–room; its windows stood open no more, for it was night now
outside and the swarm of poor folk and curious idlers, attracted by
the blaze of light which they might not reach, hung in black clusters
chilled by the north wind to the luminous sliding walls of that
buzzing hive of glass.