In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (77 page)

I caught up Andrée, and began again to sing Albertine's praises. It
was inconceivable to me that she would not repeat what I said to her
friend, seeing the emphasis that I put into it. And yet I never heard
that Albertine had been told. Andrée had, nevertheless, a far greater
understanding of the things of the heart, a refinement of nice
behaviour; finding the look, the word, the action that could most
ingeniously give pleasure, keeping to herself a remark that might
possibly cause pain, making a sacrifice (and making it as though it
were no sacrifice at all) of an afternoon's play, or it might be an
'at home' or a garden party in order to stay beside a friend who was
feeling sad, and thus shew him or her that she preferred the simple
company of a friend to frivolous pleasures; these were her habitual
delicacies. But when one knew her a little better one would have said
that it was with her as with those heroic cravens who wish not to be
afraid, and whose bravery is especially meritorious, one would have
said that in her true character there was none of that generosity
which she displayed at every moment out of moral distinction, or
sensibility, or a noble desire to shew herself a true friend. When I
listened to all the charming things she was saying to me about a
possible affection between Albertine and myself it seemed as though
she were bound to do everything in her power to bring it to pass.
Whereas, by mere chance perhaps, not even of the least of the various
minor opportunities which were at her disposal and might have proved
effective in uniting me to Albertine did she ever make any use, and I
would not swear that my effort to make myself loved by Albertine did
not—if not provoke in her friend secret stratagems destined to bring
it to nought—at any rate arouse in her an anger which however she
took good care to hide and against which even, in her delicacy of
feeling, she may herself have fought. Of the countless refinements of
goodness which Andrée shewed Albertine would have been incapable, and
yet I was not certain of the underlying goodness of the former as I
was to be, later on, of the latter's. Shewing herself always tenderly
indulgent to the exuberant frivolity of Albertine, Andrée would greet
her with speeches, with smiles which were those of a friend, better
still, she always acted towards her as a friend. I have seen her, day
after day, in order to give the benefit of her own wealth, to bring
some happiness to this penniless friend take, without any possibility
of advantage to herself, more pains than a courtier would take who
sought to win his sovereign's favour. She was charmingly gentle
always, charming in her choice of sweet, pathetic expressions, when
you said to her what a pity it was that Albertine was so poor, and
took infinitely more trouble on her behalf than she would have taken
for a wealthy friend. But if anyone were to hint that Albertine was
perhaps not quite so poor as people made out, a just discernible cloud
would veil the light of Andrée's eyes and brow; she seemed out of
temper. And if you went on to say that after all Albertine might
perhaps be less difficult to marry off than people supposed, she would
vehemently contradict you, repeating almost angrily: "Oh dear, no; she
will never get married! I am quite certain of it; it is a dreadful
worry to me!" In so far as I myself was concerned, Andrée was the only
one of the girls who would never have repeated to me anything not very
pleasant that might have been said about me by a third person; more
than that, if it were I who told her what had been said she would make
a pretence of not believing it, or would furnish some explanation
which made the remark inoffensive; it is the aggregate of these
qualities that goes by the name of tact. Tact is the attribute of
those people who, if we have called a man out in a duel, congratulate
us and add that there was no necessity, really; so as to enhance still
further in our own eyes the courage of which we have given proof
without having been forced to do lo. They are the opposite of the
people who, in similar circumstances, say: "It must have been a horrid
nuisance for you, fighting a duel, but on the other hand you couldn't
possibly swallow an insult like that, there was nothing else to be
done." But as there, is always something to be said on both sides, if
the pleasure, or at least the indifference shewn by our friends in
repeating something offensive that they have heard said about us,
proves that they do not exactly put themselves in our skin at the
moment of speaking, but thrust in the pin–point, turn the knife–blade
as though it were gold–beater's skin and not human, the art of always
keeping hidden from us what might be disagreeable to us in what they
have heard said about our actions, or in the opinion which those
actions have led the speakers themselves to form of us, proves that
there is in the other kind of friends, in the friends who are so full
of tact, a strong vein of dissimulation. It does no harm if indeed
they are incapable of thinking evil, and if what is said by other
people only makes them suffer as it would make us. I supposed this to
be the case with Andrée, without, however, being absolutely sure.

We had left the little wood and had followed a network of overgrown
paths through which Andrée managed to find her way with great skill.
Suddenly, "Look now," she said to me, "there are your famous
Creuniers, and, I say, you are in luck, it's just the time of day, and
the light is the same as when Elstir painted them." But I was still
too wretched at having fallen, during the game of 'ferret,' from such
a pinnacle of hopes. And so it was not with the pleasure which
otherwise I should doubtless have felt that I caught sight, almost
below my feet, crouching among the rocks, where they had gone for
protection from the heat, of marine goddesses for whom Elstir had lain
in wait and surprised them there, beneath a dark glaze as lovely as
Leonardo would have painted, the marvellous Shadows, sheltered and
furtive, nimble and voiceless, ready at the first glimmer of light to
slip behind the stone, to hide in a cranny, and prompt, once the
menacing ray had passed, to return to rock or seaweed beneath the sun
that crumbled the cliffs and the colourless ocean, over whose slumbers
they seemed to be watching, motionless lightfoot guardians letting
appear on the water's surface their viscous bodies and the attentive
gaze of their deep blue eyes.

We went back to the wood to pick up the other girls and go home
together. I knew now that I was in love with Albertine; but, alas! I
had no thought of letting her know it. This was because, since the
days of our games in the Champs–Elysées, my conception of love had
become different, even if the persons to whom my love was successively
assigned remained practically the same. For one thing, the avowal, the
declaration of my passion to her whom I loved no longer seemed to me
one of the vital and necessary incidents of love, nor love itself an
external reality, but simply a subjective pleasure. And as for this
pleasure, I felt that Albertine would do everything necessary to
furnish it, all the more since she would not know that I was enjoying
it.

As we walked home the image of Albertine, bathed in the light that
streamed from the other girls, was not the only one that existed for
me. But as the moon, which is no more than a tiny white cloud of a
more definite and fixed shape than other clouds during the day,
assumes her full power as soon as daylight dies, so when I was once
more in the hotel it was Albertine's sole image that rose from my
heart and began to shine. My room seemed to me to have become suddenly
a new place. Of course, for a long time past, it had not been the
hostile room of my first night in it. All our lives we go on
patiently modifying the surroundings in which we dwell; and gradually,
as habit dispenses us from feeling them, we suppress the noxious
elements of colour, shape and smell which were at the root of our
discomfort. Nor was it any longer the room, still potent enough over
my sensibility, not certainly to make me suffer, but to give me joy,
the fount of summer days, like a marble basin in which, half way up
its polished sides, they mirrored an azure surface steeped in light
over which glided for an instant, impalpable and white as a wave of
heat, a shadowy and fleeting cloud; not the room, wholly aesthetic, of
the pictorial evening hours; it was the room in which I had been now
for so many days that I no longer saw it. And now I was just beginning
again to open my eyes to it, but this time from the selfish angle
which is that of love. I liked to feel that the fine big mirror across
one corner, the handsome bookcases with their fronts of glass would
give Albertine, if she came to see me, a good impression of myself.
Instead of a place of transit in which I would stay for a few minutes
before escaping to the beach or to Rivebelle, my room became real and
dear to me, fashioned itself anew, for I looked at and appreciated
each article of its furniture with the eyes of Albertine.

A few days after the game of 'ferret,' when, having allowed ourselves
to wander rather too far afield, we had been fortunate in finding at
Maineville a couple of little "tubs" with two seats in each which
would enable us to be back in time for dinner, the keenness, already
intense, of my love for Albertine, had the following effect, first of
all, that it was Rosemonde and Andrée in turn that I invited to be my
companion, and never once Albertine, after which, in spite of my
manifest preference for Andrée or Rosemonde, I led everybody, by
secondary considerations of time and distance, cloaks and so forth, to
decide, as though against my wishes, that the most practical policy
was that I should take Albertine, to whose company I pretended to
resign myself for good or ill. Unfortunately, since love tends to the
complete assimilation of another person, while other people are not
comestible by way of conversation alone, Albertine might be (and
indeed was) as friendly as possible to me on our way home; when I had
deposited her at her own door she left me happy but more famished for
her even than I had been at the start, and reckoning the moments that
we had spent together as only à prelude, of little importance in
itself, to those that were still to come. And yet this prelude had
that initial charm which is not to be found again. I had not yet asked
anything of Albertine. She could imagine what I wanted, but, not being
certain of it, would suppose that I was tending only towards relations
without any definite purpose, in which my friend would find that
delicious vagueness, rich in surprising fulfilments of expectations,
which is true romance.

In the week that followed I scarcely attempted to see Albertine. I
made a show of preferring Andrée. Love is born; one would like to
remain, for her whom one loves, the unknown whom she may love in turn,
but one has need of her, one requires contact not so much with her
body as with her attention, her heart. One slips into a letter some
spiteful expression which will force the indifferent reader to ask for
some little kindness in compensation, and love, following an unvarying
procedure, sets going with an alternating movement the machinery in
which one can no longer either refrain from loving or be loved. I gave
to Andrée the hours spent by the others at a party which I knew that
she would sacrifice for my sake, with pleasure, and would have
sacrificed even with reluctance, from a moral nicety, so as not to let
either the others or herself think that she attached any importance to
a relatively frivolous amusement. I arranged in this way to have her
entirely to myself every evening, meaning not to make Albertine
jealous, but to improve my position in her eyes, or at any rate not to
imperil it by letting Albertine know that it was herself and not
Andrée that I loved. Nor did I confide this to Andrée either, lest she
should repeat it to her friend. When I spoke of Albertine to Andrée I
affected a coldness by which she was perhaps less deceived that I by
her apparent credulity. She made a show of believing in my
indifference to Albertine, of desiring the closest possible union
between Albertine and myself. It is probable that, on the contrary,
she neither believed in the one nor wished for the other. While I was
saying to her that I did not care very greatly for her friend, I was
thinking of one thing only, how to become acquainted with Mme.
Bontemps, who was staying for a few days near Balbec, and to whom
Albertine was going presently on a short visit. Naturally I did not
let Andrée become aware of this desire, and when I spoke to her of
Albertine's people, it was in the most careless manner possible.
Andrée's direct answers did not appear to throw any doubt on my
sincerity. Why then did she blurt out suddenly, about that time: "Oh,
guess who' I've just seen—Albertine's aunt!" It is true that she had
not said in so many words: "I could see through your casual remarks
all right that the one thing you were really thinking of was how you
could make friends with Albertine's aunt." But it was clearly to the
presence in Andrée's mind of some such idea which she felt it more
becoming to keep from me that the word 'just' seemed to point. It was
of a kind with certain glances, certain gestures which, for all that
they have not a form that is logical, rational, deliberately
calculated to match the listener's intelligence, reach him
nevertheless in their true significance, just as human speech,
converted into electricity in the telephone, is turned into speech
again when it strikes the ear. In order to remove from Andree's mind
the idea that I was interested in Mme. Bontemps, I spoke of her from
that time onwards not only carelessly but with downright malice,
saying that I had once met that idiot of a woman, and trusted I should
never have that experience again. Whereas I was seeking by every means
in my power to meet her.

I tried to induce Elstir (but without mentioning to anyone else that I
had asked him) to speak to her about me and to bring us together. He
promised to introduce me to her, though he seemed greatly surprised at
my wishing it, for he regarded her as a contemptible woman, a born
intriguer, as little interesting as she was disinterested. Reflecting
that if I did see Mme. Bontemps, Andrée would be sure to hear of it
sooner or later, I thought it best to warn her in advance. "The things
one tries hardest to avoid are what one finds one cannot escape," I
told her. "Nothing in the world could bore me so much as meeting Mme.
Bontemps again, and yet I can't get out of it, Elstir has arranged to
invite us together." "I have never doubted it for a single instant,"
exclaimed Andrée in a bitter tone, while her eyes, enlarged and
altered by her annoyance, focussed themselves upon some invisible
object. These words of Andrée's were not the most recent statement of
a thought which might be expressed thus: "I know that you are in love
with Albertine, and that you are working day and night to get in touch
with her people." But they were the shapeless fragments, easily pieced
together again by me, of some such thought which I had exploded by
striking it, through the shield of Andrée's self–control. Like her
'just,' these words had no meaning save in the second degree, that is
to say they were words of the sort which (rather than direct
affirmatives) inspires in us respect or distrust for another person,
and leads to a rupture.