In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (81 page)

Then the concerts ended, the bad weather began, my friends left
Balbec; not all at once, like the swallows, but all in the same week.
Albertine was the first to go, abruptly, without any of her friends
understanding, then or afterwards, why she had returned suddenly to
Paris whither neither her work nor any amusement summoned her. "She
said neither why nor wherefore, and with that she left!" muttered
Françoise, who, for that matter, would have liked us to leave as well.
We were, she thought, inconsiderate towards the staff, now greatly
reduced in number, but retained on account of the few visitors who
were still staying on, and towards the manager who was 'just eating up
money.' It was true that the hotel, which would very soon be closed
for the winter, had long since seen most of its patrons depart, but
never had it been so attractive. This view was not shared by the
manager; from end to end of the rooms in which we sat shivering, and
and at the doors of which no page now stood on guard, he paced the
corridors, wearing a new frock coat, so well tended by the hairdresser
that his insipid face appeared to be made of some composition in
which, for one part of flesh, there were three of cosmetics,
incessantly changing his neckties. (These refinements cost less than
having the place heated and keeping on the staff, just as a man who is
no longer able to subscribe ten thousand francs to a charity can still
parade his generosity without inconvenience to himself by tipping the
boy who brings him a telegram with five.) He appeared to be inspecting
the empty air, to be seeking to give, by the smartness of his personal
appearance, a provisional splendour to the desolation that could now
be felt in this hotel where the season had not been good, and walked
like the ghost of a monarch who returns to haunt the ruins of what was
once his palace. He was particularly annoyed when the little local
railway company, finding the supply of passengers inadequate,
discontinued its trains until the following spring. "What is lacking
here," said the manager, "is the means of commotion." In spite of the
deficit which his books shewed, he was making plans for the future on
a lavish scale. And as he was, after all, capable of retaining an
exact memory of fine language when it was directly applicable to the
hotel–keeping industry and had the effect of enhancing its importance:
"I was not adequately supported, although in the dining room I had an
efficient squad," he explained; "but the pages left something to be
desired. You will see, next year, what a phalanx I shall collect." In
the meantime the suspension of the services of the B. C. B. obliged
him to send for letters and occasionally to dispatch visitors in a
light cart. I would often ask leave to sit by the driver, and in this
way I managed to be out in all weathers, as in the winter that I had
spent at Combray.

Sometimes, however, the driving rain kept my grandmother and me, the
Casino being closed, in rooms almost completely deserted, as in the
lowest hold of a ship when a storm is raging; and there, day by day,
as in the course of a sea–voyage, a new person from among those in
whose company we had spent three months without getting to know them,
the chief magistrate from Caen, the leader of the Cherbourg bar, an
American lady and her daughters, came up to us, started conversation,
discovered some way of making the time pass less slowly, revealed some
social accomplishment, taught us a new game, invited us to drink tea
or to listen to music, to meet them at a certain hour, to plan
together some of those diversions which contain the true secret of
pleasure–giving, which is to aim not at giving pleasure but simply at
helping us to pass the time of our boredom, in a word, formed with us,
at the end of our stay at Balbec, ties of friendship which, in a day
or two, their successive departures from the place would sever. I even
made the acquaintance of the rich young man, of one of his pair of
aristocratic friends and of the actress, who had reappeared for a few
days; but their little society was composed now of three persons only,
the other friend having returned to Paris. They asked me to come out
to dinner with them at their restaurant. I think, they were just as
well pleased that I did not accept. But they had given the invitation
in the most friendly way imaginable, and albeit it came actually from
the rich young man, since the others were only his guests, as the
friend who was staying with him, the Marquis Maurice de Vaudémont,
came of a very good family indeed, instinctively the actress, in
asking me whether I would not come, said, to flatter my vanity:
"Maurice will be so pleased."

And when in the hall of the hotel I met them all three together, it
was M. de Vaudémont (the rich young man effacing himself) who said to
me: "Won't you give us the pleasure of dining with us?"

On the whole I had derived very little benefit from Balbec, but this
only strengthened my desire to return there. It seemed to me that I
had not stayed there long enough. This was not what my friends at home
were thinking, who wrote to ask whether I meant to stay there for the
rest of my life. And when I saw that it was the name 'Balbec' which
they were obliged to put on the envelope—just as my window looked out
not over a landscape or a street but on to the plains of the sea, as I
heard through the night its murmur to which I had before going to
sleep entrusted my ship of dreams, I had the illusion that this life
of promiscuity with the waves must effectively, without my knowledge,
pervade me with the notion of their charm, like those lessons which
one learns by heart while one is asleep.

The manager offered to reserve better rooms for me next year, but I
had now become attached to mine, into which I went without ever
noticing the scent of flowering grasses, while my mind, which had once
found such difficulty in rising to fill its space had come now to take
its measurements so exactly that I was obliged to submit it to a
reverse process when I had to sleep in Paris, in my own room, the
ceiling of which was low.

It was high time, indeed, to leave Balbec, for the cold and damp had
become too penetrating for us to stay any longer in a hotel which had
neither fireplaces in the rooms nor a central furnace. Moreover, I
forgot almost immediately these last weeks of our stay. What my mind's
eye did almost invariably see when I thought of Balbec were the hours
which, every morning during the fine weather, as I was going out in
the afternoon with Albertine and her friends, my grandmother,
following the doctor's orders, insisted on my spending lying down,
with the room darkened. The manager gave instructions that no noise
was to be made on my landing, and came up himself to see that they
were obeyed. Because the light outside was so strong, I kept drawn for
as long as possible the big violet curtains which had adopted so
hostile an attitude towards me the first evening. But as, in spite of
the pins with which, so that the light should not enter, Françoise
fastened them every night, pins which she alone knew how to unfasten;
as in spite of the rugs, the red cretonne table–cover, the various
fabrics collected here and there which she fitted in to her defensive
scheme, she never succeeded in making them meet exactly, the darkness
was not complete, and they allowed to spill over the carpet as it were
a scarlet shower of anemone–petals, among which I could not resist the
temptation to plunge my bare feet for a moment. And on the wall which
faced the window and so was partially lighted, a cylinder of gold with
no visible support was placed vertically and moved slowly along like
the pillar of fire which went before the Hebrews in the desert. I went
back to bed; obliged to taste without moving, in imagination only, and
all at once, the pleasures of games, bathing, walks which the morning
prompted, joy made my heart beat thunderingly like a machine set going
at full speed but fixed to the ground, which can spend its energy only
by turning upon its own axis.

I knew that my friends were on the 'front,' but I did not see them as
they passed before the links of the sea's uneven chain, far at the
back of which, and nestling amid its bluish peaks like an Italian
citadel, one could occasionally, in a clear moment, make out the
little town of Rivebelle, drawn in minutest detail by the sun. I did
not see my friends, but (while there mounted to my belvedere the shout
of the newsboy, the 'journalists' as Françoise used to call them, the
shouts of the bathers and of children at play, punctuating like the
cries of sea–birds the sound of the gently breaking waves) I guessed
their presence, I heard their laughter enveloped like the laughter of
the Nereids in the smooth tide of sound that rose to my ears. "We
looked up," said Albertine in the evening, "to see if you were coming
down. But your shutters were still closed when the concert began." At
ten o'clock, sure enough, it broke out beneath my windows. In the
intervals in the blare of the instruments, if the tide were high,
would begin again, slurred and continuous, the gliding surge of a wave
which seemed to enfold the notes of the violin in its crystal spirals
and to be spraying its foam over echoes of a submarine music. I grew
impatient because no one had yet come with my things, so that I might
rise and dress. Twelve o'clock struck, Françoise arrived at last. And
for months on end, in this Balbec to which I had so looked forward
because I imagined it only as battered by the storm and buried in
fogs, the weather had been so dazzling and so unchanging that when she
came to open the window I could always, without once being wrong,
expect to see the same patch of sunlight folded in the corner of the
outer wall, of an unalterable colour which was less moving as a sign
of summer than depressing as the colour of a lifeless and composed
enamel. And after Françoise had removed her pins from the mouldings of
the window–frame, taken down her various cloths, and drawn back the
curtains, the summer day which she disclosed seemed as dead, as
immemorially ancient as would have been a sumptuously attired dynastic
mummy from which our old servant had done no more than precautionally
unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it to my gaze, embalmed
in its vesture of gold.

THE END