Though they were now separately identifiable, still the mutual
response which they gave one another with eyes animated by
self–sufficiency and the spirit of comradeship, in which were kindled
at every moment now the interest now the insolent indifference with
which each of them sparkled according as her glance fell on one of her
friends or on passing strangers, that consciousness, moreover, of
knowing one another intimately enough always to go about together, by
making them a 'band apart' established between their independent and
separate bodies, as slowly they advanced, a bond invisible but
harmonious, like a single warm shadow, a single atmosphere making of
them a whole as homogeneous in its parts as it was different from the
crowd through which their procession gradually wound.
For an instant, as I passed the dark one with the fat cheeks who was
wheeling a bicycle, I caught her smiling, sidelong glance, aimed from
the centre of that inhuman world which enclosed the life of this
little tribe, an inaccessible, unknown world to which the idea of what
I was could certainly never attain nor find a place in it. Wholly
occupied with what her companions were saying, this young girl in her
polo–cap, pulled down very low over her brow, had she seen me at the
moment in which the dark ray emanating from her eyes had fallen on me?
In the heart of what universe did she distinguish me? It would have
been as hard for me to say as, when certain peculiarities are made
visible, thanks to the telescope, in a neighbouring planet, it is
difficult to arrive at the conclusion that human beings inhabit it,
that they can see us, or to say what ideas the sight of us can have
aroused in their minds.
If we thought that the eyes of a girl like that were merely two
glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and
to unite her life to ours. But we feel that what shines in those
reflecting discs is not due solely to their material composition; that
it is, unknown to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that the creature
is conceiving, relative to the people and places that she knows—the
turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedalling
on past fields and woods, she would have drawn me after her, that
little peri, more seductive to me than she of the Persian
paradise—the shadows, too, of the home to which she will presently
return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed
for her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her
sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. I knew
that I should never possess this young cyclist if I did not possess
also what there was in her eyes. And it was consequently her whole
life that filled me with desire; a sorrowful desire because I felt
that it was not to be realised, but exhilarating, because what had
hitherto been my life, having ceased of a sudden to be my whole life,
being no more now than a little part of the space stretching out
before me, which I was burning to cover and which was composed of the
lives of these girls, offered me that prolongation, that possible
multiplication of oneself which is happiness. And no doubt the fact
that we had, these girls and I, not one habit—as we had not one
idea—in common, was to make it more difficult for me to make friends
with them and to please them. But perhaps, also, it was thanks to
those differences, to my consciousness that there did not enter into
the composition of the nature and actions of these girls a single
element that I knew or possessed, that there came in place of my
satiety a thirst—like that with which a dry land burns—for a life
which my soul, because it had never until now received one drop of it,
would absorb all the more greedily in long draughts, with a more
perfect imbibition.
I had looked so closely at the dark cyclist with the bright eyes that
she seemed to notice my attention, and said to the biggest of the
girls something that I could not hear. To be honest, this dark one was
not the one that pleased me most, simply because she was dark and
because (since the day on which, from the little path by Tansonville,
I had seen Gilberte) a girl with reddish hair and a golden skin had
remained for me the inaccessible ideal. But Gilberte herself, had I
not loved her principally because she had appeared to me haloed with
that aureole of being the friend of Bergotte, of going with him to
look at old cathedrals? And in the same way could I not rejoice at
having seen this dark girl look at me (which made me hope that it
would be easier for me to get to know her first), for she would
introduce me to the others, to the pitiless one who had jumped over
the old man's head, to the cruel one who had said "He makes me sick,
poor old man!"—to all of them in turn, among whom, moreover, she had
the distinction of being their inseparable companion? And yet the
supposition that I might some day be the friend of one or other of
these girls, that their eyes, whose incomprehensible gaze struck me
now and again, playing upon me unawares, like the play of sunlight
upon a wall, might ever, by a miraculous alchemy, allow to
interpenetrate among their ineffable particles the idea of my
existence, some affection for my person, that I myself might some day
take my place among them in the evolution of their course by the sea's
edge—that supposition appeared to me to contain within it a
contradiction as insoluble as if, standing before some classical
frieze or a fresco representing a procession, I had believed it
possible for me, the spectator, to take my place, beloved of them,
among the godlike hierophants.
The happiness of knowing these girls was, then, not to be realised.
Certainly it would not have been the first of its kind that I had
renounced. I had only to recall the numberless strangers whom, even
at Balbec, the carriage bowling away from them at full speed had
forced me for ever to abandon. And indeed the pleasure that was given
me by the little band, as noble as if it had been composed of Hellenic
virgins, came from some suggestion that there was in it of the flight
of passing figures along a road. This fleetingness of persons who are
not known to us, who force us to put out from the harbour of life, in
which the women whose society we frequent have all, in course of time,
laid bare their blemishes, urges us into that state of pursuit in
which there is no longer anything to arrest the imagination. But to
strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own
dimensions, that is to say to nothing. Offered me by one of those
procuresses (whose good offices, all the same, the reader has seen
that I by no means scorned), withdrawn from the element which gave
them so many fine shades and such vagueness, these girls would have
enchanted me less. We must have imagination, awakened by the
uncertainty of being able to attain our object, to create a goal which
hides our other goal from us, and by substituting for sensual
pleasures the idea of penetrating into a life prevents us from
recognising that pleasure, from tasting its true savour, from
restricting it to its own range.
There must be, between us and the fish which, if we saw it for the
first time cooked and served on a table, would not appear worth the
endless trouble, craft and stratagem that are necessary if we are to
catch it, interposed, during our afternoons with the rod, the ripple
to whose surface come wavering, without our quite knowing what we
intend to do with them, the burnished gleam of flesh, the
indefiniteness of a form, in the fluidity of a transparent and flowing
azure.
These girls benefited also by that alteration of social values
characteristic of seaside life. All the advantages which, in our
ordinary environment, extend and magnify our importance, we there find
to have become invisible, in fact to be eliminated; while on the other
hand the people whom we suppose, without reason, to enjoy similar
advantages appear to us amplified to artificial dimensions. This made
it easy for strange women generally, and to–day for these girls in
particular, to acquire an enormous importance in my eyes, and
impossible to make them aware of such importance as I might myself
possess.
But if there was this to be said for the excursion of the little band,
that it was but an excerpt from the innumerable flight of passing
women, which had always disturbed me, their flight was here reduced to
a movement so slow as to approach immobility. Now, precisely because,
in a phase so far from rapid, faces no longer swept past me in a
whirlwind, but calm and distinct still appeared beautiful, I was
prevented from thinking as I had so often thought when Mme. de
Villeparisis's carriage bore me away that, at closer quarters, if I
had stopped for a moment, certain details, a pitted skin, drooping
nostrils, a silly gape, a grimace of a smile, an ugly figure might
have been substituted, in the face and body of the woman, for those
that I had doubtless imagined; for there had sufficed a pretty
outline, a glimpse of a fresh complexion, for me to add, in entire
good faith, a fascinating shoulder, a delicious glance of which I
carried in my mind for ever a memory or a preconceived idea, these
rapid decipherings of a person whom we see in motion exposing us thus
to the same errors as those too rapid readings in which, on a single
syllable and without waiting to identify the rest, we base instead of
the word that is in the text a wholly different word with which our
memory supplies us. It could not be so with me now. I had looked well
at them all; each of them I had seen, not from every angle and rarely
in full face, but all the same in two or three aspects different
enough to enable me to make either the correction or the verification,
to take a 'proof of the different possibilities of line and colour
that are hazarded at first sight, and to see persist in them, through
a series of expressions, something unalterably material. I could say
to myself with conviction that neither in Paris nor at Balbec, in the
most favourable hypotheses of what might have happened, even if I had
been able to stop and talk to them, the passing women who had caught
my eye, had there ever been one whose appearance, followed by her
disappearance without my having managed to know her, had left me with
more regret than would these, had given me the idea that her
friendship might be a thing so intoxicating. Never, among actresses
nor among peasants nor among girls from a convent school had I beheld
anything so beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so
inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible. They were, of the
unknown and potential happiness of life, an illustration so delicious
and in so perfect a state that it was almost for intellectual reasons
that I was desperate with the fear that I might not be able to make,
in unique conditions which left no room for any possibility of error,
proper trial of what is the most mysterious thing that is offered to
us by the beauty which we desire and console ourselves for never
possessing, by demanding pleasure—as Swann had always refused to do
before Odette's day—from women whom we have not desired, so that,
indeed, we die without having ever known what that other pleasure was.
No doubt it was possible that it was not in reality an unknown
pleasure, that on a close inspection its mystery would dissipate and
vanish, that it was no more than a projection, a mirage of desire. But
in that case I could blame only the compulsion of a law of
nature—which if it applied to these girls would apply to all—and not
the imperfection of the object. For it was that which I should have
chosen above all others, feeling quite certain, with a botanist's
satisfaction, that it was not possible to find collected anywhere
rarer specimens than these young flowers who were interrupting at this
moment before my eyes the line of the sea with their slender hedge,
like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorning a garden on the brink of a
cliff, between which is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by
some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue and horizontal line
that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly,
dawdling in the cup of a flower which the moving hull has long since
passed, can, if it is to fly and be sure of arriving before the
vessel, wait until nothing but the tiniest slice of blue still
separates the questing prow from the first petal of the flower towards
which it is steering.
I went indoors because I was to dine at Rivebelle with Robert, and my
grandmother insisted that on those evenings, before going out, I must
lie down for an hour on my bed, a rest which the Balbec doctor
presently ordered me to extend to the other evenings also.
However, there was no need, when one went indoors, to leave the
'front' and to enter the hotel by the hall, that is to say from
behind. By virtue of an alteration of the clock which reminded me of
those Saturdays when, at Combray, we used to have luncheon an hour
earlier, now with summer at the full the days had become so long that
the sun was still high in the heavens, as though it were only
tea–time, when the tables were being laid for dinner in the Grand
Hotel. And so the great sliding windows were kept open from the
ground. I had but to step across a low wooden sill to find myself in
the dining–room, through which I walked and straight across to the
lift.
As I passed the office I addressed a smile to the manager, and with no
shudder of disgust gathered one for myself from his face which, since
I had been at Balbec, my comprehensive study of it was injecting and
transforming, little by little, like a natural history preparation.
His features had become familiar to me, charged with a meaning that
was of no importance but still intelligible, like a script which one
can read, and had ceased in any way to resemble these queer,
intolerable characters which his face had presented to me on that
first day, when I had seen before me a personage now forgotten, or, if
I succeeded in recalling him, unrecognisable, difficult to identify
with this insignificant and polite personality of which the other was
but a caricature, a hideous and rapid sketch. Without either the
shyness or the sadness of the evening of my arrival I rang for the
attendant, who no longer stood in silence while I rose by his side in
the lift as in a mobile thoracic cage propelled upwards along its
ascending pillar, but repeated: