In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (73 page)

In the old days I should have preferred our excursion to be made in
bad weather. For then I still looked to find in Balbec the
'Cimmerians' land,' and fine days were a thing that had no right to
exist there, an intrusion of the vulgar summer of seaside
holiday–makers into that ancient region swathed in eternal mist. But
now, everything that I had hitherto despised, shut out of my field of
vision, not only effects of sunlight upon sea and shore, but even the
regattas, the race–meetings, I would have sought out with ardour, for
the reason for which formerly I had wanted only stormy seas, which was
that these were now associated in my mind, as the others had been,
with an aesthetic idea. Because I had gone several times with my new
friends to visit Elstir, and, on the days when the girls were there,
what he had selected to shew us were drawings of pretty women in
yachting dress, or else a sketch made on a race–course near Balbec. I
had at first shyly admitted to Elstir that I had not felt inclined to
go to the meetings that were being held there. "You were wrong," he
told me, "it is such a pretty sight, and so well worth seeing. For one
thing, that peculiar animal, the jockey, on whom so many eager eyes
are fastened, who in the paddock there looks so grim, a colourless
face between his brilliant jacket and cap, one body and soul with the
prancing horse he rides, how interesting to analyse his professional
movements, the bright splash of colour he makes, with the horse's coat
blending in it, as they stream down the course. What a transformation
of every visible object in that luminous vastness of a racecourse
where one is constantly surprised by fresh lights and shades which one
sees only there. How charming the women can look there, too! The first
day's racing was quite delightful, and there were women there
exquisitely dressed, in the misty light of a Dutch landscape, in which
one could feel rising to cloud the sun itself the penetrating coldness
of the water. Never have I seen women arriving in carriages, or
standing with glasses to their eyes in so extraordinary a light, which
was due, I suppose, to the moisture from the sea. I should simply have
loved to paint it. I came home from the races quite mad, and so keen
to get to work! "After which he became more enthusiastic still over
the yacht–races, and I realised that regattas, social fixtures where
well–dressed women might be seen bathed in the greenish light of a
marine race–course, might be for a modern artist as interesting a
subject as were the revels which they so loved to depict for a
Veronese or Carpaccio. When I suggested this to Elstir, "Your
comparison is all the more true," he replied, "since, from the position
of the city in which they painted, those revels were to a great extent
aquatic. Except that the beauty of the shipping in those days lay as a
rule in its solidity, in the complication of its structure. They had
water–tournaments, as we have here, held generally in honour of some
Embassy, such as Carpaccio shews us in his
Legend of Saint Ursula
.
The vessels were massive, built up like architecture, and seemed
almost amphibious, like lesser Venices set in the heart of the
greater, when, moored to the banks by hanging stages decked with
crimson satin and Persian carpets, they bore their freight of ladies
in cherry–red brocade and green damask close under the balconies
incrusted with many–coloured marbles from which other ladies leaned to
gaze at them, in gowns with black sleeves slashed with white, stitched
with pearls or bordered with lace. You cannot tell where the land
ends and the water begins, what is still the palace or already the
vessel, the caravel, the galeas, the Bucintoro." Albertine had
listened with the keenest interest to these details of costume, these
visions of elegance that Elstir was describing to us. "Oh, I should so
like to see that lace you speak of; it's so pretty, the
Venice–point," she cried. "Besides, I should love to see Venice." "You
may, perhaps, before very long, be able," Elstir informed her, "to gaze
upon the marvellous stuffs which they used to wear. Hitherto one has
seen them only in the works of the Venetian painters, or very rarely
among the treasures of old churches, except now and then when a
specimen has come into the sale–room. But I hear that a Venetian
artist, called Fortuny, has recovered the secret of the craft, and
that before many years have passed women will be able to walk abroad,
and better still to sit at home in brocades as sumptuous as those that
Venice adorned, for her patrician daughters, with patterns brought
from the Orient. But I don't know that I should much care for that,
that it wouldn't be too much of an anachronism for the women of
to–day, even when they parade at regattas, for, to return to our
modern pleasure–craft, the times have completely changed since
'Venice, Queen of the Adriatic.' The great charm of a yacht, of the
furnishings of a yacht, of yachting dress, is their simplicity, as
just things for the sea, and I do so love the sea. I must confess to
you that I prefer the fashions of to–day to those of Veronese's and
even of Carpaccio's time. What there is so attractive about our
yachts—and the smaller yachts especially, I don't like the huge ones,
they're too much like ships; yachts are like women's hats, you must
keep within certain limits—is the unbroken surface, simple, gleaming,
grey, which under a cloudy, leaden sky takes on a creamy softness. The
cabin in which we live ought to make us think of a little café. And
women's clothes on board a yacht are the same sort of thing; what
really are charming are those light garments, uniformly white, of
cloth or linen or nankeen or drill, which in the sunlight and against
the blue of the sea shew up with as dazzling a whiteness as a spread
sail. You very seldom see a woman, for that matter, who knows how to
dress, and yet some of them are quite wonderful. At the races, Mlle.
Léa had a little white hat and a little white sunshade, simply
enchanting. I don't know what I wouldn't give for that little
sunshade." I should have liked very much to know in what respect this
little sunshade differed from any other, and for other reasons,
reasons of feminine vanity, Albertine was still more curious. But,
just as Françoise used to explain the excellence of her
soufflés
by
"It's the way you do them," so here the difference lay in the cut. "It
was," Elstir explained, "quite tiny, quite round, like a Chinese
umbrella." I mentioned the sunshades carried by various ladies, but it
was not like any of them. Elstir found them all quite hideous. A man
of exquisite taste, singularly hard to please, he would isolate some
minute detail which was the whole difference between what was worn by
three–quarters of the women he saw, and horrified him, and a thing
which enchanted him by its prettiness; and—in contrast to its effect
on myself, whose mind any display of luxury at once
sterilised—stimulated his desire to paint "so as to make something as
attractive." "Here you see a young lady who has guessed what the hat
and sunshade were like," he said to me, pointing to Albertine whose
eyes shone with envy. "How I should love to be rich, to have a yacht!"
she said to the painter. "I should come to you to tell me how to run
it. What lovely trips I'd take. And what fun it would be to go to
Cowes for the races. And a motor–car! Tell me, do you think the
ladies' fashions for motoring pretty?" "No"; replied Elstir, "but that
will come in time. You see, there are very few firms at present, one
or two only, Callot—although they go in rather too freely for
lace—Doucet, Cheruit, Paquin sometimes. The others are all horrible."
"Then, is there a vast difference between a Callot dress and one from
any ordinary shop?" I asked Albertine. "Why, an enormous difference, my
little man! I beg your pardon! Only, alas! what you get for three
hundred francs in an ordinary shop will cost two thousand there. But
there can be no comparison; they look the same only to people who know
nothing at all about it." "Quite so," put in Elstir; "though I should
not go so far as to say that it is as profound as the difference
between a statue from Rheims Cathedral and one from Saint–Augustin. By
the way, talking of cathedrals," he went on, addressing himself
exclusively to me, because what he was saying had reference to an
earlier conversation in which the girls had not taken part, and which
for that matter would not have interested them at all, "I spoke to you
the other day of Balbec Church as a great cliff, a huge breakwater
built of the stone of the country; now look at this"; he handed me a
water–colour. "Look at these cliffs (it's a sketch I did close to
here, at the Creuniers); don't these rocks remind you of a
cathedral?" And indeed one would have taken them for soaring red
arches. But, painted on a roasting hot day, they seemed to have
crumbled into dust, made volatile by the heat which had drunk up half
the sea, distilled over the whole surface of the picture almost into a
gaseous state. On this day on which the sunlight had, so to speak,
destroyed reality, reality concentrated itself in certain dusky and
transparent creatures which, by contrast, gave a more striking, a
closer impression of life: the shadows. Ravening after coolness, most
of them, deserting the scorched open spaces, had fled for shelter to
the foot of the rocks, out of reach of the sun; others, swimming
gently upon the tide, like dolphins, kept close under the sides of the
moving vessels, whose hulls they extended upon the pale surface of the
water with their glossy blue forms. It was perhaps the thirst for
coolness which they conveyed that did most to give me the sensation of
the heat of this day and made me exclaim how much I regretted not
knowing the Creuniers. Albertine and Andrée were positive that I must
have been there hundreds of times. If so I had been there without
knowing it, never suspecting that one day the sight of these rocks was
to inspire me with such a thirst for beauty, not perhaps exactly
natural beauty such as I had been seeking hitherto among the cliffs of
Balbec, but rather architectural. Above all, I who, having come here
to visit the kingdom of the storm, had never found, on any of my
drives with Mme. de Villeparisis, when often we saw it only from afar,
painted in a gap between the trees, the ocean sufficiently real,
sufficiently liquid, giving a sufficient impression that it was
hurling its massed forces against the shore, and would have liked to
see it lie motionless only under a wintry shroud of fog, I could never
have believed that I should now be dreaming of a sea which was nothing
more than a whitish vapour that had lost both consistency and colour.
But of such a sea Elstir, like the people who sat musing on board
those vessels drowsy with the heat, had so intensely felt the
enchantment that he had succeeded in transcribing, in fixing for all
time upon the painted sheet the imperceptible reflux of the tide, the
throb of one happy moment; and one suddenly became so enamoured, at
the sight of this magic portrait, that one could think of nothing else
than to range the world over, seeking to recapture the vanished day in
its instantaneous, slumbering beauty.

So that if before these visits to Elstir, before I had set eyes on one
of his sea–pictures in which a young woman in a dress of white serge
or linen, on the deck of a yacht flying the American flag, had
duplicated a white linen dress and coloured flag in my imagination
which at once bred in me an insatiable desire to visit the spot and
see there with my own eyes white linen dresses and flags against the
sea, as though no such experience had ever yet befallen me, always
until then I had taken care when I stood by the sea to expel from my
field of vision, as well as the bathers in the foreground, the yachts
with their too dazzling sails that were like seaside costumes,
everything that prevented me from persuading myself that I was
contemplating the immemorial flood of ocean which had been moving with
the same mysterious life before the appearance of the human race; and
had grudged even the days of radiant sunshine which seemed to me to
invest with the trivial aspect of the world's universal summer this
coast of fog and tempest, to mark simply an interruption, equivalent
to what in music is known as a rest; now on the other hand it was the
bad days that appeared to me to be some disastrous accident, a thing
that could no longer find any place for itself in the world of beauty;
I felt a keen desire to go out and recapture in reality what had so
powerfully aroused my imagination, and I hoped that the weather would
be propitious enough for me to see from the summit of the cliff the
same blue shadows as were in Elstir's picture.

Nor, as I went along, did I still make a frame about my eyes with my
hands as in the days when, conceiving nature to be animated by a life
anterior to the first appearance of man, and inconsistent with all
those wearisome perfections of industrial achievement which had
hitherto made me yawn with boredom at Universal Exhibitions or in the
milliners' windows, I endeavoured to include only that section of the
sea over which there was no steamer passing, so that I might picture
it to myself as immemorial, still contemporary with the ages in which
it had been set apart from the land, or at least with the first dawn
of life in Greece, which enabled me to repeat in their literal meaning
the lines of 'Father Leconte' of which Bloch was so fond:

I could no longer despise the milliners, now that Elstir had told me
that the delicate touches by which they give a last refinement, a
supreme caress to the ribbons or feathers of a hat after it is
finished, would be as interesting to him to paint as the muscular
action of the jockeys themselves (a statement which had delighted
Albertine). But I must wait until I had returned—for milliners, to
Paris—for regattas and races to Balbec, where there would be no more
now until next year–. Even a yacht with women in white linen garments
was not to be found.