In Search Of Lost Time. Volumes 1 to 7. Marcel Proust
windings of its line, was positively alarmed by the glibness with which Albertine spoke of the ‘tram,’ and called it a ‘tin-pot.’ I could feel her mastery of a form of speech in which I was afraid of her detecting and scorning my inferiority. And yet the full wealth of the synonyms that the little band possessed to denote this railway had not yet been revealed to me. In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless, her nostrils closed, allowing only the corners of her lips to move. The result of this was a drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial descent, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose. This enunciation which, as it happened, soon disappeared when she knew people better, giving place to a natural girlish tone, might have been thought unpleasant. But it was peculiar to herself, and delighted me. Whenever I had gone for several days without seeing her, I would refresh my spirit by repeating to myself: “We don’t ever see you playing golf,” with the nasal intonation in which she had uttered the words, point blank, without moving a muscle of her face. And I thought then that there could be no one in the world so desirable.
We formed that morning one of those couples who dotted the ‘front’ here and there with their conjunction, their stopping together for time enough just to exchange a few words before breaking apart, each to resume separately his or her divergent stroll. I seized the opportunity, while she stood still, to look again and discover once and for all where exactly the little mole was placed. Then, just as a phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the sonata, and which my recollection allowed to wander from the andante to the finale, until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was able to find it, and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the scherzo, so this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek, now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her nose. In the same way, too, do we come with amazement upon lines that we know by heart in a poem in which we never dreamed that they were to be found.
At that moment, as if in order that against the sea there might multiply in freedom, in the variety of its forms, all the rich decorative whole which was the lovely unfolding of the train of maidens, at once golden and rosy, baked by sun and wind, Albertine’s friends, with their shapely limbs, their supple figures, but so different one from another, came into sight in a cluster that expanded as it approached, advancing towards us, but keeping closer to the sea, along a parallel line. I asked Albertine’s permission to walk for a little way with her. Unfortunately, all she did was to wave her hand to them in greeting. “But your friends will be disappointed if you don’t go with them,” I hinted, hoping that we might all walk together. A young man with regular features, carrying a bag of golf-clubs, sauntered up to us. It was the baccarat-player, whose fast ways so enraged the chief magistrate’s wife. In a frigid, impassive tone, which he evidently regarded as an indication of the highest refinement, he bade Albertine good day. “Been playing golf, Octave?” she asked. “How did the game go? Were you in form?” “Oh, it’s too sickening; I can’t play for nuts,” he replied. “Was Andrée playing?” “Yes, she went round in seventy-seven.” “Why, that’s a record!” “I went round in eighty-two yesterday.” He was the son of an immensely rich manufacturer who was to take an important part in the organisation of the coming World’s Fair. I was struck by the extreme degree to which, in this young man and in the other by no means numerous male friends of the band of girls, the knowledge of everything that pertained to clothes and how to wear them, cigars, English drinks, horses, a knowledge which he possessed in its minutest details with a haughty infallibility that approached the reticent modesty of the true expert, had been developed in complete isolation, unaccompanied by the least trace of any intellectual culture. He had no hesitation as to the right time and place for dinner-jacket or pyjamas, but neither had he any suspicion of the circumstances in which one might or might not employ this or that word, or even of the simplest rules of grammar. This disparity between the two forms of culture must have existed also in his father, the President of the Syndicate that ‘ran’ Balbec, for, in an open letter to the electors which he had recently had posted on all the walls, he announced: “I desired to see the Mayor, to speak to him of the matter; he would not listen to my righteous plaint.” Octave, at the Casino, took prizes in all the dancing competitions, for bostons, tangos and what-not, an accomplishment that would entitle him, if he chose, to make a fine marriage in that seaside society where it is not figuratively but in sober earnest that the young women ‘marry their dancing-partners.’ He lighted a cigar with a “D’you mind?” to Albertine, as one who asks permission to finish, while going on talking, an urgent piece of work. For he was one of those people who can never be ‘doing nothing,’ although there was nothing, for that matter, that he could ever be said to do. And as complete inactivity has the same effect on us, in the end, as prolonged overwork, and on the character as much as on the life of body and muscles, the unimpaired nullity of intellect that was enshrined behind Octave’s meditative brow had ended by giving him, despite his air of unruffled calm, ineffectual longings to think which kept him awake at night, for all the world like an overwrought philosopher.
Supposing that if I knew their male friends I should have more opportunities of seeing the girls, I had been on the point of asking for an introduction to Octave. I told Albertine this, as soon as he had left us, still muttering, “I couldn’t play for nuts!” I thought I would thus put into her head the idea of doing it next time. “But I can’t,” she cried, “introduce you to a tame cat like that. This place simply swarms with them. But what on earth would they have to say to you? That one plays golf quite well, and that’s all there is to it. I know what I’m talking about; you’d find he wasn’t at all your sort.” “Your friends will be cross with you if you desert them like this,” I repeated, hoping that she would then suggest my joining the party. “Oh, no, they don’t want me.” We ran into Bloch, who directed at me a subtle, insinuating smile, and, embarrassed by the presence of Albertine, whom he did not know, or, rather, knew ‘without knowing’ her, bent his head with a stiff, almost irritated jerk. “What’s he called, that Ostrogoth?” Albertine asked. “I can’t think why he should bow to me; he doesn’t know me. And I didn’t bow to him, either.” I had no time to explain to her, for, bearing straight down upon us, “Excuse me,” he began, “for interrupting you, but I must tell you that I am going to Don-cières to-morrow. I cannot put it off any longer without discourtesy; indeed, I ask myself, what must de Saint-Loup-en-Bray think of me. I just came to let you know that I shall take the two o’clock train. At your service.” But I thought now only of seeing Albertine again, and of trying to get to know her friends, and Doncières, since they were not going there, and my going would bring me back too late to see them still on the beach, seemed to me to be situated at the other end of the world. I told Bloch that it was impossible. “Oh, very well, I shall go alone. In the fatuous words of Master Arouet, I shall say to Saint-Loup, to beguile his clericalism:
‘My duty stands alone, by his in no way bound;
Though he should choose to fail, yet faithful I’ll be found.’”
“I admit he’s not a bad looking boy,” was Albertine’s comment, “but he makes me feel quite sick.” I had never thought that Bloch might be ‘not a bad looking boy’; and yet, when one came to think of it, so he was. With his rather prominent brow, very aquiline nose, and his air of extreme cleverness and of being convinced of his cleverness, he had a pleasing face. But he could not succeed in pleasing Albertine. This was perhaps due, to some extent, to her own disadvantages, the harshness, the want of feeling of the little band, its rudeness towards everything that was not itself. And later on, when I introduced them, Albertine’s antipathy for him grew no less. Bloch belonged to a section of society in which, between the free and easy customs of the ‘smart set’ and the regard for good manners which a man is supposed to shew who ‘does not soil his hands,’ a sort of special compromise has been reached which differs from the manners of the world and is nevertheless a peculiarly unpleasant form of worldliness. When he was introduced to anyone he would bow with a sceptical smile, and at the same time with an exaggerated show of respect, and, if it was to a man, would say: “Pleased to meet you, sir,” in a voice which ridiculed the words that it was uttering, though with a consciousness of belonging to some one who was no fool. Having sacrificed this first moment to a custom which he at once followed and derided (just as on the first of January he would greet