Within A Budding Grove: Seascape, with Frieze of Girls (16th post)

 Seascape, with Frieze of Girls is the title that Scott Moncrieff gave to the third and final part of Within a Budding Grove. For Proust, and later translators, there were only two parts: Madame Swann at Home and Place-Names: The Place. The latter is itself in two parts, and it is this second part of Place-Names: The Place that Scott Moncrieff has chosen to entitle. His sectioning off is understandable because while the whole of Place-Names: The Place is set in Balbec during Marcel's stay at the Grand Hotel, its first half concerns his meeting Mme de Villeparisis, Robert de Saint-Loup and Baron de Charlus, while its second half concerns his meeting the painter Elstir and, through him, Albertine Simonet and her “little band” of girl friends.

Artist: Frank Weston Benson

Robert, who is a sergeant in a cavalry regiment, has had to depart Balbec for his barracks at Doncières. Left by himself, Marcel is hanging about outside the hotel when he sees in the distance, walking towards him “five or six young girls, as different in appearance and manner from all the people whom one was accustomed to see at Balbec as could have been” (p.122 IV Scott Moncrieff, p.846 Kilmartin). Not only are they different from the other promenaders in that they are young, healthy and fit, they are each beautiful in a different way from each other, although at this stage, Marcel is not able to keep their individual images in mind. “And this want, in my vision, of the demarcations which I should presently establish between them sent flooding over the group a wave of harmony, the continuous transfusion of a beauty fluid, collective and mobile” (p.124 IV SM, pp.847-848 TK). Marcel is mesmerised by their distinctiveness in the same way as the young dog in Kafka's Investigations of a Dog is entranced by the group of canine musicians walking towards him on their hind legs.

Meanwhile, while Robert is back visiting Balbec, he and Marcel dine at a restaurant in nearby Rivebelle, where they see a solitary diner at another table staring into the air and, on inquiring, they are informed by the proprietor that it is the famous painter Elstir. They send him a note saying they are great admirers of his work, and then begin to worry that this overture has shocked him. Furthermore, “we did not bear in mind for a single instant a consideration which should, nevertheless, have seemed to us most important, namely that our enthusiasm for Elstir, on the sincerity of which we should not have allowed the least doubt to be cast, which we could indeed have supported with the evidence of our breathing arrested by expectancy, our desire to do no matter what that was difficult or heroic for the great man, was not, as we imagined it to be, admiration, since neither of us had ever seen anything that he had painted” (p.175 IV SM, p.885 TK). Their fears are allayed when, on his way out of the restaurant, Elstir comes across to speak to them and invites Marcel to visit his studio in Balbec.

The next day Marcel sees one of the girls again, but she seems different from before with a rosier complexion, prettier and better-disciplined (p.178 IV SM, p.887 TK). This is one of the common themes, cf Marcel's confused visual memory of Gilberte (see my 6th post here). Another common theme is that of suffering being a necessary, and maybe sufficient, condition for love (see my 8th and 12th posts here and here). Having spotted the little band here and there, Marcel tries to derive from his observations laws that will allow him to forecast, like the ancient Greek astronomers tracking the wandering planets, where they can be seen at certain times. However, the sudden disquieting realisation that they could at any moment leave Balbec “was enough to make me begin to love them” because the possibility of their departure creates “that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love”. Proust suggests the reason for this particular common theme is that there are recurrent features in successive love-affairs, “perhaps everything that formed a distinctive feature of our first love attaches itself to those that come after, by recollection, suggestion, habit, and through the successive periods of our life gives to its different aspects a general character” (p.182 IV SM, p.890 TK).

And there Marcel's love rests – unfocused and pregnant with potential sorrow – until the day he visits Elstir's studio. There, from a window, he sees one of the girls on a lane which runs alongside the garden. “On that auspicious path, miraculously filled with promise of delights, I saw her beneath the trees throw to Elstir the smiling greeting of a friend, a rainbow that bridged the gulf for me between our terraqueous world and regions which I had hitherto regarded as inaccessible” (p.199 IV SM, p.902 TK). Inquiring of Elstir the girl's name, Marcel is informed she is called Albertine Simonet. “And this peaceful studio with its rural horizon was at once filled with a surfeit of delight”. Marcel realises that if he is with Elstir the next time he sees the band, he could get to know them all. To this end, he persuades Elstir to take a walk towards the beach: “he was no longer sufficient in himself, he was now only the necessary intermediary between these girls and me; the distinction which, only a few moments ago, his talent had still given him in my eyes was now worthless save in so far as it might confer a little on me also in the eyes of the little band to whom I should be presented by him” (p.204 IV SM, p.906 TK). This hope of making an impression on a girl by her seeing him with an illustrious person is a rerun of the tactic Marcel used on Mlle Stermaria when in the company of Mme de Villeparisis (see my 14th post here). However, when he and Elstir run across the little band, Marcel repeats his earlier behaviour with Gilberte (and Swann's behaviour with Odette – see my 8th and 12th posts here and here) by feigning indifference and, instead of going to meet them with Elstir, stops to look in the window of a curiosity shop, banking on Elstir calling him across to join them. Elstir, however, talks to the girls and then bids them goodbye – and so once again the ploy backfires and the pretender is punished (pp. 214-216 IV SM, pp.914-915 TK). Marcel is disappointed at not having met the girls, but he then reflects how much closer he is to that goal because Elstir is a friend of theirs, they had seen him “walking in friendly intimacy with the great painter”, and he will help Marcel make their acquaintance. “All this had been a source of pleasure to me, but that pleasure had remained hidden.” Sometimes we fail to heed such a pleasure: “And we should regret that failure, for existence to us is hardly interesting save on the days on which the dust of realities is shot with magic sand, on which some trivial incident of life becomes a spring of romance” (pp. 228-230 IV SM, pp.924-925 TK).

On this rare optimistic note, we leave Marcel and will rejoin him when he is introduced to Albertine.