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By Root 1511 0

by the landlord, though he was to reach the height of his fame within a very few years. But he had been one of the first to frequent this restaurant when it was still only a sort of farmhouse, and had brought to it a whole colony of artists (who had all, as it happened, migrated elsewhere as soon as the farm, where they used to feed in the open air under a lean-to roof, had become a fashionable centre; Elstir himself had returned to Rivebelle this evening on account of the temporary absence of his wife, with whom he lived not far away). But great talent, even when its existence is not yet recognised, will inevitably provoke a few quirks of admiration, such as the landlord had managed to detect in the questions asked by more than one English lady visitor, athirst for information as to the life led by Elstir, or in the number of letters that he received from abroad. Then the landlord had further remarked that Elstir did not like to be disturbed when he was working, that he would rise in the middle of the night and take a young model down to the sea-shore to pose for him, nude, if the moon was shining, and had told himself that so much labour was not in vain, nor the admiration of the tourist unjustified, when he had recognised in one of Elstir’s pictures a wooden cross which stood by the roadside on the way into Rivebelle.

“That’s it all right,” he would repeat with stupefaction, “there are all the four beams! Oh, he does take a lot of trouble!”

And he did not know whether a little Sunrise over the Sea which Elstir had given him might not be worth a fortune.

We watched him read our letter, put it in his pocket, finish his dinner, begin to ask for his things, get up to go; and we were so convinced that we had offended him by our overture that we would now have hoped (as keenly as at first we had dreaded) to make our escape without his noticing us. What did not cross our minds for a single instant was a consideration which should have seemed to us of cardinal importance, namely that our enthusiasm for Elstir, on the sincerity of which we would not have allowed the least doubt to be cast, which we could indeed have confirmed with the evidence of our bated breath, 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; our feeling might have as its object the hollow idea of a “great artist,” but not a body of work which was unknown to us. It was, at most, admiration in the abstract, the nervous envelope, the sentimental framework of an admiration without content, that is to say a thing as indissolubly attached to boyhood as are certain organs which no longer exist in the adult man; we were still boys. Elstir meanwhile was approaching the door when suddenly he turned and came towards us. I was overcome by a delicious thrill of terror such as I could not have felt a few years later, because, as age diminishes the capacity, familiarity with the world meanwhile destroys in us any inclination to provoke such strange encounters, to feel that kind of emotion.

In the course of the few words that Elstir came to say to us, sitting down at our table, he never replied to me on the several occasions on which I spoke to him of Swann. I began to think that he did not know him. He nevertheless asked me to come and see him at his Balbec studio, an invitation which he did not extend to Saint-Loup, and which I had earned, as I might not, perhaps, from Swann’s recommendation had Elstir been a friend of his (for the part played by disinterested motives is greater than we are inclined to think in people’s lives), by a few words which made him think that I was devoted to the arts. He lavished on me a friendliness which was as far above that of Saint-Loup as the latter’s was above the affability of a shopkeeper. Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness of a great nobleman, however charming it may be, seems like play-acting, like simulation. Saint-Loup sought to please; Elstir loved to give, to give himself.