In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [238]
And no doubt at first he had thought with pleasure, even in his solitude, that, thanks to his work, he was addressing from a distance, was imbuing with a loftier idea of himself, those who had misunderstood or offended him. Perhaps, in those days, he lived alone not from indifference but from love of his fellows, and, just as I had renounced Gilberte in order to appear to her again one day in more attractive colours, dedicated his work to certain people as a sort of new approach to them whereby, without actually seeing him, they would be brought to love him, admire him, talk about him; a renunciation is not always total from the start, when we decide upon it in our original frame of mind and before it has reacted upon us, whether it be the renunciation of an invalid, a monk, an artist or a hero. But if he had wished to produce with certain people in his mind, in producing he had lived for himself, remote from society, to which he had become indifferent; the practice of solitude had given him a love for it, as happens with every big thing which we have begun by fearing, because we know it to be incompatible with smaller things which we prize and which it does not so much deprive us of as detach us from. Before we experience it, our whole preoccupation is to know to what extent we can reconcile it with certain pleasures which cease to be pleasures as soon as we have experienced it.
Elstir did not stay talking to us for long. I made up my mind that I would go to his studio during the next few days, but on the following afternoon, after I had accompanied my grandmother to the far end of the seafront, near the cliffs of Canapville, on the way back, at the corner of one of the little streets which ran down at right angles to the beach, we passed a girl who, hanging her head like an animal that is being driven reluctant to its stall, and carrying golf-clubs, was walking in front of an authoritarian-looking person, in all probability her or one of her friends’ “Miss,” who suggested a portrait of Jeffreys by Hogarth, with a face as red as if her favourite beverage were gin rather than tea, on which a dried smear of tobacco at the corner of her mouth prolonged the curve of a moustache that was grizzled but abundant. The girl who preceded her resembled the member of the little band who, beneath a black polo-cap, had shown in an in expressive chubby face a pair of laughing eyes. However, though this one had also a black polo-cap, she struck me as being even prettier than the other; the line of her nose was straighter, the curve of the nostrils fuller and more fleshy. Besides, the other had seemed a proud, pale girl, this one a child well-disciplined and of rosy complexion. And yet, since she was pushing a bicycle just like the other’s, and was wearing the same kid gloves, I concluded that the differences arose perhaps from the angle and the circumstances in which I now saw her, for it was hardly likely that there could be at Balbec a second girl with a face that was on the whole so similar and combining the same details in her accoutrement. She flung a rapid glance in my direction. During the next few days, when I saw the little band again on the beach, and indeed long afterwards when I knew all the girls who composed it, I could never be absolutely certain that any of them—even the one who resembled her most, the girl with the bicycle—was indeed the one that I had seen that evening at the corner of the street at the end of the esplanade, a girl who was scarcely but still just perceptibly different from the one I had noticed in the procession.
From that moment, whereas for the last few days my mind had been occupied chiefly by the tall one, it was the one with the golf-clubs,