In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [239]
But it was perhaps yet another, the one with geranium cheeks and green eyes, whom I should have liked most to know. And yet, whichever of them it might be, on any given day, that I preferred to see, the others, without her, were sufficient to excite my desire which, concentrated now chiefly on one, now on another, continued—as, on the first day, my confused vision had done—to combine and blend them, to make of them the little world apart, animated by a life in common, which indeed they doubtless imagined themselves to form; and in becoming a friend of one of them I should have penetrated—like a cultivated pagan or a meticulous Christian going among barbarians—a youthful society in which thoughtlessness, health, sensual pleasure, cruelty, unintellectuality and joy held sway.
My grandmother, whom I had told of my meeting with Elstir and who rejoiced at the thought of all the intellectual profit that I might derive from his friendship, considered it absurd and none too polite of me not to have yet gone to pay him a visit. But I could think only of the little band, and being uncertain of the hour at which the girls would be passing along the front, I dared not absent myself. My grandmother was astonished, too, at the elegance of my attire, for I had suddenly remembered suits which had been lying all this time at the bottom of my trunk. I put on a different one every day, and had even written to Paris ordering new hats and new ties.
It adds a great charm to life in a watering-place like Balbec if the face of a pretty girl, a vendor of shells, cakes or flowers, painted in vivid colours in our mind, is regularly, from early morning, the purpose of each of those leisured, luminous days which we spend on the beach. They become then, and for that reason, albeit idle, as alert as working-days, pointed, magnetised, raised slightly to meet an approaching moment, that in which, while we purchase shortbread, roses, ammonites, we will delight in seeing, on a feminine face, colours displayed as purely as on a flower. But at least one can speak to these young vendors, and this dispenses one from having to construct with one’s imagination those aspects which a mere visual perception fails to provide, and to re-create their life, magnifying its charm, as in front of a portrait; moreover, precisely because one speaks to them, one can learn where and at what time it will be possible to see them again. Now I had none of these advantages when it came to the little band. Since their habits were unknown to me, when on certain days I failed to catch a glimpse of them, not knowing the cause of their absence I sought to discover whether it was something fixed and regular, if they were to be seen only every other day, or in certain kinds of weather, or if there were days on which they were not to be seen at all. I imagined myself already friends with them, and saying: “But you weren’t there the other day?” “Weren’t we? Oh, no, of course not; it was a Saturday. On Saturdays we don’t ever come, because . . .” If only it were simply a matter of knowing that on black Saturday it was useless to torment oneself, that one might range the beach from end to end, sit down outside the pastry-cook’s and pretend to be nibbling an éclair, poke into the curio shop, wait for bathing time, the concert, high tide, sunset, night, all without