In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [247]
Elstir and I had meanwhile been walking towards the end of the studio, and had reached the window that looked across the garden on to a narrow side-street that was almost a country lane. We had gone there to breathe the cooler air of the late afternoon. I supposed myself to be nowhere near the girls of the little band, and it was only by sacrificing for once the hope of seeing them that I had yielded to my grandmother’s entreaties and had gone to see Elstir. For we do not know the whereabouts of what we are seeking, and often we avoid for a long time the place to which, for quite different reasons, everyone has been asking us to go; but we never suspect that we shall there see the very person of whom we are thinking. I looked out vaguely over this rustic path which passed quite close to the studio but did not belong to Elstir. Suddenly there appeared on it, coming towards us at a rapid pace, the young cyclist of the little band, with her polocap pulled down over her dark hair towards her plump cheeks, her eyes gay and slightly challenging; and on that auspicious path, miraculously filled with the promise of delights, I saw her, beneath the trees, address to Elstir the smiling greeting of a friend, a rainbow that bridged for me the gulf between our terraqueous world and regions which I had hitherto regarded as inaccessible. She even came up to shake hands with the painter, though without stopping, and I saw that she had a tiny beauty spot on her chin. “Do you know that girl, Monsieur?” I asked Elstir, realising that he might introduce me to her, invite her to his house. And this peaceful studio with its rural horizon was at once filled with a surfeit of delight such as a child might feel in a house where he was already happily playing when he learned that, in addition, out of that bounteousness which enables lovely things and noble hosts to increase their gifts beyond all measure, a sumptuous meal was being prepared for him. Elstir told me that she was called Albertine Simonet, and gave me the names also of her friends, whom I described to him with sufficient accuracy for him to identify them almost without hesitation. I had made a mistake with regard to their social position, but not the mistake that I usually made at Balbec. I was always ready to take the sons of shopkeepers for princes when they appeared on horseback. This time I had placed in a shady milieu the daughters of middle-class people, extremely rich, belonging to the world of trade and industry. It was the class which, at first sight, interested me least, since it held for me none of the mystery either of the people or of a society such as that of the Guermantes. And no doubt if a preliminary glamour which they would never now lose had not been conferred on them, in my dazzled eyes, by the glaring vacuity of seaside life, I should perhaps not have succeeded in resisting and overcoming the idea that they were the daughters of prosperous merchants. I could not help marvelling at what a wonderful workshop the French middle class was for sculpture of the most varied kind. What unexpected types, what richness of invention in the character of the faces, what firmness, what freshness, what simplicity in the features! The shrewd old burghers from whom these Dianas and these nymphs had sprung seemed to me to have been the greatest of statuaries. Scarcely had I had time to register the social metamorphosis of the little band—for these discoveries of a mistake, these modifications of the notion one has of a person, have the instantaneousness of a chemical reaction—than the idea had already established itself behind the guttersnipe ways of these girls, whom I had taken for the mistresses of racing cyclists or prize-fighters, that they might easily be connected