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By Root 1543 0

He knows that he has created his masterpieces out of effects of attenuated light, out of the action of remorse upon consciousness of guilt, out of women posed beneath trees or half-immersed in water, like statues. A day will come when, owing to the erosion of his brain, he will no longer have the strength, faced with those materials which his genius was wont to use, to make the intellectual effort which alone can produce his work, and yet will continue to seek them out, happy to be near them because of the spiritual pleasure, the allurement to work, that they arouse in him; and, surrounding them besides with an aura of superstition as if they were superior to all things else, as if there dwelt in them already a great part of the work of art which they might be said to carry within them ready-made, he will confine himself to the company, to the adoration of his models. He will hold endless conversations with the repentant criminals whose remorse and regeneration once formed the subject of his novels; he will buy a house in a countryside where mists attenuate the light, he will spend long hours looking at women bathing; he will collect sumptuous stuffs. And thus the beauty of life, an expression somehow devoid of meaning, a stage this side of art at which I had seen Swann come to rest, was that also which, by a slackening of creative ardour, idolatry of the forms which had inspired it, a tendency to take the line of least resistance, must gradually undermine an Elstir’s progress.

At last he had applied the final brush-stroke to his flowers. I sacrificed a minute to look at them. There was no merit in my doing so, for I knew that there was no chance now of our finding the girls on the beach; and yet, had I believed them to be still there, and that these wasted moments would make me miss them, I should have stopped to look none the less, for I should have told myself that Elstir was more interested in his flowers than in my meeting with the girls. My grandmother’s nature, a nature that was the exact opposite of my complete egoism, was nevertheless reflected in certain aspects of my own. In circumstances in which someone to whom I was indifferent, for whom I had always feigned affection or respect, ran the risk merely of some unpleasantness whereas I was in real danger, I could not have done otherwise than commiserate with him on his vexation as though it had been something important, and treat my own danger as nothing, because I would feel that these were the proportions in which he must see things. To be quite accurate, I would go even further and not only not complain of the danger in which I myself stood but go half-way to meet it, and with respect to one that threatened other people, try, on the contrary, at the risk of being endangered myself, to avert it from them. The reasons for this are several, none of them to my credit. One is that if, as long as I was simply applying my reason to the matter, I felt that I cherished life above all else, whenever in the course of my existence I have found myself obsessed by mental worry or merely by nervous anxieties, sometimes so puerile that I would not dare to reveal them, if an unforeseen circumstance then arose, involving for me the risk of being killed, this new preoccupation was so trivial in comparison with the others that I welcomed it with a sense of relief, almost of joy. Thus I find that I have experienced, although the least courageous of men, a feeling which has always seemed to me, in my reasoning moods, so foreign to my nature, so inconceivable: the intoxication of danger. But even if, when a danger arose, however mortal, I were going through an entirely calm and happy phase, I could not, were I with another person, refrain from sheltering him behind me and choosing for myself the post of danger. When a sufficient number of experiences had taught me that I invariably acted and enjoyed acting thus, I discovered—and was deeply ashamed by the discovery—that it was because, contrary to what I had always believed and asserted, I was extremely sensitive to the opinion of