In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [267]
“What weather!” she began. “Really the perpetual summer of Balbec is all stuff and nonsense. Don’t you do anything here? We never see you playing golf, or dancing at the Casino. You don’t ride either. You must be bored stiff. You don’t find it too deadly, idling about on the beach all day? Ah, so you like basking in the sun like a lizard? You must have plenty of time on your hands. I can see you’re not like me; I simply adore all sports. You weren’t at the Sogne races? We went in the ‘tram,’ and I can quite understand that you wouldn’t see any fun in going in an old rattletrap like that. It took us two whole hours! I could have gone there and back three times on my bike.”
I who had admired Saint-Loup when, in the most natural manner in the world, he had called the little local train the “crawler,” because of the ceaseless windings of its line, was daunted by the glibness with which Albertine spoke of it as the “tram” and the “rattletrap.” I could sense her mastery of a mode of nomenclature in which I was afraid of her detecting and despising my inferiority. And the full wealth of the synonyms that the little band possessed to designate this railway had not yet been revealed to me. In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless and her nostrils pinched, and scarcely moved her lips. The result of this was a drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial heredity, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose. This enunciation which, as it happened, soon disappeared when she knew people better, giving place to a natural girlish tone, might have been thought unpleasant. But to me it was peculiarly delightful. Whenever I had gone for several days without seeing her, I would refresh my spirit by repeating to myself: “We don’t ever see you playing golf,” with the nasal intonation in which she had uttered the words, point blank, without moving a muscle of her face. And I thought then that there was no one in the world so desirable.
We formed, that morning, one of those couples who dotted the front here and there with their conjunction, their stopping together just long enough to exchange a few words before breaking apart, each to resume separately his or her divergent stroll. I took advantage of this immobility to look again and discover once and for all where exactly the little mole was placed. Then, just as a phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the sonata, and which my recollection allowed to wander from the andante to the finale, until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was able to find it and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the scherzo, so this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek, now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her nose. In the same way, too, we are sometimes amazed to come upon lines that we know by heart in a play in which we never dreamed that they were to be found.
At that moment, as if in order that the rich decorative ensemble formed by the lovely train of maidens, at once pink and golden, baked by the sun and wind, might freely proliferate before the sea in all the variety of its forms, Albertine’s friends, with their shapely limbs, their supple figures, but so different one from another, came into sight in a cluster that spread out as it advanced in our direction, but closer to the sea, in a parallel line. I asked Albertine’s permission to walk for a little way with her. Unfortunately, all she did was to wave her hand to them in greeting. “But your friends will be disappointed if you don’t go with them,” I hinted, hoping that we might all walk together.
A young man with regular features, carrying a bag of golf-clubs, sauntered up to us. It was the baccarat-player whose fast ways so enraged the senior judge’s wife. In a frigid, impassive tone, which he evidently regarded as an indication