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By Root 1432 0

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s as profound as the difference between a statue from Rheims Cathedral and one from Saint-Augustin. By the way, talking of cathedrals,” he went on, addressing himself exclusively to me, because what he was saying referred to an earlier conversation in which the girls had not taken part, and which for that matter would in no way have interested them, “I spoke to you the other day of Balbec church as a great cliff, a huge breakwater built of the stone of the country, but conversely,” he went on, showing me a water-colour, “look at these cliffs (it’s a sketch I did near here, at the Creuniers); don’t those rocks, so powerfully and delicately modelled, remind you of a cathedral?”

And indeed one would have taken them for soaring red arches. But, painted on a scorching hot day, they seemed to have been reduced to dust, volatilised by the heat which had drunk up half the sea so that it had almost been distilled, over the whole surface of the picture, into a gaseous state. On this day when the sunlight had, so to speak, destroyed reality, reality concentrated itself in certain dusky and transparent creatures which, by contrast, gave a more striking, a closer impression of life: the shadows. Thirsting for coolness, most of them, deserting the torrid sea, had taken shelter at the foot of the rocks, out of reach of the sun; others, swimming gently upon the tide, like dolphins, kept close under the sides of occasional moving boats, whose hulls they extended upon the pale surface of the water with their glossy blue forms. It was perhaps the thirst for coolness which they conveyed that did most to give me the sensation of the heat of that day and made me exclaim how much I regretted not knowing the Creuniers. Albertine and Andrée were positive that I must have been there hundreds of times. If so I had been there without knowing it, never suspecting that one day the sight of these rocks would arouse in me such a thirst for beauty, not perhaps precisely natural beauty such as I had sought hitherto among the cliffs of Balbec, but architectural rather. Especially since, having come here to visit the kingdom of the storms, I had never found, on any of my drives with Mme de Villeparisis, when often we saw it only from afar, painted in a gap between the trees, that the sea was sufficiently real or sufficiently liquid or gave a sufficient impression of hurling its massed forces against the shore, and would have liked to see it lie motionless only under a wintry shroud of fog, I could never have believed that I should now be dreaming of a sea which was no more than a whitish vapour that had lost both consistency and colour. But of such a sea Elstir, like the people who sat musing on board those vessels drowsy with the heat, had felt so intensely the enchantment that he had succeeded in transcribing, in fixing for all time upon his canvas, the imperceptible ebb of the tide, the throb of one happy moment; and at the sight of this magic portrait, one could think of nothing else than to range the wide world, seeking to recapture the vanished day in its instantaneous, slumbering beauty.

So that if, before these visits to Elstir—before I had set eyes on one of his sea-pictures in which a young woman in a dress of white serge or linen, on the deck of a yacht flying the American flag, put into my imagination the spiritual “carbon copy” of a white linen dress and coloured flag which at once bred in me an insatiable desire to see there and then with my own eyes white linen dresses and flags against the sea, as if no such experience had ever yet befallen me—I had always striven, when I stood before the sea, to expel from my field of vision, as well as the bathers in the foreground and the yachts with their too dazzling sails that were like seaside costumes, everything that prevented me from persuading myself that I was contemplating the immemorial ocean which had already been pursuing the same mysterious life before the appearance of the human race, and had grudged even the days of radiant sunshine which seemed to