In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [285]
us and on to whom we are always so ready to unload the burden of taking thought—I strove to find a beauty very different from that which I pursued in silence when I was really alone, but one that would enhance the merit not only of Robert, but of myself and of my life. In the life which such a friend provided for me, I seemed to myself to be cosily preserved from solitude, nobly desirous of sacrificing myself for him, in short incapable of realising myself. With the girls, on the other hand, if the pleasure which I enjoyed was selfish, at least it was not based on the lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone and prevents us from admitting that, when we chat, it is no longer we who speak, that we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people and not of a self that differs from them. The words exchanged between the girls of the little band and myself were of little interest; they were, moreover, few, broken by long spells of silence on my part. This did not prevent me from taking as much pleasure in listening to them as in looking at them, in discovering in the voice of each one of them a brightly coloured picture. It was with delight that I listened to their pipings. Loving helps us to discern, to discriminate. The bird-lover in a wood at once distinguishes the twittering of the different species, which to ordinary people sound the same. The devotee of girls knows that human voices vary even more. Each one possesses more notes than the richest instrument of music. And the combinations in which it groups those notes are as inexhaustible as the infinite variety of personalities. When I talked with any one of my young friends I was conscious that the original, the unique portrait of her individuality had been skilfully traced, tyrannically imposed on my mind as much by the inflexions of her voice as by those of her face, and that they were two separate spectacles which expressed, each on its own plane, the same singular reality. No doubt the lines of the voice, like those of the face, were not yet finally fixed; the voice had still to break, as the face to change. Just as infants have a gland the secretion of which enables them to digest milk, a gland which is not found in adults, so there were in the twitterings of these girls notes which women’s voices no longer contain. And on this more varied instrument they played with their lips, with all the application and the ardour of Bellini’s little angel musicians, qualities which also are an exclusive appanage of youth. Later on these girls would lose that note of enthusiastic conviction which gave a charm to their simplest utterances, whether it were Albertine who, in a tone of authority, repeated puns to which the younger ones listened with admiration, until a paroxysm of giggles took hold of them with the irresistible violence of a sneezing fit, or Andrée who spoke of their school work, even more childish seemingly than the games they played, with an essentially puerile gravity; and their words varied in tone, like the strophes of antiquity when poetry, still hardly differentiated from music, was declaimed on different notes. In spite of everything, the voices of these girls already gave a quite clear indication of the attitude that each of these young people had adopted towards life, an attitude so individual that it would be speaking in far too general terms to say of one: “She treats everything as a joke,” of another: “She jumps from assertion to assertion,” of a third: “She lives in a state of expectant hesitancy.” The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph, has arrested us in an accustomed movement. Similarly, our intonation embodies our philosophy of life, what a person invariably says to himself about things. No doubt these characteristics did not belong only to these girls. They were those of their parents. The individual is steeped in something more general than himself. By this reckoning, our parents