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By Root 1800 0

his original impression. I had already observed at Balbec that, side by side with that childlike sincerity of his face, the skin of which by its transparency made visible the sudden surge of his emotions, his body had been admirably trained to perform a certain number of well-bred dissimulations, and that, like a consummate actor, he could, in his regimental and in his social life, play alternately quite different roles. In one of his roles he loved me tenderly, and behaved towards me almost as if he was my brother; my brother he had been, and was now again, but for a moment that day he had been another person who did not know me and who, holding the reins, his monocle screwed into his eye, without a look or a smile had lifted his disengaged hand to the peak of his cap to give me a correct military salute!

The stage sets, still in their place, among which I was passing, seen thus at close range and deprived of those effects of lighting and distance on which the eminent artist whose brush had painted them had calculated, were a depressing sight, and Rachel, when I came near her, was subjected to a no less destructive influence. The curves of her charming nostrils had remained in the perspective between auditorium and stage, like the relief of the scenery. It was no longer she: I recognised her only by her eyes, in which her identity had taken refuge. The form, the radiance of this young star, so brilliant a moment ago, had vanished. On the other hand—as though we were to look more closely at the moon so that it ceased to present the appearance of a disc of pink and gold—on this face that had seemed so smooth a surface I could now distinguish only protuberances, blemishes, hollows.

Yet in spite of the incoherence into which the woman’s face and likewise the painted backdrops dissolved when seen from close to, I was happy to be there, to stroll among the sets, in surroundings which in the past my love of nature would have made me find tiresome and artificial, but to which Goethe’s portrayal of them in Wilhelm Meister had given a certain beauty in my eyes. And I was delighted to observe, in the thick of a crowd of journalists or men of fashion, admirers of the actresses, who were greeting one another, talking, smoking, as though at a party in town, a young man in a black velvet cap and hortensia-coloured skirt, his cheeks chalked in red like a page from a Watteau album, who with smiling lips and eyes raised to the ceiling, describing graceful patterns with the palms of his hands and springing lightly into the air, seemed so entirely of another species from the sensible people in everyday clothes in the midst of whom he was pursuing like a madman the course of his ecstatic dream, so alien to the preoccupations of their life, so anterior to the habits of their civilisation, so enfranchised from the laws of nature, that it was as restful and refreshing a spectacle as watching a butterfly straying through a crowd to follow with one’s eyes, between the flats, the natural arabesques traced by his winged, capricious, painted curvetings. But at that moment Saint-Loup conceived the notion that his mistress was paying undue attention to this dancer, who was now engaged in a final rehearsal of a dance-figure for the ballet performance in which he was about to appear, and his face darkened.

“You might look the other way,” he said to her sombrely. “You know that those dancer-fellows are not worth the rope which one hopes they’ll fall off and break their necks, and they’re the sort of people who go about afterwards boasting that you’ve taken notice of them. Besides, you know very well you’ve been told to go to your dressing-room and change. You’ll be missing your call again.”

A group of men—journalists—noticing the look of fury on Saint-Loup’s face, came nearer, amused, to listen to what was being said. And as the stage-hands had just set up some scenery on our other side we were forced into close contact with them.

“Oh, but I know him; he’s a friend of mine,” cried Saint-Loup’s mistress, her eyes still fixed on the dancer. “Look how