In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [70]
At length she wrote to ask whether he would consent to forgive her. As soon as he realised that a definite rupture had been avoided he saw all the disadvantages of a reconciliation. Besides, he had already begun to suffer less acutely, and had almost accepted a grief of which, in a few months perhaps, he would have to suffer the sharp bite again if their liaison were to be resumed. He did not hesitate for long. And perhaps he hesitated only because he was now certain of being able to recover his mistress, of being able to do so and therefore of doing so. However, she asked him, so that she might have time to recover her equanimity, not to come to Paris at the New Year. And he did not have the heart to go to Paris without seeing her. On the other hand, she had declared her willingness to go abroad with him, but for that he would need to make a formal application for leave, which Captain de Borodino was unwilling to grant.
“I’m sorry about it because of our visit to my aunt, which will have to be put off. I dare say I shall be in Paris at Easter.”
“We shan’t be able to call on Mme de Guermantes then, because I shall have gone to Balbec. But, really, it doesn’t matter in the least, I assure you.”
“To Balbec? But you didn’t go there till August.”
“I know, but next year I’m being sent there earlier, for my health.”
His main fear was that I might form a bad impression of his mistress after what he had told me. “She is violent simply because she’s too frank, too headstrong in her feelings. But she’s a sublime creature. You can’t imagine the poetic delicacy there is in her. She goes every year to spend All Souls’ Day at Bruges. Rather good, don’t you think? If you ever meet her you’ll see what I mean: she has a sort of greatness . . .” And, as he was infected with certain of the linguistic mannerisms current in the literary circles in which the lady moved: “There’s something astral about her, in fact something vatic. You know what I mean, the poet merging into the priest.”
I searched all through dinner for a pretext which would enable Saint-Loup to ask his aunt to see me without my having to wait until he came to Paris. Such a pretext was finally furnished me by the desire I cherished to see some more pictures by Elstir, the famous painter whom Saint-Loup and I had met at Balbec—a pretext behind which there was, moreover, an element of truth, for if, on my visits to Elstir, I had asked of his painting that it should lead me to the understanding and love of things better than itself, a real thaw, an authentic square in a country town, live women on a beach (at most I would have commissioned from him portraits of realities I had not been able to fathom, such as a hedge of hawthorns, not so much that it might perpetuate their beauty for me as that it might reveal that beauty to me), now, on the contrary, it was the originality, the seductive attraction of those paintings that aroused my desire, and what I wanted above all else was to look at other pictures by Elstir.
It seemed to me, moreover, that the least of his pictures were something quite different from the masterpieces even of greater painters than himself. His work was like a realm apart, with impenetrable frontiers, peerless in substance. Eagerly collecting the infrequent periodicals in which articles on him and his work had appeared, I had learned that it was only recently that he had begun to paint landscape and still life, and that he had started with mythological subjects (I had seen photographs of two of these in his studio), and had then been for long under the influence of Japanese art.
Several of the works most characteristic of his various manners were scattered about the provinces. A certain house at Les Andelys, in which there was one of his finest landscapes, seemed to me as precious, gave me as keen a desire to go there, as might a village near Chartres among whose millstone walls was enshrined