Day Sixty-One: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 416-427

From "At the hotel in Balbec ..." to "... it might lend some of itself to me, in their eyes."

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Viewing Elstir's work inspires the narrator to musings on Impressionism. (Commenters on Proust often identify Elstir with -- among others -- Monet.)

Those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir's work was made of. One of the metaphors that recurred most often in the sea pictures surrounding him then was one that compares the land to the sea, blurring all distinction between them....

On the beach in the foreground, the painter had accustomed the eye to distinguish no clear fontier, no line of demarcation, between the land and the ocean....

Though the whole painting gave the impression of seaports where the waves advance into the land, where the land almost belongs to the sea, and the population is amphibious, the power of the marine element was everywhere manifest....

Elstir's intent, not to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions that our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been first to discover them....

The effort made by Elstir, when seeing reality, to rid himself of all the ideas the mind contains, to make himself ignorant in order to paint, to forget everything for the sake of his own integrity (since the things one knows are not one's own), was especially admirable in a man whose own mind was exceptionally cultivated.

And so on. 

Elstir also takes it upon himself to correct the narrator's first disappointed experience of the church of Balbec. And he disagrees with Legrandin's comment to the narrator that Brittany was "bad for someone inclined to wistfulness."

"Not at all," he replied. "When the soul of a man inclines to the wistful, he mustn't be kept away from it, he mustn't have it rationed. If you keep your mind off it, your mind will never know what's in it. And you'll be the plaything of all sorts of appearances, because you'll never have managed to understand the nature of them. If a little wistfulness is a dangerous thing, what cures a man of it is not less of it, it's more of it, it's all of it! Whatever dreams one may have, it is important to have a thorough acquaintance with them, so as to have done with suffering from them."

"Wistfulness" is not a word we use much anymore, and in this context I'd like to know what the original word in French was. The dictionary gives, as translations for "wistfulness," nostalgie, mélancolie and tristesse. But "nostalgia" and "melancholy," though the narrator is certainly given to both, seem to narrow the focus to, on the one hand, a longing for the past, and on the other, a generalized feeling of the blues. "Wistfulness" suggests dreaminess and longing, and I think Grieve must have hit on the right word to characterize the narrator. Certainly no one ever put more effort into getting to know his dreams, his longings, his nostalgia and his melancholy than the narrator does. 

And then a surprise: "the young cyclist from the little group of girls came tripping along the lane, with her black hair, and her toque pulled down, her plump cheeks, and her cheerful, rather insistent eyes." She greets Elstir, and he tells the narrator that her name is Albertine Simonet. 

"There's hardly a day," Elstir said, "when one or another of [the gang of girls] doesn't come down the lane and drop in to pay me a little visit," a statement that reduced me to despair -- if I had gone to see him as soon as my grandmother had suggested it, I might well have made the acquaintance of Albertine long since!

Day Sixty: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 404-416

From "It was the day after I had seen ..." to "... whatever does not correspond to that view."

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Sober again, the narrator resumes his obsession with his "group of girls," but also finds time to make more trips with Saint-Loup to Rivebelle, where they notice "a tall man, very well built, with regular features and a beard turning gray." The owner informs them that this is "the famous painter Elstir," whom the narrator remembers as having been mentioned by Swann. The narrator and Saint-Loup send a note to Elstir's table. The artist comes and sits with them, "but he did not pursue any of the allusions I made to Swann. I could easily have believed he did not know him." He invites the narrator to visit his studio in Balbec.

But the narrator's obsession with the group of girls is such that he puts the visit off after, out for a walk with his grandmother, he sees one of the group "hanging her head, like an animal being forced back to the stable," with "an authoritative-looking personage," perhaps her governess. "From that moment on, although until then I had been thinking mostly about the tall one, it was once more the girl with the golf clubs, whom I assumed to be Mlle Simonet, who preoccupied me." He takes every opportunity he can to be on the esplanade or wherever he might catch sight of the girls. 

Then my initial uncertainty about whether I would see them or not on a particular day was aggravated by another, much more serious one, whether I would see them ever again -- for all I knew, they might be leaving for America or returning to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to fall in love with them. ... Loving them all, I was in love with none of them; and yet the possibility of meeting them was the only element of delight in my days.

His grandmother is irritated at his failure to visit Elstir, and eventually he gives in and makes the visit. His mood changes when he sees the works in the artist's studio, "for I glimpsed in them the possibility that I might rise to a poetic awareness, rich in fulfilling thoughts for me, of many forms that I had hitherto never distinguished in reality's composite spectacle."

Day Fifty-Nine: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 391-404

From "An amount of beer, let alone..." to "...rehearsal of the memory of a certain person."

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The narrator gets drunk at Rivebelle and gives us a tipsy view of the dining room with its waiters dashing about, at first seemingly chaotically but then, as he mellows, "turning into something nobler and calmer" with "a soothing harmony." He sees the tables as little planets "as depicted in allegorical paintings from earlier times," or as a "planetary system, designed in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages." There is something in the passage reminiscent of Dickens or Twain when they adopt the Martian view of a familiar setting. 

I felt rather sorry for the diners, because I sensed that for them the round tables were not planets, and that they were unpracticed in the art of of cross-sectioning things so as to rid them of their customary appearance and enable us to see analogies.

But what follows is unmistakably Proustian, an analysis of the effect of music on his intoxicated mind: "each musical phrase, though as individual as a particular woman, limited the secret of its sensual thrills not to a single privileged person, as she would have done -- it offered them to me, it ogled me, it accosted me, it toyed with me in seductively whimsical or vulgar ways, it caressed me, as though I had suddenly become more attractive, powerful, or wealthy.... I felt endowed with a power that seemed to make me almost irresistible."

Moreover, the alcohol liberates him from past and future: "I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards." It makes him reckless: 

In fact, what I was doing was condensing into one evening the unconcern that others dilute in their whole existence: every day they take the needless risk of a sea voyage, a ride in an airplane, a drive in a motorcar, when the person who would be stricken by grief if they were to die sits waiting for them at home, when the book, as yet unrevealed to the world, in which they see the point of their whole life, still lives only within their fragile brain.

For the moment, even the quest for Mlle. Simonet seems "a matter of indifference, since nothing but my present sensation, because of the extraordinary power of it, the euphoria afforded by its slightest varations, and even by the mere continuity of it, had any imporance.... [D]runkenness brings about, for the space of a few hours, subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; all things become mere appearances, and exist only as a function of our sublime selves." 

When he gets back to the hotel, he crashes into a sleep that lasts until the afternoon, and is filled with dreams. "The difficulty of digesting the Rivebelle dinner meant that it was in a more fitful light that I visited, in incoherent succession, the darkened zones of my past life, and that I became a creature for whom supreme happiness would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just had a dream conversation." Awake he remembers a woman he had seen the night before: "the young blonde with the wistful look who had glanced at me at Rivebelle. During the evening at the restaurant, many other women had seemed just as nice, yet she was the one who now stood alone in my memory."

Day Fifty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 380-391

From "I had to go back to the hotel, as Robert..." to "...the waiters who were about to serve us."

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Preparing to go out to dinner at Rivebelle with Saint-Loup, the narrator summons the "lift," who makes small talk as they ascend, giving the narrator some insights into "the working classes of modern times," such as their efforts "to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong." The "lift" (Proust always puts the word in quotation marks) says "tunic" for "uniform" and "remuneration" for "wages," and puzzles the narrator by referring to "the lady that's an employee of yours." The narrator thinks, "'we're not factory-owners -- we don't have employees," before he realizes that the "lady" is Françoise and that "the word 'employee' is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waters in cafés." 

But mostly his mind is on the group of girls he has seen on the esplanade. He had overheard a woman comment, "she's one of the friends of the Simonet girl."

Why I decided, there and then, that the name 'Simonet' must belong to one of the gang of girls, I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation. ... The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes.

When asked if he knows anyone named Simonet, the "lift" says vaguely that "he thought he had 'heard tell of some such a name,'" so the narrator asks him to have a list of the latest arrivals to the hotel sent up to him. He also lets the reader know that "the name of 'the Simonet girl'" was to become important to him "several years later."

In his room, the narrator reflects -- in one of those extended, minutely observed, but seemingly skimmable Proustian passages -- on the view from the window, until it's time to dress for dinner, full of anticipation of seeing again "a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purplose of giving me the chance to follow her out."  Then Aimé arrives with the list of new arrivals and the comment that "there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly." This dates the stay at Balbec to 1897 or 1898, which means that if the narrator is Proust himself, he is at least 26 -- a more advanced age than the reader might expect from his frequent childishness. 

More important for the story, however, is that "not without a little palpitation ... I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family.... I had no idea which of these girls -- or, indeed, whether any of them -- might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup's presence, I was going to try to make her acquantance." This fantasy so delights him that he surprises Saint-Loup when they arrive at Rivebelle by letting the servant take his overcoat despite Saint-Loup's warning that "it's not very warm here." "I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying ... had likewise vanished from my mind."

From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.