“We don’t ever see you playing golf”
From Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 2: Within a Budding Grove
Dear Readers,
Every Sunday, A Page of Proust offers you an extract from À la recherche du temps perdu that everyone, connoisseur or not, can appreciate.
My aim is to sculpt and share ideal Pages of Proust, ones that will make everyone want to read or re-read Proust.
To receive the pages in your mailbox, please enter your address here (you can always unsubscribe at the end of each email):
The young narrator finds it difficult to recognise Albertine when he meets her, for she always seems different from what he remembers. If he had enjoyed imagining her as insolent as the other girls of the "little band", he was surprised and disappointed by her good manners at the painter Elstir's house. Manners that seem to have disappeared when the narrator meets her again. This time he noticed with delight her casual way of speaking and naming the little local train of Balbec in many ways:
[…] one morning when it had been raining and was almost cold, I was accosted on the ‘front’ by a girl wearing a close-fitting toque and carrying a muff, so different from the girl whom I had met at Elstir’s party that to recognise in her the same person seemed an operation beyond the power of the human mind; mine was, nevertheless, successful in performing it, but after a momentary surprise which did not, I think, escape Albertine’s notice. On the other hand, when I instinctively recalled the good breeding which had so impressed me before, she filled me with a converse astonishment by her rude tone and manners typical of the ‘little band.’ […] “What weather!” she began. “Really the perpetual summer of Balbec is all stuff and nonsense. You don’t go in for anything special here, do you? We don’t ever see you playing golf, or dancing at the Casino. You don’t ride, either. You must be bored stiff. […] I can see you’re not like me; I simply adore all sports. You weren’t at the Sogne races! We went in the ‘tram,’ and I can quite believe you don’t see the fun of going in an old ‘tin-pot’ like that. It took us two whole hours! I could have gone there and back three times on my bike.” I, who had been lost in admiration of Saint-Loup when he, in the most natural manner in the world, called the little local train the ‘crawler,’ because of the ceaseless windings of its line, was positively alarmed by the glibness with which Albertine spoke of the ‘tram,’ and called it a ‘tin-pot.’ I could feel her mastery of a form of speech in which I was afraid of her detecting and scorning my inferiority. And yet the full wealth of the synonyms that the little band possessed to denote this railway had not yet been revealed to me. In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless, her nostrils closed, allowing only the corners of her lips to move. The result of this was a drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial descent, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose. This enunciation which, as it happened, soon disappeared when she knew people better, giving place to a natural girlish tone, might have been thought unpleasant. But it was peculiar to herself, and delighted me. Whenever I had gone for several days without seeing her, I would refresh my spirit by repeating to myself: “We don’t ever see you playing golf,” with the nasal intonation in which she had uttered the words, point blank, without moving a muscle of her face. And I thought then that there could be no one in the world so desirable. 📖