In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Read Online Free

the programme of these performances, that it was she who had
decided to shew herself once more to the public in some of her early
creations. She was conscious, then, that certain stage–parts have an
interest which survives the novelty of their first production or the
success of a revival; she regarded them, when interpreted by herself,
as museum pieces which it might be instructive to set before the eyes
of the generation which had admired her in them long ago, or of that
which had never yet seen her in them. In thus advertising, in the
middle of a column of plays intended only to while away an evening,
this Phèdre , a title no longer than any of the rest, nor set in
different type, she added something indescribable, as though a
hostess, introducing you, before you all go in to dinner, to her other
guests, were to mention, casually, amid the string of names which are
the names of guests and nothing more, and without any change of
tone:—"M. Anatole France."
    The doctor who was attending me—the same who had forbidden me to
travel—advised my parents not to let me go to the theatre; I should
only be ill again afterwards, perhaps for weeks, and should in the
long run derive more pain than pleasure from the experience. The fear
of this might have availed to stop me, if what I had anticipated from
such a spectacle had been only a pleasure for which a subsequent pain
could so compensate as to cancel it. But what I demanded from this
performance—just as from the visit to Balbec, the visit to Venice for
which I had so intensely longed—was something quite different from
pleasure; a series of verities pertaining to a world more real than
that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from
me again by any of the trivial incidents—even though it were the
cause of bodily suffering—of my otiose existence. At best, the
pleasure which I was to feel during the performance appeared to me as
the perhaps inevitable form of the perception of these truths; and I
hoped only that the illness which had been forecast for me would not
begin until the play was finished, so that my pleasure should not be
in any way compromised or spoiled. I implored my parents, who, after
the doctor's visit, were no longer inclined to let me go to Phèdre . I
repeated, all day long, to myself, the speech beginning,
    "On dit qu'un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous,——"
    seeking out every intonation that could be put into it, so as to be
able better to measure my surprise at the way which Berma would have
found of uttering the lines. Concealed, like the Holy of Holies,
beneath the veil that screened her from my gaze, behind which I
invested her, every moment, with a fresh aspect, according to which of
the words of Bergotte—in the pamphlet that Gilberte had found for
me—was passing through my mind; "plastic nobility," "Christian
austerity" or "Jansenist pallor," "Princess of Troezen and of Cleves"
or "Mycenean drama," "Delphic symbol," "Solar myth"; that divine
Beauty, whom Berma's acting was to reveal to me, night and day, upon
an altar perpetually illumined, sat enthroned in the sanctuary of my
mind, my mind for which not itself but my stern, my fickle parents
were to decide whether or not it was to enshrine, and for all time,
the perfections of the Deity unveiled, in the same spot where was now
her invisible form. And with my eyes fixed upon that inconceivable
image, I strove from morning to night to overcome the barriers which
my family were putting in my way. But when those had at last fallen,
when my mother—albeit this matinée was actually to coincide with the
meeting of the Commission from which my father had promised to bring
M. de Norpois home to dinner—had said to me, "Very well, we don't
wish you to be unhappy;—if you think that you will enjoy it so very
much, you must go; that's all;" when this day of theatre–going,
hitherto forbidden and unattainable, depended now only upon myself,
then for the first time,