In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Read Online Free Page A

being no longer troubled by the wish that it
might cease to be impossible, I asked myself if it were desirable, if
there were not other reasons than my parents' prohibition which should
make me abandon my design. In the first place, whereas I had been
detesting them for their cruelty, their consent made them now so dear
to me that the thought of causing them pain stabbed me also with a
pain through which the purpose of life shewed itself as the pursuit
not of truth but of loving–kindness, and life itself seemed good or
evil only as my parents were happy or sad. "I would rather not go, if
it hurts you," I told my mother, who, on the contrary, strove hard to
expel from my mind any lurking fear that she might regret my going,
since that, she said, would spoil the pleasure that I should otherwise
derive from Phèdre , and it was the thought of my pleasure that had
induced my father and her to reverse their earlier decision. But then
this sort of obligation to find a pleasure in the performance seemed
to me very burdensome. Besides, if I returned home ill, should I be
well again in time to be able to go to the Champs–Elysées as soon as
the holidays were over and Gilberte returned? Against all these
arguments I set, so as to decide which course I should take, the idea,
invisible there behind its veil, of the perfections of Berma. I cast
into one pan of the scales "Making Mamma unhappy," "risking not being
able to go on the Champs–Elysées," and the other, "Jansenist pallor,"
"Solar myth," until the words themselves grew dark and clouded in my
mind's vision, ceased to say anything to me, lost all their force; and
gradually my hesitations became so painful that if I had now decided
upon the theatre it would have been only that I might bring them to an
end, and be delivered from them once and for all. It would have been
to fix a term to my sufferings, and no longer in the expectation of an
intellectual benediction, yielding to the attractions of perfection,
that I would let myself be taken, not now to the Wise Goddess, but to
the stern, implacable Divinity, featureless and unnamed, who had been
secretly substituted for her behind the veil. But suddenly everything
was altered. My desire to go and hear Berma received a fresh stimulus
which enabled me to await the coming of the matinée with impatience
and with joy; having gone to take up, in front of the column on which
the playbills were, my daily station, as excruciating, of late, as
that of a stylite saint, I had seen there, still moist and wrinkled,
the complete bill of Phèdre , which had just been pasted up for the
first time (and on which, I must confess, the rest of the cast
furnished no additional attraction which could help me to decide).
But it gave to one of the points between which my indecision wavered a
form at once more concrete and—inasmuch as the bill was dated not
from the day on which I read it but from that on which the performance
would take place, and from the very hour at which the curtain would
rise—almost imminent, well on the way, already, to its realisation,
so that I jumped for joy before the column at the thought that on that
day, and at that hour precisely, I should be sitting there in my
place, ready to hear the voice of Berma; and for fear lest my parents
might not now be in time to secure two good seats for my grandmother
and myself, I raced back to the house, whipped on by the magic words
which had now taken the place, in my mind, of "Jansenist pallor" and
"Solar myth";—"Ladies will not be admitted to the stalls in hats. The
doors will be closed at two o'clock."
    Alas! that first matinée was to prove a bitter disappointment. My
father offered to drop my grandmother and me at the theatre, on his
way to the Commission. Before leaving the house he said to my mother:
"See that you have a good dinner for us to–night; you remember, I'm
bringing de Norpois back with me." My mother had not forgotten. And
all that day, and overnight, Françoise,