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An Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
LOVE AT BALBEC
The band of girls approaches on the beach, their features indistinct. As they grow closer, Marcel's gaze fastens on “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks, a black polo-cap crammed on her head, who was pushing a bicycle with … an uninhibited swing of the hips” (1.850). Their insolence and daring dazzle him. For a brief moment he sees the dark girl's eyes beneath her cap, sees a “smiling, sidelong glance, aimed from … an inaccessible, unknown world wherein the idea of what I was could certainly never penetrate” (1.851). It is at this moment that love begins, inspired by the sign of a hidden life:
If we thought that the eyes of such a girl were merely two glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life to ours. But we sense that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark shadows of ideas that that person cherishes about the people and places she knows – the turf of race-courses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedalling on past fields and woods, she would have drawn me after her, … the shadows, too, of the home to which she will presently return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed for her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. […]
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