The Lamp of Truth: Proust and George Eliot

Abstract

On holiday with his grandmother in Balbec the adolescent boy of A l’ombre des jeunes files en fleurs is prey to sundry appearances. Balbec itself is an appearance, the successive projections of which disguise its reality: a rather ordinary upper-middle-class resort on the coast of Normandy. As these illusions or perceptions peel back, he creeps closer to the truth, or rather to a stable perception of that which confounds the successive masks which concealed it. One of more perplexing of these illusions concerns the ‘jeunes filles’ themselves, who at first sight, swanning along the promenade in happy abandon, appear to possess a certain uniformity of manner: a devil-may-care athleticism, an almost callous confidence, a careless and concerted cruelty. At one point one of the girls whose name, he later learns, is Andrée, skips on to the edge of the bandstand, and discovering in her path the head of an elderly man of the law settled in a deckchair beneath, executes a leap that carries her within a few inches of his ears, to the abject terror of the octogenarian judge but the explosive delight of her companions.