 section 29 of Swan's Way. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Andrew Coleman. Swan's Way by Marcel Proust. Translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrief. Section 29. The Transwires found it too cold to stand about. So we walked to the Pont de la Concorde to see the Sain frozen over, on to which everyone, even children, walked fearlessly, as though upon an enormous whale, stranded, defenseless, and about to be cut up. We returned to the Champs Elysees. I was growing sick with misery between the motionless wooden horses and the white lawn, caught in a net of black paths from which the snow had been cleared, while the statue that's mounted it held in its hand a long, pendant icicle which seemed to explain its gesture. The old lady herself, having folded up her debas, asked a passing nursemaid the time, thanking her with, how very good of you, then begged the road sweeper to tell her grandchildren come, as she felt cold, adding, a thousand thanks, I'm sorry to give you so much trouble. Suddenly the sky was rent in two, between the Punch and Judy and the horses, against the opening horizon I had just seen, like a miraculous sign, Mademoiselle's blue feather. And now, Gilbert was running at full speed towards me, sparkling and rosy beneath a cap trimmed with fur, enlivened by the cold, by being late by her anxiety for a game. Shortly before she reached me, she slipped on a piece of ice, and, either to regain her balance, or because it appeared to her graceful, or else pretending that she was on skates, it was with outstretched arms that she smilingly advanced, as though to embrace me. Bravo, bravo, that splendid, topping I should say like you, sporting, I suppose I ought to say, only I'm a hundred and one, a woman of the old school, exclaimed the lady, uttering, on behalf of the voiceless Champs Elyse, their thanks to Gilbert for having come, without letting herself be frightened away by the weather. You are like me, faithful at all costs to our old Champs Elyse, we are two brave souls, you wouldn't believe me, I daresay, if I told you that I loved them, even like this. This snow, I know you will laugh at me, it makes me think of Irmin, and the old lady began to laugh herself. The first of these days, to which the snow, a symbol of the powers that were able to deprive me of the sight of Gilbert, imparted the sadness of a day of separation, almost the aspect of a day of departure, because it changed the outward form, and almost forbade the use of the customary scene of our only encounters. Now altered, covered as it were in dust sheets, that day nonetheless marked a stage in the progress of my love, for it was, in a sense, the first sorrow that she was to share with me. There were only our two selves of our little company, and to be thus alone with her was not merely like a beginning of intimacy, but also on her part, as though she had come there solely to please me, and in such weather. It seemed to me as touching as if, on one of those days on which she had been invited to her party, she had given it up in order to come to me in the Champs Elysees. I acquired more confidence in the vitality, in the future of a friendship which could remain so much alive amid the torpor, the solitude, the decay of our surroundings, and while she dropped pellets of snow down my neck, I smiled lovingly at what seemed to me at once a predilection that she showed for me, in thus tolerating me as her travelling companion in this new, this wintry land, at a sort of loyalty to me which she preserved through evil times. Presently, one after another, like shyly bopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow. We got ready to play, and since this day which had become so sadly, was destined to end in joy, as I went up, before the game started, to the friend with the sharp voice whom I had heard, that first day calling Gilbert by name, she said to me, No, no, I'm sure you'd much rather be in Gilbert's camp, besides, look, she's signalling to you. She was, in fact, summoning me to cross the snowy lawn to her camp, to take the field which the sun, by casting over it a rosy gleam, the metallic luster of old and worn brocades, had turned into a field of the cloth of gold. This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched. For, although I no longer thought now, of anything, save not to let a single day pass without seeing Gilbert. So much so, that once, when my grandmother had not come home by dinnertime, I could not resist the instinctive reflection that, if she had been run over in the street and killed, I should not for some time be allowed to play in the Champs Elysees. When one is in love, one has no love left for anyone. Yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited with so much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the world, were by no means happy moments. Well, all did I know it, for they were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous, undistracted attention, and yet I could not discover in them one atom of pleasure. All the time that I was away from Gilbert, I wanted to see her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her, I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my love corresponded. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me, far from it. She had often boasted that she knew other little boys, whom she preferred to myself, that I was a good companion, with whom she was always willing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive enough to the game. Moreover, she had often shown signs of apparent coldness towards me, which might have shaken my faith that I was, for her, a creature different from the rest, had that faith been founded upon a love that Gilbert had felt for me, and not, as was the case, upon the love that I felt for her, which strengthened its resistance to the assaults of doubt, by making it depend entirely upon the manner in which I was obliged, by an internal compulsion, to think of Gilbert. But my feelings with regard to her, I had never yet ventured to express to her in words. Of course, on every page of my exercise-books, I wrote out, in endless repetition, her name and address, but at the sight of those vague lines which I might trace, without her having to think on that account of me, I felt discouraged, because they spoke to me, not of Gilbert, who would never so much as seize them, but of my own desire, which they seemed to show me in its true colours, as something purely personal, unreal, tedious and ineffective. The most important thing was that we should see each other, Gilbert and I, and should have an opportunity of making a mutual confession of our love, which, until then, would not officially, so to speak, have begun. Doubtless the various reasons which made me so impatient to see her would have appeared less urgent to a grown man. As life goes on, we acquire such a jointness in the culture of our pleasures, that we content ourselves with that which we derive from thinking of a woman, as I was thinking of Gilbert, without troubling ourselves to ascertain whether the image corresponds to the reality, and with the pleasure of loving her, without needing to be sure, also, that she loves us. Or again, that we renounce the pleasure of confessing our passion for her, so as to preserve and enhance the passion that she has for us, like those Japanese gardeners who, to obtain one perfect blossom, will sacrifice the rest. But, at the period when I was in love with Gilbert, I still believed that love did really exist, apart from ourselves, that allowing us, at the most, to surmount the obstacles in our way, it offered us its blessings in an order in which we were not free to make the least alteration. It seemed to me that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of a confession, a pretense of indifference, I should not only have been depriving myself of one of the joys of which I had most often dreamed, I should have been fabricating, of my own free will, a love that was artificial, and without value, that bore no relation to the truth whose mysterious and foreordained ways I should thus have been declining to follow. But when I arrived at the Champs Elysees, and as at first sight it appeared, was in a position to confront my love, so as to make it undergo the necessary modifications, with its living and independent cause, as soon as I was in the presence of that Gilbert swan on the site of whom I had counted to revive the images that my tarred memory had lost and could not find again, of that Gilbert swan with whom I had been playing the day before, and whom I had just been prompted to greet and then to recognise by a blind instinct like that which, when we are walking, sets one foot before the other, without giving us time to think what we are doing. Then at once it became as though she and the little girl who had inspired my dreams had been two different people. If, for instance, I had retained in my memory overnight two fiery eyes above plump and rosy cheeks, Gilbert's face would now offer me, and with emphasis, something that I distinctly had not remembered. A certain sharpening and prolongation of the nose which, instantaneously associating itself with certain others of her features, assumed the importance of those characteristics which, in natural history, are used to define a species, and transformed her into a little girl of the kind that have sharpened profiles. While I was making myself ready to take advantage of this long expected moment, and to surrender myself to the impression of Gilbert which I had prepared beforehand but could no longer find in my head, to an extent which would enable me, during the long hours which I must spend alone, to be certain that it was indeed herself whom I had in mind, that it was indeed my love for her that I was gradually making grow, as a book grows when one is writing it. She threw me a ball, and, like the idealist philosopher whose body takes account of the external world in the reality of which its intellect declines to believe, the same self which had made me salute her before I had identified her, now urged me to catch the ball that she tossed me, as though she had been a companion with whom I had come to play, and not a sister soul with whom my soul had come to be limited. Made me, out of politeness, until the time came when she had to go, address a thousand polite and trivial remarks to her, and so prevented me both from keeping a silence in which I might at last have laid my hand upon the indispensable escaped idea, and from uttering the words which might have made that definite progress in the course of our love, on which I was always obliged to count only for the following afternoon. There was, however, an occasional development. One day we had gone with Gilbert to the stall of our own special vendor, who was always particularly nice to us, since it was to her that Monsieur Swan used to send for his gingerbread, of which, for reasons of health, he suffered from a racial eczema and from the constipation of the prophets. He consumed a great quantity. Gilbert pointed out to me with a laugh two little boys who were like the little artist and the little naturalist in the children's story books. For one of them would not have a red stick of rock, because he preferred the purple. While the other, with tears in his eyes, refused a plum which his nurse was buying for him, because, as he finally explained in passionate tones, I want the other plum! It's got a worm in it! I purchased two Haightney marbles. With admiring eyes I saw luminous and imprisoned in a bowl by themselves the agate marbles, which seemed precious to me, because they were as fair and smiling as little girls, and because they cost five pence each. Gilbert, who was given a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked me which I thought the prettiest. They were as transparent, as liquid seeming as life itself. I would not have had her sacrifice a single one of them. I should have liked her to be able to buy them, to liberate them all. Still, I pointed out one that had the same colour as her eyes. Gilbert took it, turned it about until it shone with a ray of gold, fondled it, paid its ransom, but at once handed me her captive, saying, Take it, it is for you. I give it to you. Keep it to remind yourself of me. Another time, being still obsessed by the desire to hear Bama in classic drama, I had asked her whether she had not a copy of a pamphlet in which Bergott spoke of Racine, and which was now out of print. She had told me to let her know the exact title of it, and that evening I had sent her a little telegram, writing on its envelope the name, Gilbert Swan, which I had so often traced in my exercise books. Next day she brought me in a parcel tied with pink bows and sealed with white racks, the pamphlet, a copy of which she had managed to find. You see, it is what you ask me for," she said, taking from her muff the telegram that I had sent her. But in the address on the pneumatic message, which only yesterday was nothing, was merely a little blue that I had written, and after a messenger had delivered it to Gilbert's porter, and a servant had taken it to her in her room, had become a thing without value or distinction, one of the little blues that she had received in the course of the day. I had difficulty in recognising the futile, straggling lines of my own handwriting beneath the circles stamped on it at the post office. The inscriptions added in pencil by a postman, signs of effectual realisation, seals of the external world, violet bands, symbolical of life itself, which for the first time came to espouse, to maintain, to raise, to rejoice my dream. And there was another day on which she said to me, you know, you may call me as your bet. In any case, I'm going to call you by your first name. It's too silly not to. Yet she continued for a while, to address me by the more formal voo. And when I drew her attention to this, smiled, and composing, constructing a phrase like those that are put into the grammar books of foreign languages, with no other object than to teach us to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name. And when I recalled later what I had felt at the time, I could distinguish the impression of having been held for a moment in her mouth, myself naked, without any longer any of the social qualifications which belonged equally to her other companions. And when she used my surname to my parents' accessories of which her lips, by the effort that she made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special value, had the air of stripping, of divesting me, as one peels the skin from a fruit of which one is going to put only the pulp into one's mouth, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly, not without testifying to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt, accompanying itself with a smile. But at that actual moment, I was not able to appreciate the worth of these new pleasures. They were given not by the little girl whom I loved, to me who loved her, but by the other, her with whom I used to play, to my other self, who possessed neither the memory of the trucial bed, nor the fixed heart which alone could have known the value of a happiness for which it alone had longed. Even after I had returned home, I did not taste them, since every day the necessity which made me hope that on the morrow I should arrive at the clear, calm, happy contemplation of Gilbert, that she would at last confess her love for me, explaining to me the reasons by which she had been obliged hitherto to conceal it, that same necessity forced me to regard the past as of no account, to look ahead of me only, to consider the little advantages that she had given me, not in themselves, and as if they were self-sufficient, but like fresh rungs of the ladder on which I might set my feet, which were going to allow me to advance a step further, and finally to attain the happiness which I had not yet encountered. If at times she showed me these marks of her affection, she troubled me also by seeming not to be pleased to see me, and this happened often on the very days on which I had most counted for the realisation of my hopes. I was sure that Gilbert was coming to the Champs Elysees, and I felt an elation which seemed merely the anticipation of a great happiness, when, going into the drawing-room in the morning, to kiss Mamma, who was already dressed to go out, the coils of her black hair elaborately built up, and her beautiful hands, plump and white, frequent still with soap, I had been apprised by seeing a column of dust standing by itself in the air above the piano, and by hearing a barrel organ playing beneath the window, on revenant de la revue, that the winter had received, until nightfall, an unexpected, radiant visit from a day of spring. When we sat at luncheon, by opening her window, the lady opposite had sent packing, in the twinkling of an eye, from beside my chair, to sweep in a single stride over the whole width of our dining-room, a sun-beam which had lain down there for its midday rest, and returned to continue it there a moment later. At school, during the one o'clock lesson, the sun made me sick with impatience and boredom, as it let fall a golden stream that crept the edge of my desk, like an invitation to the feast at which I could not myself arrive before three o'clock, until the moment when Francoise came to fetch me at the school gate, and we made our way towards the Champs-Élysées, through streets decorated with sunlight, dense with people, of which the balconies, detached by the sun, and made vaporous, seemed to float in front of the houses like clouds of gold. Alas, in the Champs-Élysées, I found no sure bet, she had not yet arrived. Motionless, on the lawn nurtured by the invisible sun which, here and there, kindled to a flame the point of a blade of grass, while the pigeons that had lighted upon it had the appearance of ancient sculptures which the gardener's pick had heaved to the surface of a hallowed soil. I stood with my eyes fixed on the horizon, expecting at every moment to see appear the form of Gilbert, following that of her governess, behind the statue that seemed to be holding out the child which it had in its arms and which glistened in the stream of light to receive benediction from the sun. The old lady who read the debas was sitting on her chair in her invariable place, and had just accosted a park-keeper with a friendly wave of her hands towards him as she exclaimed, What a lovely day! And when the chairwoman came up to collect her penny, with an infinity of smirks and affectations, she folded the ticket away inside her glove as though it had been a posy of flowers for which she had sought, in gratitude to the donor, the most becoming place upon her person. When she had found it she performed a circular movement with her neck, straightened her bower, and fastened upon the collector, as she showed her the end of yellow paper that stuck out of her bare wrist, the bewitching smile with which a woman says to a young man, pointing to her bosom, You see, I'm wearing your roses. I dragged Francoise on the way towards your bed, as far as the Arc de Triomphe. We did not meet her, and I was returning towards the lawn convinced now that she was not coming, when, in front of the wooden horses, the little girl with the sharp voice flunk herself upon me, Quick, quick, Gilbert's been here a quarter of an hour, she's just going, we've been waiting for you to make up a prisoner's base. While I had been going up the avenue des Champs-Elysées, Gilbert had arrived by the Rouboise d'Anglard, Mademoiselle having taken advantage of the fine weather to go on some errand of her own, and Monsieur Swan was coming to fetch his daughter. And so it was my fault, I ought not to have strayed from the lawn, for one never knew for certain from what directions Gilbert would appear, whether she would be early or late, and this perpetual tension succeeded in making more impressive not only the Champs-Elysées in their entirety, and the whole span of the afternoon like a vast expanse of space and time on every point, and at every moment of which it was possible that the form of Gilbert might appear, but also that form itself. Since behind its appearance I felt that their lay concealed the reason for which it had shot its arrow into my heart at four o'clock, instead of at half-past two. Crowned with a smart hat for paying calls instead of the plain cap for games, in front of the ambassadors, and not between the two puppet shows, I defined one of those occupations in which I might not follow Gilbert, occupations that forced her to go out or to stay at home. I was in contact with the mystery of her unknown life. It was this mystery, too, which troubled me when, running at the sharp-voiced girl's bidding, so as to begin our game without more delay, I saw Gilbert, so quick and informal with us, make a ceremonious bow to the old lady with the debas, who acknowledged it with, What a lovely sun! You think there was a fire burning? Speaking to her with a shy smile, with an air of constraint, which called to my mind the other little girl that Gilbert must be when at home with her parents, or with friends of her parents, paying visits in all the rest that escaped me of her existence. But of that existence no one gave me so strong an impression as did Monsieur Swan, who came a little later to fetch his daughter. That was because he and Madame Swan, inasmuch as their daughter lived with them, as her lessons, her games, her friendships depended upon them, contained for me, like Gilbert, perhaps even more than Gilbert, as befitted subjects that had an all-powerful control over her, in whom it must have had its source, an undefined and inaccessible quality of melancholy charm. Everything that concerned them was on my part the object of so constant a preoccupation, that the days on which, as on this day, Monsieur Swan, whom I had seen so often, long ago, without his having aroused my curiosity, when he was still on good terms with my parents, came for Gilbert to the Champs Elyse, whilst the pulsations to which my heart had been excited by the appearance of his grey hat and hooded cape had subsided. The sight of him still impressed me as might that of an historic personage, upon whom one had just been studying a series of books and the smallest details of whose life one learned with enthusiasm. His relations with the Comte de Paris, which, when I had them discussed at Combray, seemed to me unimportant, became now, in my eyes, something marvellous, as if no one else had ever known the House of Orleans. They set him in vivid detachment against the vulgar background of pedestrians of different classes, who encumbered that particular path in the Champs Elyse, in the midst of whom I admired his condescending to figure without claiming any special deference, which, as it happened, none of them dreamed of paying him, so profound was the incognito in which he was wrapped. He responded politely to the salutations of Gilbert's companions, even to mine, for all that he was no longer on good terms with my family, but without appearing to know who I was. This reminded me that he had constantly seen me in the country, a memory which I had retained, but kept out of sight, because, since I had seen Gilbert again, Swan had become to me preeminently her father, no longer the Combray Swan. As the ideas which nowadays I made his name connote were different from the ideas in the system of which it was formally comprised, which I utilised not at all now when I had occasion to think of him. He had become anew another person. Still I attached him by an artificial thread, secondary and transversal, to a former guest, and as nothing had any longer any value for me, saving the extent to which my love might profit by it. It was with a spasm of shame and of regret at not being able to erase them from my memory, that I recaptured the years in which, in the eyes of this same Swan, who was at this moment before me in the Champs Elysees, and to whom, fortunately, Gilbert had perhaps not mentioned my name. I had so often, in the evenings, made myself ridiculous by sending to ask Mamar to come upstairs to my room to say good night to me, while she was drinking coffee with him and my father and my grandparents at the table in the garden. He told Gilbert that she might play one game. He could wait for a quarter of an hour, and sitting down just like anyone else on an iron chair, paid for his ticket with that hand which Philip VII had so often held in his own. While we began our game upon the lawn, scattering the pigeons whose beautiful, iridescent bodies shaped like hearts and surely the lilacs of the feathered kingdom took refuge as in so many sanctuaries, one on the great basin of stone on which it's beak, as it disappeared below the rim, conferred the part, assigned the purpose of offering to the bird in abundance the fruit or grain at which it appeared to be pecking, another on the head of the statue, which seemed crowned with one of those enameled objects whose polychrome varies in certain classical works the monotony of the stone and with an attribute which, when the goddess bears it, entitles her to a particular epithet and makes of her as a different Christian name makes of a mortal, a fresh divinity. On one of these sunny days which had not realised my hopes, I had not the courage to conceal my disappointment from Gilbert. I had ever so many things to ask you, I said her. I thought that today was going to mean so much in our friendship and no sooner have you come than you go away. Try to come early tomorrow so that I can talk to you. Her face lighted up and she jumped for joy as she answered, tomorrow you may make up your mind my dear friend, I shan't come. First of all, I have a big luncheon party. Then in the afternoon I'm going to a friend's house to see King Theodosius arrive from her windows. Won't that be splendid? And then next day I'm going to Michel Strogoff and after that it will soon be Christmas and the New Year holidays. Perhaps I'll take me south to the Riviera. Won't that be nice? Though I should miss the Christmas tree here. Anyway, if I do stay in Paris I shan't be coming here because I should be out paying calls with my mum. Why, there's Papa calling me. I returned home with Francoise through streets that were still gay with sunshine as on the evening of a holiday when the merriment is over. I could scarcely drag my legs along. I'm not surprised, said Francoise. It's not the right weather for the time of year. It's much too warm. Oh dear, oh dear, to think of all the poor sick people there must be everywhere. You would think that up there too, everything's got out of order. I repeated to myself, stifling my sobs, the words in which Gilbert had given utterance to her joy at the prospect of not coming back for a long time to the Champs Elyse. But already the charm with which by the mere act of thinking my mind was filled as soon as it thought of her, the privileged position unique even if it were painful in which I was inevitably placed in relation to Gilbert by the contraction of a scar in my mind. I had begun to add to that very mark of her indifference something romantic and in the midst of my tears my lips would shape themselves in a smile which was indeed the timid outline of a kiss. And when the time came for the postman I said to myself that evening as on every other I'm going to have a letter from Gilbert. She is going to tell me at last that she has never ceased to love me and to explain to me the mysterious reason by which she has been forced to love from me until now to put on the appearance of being able to be happy without seeing me the reason for which she has assumed the form of the others you'll bet who is simply a companion. Every evening I would begar myself into imagining this letter believing that I was actually reading it reciting each of its sentences in turn. Suddenly I would stop in alarm. I had realised that if I was to receive a letter from Gilbert it could not in any case be this letter since it was I myself who had just composed it and from that moment I would strive to keep my thoughts clear of the words which I should have liked her to write to me from fear lest by first selecting them myself I should be excluding just those identical words the dearest the most desired from the field of possible events even if by an almost impossible coincidence it have been precisely the letter of my invention that Gilbert had addressed me of her own accord recognising my own work in it I should not have had the impression that I was receiving something that had not originated in myself something real something new a happiness external to my mind independent of my will a gift indeed from love while I waited I read over again a page which although it had not been written to me by Gilbert came to me nonetheless from her that page by begot upon the beauty of the old mess from which Racine drew his inspiration which with the agate marble I always kept within reach I was touched by my friend's kindness in having procured the book for me and as everyone is obliged to find some reason for his passion so much so that he is glad to find in the creature whom he loves qualities which he has learned by reading or in conversation are worthy to excite a man's love that he assimilates them by imitation and makes out of them fresh reasons for his love even although these qualities be diametrically opposed to those for which his love would have sought so long as it was spontaneous as Swan before my day had sought to establish the aesthetic basis of Odette's beauty I who had at first loved Gilbert in combre days on account of all the unknown element in her life into which I would feign have plunged headlong have undergone reincarnation discarding my own separate existence as a thing that no longer mattered I thought now as of an inestimable advantage that of this my own, my too familiar my contemptible existence Gilbert might one day become the humble servant the kindly, the comforting collaborator who in the evenings helping me in my work would collate for me the texts of rare pamphlets as for a begot that infinitely wise almost divine old man because of whom I had first before I had even seen her loved Gilbert now it was for Gilbert's sake chiefly that I loved him with as much pleasure as the pages written about Racine I studied the wrapper folded under great silves of white wax and tied with billows of pink ribbon in which she had brought these pages to me I kissed the agate marble which was the better part of my love's heart the part that was not frivolous but faithful and for all that it was adorned with mysterious charm of Gilbert's life dropped close beside me inhabited my chamber shared my bed and the beauty of that stone and the beauty also of those pages of begot which I was glad to associate with the idea of my love for Gilbert as if in the moments when my love seemed no longer to have any existence they gave it a kind of consistency were I perceived anterior to that love which they in no way resembled their elements had been determined by the writer's talent or by geological laws before ever Gilbert had known me that everything in book or stone would have been different if Gilbert had not loved me and there was nothing consequently that authorised me to read in them a message of happiness and while my love incessantly waiting for the morrow to bring a confession of Gilbert's love for me destroyed unraveled every evening the ill done work of the day in some shadowed part of my being was an unknown weaver who would not leave where they lay expected and rearrange them without any thought of pleasing me or of toiling for my advantage in the different order which he gave to all her handiwork without any special interest in my love not beginning by deciding that I was loved she placed side by side those of Gilbert's actions that had seemed to me inexplicable at her faults which I had excused then one with another they took on a meaning it seemed to tell me this new arrangement that when I saw Gilbert instead of coming to me in the Champs Elyse going to a party or on errands with her governess when I saw her prepared for an absence that would extend of the New Year holidays I was wrong in thinking in saying it is because she is frivolous or easily led for she would have ceased to be either if she had loved me and if she had been forced to obey it would have been with the same despair in her heart that I felt on the days when I did not see her it showed me further this new arrangement that I ought, after all to know what it was to love since I loved Gilbert it drew my attention to the constant anxiety that I had to show off before her by reason of which I tried to persuade my mother to get from Francois a waterproof coat of leather or better still to stop sending with me to the Champs Elyse an attendant with whom I blushed to be seen to all of which my mother replied that I was not fair to Francois that she was an excellent woman and devoted to us all and also that sole exclusive need to seize your bed the result of which was that months in advance I could think of nothing but how to find out feeling that the most attractive country in the world would be but a place of exile if she were not to be there and asking only to be allowed to stay forever in Paris so long as I might see her in the Champs Elyse and it had little difficulty in making me see that neither my anxiety nor my need could be justified by anything in Gilbert's conduct she, on the contrary was genuinely fond of her governess without troubling herself I might choose to think about it it seemed quite natural to her not to come to the Champs Elyse if she had to go shopping with mademoiselle delightful if she had to go out somewhere with her mother and even supposing that she would ever have allowed me to spend my holidays in the same place as herself when it came to choosing that place she considered her parents wishes a thousand different amusements of which she had been told and not at all that it should be that she had sent me when she assured me as sometimes happened that she liked me less than some other of her friends less than she had liked me the day before because by my clumsiness I had made her side lose a game I would beg her pardon I would beg her to tell me what I must do in order that she should begin again to like me as much as or more than the rest I hoped to hear her say that that was already my position I besought her to justify her affection for me as she or I chose to give me pleasure merely by the words that she would utter as my good or bad conduct should deserve was I then not yet aware that what I felt myself for her depended neither upon her actions nor upon my desires it showed me finally the new arrangement planned by my unseen weaver that if we find ourselves hoping that the actions of a person who has hitherto caused us anxiety may prove not to have been sincere they shared in their wake a light which our hopes are powerless to extinguish a light to which rather than to our hopes we must put the question what will be that person's actions on the morrow these new councils my love listened and heard them they persuaded it that the morrow would not be different from the previous that had gone before that Gilbert's feeling for me too long established now to be capable of alteration was in difference that in my friendship with Gilbert it was I alone who loved that is true my love responded there is nothing more to be made of that friendship it will not alter now and so the very next day unless I were to wait for a public holiday if there was one approaching perhaps one of those days which are not like other days on which time starts afresh casting aside the heritage of the past declining its legacy of sorrows I would appeal to Gilbert to terminate our old and to join me in laying the foundations of a new friendship end of section 29 section 30 of swans way this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Andrew Coleman Swans Way by Marcel Proust translated by C.K. Scott Moncrief section 30 I had always within reach a plan of Paris which because I could see drawn on it the street in which Monsieur and Madame Swan lived seemed to me to contain a secret treasure and to please myself as well as by a sort of chivalrous loyalty in any connection or with no relevance at all I would repeat the name of that street until my father not being like my mother and grandmother in the secret of my love would ask but why are you always talking about that street there's nothing wonderful about it it is an admirable street to live in because it's only a few minutes walk from the boire but there are a dozen other streets just the same I made every effort to introduce the name of Swan into my conversation with my parents in my own mind of course I never ceased to murmur it but I needed also to hear its exquisite sound and to make myself play that chord the useless rendering of which did not suffice me moreover that name of Swan with which I had for so long been familiar was to me now as happens at times to people suffering from aphasia in the case of the most ordinary words the name of something new it was forever present in my mind which could not however grow accustomed to it I analysed it its orthography came to me as a surprise and with its familiarity it had simultaneously lost its innocence the pleasure that I derived from the sound of it I felt to be so guilty that it seemed to me as though the others must read my thoughts and would change the conversation if I endeavoured to guide it in that direction I fell back upon subjects which still brought me into touch with Gilbert I eternally repeated the same words and it was no use my knowing that they were but words words uttered in her absence which she could not hear words without virtue in themselves repeating what were indeed facts but powerless to modify them for still it seemed to me that by dint of handling of stirring in this way everything that had referenced to you I might perhaps make emerge from it something that would bring me happiness I told my parents again that Gilbert was very fond of her governess as if the statement when repeated for the hundredth time would at last have the effect of making Gilbert suddenly burst into the room come to live with us forever I had already sung the praises of the old lady who read the debas I had hinted to my parents that she must at least be an ambassador's widow if not actually a highness and I continued to descant on her beauty her splendor her nobility until the day on which I mentioned that by what I had heard Gilbert call her she appeared to be a Madame Bléton oh now I know whom you mean cried to my mother while I felt myself grow red all over with shame as your grandfather says and so is she that you think so wonderful why, she's perfectly horrible and always has been she's the widow of a bailiff you can't remember when you were little all the trouble I used to have to avoid her at your gymnastic lessons where she was always trying to get hold of me I didn't know the woman of course to tell me that you were much too nice looking for a boy she has always had an insane desire to get to know people she's quite insane as I have always thought if she really does know Madame Swan for even if she does come on very common people I've never heard anything said against her character but she must always be forcing herself upon strangers she is really a horrible woman frightfully vulgar and besides she's always creating awkward situations as for Swan in my attempts to resemble him I spent the whole time in drawing my finger along my nose and in rubbing my eyes my father would exclaim the child's a perfect idiot is becoming quite impossible more than all else I should have liked to be as bald as Swan he appeared to me to be a creature so extraordinary that I found it impossible to believe that people whom I knew and often saw knew him also and that in the course of the day anyone might run against him and once my mother while she was telling us as she did every evening at dinner where she had been and what she had done that afternoon merely by the words by the way guess who I saw at the Twerkartier at the umbrella counter Swan caused a burst open in the midst of what a melancholy satisfaction to learn that that very afternoon threading through the crowd his supernatural form Swan had gone to buy an umbrella among the events of the day great and small but all equally unimportant that one alone aroused in me those peculiar vibrations by which my love for Gilbert was invariably stirred my father complained that I took no interest in anything because I did not listen while he was speaking of the political developments that might follow the visit of King Theodosius at that moment in France as the nation's guest and it was hinted ally and yet how intensely interested I was to know whether Swan had been wearing his hooded cape did you speak to him I asked yes of course I did answer to my mother who always seemed afraid, lest were she to admit that we were not on the warmest of terms with Swan people would seek to reconcile us more than she cared for in view of the existence of Madame Swan and she did not wish to know it was he who came up and spoke to me I hadn't seen him then you haven't quarrelled quarrelled? what on earth made you think that we had quarrelled as though I had cast doubt on the fiction of her friendly relations with Swan and was planning an attempt to bring them together he might be crossed with you for never asking him here one isn't obliged to ask everyone to one's house you know as he ever asked me to his I don't know his wife but he used often to come at Combré I should think he did he used to come at Combré and now in Paris but I can promise you we didn't look in the least like people who had quarrelled we were kept waiting there for some time while they brought him his parcel he asked after you he told me you had been playing with his daughter my mother went on amazing me with a portentous revelation of my own existence since one's mind far more than that of my existence in so complete so material a form that when I stood before him trembling with love in the Champs Elysees he had known my name and who my mother was and had been able to blend with my quality as his daughter's playmate certain facts with regard to my grandparents and their connections the place in which we lived certain details of our past life all of which I myself perhaps did not know but my mother did not seem to have noticed anything particularly attractive in that counter to our Cartier where she had represented to Swan at the moment in which he caught sight of her a definite person with whom he had sufficient memories in common to impel him to come up to her and to speak nor did either she or my father seem to find any occasion now to mention Swan's family the grandparents of Gilbert nor to use the title of stockbroker topics than which nothing else gave me so keen a pleasure my imagination had isolated and concentrated in the social Paris a certain family just as it had set apart in the structural Paris a certain house on whose porch it had fashioned sculptures and made its windows precious but these ornaments I alone had eyes to see just as my father and mother looked upon the house in which Swan lived as one that closely resembled the other houses built at the same period in the neighbourhood of the Bois so Swan's family seemed to them to be in the same category as many other families of stockbrokers their judgement was more or less favourable according to the extent to which the family in question shared in merits that were common to the rest of the universe and there was about it nothing that they could call unique what on the other hand they did appreciate in the Swans if not in greater measure elsewhere and so after admitting that the house was in a good position they would go on to speak of some other house that was in a better but had nothing to do with Gilbert or of financiers on a larger scale than her grandfather had been and if they had appeared for a moment to be of my opinion that was a mistake which was very soon corrected for in order to distinguish in all Gilbert's surroundings an indefinable quality analogous in the scale of emotions to what in the scale of colours is called infrared a supplementary sense of perception was required with which love for the time being had endowed me and this my parents lacked on the days when Gilbert had warned me of coming to the Champs Elysees I would try to arrange my walks so that I should be brought into some kind of contact with her sometimes I would lead Francoise on a pilgrimage to the house in which the Swans lived making her repeat to me unendingly all that she had learned from the governess with regard to Madam Swann it seems she puts great faith in medals she would never think of starting on a journey if she had heard an owl hoot in the wall or if she had seen a cat at midnight or if the furniture had creaked oh yes, she's a most religious lady she is I was so madly in love with Gilbert that if on our way I caught sight of their old butler taking the dog out my emotion would bring me to a stand still I would fasten on his white whiskers eyes that melted with passion and Francoise would rose me with what's wrong with you now child? and we would continue on our way until we reached their gate we're a porter different from every other porter in the world and saturated even to the breed on his livery with the same melancholy charm that I had felt to be latent in the name of Gilbert looked at me as though he knew that I was one of those whose natural unworthiness would prevent them from penetrating into the mysteries of the life inside which it was his duty to guard and over which the ground floor windows appeared conscious of being protectively closed with far less resemblance between the nobly sweeping arches of their muslin curtains to any other windows in the world than to your bed's glancing eyes on other days we would go along the boulevards and I would post myself at the corner of the rule doofal I had heard that Swan was often to be seen passing there on his way to the dentists and my imagination so far differentiated Gilbert's father from the rest of humanity his presence in the midst of a crowd of real people introduced among them so miraculous an element that even before we reached the Madeline I would be trembling with emotion at the thought that I was approaching a street from which that supernatural apparition might at any moment burst upon me unawares but most often of all on days when I was not to see Gilbert as I had heard that Madame Swan walked almost every day along the Allée des Acaches round the Big Lake and in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite I would guide François in the direction of the Boyardais Boulogne it was to me like one of those zoological gardens in which one sees assembled together a variety of flora and contrasted effects in landscape where from a hill one passes to a grotto a meadow rocks, a stream, a trench another hill, a marsh but knows that they are there only to enable the hippopotamus zebra, crocodile, rabbit, bear and heron to despot themselves in a natural or a picturesque setting this, the Bois equally complex uniting a multitude of little worlds distinct and separate placing a stage set with red trees, American oaks like an experimental forest in Virginia next to a fur wood by the edge of the lake or to a forest grove from which would suddenly emerge in her listen covering of furs such appealing eyes of a dumb animal a hastening walker was the garden of woman and like the Myrtle Alley in the Aeneid planted for their delight with trees of one kind only the Alley de Zacacha was thronged by the famous beauties of the day as from a long way off the sight of the jutting crag from which it dives into the pool thrills with joy the children who know long before I reached the Acacia Alley their fragrance scattered abroad would make me feel that I was approaching the incomparable presence of a vegetable personality strong and tender then as I drew near the sight of their topmost branches their lightly tossing foliage in its easy grace its kiketish outline its delicate fabric over which hundreds of flowers were laid like winged and throbbing colonies of precious insects and finally their name itself feminine, indolent and seductive made my heart beat but with a social longing like those waltzes which remind us only of the names of their fair dancers called aloud as they entered the ballroom I had been told that I should see in the Alley certain women of fashion who in spite of their not all having husbands were constantly mentioned in conjunction with Madame Swan but most often by their professional names their new names when they had any being but a sort of incognito a veil which those who would speak of them were careful to draw a sight so as to make themselves understood thinking that beauty in the order of feminine elegance was governed by occult laws into the knowledge of which they had been initiated and that they had the power to realise it I accepted before seeing them like the truth of a coming revelation the appearance of their clothes of their carriages and horses of a thousand details among which I placed my faith as in an inner soul which gave the cohesion of a work of art to that ephemeral touching pageant but it was Madame Swan whom I wished to see and I waited for her to go past as deeply moved as though she was your bet whose parents saturated like everything in her environment with her own special charm excited in me as keen a passion as she did herself indeed a still more painful disturbance since their point of contact with her that intimate that internal part of her life which was hidden from me and furthermore for I very soon learned as we shall see in due course that they did not like my playing with her that feeling of veneration which we always have for those who hold and exercise without restraint the power to do us an injury I assigned the first place in the order of aesthetic merit and of social grandeur to simplicity when I saw Madame Swan on foot in a polonaise of plain cloth a little toque on her head trimmed with a pheasant's wink a bunch of violets in her bosom he sning along the allée des acaches as if it had been merely the shortest way back to her own house and acknowledging with a rapid glance the courtesy of the gentleman in carriages who, recognising her figure at a distance were raising their hats to her and saying to one another that there was never anyone so well turned out as she but instead of simplicity it was to ostentation that I must assign the first place if after I had compelled Francoise who could hold out no longer and complained that her legs were giving beneath her to stroll up and down with me for another hour and more at length emerging from the port du fan figuring for me a royal dignity the passage of a sovereign an impression such as no real queen has ever since been able to give me because my notion of their power has been less vague and more founded upon experience born along by the flight of a pair of fiery horses slender and shapely as one sees them in the drawings of Constantine Guise carrying on its box an enormous coachman third like a Cossack and by his side a diminutive groom like Toby the late Baudenauds Tiger I saw or rather I felt its outlines engraved upon my heart by a clean and killing stab a matchless Victoria built rather high and hinting through her eyes at the forms of an earlier day deep down in which lay negligently back Madame Swan her hair now quite pale with one grey lock good with a narrow band of flowers usually violets from which floated down long veils a lilac parasol in her hand on her lips an ambiguous smile in which I read only the benign it was preeminently the enticing smile of the courtesan which he graciously bestowed upon the men who bowed to her that smile was in reality saying to one oh yes I do remember quite well it was wonderful to another how I should have loved to we were unfortunate to a third for a minute then as soon as I can I will break away when strangers passed she still allowed to linger about a lips a lazy smile as though she expected or remembered some friend which made them say what a lovely woman and for certain men only she had a sour strained shy cold smile which meant that you can't keep quiet for a moment but you suppose that I care what you say cockalan passed talking in a group of listening friends and with a sweeping wave of his hand bade a theatrical good day to the people in the carriages but I thought only of Madame Swan and pretended to have not yet seen her for I knew that when she reached the pigeon shooting ground she would tell her coachmen to break away the carriage so that she might come back on foot and on days when I felt that I had the courage to pass close by her I would drag France was off in that direction until the moment came when I saw Madame Swan letting trail behind her the long train of her lilac skirt dressed as the populace imagine queens to be dressed in richer tire such as no other woman might wear lowering her eyes now and then to study the handle of her parasol paying scant attention to the passersby as though the important thing for her her one object in being there was to take exercise without thinking that she was seen and that every head was turned towards her sometimes however when she had looked back to call her dog to her she would cast almost imperceptibly a sweeping glance round about those even who did not know her were warned by something exceptional something beyond the normal in her or perhaps by a telepathic suggestion such as would move an ignorant audience to a frenzy of applause when Bama was sublime that she must be someone well-known they would ask one another who is she or sometimes would interrogate a passing stranger or to make a mental note of how she was dressed so as to fix her identity later in the mind of a friend better informed than themselves who would at once enlighten them another pair half-stopping in their walk would exchange you know who that is madam swan that conveys nothing to you owed it to crazy then why I thought as much those great sad eyes but I say you know she can't be as young as she was once, eh? I remember I had her on the days that McMorn went I shouldn't remind her of it if I were you she is now madam swan the wife of a gentleman in the jockey club a friend of the Prince of Wales apart from that though she is wonderful still oh, but you ought to have known her then a gad she was lovely she lived in a very odd little house with a lot of Chinese stuff I remember we were bothered all the time by the news boys shouting outside in the end she made me get up and go without listening to these memories I could feel all about her the indistinct murmur of fame my heart leaped with impatience when I thought that a few seconds must still elapse before all these people among whom I was dismayed a certain mulatto banker who, or so I felt had a contempt for me were to see the unknown youth to whom they had not so far been paying the slightest attention salute without knowing her it was true but I thought that I had sufficient authority since my parents knew her husband and I was her daughter's playmate this woman whose reputation for beauty for misconduct and for elegance was universal but I was now close to Madame Swan I pulled off my hat with so lavish so prolonged a gesture that she could not repress a smile people laughed as for her she had never seen me with Gilbert she did not know my name but I was for her like one of the keepers in the boire like the boatman of the ducks on the lake to which she threw scraps of bread one of the minor personages familiar, nameless as devoid of individual character as a stage hand in a theatre of her daily walks abroad on certain days when I had missed her in the Alé des Acaches I would be so fortunate as to meet her in the Alé de Lorraine Marguerite where women went to wish to be alone or to appear to be wishing to be alone she would not be alone for long being soon overtaken by some man or other often in a grey tile hat whom I did not know and who would talk to her for some time while their two carriages crawled behind the sense of the complexity of the boire de Boulogne which made it an artificial place and in the zoological or mythological sense of the word a garden I captured again this year as I crossed it on my way to Trianon on one of those mornings early in November when in Paris if we stay indoors being so near and yet prevented from witnessing the transformations scene of autumn which is drawing so rapidly to a close without our assistance we feel a regret for the fallen leaves that becomes a fever and may even keep us awake at night into my closed room they have been drifting already for a month summoned there by my desire to see them slipping between my thoughts and the object whatever it might be upon which I was trying to concentrate them whirling in front of me like those brown spots that sometimes whatever we may be looking at will seem to be dancing or swimming before our eyes and on that morning not hearing the splash of the rain as on the previous days seeing the smile of fine weather at the corners of my drawn curtains as from the corners of closed lips may escape the secret of their happiness I had felt that I could actually see those yellow leaves with the light shining through them in their supreme beauty and being no more able to restrain myself from going to look at the trees than in my childhood days when the wind howled in the chimney I had been able to resist the longing to visit the sea I had risen and left the house to go to Trianon passing through the Bois de Boulogne it was the hour and the season in which the Bois seems perhaps most multi-form not only because it is then most divided but because it is divided in a different way even in the unwodded parts where the horizon is large here and there there is the background of a dark and distant mass of trees now leafless or still keeping the summer foliage unchanged double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed as in a picture just begun to be the only thing painted so far by an artist who had not yet laid any colour on the rest and be offering their cloister in full daylight for the casual exercise of the human figures later on further off at a place where the trees were still all green one alone small, stunted lopped but stubborn in its resistance was tossing in the breeze an ugly mane of red elsewhere again might be seen the first awakening of this maytime of the leaves and those of an ampelopsis a smiling miracle like a red hawthorn flowering in winter had that very morning all come out so to speak in blossom and the wire had the temporary, unfinished artificial look of a nursery garden or a park in which either for some botanic purpose or in preparation for a festival there have been embedded among the trees of commoner growth which have not yet been uprooted and transplanted elsewhere a few rare specimens of a village which seem to be clearing all round themselves an empty space making room giving air diffusing light thus it was the time of year at which the broude de Boulogne displays more separate characteristics assembles more distinct elements in a composite hole than at any other it was also the time of day when the leaves they seem to have undergone an alteration of their substance from the point at which they were touched by the sun's light still at this hour in the morning almost horizontal as it would be again a few hours later at the moment when just as dusk began it would flame up like a lamp project a far over the leaves a warm and artificial glow and set ablaze in combustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest at one spot the light grew solid as a brick wall and like a piece of yellow Persian masonry patterned in blue daubed coarsely upon the sky the leaves of the chestnuts at another it cut them off from the sky towards which they stretched out their curling golden fingers halfway up the trunk of a tree with a red vine the light had grafted and brought to blossom too dazzling to be clearly distinguished an enormous posy of red flowers apparently perhaps of a new variety of carnation the different parts of the boire so easily confounded in summer in the density and monotony of their universal green were now clearly divided a patch of brightness indicated the approach to almost every one of them a varied mass of foliage stood out before it like an aura flame I could make out as on a coloured map Armenonville the Prey Catalan Madrid the race course and the shore of the lake here and there would appear some meaningless erection a sham grotto a mill for which the trees made room by drawing away from it or which was born upon the soft green platform of a grassy lawn that it existed for a purpose alien to the life of its trees my sense of exaltation was due not only to admiration of the autumn tints but to a bodily desire ample source of a joy which the heart fills at first without being conscious of its cause without understanding that it results from no external impulse thus I gazed at the trees with an unsatisfied longing which went beyond them and without my knowledge directed itself towards that masterpiece of beautiful strolling women which the trees inframed for a few hours every day I walked towards the Alè des Acaches I passed through forest groves in which the morning light breaking them into new sections lopped and trimmed the trees united different trunks in marriage made nose gaze of their branches it would skillfully draw towards it a pair of trees making deft use of the sharp chisel of light and shade it would cut away from each of them half of its trunk and branches and weaving together the two halves that remained would make of them either a single pillar of shade defined by the surrounding light or a single luminous phantom whose artificial quivering contour was encompassed in a network of inky shadows it would hold the highest branches they seemed soaked and still gripping with a sparkling moisture to have emerged alone from the liquid emerald green atmosphere in which the whole grove was plunged as though beneath the sea for the trees continued to live by their own vitality and when they had no longer any leaves that vitality gleamed more brightly still from the nap of green velvet carpeted their trunks or in the white enamel of the globes of mistletoe that was scattered all the way up to the topmost branches of the poplars rounded as are the sun and moon in Michelangelo's creation but forced for so many years now by a sort of grafting process to share the life of feminine humanity they call to my mind the figure of the dryad the fair world link swiftly walking brightly coloured whom they sheltered with their branches as she passed beneath them and obliged to acknowledge as they themselves acknowledged the power of the season they recalled to me the happy days when I was young and had faith when I would hasten eagerly to the spots where masterpieces of female elegance would be incarnate from few moments beneath the unconscious accommodating boughs of beauty for which the furs and acacias of the bite of loin made me long more disquieting in that respect than the chestnuts and lilacs of Trianon which I was going to see was not fixed somewhere outside myself in the relics of an historical period in works of art in a little temple of love at whose door was piled an ablation of autumn leaves ribbed with gold I reached the shore of the lake as far as the pigeon shooting ground the idea of perfection which I had within me I had bestowed in that other time upon the height of a Victoria upon the raking thinness of those horses frenzied and light as wasps upon the wing with bloodshot eyes like the cruel steeds of diamet which now smitten by a desire to see again what I had once loved as ardent as the desire that had driven me along the same paths I wished to see renewed before my eyes at the moment when Madame Swan's enormous coachman supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist and as infantile as St George in the picture endeavoured to curb the ardour of the flying still tipped pinions with which they thundered along the ground alas there was nothing now but motor cars and a stushed mechanic with a tall footman towering by his side I wished to hold before my bodily eyes that I might know whether they were indeed as charming as they appeared to the eyes of memory little hats so low crowned as to seem no more than garlands about the brows of women all the hats now were immense covered with fruits and flowers and all manner of birds in place of the lovely gowns in which Madame Swan walked like a queen appeared greco-saxon tunics with tenagra folds or sometimes in the directoir style libti chiffons sprinkled with flowers like sheets of wallpaper on the heads of the gentlemen who might have been eligible to stroll with Madame Swan in the Allée de la Reine Maguerite I found not the grey tile hats of old nor any other kind they walked the boire bare-headed and seeing all these new elements of the spectacle I had no longer the faith which applied to them would have given them consistency unity life they passed in a scattered sequence before me at random without reality beauty that my eyes might have endeavoured as in the old days to extract from them and to compose in a picture they were just women in whose elegance I had no belief and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant but when a belief vanishes there survives it more and more ardently so as to cloak the absence of the power now lost to us of imparting reality to new phenomena an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause the death of the gods oh horrible I exclaimed to myself does anyone really imagine that these motor-cars are as smart as the old carriage and pair I daresay I am too old now but I was not intended for a world in which women shackle themselves in garments that are not even made of cloth to what purpose shall I walk among these trees if there is nothing left now of the assembly that used to meet beneath the delicate tracery of reddening leaves if vulgarity and fatuity have supplanted the exquisite thing that once their branches framed oh horrible my consolation is to think of the women whom I have known in the past now that there is no standard left of elegance but how can the people who watch these dreadful creatures hobble by garments on which have been heaped the spoils of aviary or garden bed how can they imagine the charm that there was in the sight of Madame Swan crowned with a close-fitting lilac bonnet or with a tiny hat from which rose stiffly above her head a single iris could I ever have made them understand the emotion that I used to feel on winter mornings when I met Madame Swan on foot in an otter-skin coat with a woollen cap from which stuck out two blade-like partridge feathers but enveloped also in the deliberate artificial warmth of her own house which was suggested by nothing more than the bunch of violets crushed into a boson whose flowering vivid and blue against the grey sky the freezing air the naked boughs had the same charming effect of using the season and the weather merely as a setting and of living actually in a human atmosphere in the atmosphere of this woman as had in the vases and bullpaws of her drawing-room besides the blazing fire in front of the silk-covered sofa the flowers that looked out through closed windows at the falling snow but it would not have sufficed me if the costumes alone should still have been the same as in those distant years because of the solidarity that binds together the different parts of a general impression parts that our memory keeps in a balanced whole of which we are not permitted to subtract or to decline any fraction I should have liked to be able to pass the rest of the day with one of those women over a cup of tea with dark painted walls as Madame Swan's were still in the year after that in which the first part of this story ends against which would glow the orange flame the red combustion the pink and white flickering of her chrysanthemums in the twilight of a November evening in moments similar to those in which as we shall see I had not managed to discover the pleasures for which I longed to know albeit they had led to nothing those moments struck me as having been charming enough in themselves I sought to find them again as I remembered them alas there was nothing now but flats decorated in the Louis says style all white paint with Hortensias in blue enamel moreover people did not return to Paris now until much later Madame Swan would have written to me from a country house that she would not be in town before February had I asked her to reconstruct for me the elements of that memory which I felt to belong to a distant era to a date in time towards which it was forbidden me to ascend again the fatal slope the elements of that longing which had become itself as inaccessible as the pleasure that it had once vainly pursued and I should have required also that they be the same women those whose costume interested me because at a time when I still had faith my imagination had individualised them and had provided each of them with a legend alas in the Acacia Avenue the Myrtle Alley I did see some of them again grown old no more now than grim spectres of what once they had been wandering to and fro in desperate search of heaven knew what through the Vagillion Groves they had long fled and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths the sun's face was hidden nature began again to reign over the boire from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman above the Jim Crack Windmill the real sky was grey the wind wrinkled the surface of the grand luck in little wavelets like a real lake large birds passed swiftly over the boire as over a real wood and with shrill cries perched one after another on the great oaks which beneath their druidical crown and with Dodenaic Majesty seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from there not being apprehended by the senses the reality that I had known no longer existed it's sufficed that Madame Swan did not appear in the same attire and at the same moment for the whole avenue to be altered the places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience none of them was ever more than a thin slice held between the contiguous impressions and composed our life at that time Remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment and houses roads avenues are as fugitive alas as the years end of section 30 end of Swan's Way by Marcel Proust