 11. The absence of Mademoiselle Swann, which, since it preserved me from the terrible risk of seeing her appear on one of the paths, and of being identified and scorned by this so privileged little girl, who had begot for a friend, and used to go with him to visit cathedrals, made the exploration of Thompsonville, now for the first time permitted me, a matter of indifference to myself. I named, however, to invest the property, into my grandfather's and father's eyes, with a fresh and transient charm, and, like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering, to make the day extraordinarily propitious for a walk in this direction. I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a miracle, Mademoiselle Swann appear, with her father, so close to us, that we should not have time to escape, and should therefore be obliged to make her acquaintance. And so, when I suddenly noticed, a straw basket lying forgotten on the grass, by the side of a line whose float was bobbing in the water, I made a great effort to keep my father and grandfather looking in another direction, away from this sign that she might, after all, be in residence. Still, as Swann had told us that he ought not, really, to go away just then, as he had some people staying in the house, the line might equally belong to one of these guests. Not a footstep was to be heard on any of the paths, somewhere in one of the tall trees, making a stage in its height, an invisible bird, desperately attempting to make the day seem shorter, was exploring, with a long, continuous note, the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once, so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that, one would have said, it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly. The sunlight fell so implacably, from a fixed sky, that one was naturally inclined to slip away out of the reach of its attentions, and even the slumbering water, whose repose was perpetually being invaded by the insects, that swarmed above its surface, while it dreamed, no doubt, of some imaginary maelstrom, intensified the uneasiness which the sight of that floating cork had wrought in me, by appearing to draw it at full speed across the silent reaches of a mirrored firmament. Now almost vertical, it seemed on the point of plunging down out of sight, and I had begun to ask myself whether, setting aside the longing and the terror that I had of making her acquaintance, it was not actually my duty to warn mademoiselle Swan that the fish was biting, when I was obliged to run after my father and grandfather, who were calling me, and were surprised that I had not followed them along the little path, climbing uphill towards the open fields into which they had already turned. I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their altars, while, underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a window. The scent that swept out over me from them was as rich and as circumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-Auto, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of glittering stamens, with an air of inattention, fine radiating nerves in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in church, frame the stair to the rude loft, or closed the perpendicular tracery of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white, like strawberry beds in spring. How simple and rustic, in comparison with these, would seem the dog-roses, which, in a few weeks time, would be climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be undone and scattered by the first breath of wind. But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to marshal before my mind, which knew not what to make of it, to lose in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there, with the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals of music. They offered me an indefinite continuation of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in succession, without coming any nearer to their secret. I turned away from them for a moment, so as to be able to return to them with renewed strength. My eyes followed up the slope, which, outside the hedge, rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed and been lost by its fellows, or a few corn-flowers that had fallen lazily behind, and decorated the ground here and there with their flowers like the border of a tapestry, in which may be seen at intervals hints of the rustic theme which appears triumphant in the panel itself. In frequent still, spaced apart as the scattered houses which warn us that we are approaching a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse of waving corn beneath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging, and holding against the breeze its scarlet ensign over the boy of rich black earth from which it sprang, made my heart beat as does a wayfarer's, when he perceives upon some low-lying ground an old and broken boat, which is being corked and made sea-worthy, and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of it, the sea. And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood before them, as one stands before those masterpieces of painting, which one imagines one will be better able to take in, when one has looked away for a moment, at something else. But in vain did I shake my fingers into a frame, so as to have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes. The sentiment which they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free itself, to float across and become one with the flowers. They themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing. And then, inspiring me with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite painter, quite different from any of those that we already know, or better still, when someone has taken us and set us down in front of a picture of which we have hitherto seen no more than a penciled sketch, or when a piece of music which we have heard played over on the piano bursts out again in our ears with all the splendour and fullness of an orchestra. My grandfather called me to him, and pointing to the hedge of Tonsenville said, You're fond of hawthorns, just look at this pink one, isn't it pretty? And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink and lovelier even than the white. It too was in holiday attire, for one of those days which are the only true holidays, the holy days of religion, because they are not appointed by any capricious accident as secular holidays are appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for such observances, which have nothing about them that is essentially festival, but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wheezed about the crook of a rococo shepherdess, where every one of them in colour, and consequently of a superior quality by the aesthetic standards of Combray, to the plain, if one was to judge by the scale of prices at the stores in the square, or at camos where the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. And for my own part I set a higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed strawberries, and these flowers had chosen precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival, which colours in as much as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of children, and for that reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other tints, even after the child's mind has realised that they offer no gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the dressmaker. And indeed I had felt at once, as I had felt before the white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it, with the simplicity of a woman from a village shop labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some procession, by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too ravishing in colour this rustic pompadour, high up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals. A thousand buds were swelling and opening, peeler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers, the special, irresistible quality of the Hawthorne tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone. Making its place in the hedge, but as different from the rest as a young girl in holiday attire, among a crowd of dowdy women in everyday clothes who are staying at home, equipped and ready for the month of Mary, of which it seemed already to form a part, its shone and smiled in its cool, rosy garments, a Catholic bush indeed, and altogether delightful. The hedge allowed us a glimpse inside the park of an alley bordered with jasmine, pansies and verbenas, among which the stalks held open their fresh, plump purses, of a pink as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish leather, while on the gravel path, a long watering pipe, painted green, coiling across the ground, poured where its holes were, over the flowers whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan of infinitesimal rainbow-coloured drops. Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception, and takes possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles. Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned how to reduce to its objective elements any strong impression, since I had not, as they say, enough power of observation to isolate the sense of their colour. For a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes would at once present itself to me, as a vivid azure, since her complexion was fair. So much so that, perhaps, if her eyes had not been quite so black, which was what struck one most forcibly on first meeting her, I should not have been, as I was, especially enamoured of their imagined blue. I gazed at her, at first, with that gaze which is not merely a messenger from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, that gaze which would feign reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body. Then, so frightened was I, lest at any moment my grandfather and father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her by making me run on in front of them, with another, an unconsciously appealing look whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to see, to know me. She cast a glance forwards and sideways, so as to take stock of my grandfather and father, and doubtless the impression she formed of them was that we were all absurd people, for she turned away with an indifferent and contemptuous air, withdrew herself so as to spare her face the indignity of remaining within their field of vision, and while they, continuing to walk on without noticing her, had overtaken and passed me, she allowed her eyes to wander over the space that lay between us in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to have seen me, but with an intensity, a half hidden smile which I was unable to interpret according to the instruction I had received in the ways of good-breeding, save as a mark of infinite disgust, and her hand, at the same time, sketched in the air an indelicate gesture, for which, when it was addressed in public to a person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which I carried in my mind, supplied only one meaning, namely, a deliberate insult. Joubert, come along, what are you doing? Called out in a piercing tone of authority, a lady in white whom I had not seen until that moment, while, a little way beyond her, a gentleman in a suit of linen ducks whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head. The little girl's smile abruptly faded, and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable, and sly. And so was wafted to my ears, the name of Joubert, bestowed on me like a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her whom its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality, whereas, a moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen. So it came to me, uttered across the heads of the stocks and jasmines, pungent and cool as the drops which fell from the green watering pipe, impregnating and irradiating the zonal pure air through which it had passed, which it set apart and isolated from all other air, with the mystery of the life of her whom its syllables designated to the happy creatures that lived and walked and travelled in her company, unfolding through the arch of the pink hawthorn which opened at the height of my shoulder, the quintessence of their familiarity so exquisitely painful to myself, with her, and with all that unknown world of her existence into which I should never penetrate. For a moment, while we moved away and my grandfather murmured, Pours one, what a life they are leading him, fancy sending him away so that she can be left alone with her charlou, for that was charlou. I recognised him at once, and the child, too, at her age to be mixed up in all that. The impression left on me by the despotic tone in which Gilbert's mother had spoken to her, without her replying, by exhibiting her to me as being obliged to yield obedience to someone else, as not being indeed superior to the whole world, calmed my suffering somewhat, revived some hope in me, and called the ardour of my love. But very soon that love surged up again in me, like a reaction by which my humiliated heart was endeavouring to rise to Gilbert's level, or to draw her down to its own. I loved her. I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me. I knew her to be so beautiful, that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps, so as to shake my fist at her and shout, I think you are hideous, grotesque, you are utterly disgusting. However, I walked away, carrying with me then and for ever afterwards, as the first illustration of a type of happiness rendered inaccessible to a little boy of my kind, by certain laws of nature which it was impossible to transgress, the picture of a little girl with reddish hair, and a skin freckled with tiny pink marks, who held a trowel in her hand, and smiled as she directed towards me a long and subtle and inexpressive stare. And already the charm with which her name, like a cloud of incense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn through which she and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to conquer, to cover, to embalm, to beautify everything with which it had any association. The grandparents, whom my own had been so unspeakably fortunate as to know. The glorious profession of a stockbroker, even the melancholy neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysées, where she lived in Paris. —Leonie! said my grandfather on our return, I wish we had had you with us this afternoon. You would never have known, Tonsenville. If I had had the courage, I would have cut you a branch of that pink hawthorn you used to like so much. And so my grandfather told her the story of our walk, either just to amuse her, or perhaps because there was still some hope that she might be stimulated to rise from her bed, and to go out of doors. For in earlier days she had been very fond of Tonsenville, and moreover Swan's visits had been the last that she had continued to receive, at a time when she had already closed her doors to all the world. And just as, when he called in these later days to inquire for her, and she was still the only person in our household whom he would ask to see, she was sent down to say that she was tired at the moment, and resting, but that she would be happy to see him another time. So this evening she said to my grandfather, yes, some day when the weather is fine, I shall go for a drive as far as the gate of the park. And in saying this, she was quite sincere. She would have liked to see Swan and Tonsenville again. But the mere wish to do so, sufficed for all that remained of her strength, which its fulfilment would have more than exhausted. Perhaps a spell of fine weather made her a little more energetic. She would rise and put on her clothes. But before she had reached the outer room she would be tired again, and would insist on returning to her bed. The process which had begun in her, and in her a little earlier only, than it must come to all of us, was the great and general renunciation which old age makes in preparation for death. The chrysalis stage of life, which may be observed wherever life has been unduly prolonged. Even in old lovers who have lived for one another with the utmost intensity of passion, and in old friends bound by the closest ties of mental sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey, or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know well that they will communicate no more in this world. My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swan again, that she would never leave her own house any more. But this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable, namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength, which she was able to measure daily, which by making every action, every movement, towering to her, if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation, and silence, the blessed strengthening and refreshing charm of repose. My aunt did not go to see the Pink Hawthorne in the hedge. But at all hours of the day I would ask the rest of my family whether she was not going to go, whether she used not, at one time, to go often to Tonsonville, trying to make them speak of Mademoiselle Swan's parents and grandparents, who appear to me to be as great and glorious as God's. The name which had for me become almost mythological of Swan. When I talked with my family I would grow sick with longing to hear them utter it. I dared not pronounce it myself, but I would draw them into the discussion of matters which led naturally to Gilbert and her family, in which she was involved, in speaking of which I would feel myself not too remotely banished from her company, and I would suddenly force my father, by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather's business had been in our family before his day, or that the hedge with the Pink Hawthorne which my aunt Learney wished to visit was on common ground, to correct my statements, to say, as though in opposition to me and of his own accord, No, no, the business belonged to Swan's father. That hedge is part of Swan's park. And then I would be obliged to pause for breath. So stifling was the pressure upon that part of me where it was for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment when I heard it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other name, because it was burdened with the weight of all the occasions on which I had secretly uttered it in my mind. It caused me a pleasure which I was ashamed to have dared to demand from my parents, for so great was it that to have procured it from me must have involved them in an immensity of effort, and with no recompense, since for them there was no pleasure in the sound. And so I would prudently turn the conversation, and by a scruple of conscience also, all the singular seductions which I had stored up in the sound of that word swan, I found again as soon as it was uttered. And then it occurred to me suddenly, that my parents could not fail to experience the same emotions, that they must find themselves sharing my point of view, that they perceived in their turn, that they condoned, that they even embraced my visionary longings. And I was as wretched as though I had ravished and corrupted the innocence of their hearts. That year my family fixed the day of their return to Paris, rather earlier than usual. On the morning of our departure I had had my hair curled, to be ready to face the photographer, had had a new hat carefully set upon my head, and had been buttoned into a velvet jacket. A little later my mother, after searching everywhere for me, found me standing in tears on that steep little hillside close to Tonsonville, waiting a long farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches to my bosom, and, like a princess in a tragedy, oppressed by the weight of all her senseless jewellery, with no gratitude towards the officious hand which had, in curling those ringlets, been at pains to collect all my hair upon my forehead, trampling underfoot the curl-papers which I had torn from my head, and my new hat with them. My mother was not at all moved by my tears, but she could not suppress a cry at the sight of my battered headgear and my ruined jacket. I did not, however, hear her. Oh, my poor little hawthorns! I was assuring them through my sobs. It is not you that want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you. You have never done me any harm, so I shall always love you. Drag my eyes. I promised them that, when I grew up, I would never copy the foolish example of other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring days, instead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would make excursions into the country, to see the first hawthorn trees in blue. Once in the fields, we never left them again during the rest of our miserly's walk. They were perpetually crossed as though by invisible streams of traffic, by the wind, which was to me the tutelary genius of Cambrai. Every year, on the day of our arrival, in order to feel that I really was at Cambrai, I would climb the hill to find it running again through my clothing, and setting me running in its wake. One always had the wind for companion, when one went the miserly's way, on their swelling plain which stretched mile beyond mile, without any disturbance of its gentle contour. I knew that Madame Musel swan used often to go and spend a few days at León, and for all that it was many miles away, the distance was obviated by the absence of any intervening obstacle. Again on hot afternoons, I would see a breath of wind emerge from the farthest horizon, bearing the heads of the corn in distant fields, pouring like a flood over all that vast expanse, and finally settling down, warm and rustling, among the clover and sanfran by feet. That plain which was common to us both seemed then to draw us together, to unite us. I would imagine that the same breath had passed by her also, that there was some message from her in what it was whispering to me, without my being able to understand it, and I would catch and kiss it as it passed. On my left was a village called Champur, Campas Pagani according to the curée. On my right I could see across the corn fields the two crooked rustic spires of Saint-André Deschamps, themselves as tapering, scaly, plaited, honeycombed, yellowed and roughened as two ears of wheat. At regular intervals, among the inimitable ornamentation of their leaves, which can be mistaken for those of no other fruit tree, the apple trees were exposing the broad petals of white satin, or hanging in shy bunches their unopened, blushing buds. It was while going the mesugley's way, that I first noticed the circular shadow which apple trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impelpable threads of golden silk, which the setting sun weaved slantingly downwards from beneath their leaves, and which I would see my father slashed through with his stick, without ever making them swerve from their straight path. Sometimes, in the afternoon sky, a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to come on for a while, and so goes in front in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I was glad to find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of art were very different, at least in my earlier years, before Block had attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies, from those in which the moon seems fair to me today, but in which I should not have recognised her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by Santine, some landscape by Glère, in which she is cut out sharply against the sky in the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and as incomplete as were at that date my own impressions, and which it enraged my grandmother's sisters to see me admire. They held that one ought to set before children, and that children showed their own innate good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt they regarded aesthetic values as material objects which an unclouded vision could not fail to discern, without needing to have their equivalent in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in one's heart. It was along the Masakles Way, at Monjuvan, a house built on the edge of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep, shrub-grown hill that Monsieur Ventoy lived, and so we used often to meet his daughter driving her dog-cart at full speed along the road. After a certain year we never saw her alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than herself, with an evil reputation in the neighborhood, who in the end installed herself permanently one day at Monjuvan. People said, that poor Monsieur Ventoy must be blinded by love not to see what everyone is talking about, and to let his daughter, a man who is horrified if you use a word in the wrong sense, bring a woman like that to live under his roof. He says that she is a most superior woman, with a heart of gold, and that she would have shown extraordinary musical talent if she had only been trained. He may be sure it is not music that she is teaching his daughter, but Monsieur Ventoy assured them that it was, and indeed it is remarkable that people never fail to arouse admiration of the moral qualities in the relatives of any one with whom they are in physical intercourse. Bodlely passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders. Dr. Perspie, whose loud voice and bushy eyebrows enabled him to play to his heart's content the part of double dealer, a part to which he was not otherwise adapted, without in the least degree compromising his unassailable and quite unmerited reputation of being a kind-hearted old curmudgeon, could make the curée and everyone else laugh until they cried by saying in a harsh voice, what do you say to this now? It seems that she plays music with her friend, Madame Sylvain Toi, that surprises you, does it? Oh, I know nothing, nothing at all. It was Papa Van Toi who told me all about it yesterday. After all, she has every right to be fond of music that girl. I should never dream of thwarting the artistic vocation of her child, nor Van Toi, either, it seems. And then he plays music too with his daughter's friend. Why, gracious heavens, it must be a regular musical box that house out there. What are you laughing at? I say they've been playing too much music, those people. I met Papa Van Toi the other day by the symmetry, if all he could do to keep on his feet. Anyone who, like ourselves, had seen Monsieur Van Toi about this time, avoiding people whom he knew, and turning away as soon as he caught sight of them, changed in a few months into an old man, engulfed in a sea of sorrows, incapable of any effort not directly aimed at promoting his daughter's happiness, spending whole days beside his wife's grave, could hardly have failed to realise that he was gradually dying of a broken heart. Could hardly have supposed that he paid no attention to the rumours which were going about. He knew, perhaps he even believed, what his neighbours were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with very vice, which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning, without at first recognising it beneath the disguise which it assumes on entering his presence, so as to wound him, and to make him suffer. The odd words, the unaccountable attitude one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand reasons for loving. But for a man of Monsieur Van Toi's sensibility, it must be far more painful than for a heartened man of the world to have to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian circles only, for they are produced whenever their needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development, a vice which nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might blend the colours of their eyes. And yet, however much Monsieur Van Toi may have known of his daughter's conduct, it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished, as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them. They can aim at them, continual blows of contradiction and disproof, without weakening them, and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming one after another without interruption into the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician. But when Monsieur Van Toi regarded his daughter and himself from the point of view of the world and of their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was bound to give judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely the terms which the inhabitant of Combray most hostile to him and his daughter would have implied. He saw himself and her in low, in the very lowest water, inextricably stranded, and his manners had of late been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him, and to whom he must now look up, however far beneath him they might hitherto have been, their tendency to search for some means of rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any human misfortune. One day, when we were walking with Swan in one of the streets of Combray, Monsieur Van Toi, turning out of another street, found himself so suddenly face to face with us all that he had not time to escape and Swan, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence, the outward signs of which serve to enhance and gratify the self-esteem of the bestower, because he feels that they are all the more precious to him upon whom they are bestowed, conversed at great length with Monsieur Van Toi, with whom for a long time he had been barely on speaking terms, and invited him before leaving us to send his daughter over one day to play at Tonsonville. It was an invitation which two years earlier would have enraged Monsieur Van Toi, but which now filled him with so much gratitude that he felt himself obliged to refrain from the indiscretion of accepting. Swan's friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to be in itself so honourable, so precious a support for his cause, that he felt it would perhaps be better to make no use of it, so as to have the wholly platonic satisfaction of keeping it in reserve. What a charming man, he said to us, after Swan had gone, with the same enthusiasm and veneration which made clever and pretty women of the middle classes, for victims to the physical and intellectual charms of a duchess, even though she be ugly and a fool. What a charming man, what a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage! And then, so strong an element of hypocrisy is there, in even the most sincere of men, who cast off while they are talking to any one, the opinion they actually hold of him, and will express when he is no longer there. My family joined with Monsieur Van Toi into plawing Swan's marriage, invoking principles and conventions which, all the more because they invoke them in common with him, as though we were all thorough good fellows of the same sort, they appeared to suggest were in no way infringed at Montjuvan. Monsieur Van Toi did not send his daughter to visit Swan, an omission which Swan was the first to regret. For constantly, after meeting Monsieur Van Toi, he would remember that he had been meaning for a long time to ask him about someone of the same name as himself, one of his relatives, Swan supposed. And on this occasion he determined that he would not forget what he had to say to him, when Monsieur Van Toi should appear with his daughter at Tonsonville. Since the Mesa Glees way was the shorter of the two that we used to take for our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for days of uncertain weather. It followed that the climate of Mesa Glees showed an unduly high rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the fringe of Roussenville Wood, so that we could at any moment run for shelter beneath its dense thatch of leaves. Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its roundness, but whose edge the sun gilded in return. The brightness, though not the light of day, would then be shut off from a landscape in which all life appeared to be suspended, while the little village of Roussenville carved in relief upon the sky the white mass of its gables. With a startling precision of detail. A gust of wind blew from its perch a rook, which floated away and settled in the distance, while beneath a peeling sky the woods on the horizon assumed a deeper tone of blue, as though they were painted in one of those cameos, which you still find decorating the walls of old houses, but on other days would begin to fall the rain, of which we had had due warning from the little barometer figure which the spectacle maker hung out in his doorway. Its drops, like migrating birds which fly off in a body at a given moment, would come down out of the sky in close marching order. They would never drift apart, would make no movement at random in their rapid course, but each one, keeping in its place, would draw after it the drop which was following, and the sky would be as greatly darkened as by the swallows flying south. We would take refuge among the trees, and when it seemed that their flight was accomplished, a few last drops, feebler and slower than the rest, would still come down. But we would emerge from our shelter, for the rain was playing a game now among the branches, and, even when it was almost dry again underfoot, a stray drop or two, lingering in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and hang glistening from the point of it, until suddenly they splashed plump upon our upturned faces from the whole height of the tree. Often, too, we would hurry for shelter, tumbling in among all its stony saints and patriarchs, into the porch of Saint-André Deschamps, how typically fringe that church was. Over its door, the saints, the kings of chivalry, with lilies in their hands, the wedding scenes and funerals, were carved as they might have been in the mind of François. The sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil. Precisely as François in her kitchen would break into speech about Saint-Louis, as though she herself had known him, generally in order to depreciate by contrast with him, my grandparents, whom she considered less righteous. One could see that the ideas which the medieval artist, and the medieval peasant, who had survived Cook for us in the nineteenth century, had of classical and of early Christian history, ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognizable, and alive. Another combré person whom I could discern also, potential and typified, in the Gothic sculptures of Saint-André Deschamps, was young Theodore, the assistant in Camus' shop. And indeed François herself was well aware that she had in him a countryman and contemporary, for when my aunt was too ill for François to be able, unaided, to lift her in her bed, or to carry her to her chair, rather than let the kitchen maid come upstairs and perhaps make an impression on my aunt, she would send out for Theodore. And this lad, who was regarded, and quite rightly in the town as a bad character, was so abounding in that spirit which had served to decorate the porch of Saint-André Deschamps, and particularly in the feelings of respect due, in François's eyes, to all poor invalids, and above all to her own poor mistress, that he had, when he bent down to raise my aunt's head from her pillow, the same air of pre-Raphaelite simplisty and zeal, which the little angels in the base reliefs wear, who throng with tapers in their hands about the deathbed of our Lady, as though those carved faces of stone, naked and gray like trees in winter, were like them, asleep only, storing up life and waiting to flower again in capitalist plebeian faces, reverend and cunning as the face of Theodore, and glowing with the ruddy brilliance of ripe apples. End of section 11. Section 12 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 12 There, too, not fastened to the wall like the little angels, but detached from the porch of more than human stature, erect upon her pedestal as upon a footstall, which had been placed there to save her feet from contact with the wet ground, stood as Saint with the full cheeks, the firm breasts which swelled out inside her draperies, like a cluster of ripe grapes inside a bag, the narrow forehead, short and stubborn nose, deep-set eyes, and strong, thick-skinned, courageous expression of the country women of those parts. This similarity, which imparted to the statue itself a kindness that I had not looked to find in it, was corroborated often by the arrival of some girl from the fields, come, like ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose presence there, as when the leaves of a climbing plant have grown up beside leaves carved in stone, seemed intended by fate to allow us, by confronting it with its type in nature, to form a critical estimate of the truth of the work of art. Before our eyes, in the distance, a promised or an accursed land, Roussenville, within whose walls I had never penetrated, Roussenville was now, when the rain had ceased for us, still being chastised, like a village in the Old Testament, by all the innumerable spears and arrows of the storm, which beat down obliquely upon the dwellings of its inhabitants, or else had already received the forgiveness of the Almighty, who had restored to it the light of his son, which fell upon it in rays of uneven length, like the rays of a monstrance upon an altar. Sometimes, when the weather had completely broken, we were obliged to go home and to remain shut up indoors. Here and there, in the distance, in a landscape which, what with the failing light and saturated atmosphere, resembled a seascape rather, a few solitary houses clinging to the lower slopes of a hill, whose heights were buried in a cloudy darkness, shone out like little boats which had folded their sails, and would ride at anchor all night upon the sea. But what mattered rain or storm? In summer, bad weather is no more than a passing fit of superficial ill temper, expressed by the permanent, underlying fine weather, a very different thing from the fluid and unstable fine weather of winter. It's very opposite, in fact, for has it not, firmly established in the soil on which it has taken solid form in dense masses of foliage over which the rain may pour in torrents, without weakening the resistance offered by their real and lasting happiness. Hoisted, to keep them flying throughout the season, in the village streets, on the walls of the houses and in their gardens, its silken banners, violet and white. Sitting in the little parlour, where I would pass the time until dinner with a book, I might hear the water dripping from our chestnut trees, but I would know that the shower would only glaze and brighten the greenness of their thick, crumpled leaves, and that they themselves had undertaken to remain there, like pledges of summer, all through the rainy night, to assure me of the fine weather's continuing. It might rain as it pleased, but tomorrow, over the white fence of Tonsonville, there would surge and flow, numerous as ever, a sea of little heart-shaped leaves. And without the least anxiety, I could watch the poplar in the rude persham, praying for mercy, bowing in desperation before the storm. Without the least anxiety, I could hear, at the far end of the garden, the last peals of thunder, growling among our lilac trees. If the weather was bad or morning, my family would abandon the idea of a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards Mais-A-Glise-Leviners, during that autumn, when we had to come to Combray to settle the division of my Aunt Learney's estate, for she had died at last, leaving both parties among her neighbours, triumphant in the fact of her demise. Those who had insisted that her mode of life was in fee-blink, and must ultimately kill her, and equally, those who had always maintained that she suffered from some disease not imaginary, but organic, by the visible proof of which the most skeptical would be obliged to own themselves convinced once she had succumbed to it, causing no intense grief to any save one of her survivors, but to that one a grief savage in its violence. During the long fortnight of my Aunt's last illness, Francoise never went out of her room for an instant, never took off her clothes, allowed no one else to do anything for my Aunt, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave. Then, at last, we understood that the sort of terror in which Francoise had lived of my Aunt's harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had developed in her a sentiment which we had mistaken for hatred, and which was really veneration and love. Her true mistress, whose decisions it had been impossible to foresee, from whose stratagems it had been so hard to escape, of whose good nature it had been so easy to take advantage, her sovereign, her mysterious and omnipotent monarch, was no more. Compared with such a mistress, we counted for very little. The time had long passed when, on our first coming to spend our holidays at Cambrai, we had been of equal importance, in Francoise's eyes, with my Aunt. During that autumn, my parents, finding the days so fully occupied with the legal formalities that had begun through, and discussions with solicitors and farmers, that they had little time for walks, which, as it happened, the weather made precarious, began to let me go without them, along the miserably's way, wrapped up in a huge highland plaid, which protected me from the rain, in which I was all the more ready to throw over my shoulders, because I felt that the stripes of its gaudy tartan scandalised Francoise, whom it was impossible to convince, that the colour of one's clothes had nothing whatever to do with one's mourning for the dead, and whom the grief which we had shown on my Aunt's death was wholly unsatisfactory, since we had not entertained the neighbours to a great funeral banquet, and did not adopt a special tone when we spoke of her, while I at times might be heard humming a tune. I am sure that in a book, and to that extent, my feelings were closely akin to those of Francoise. Such a conception of mourning, in the manner of the chanson de Roland, and of the porch of Saint-André Deschamps, would have seemed most attractive. But the moment that Francoise herself approached, some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her angry, and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I regretted my Aunt's death, because she had been a good woman in spite of her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my Aunt, that she might easily have been my Aunt, and yet have been so odious that her death would not have caused me a moment's sorrow. Statements which, in a book, would have struck me as merely fatuous. And if Francoise then inspired like a poet with a flood of confused reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying, I don't know how to express myself, I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal common sense worthy of Dr. Pespierre. And if she went on, or the same, she was a geological relation, there is always the respect due to your geology. I would shrug my shoulders and say, it is really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot speak her own language. Adopting to deliver judgment on Francoise, the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him, in the impartiality of their own minds, are only too prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life. My walks that autumn were all the more delightful, because I used to take them after long hours spent over a book. When I was tired of reading, after a whole morning in the house, I would throw my plaid across my shoulders and set out. My body, which in a long spell of enforced immobility had stored up an accumulation of vital energy, was now obliged, like a spinning top round and let go, to spend this in every direction. The walls of houses, the Tonsonville hedge, the trees of Rousonville wood, the bushes against which Monjuvan leaned its back, all must bear the blows of my walking stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, blows and shouts being indeed no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which not being developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the light of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation, felt it easier and more pleasant to drift into an immediate outlet. And so it is that the bulk of what appear to be the emotional renderings of our inmost sensations, do no more than relieve us of the burden of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us in an indistinct form which does not teach us how it should be interpreted. When I attempt to reckon up all that I owe to the major Gleesway, all the humble discoveries of which it was either the accidental setting or the direct inspiration and cause, I am reminded that it was in that same autumn, on one of those walks, near the bushy precipice which guarded Monjuvan from the rear, that I was struck for the first time by this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of expression. After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had put up a brisk fight, as I came to the edge of the Monjuvan pond, and reached a little hut, roofed with tiles, in which Monsieur Ventoy's gardener kept his tools. The sun shone out again, and its golden rays, washed clean by the shower, blazed once more in the sky, on the trees, on the wall of the hut, and on the still wet tiles of the roof, which had a chicken perching upon its ridge. The wind pulled out sideways the wild grass that grew in the wall, and the chickens downy feathers, both of which things let themselves float upon the wind's breath to their full extent, with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless matter. The tiled roof cast upon the pond, whose reflections were now clear again in the sunlight, a square of pink marble, the like of which I had never observed before. And seeing upon the water, where it reflected the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella, damn, damn, damn, damn! But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound, not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more clearly, into the sources of my enjoyment. And it was at that moment, too. Thanks to a peasant who went past, apparently in a bad enough humour already, but more so when he nearly received my umbrella in his face, and who replied without any cordiality to my, find a what, good to be out walking, that I learned that identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts of all men simultaneously, by pre-established order. Later on I discovered that, whenever I had read for too long, and was in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I would be burning to say something would, at that moment, have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed. And if I had been thinking with affection of my parents, and forming the most sensible and proper plans for giving them pleasure, they would have been using the same interval of time to discover some misdeed that I had already forgotten, and would begin to scold me severely, just as I flunk myself upon them with a kiss. Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone, would be added an alternative feeling, so that I could not be clear in my mind to which I should give the casting vote, a feeling stimulated by the desire to see rise up before my eyes, a peasant girl whom I might clasp in my arms. Coming abruptly, and without giving me time to trace it accurately to its source among so many ideas of a very different kind, the pleasure which accompanied this desire seemed only a degree superior to what was given me by my other thoughts. I found an additional merit in everything that was in my mind at the moment, in the pink reflection of the tiled roof, the wild grass in the wall, the village of Roussenville into which I had long desire to penetrate, the trees of its wood and the steep love its church, created in them by this fresh emotion which made them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear me more swiftly towards them when it filled myself with a potent, unknown, and propitious breeze. But if this desire that a woman should appear added for me something more exalting than the charms of nature, they in their turn enlarged what I might in the woman's charm have found too much restricted. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers also, and that, as for the spirit of those horizons, of the village of Roussenville, of the books which I was reading that year, it was her kiss which would make me master of them all. At my imagination drawing strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire had no longer any bounds. Moreover, just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature, the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas of things set on one side, we believe with the profoundest faith in the originality, in the individual existence of the place in which we may happen to be. The passing figure which my desire evoked seemed to be not any one example of the general type of woman, but a necessary and natural product of the soil. For at that time everything which was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to full-grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made no distinction. I had a desire for a peasant girl from Mesa Glees or Roussenville, for a fisher girl from Baalbeck, just as I had a desire for Baalbeck and Mesa Glees. The pleasure which those girls were empowered to give me would have seemed less genuine. I should have had no faith in it any longer, if I had been at liberty to modify its conditions as I chose. To meet in Paris a fisher girl from Baalbeck, or a peasant girl from Mesa Glees, would have been like receiving the present of a shell which I had never seen upon the beach, or of a fern which I had never found among the woods, would have stripped from the pleasure which she was about to give me all those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had enrapt her. But to wander thus among the woods of Roussenville, without a peasant girl to embrace, was to see those woods, and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep hidden beauty. That girl whom I never saw, save dappled with the shadows of their leaves, was to me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the rest, and one whose structure would enable me to approach more closely than in them, to the intimate savor of the land from which she had sprung. I could believe this, all the more readily, and also that the caresses by which she would bring that savor to my senses were themselves of a particular kind, yielding a pleasure which I could never derive from any but herself. Since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea, which makes one regard them thus forward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself. Obscurely awaited, imminent and concealed, it roses to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender glance, in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for the kindness of heart of our companion, and for her touching predilection of ourselves, which we measure by the benefits, by the happiness that she showers upon us. Alas! it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keeper of Roussenville, that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village, appealing to it as to the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my earliest desires when, from the top floor of our house at Combray, from the little room that smelt of Orris root, I had peered out, and seen nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window, while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for unknown climbs, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to my death even, until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering current which, creeping in through the window, tumbled all about my body. In vain I called upon it now. In vain I compressed the whole landscape into my field of vision, draining it with an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it a female creature. I might go alone, as far as the porch of Saint-André des Chants. Never did I find there the girl whom I should inevitably have met, had I been with my grandfather, and so unable to engage her in conversation. I would fix my eyes, without limit of time, upon the trunk of a distant tree, from behind which she must appear and spring towards me. My closest scrutiny left the horizon barren as before. Night was falling. Without any hope now would I concentrate my attention, as though to force up out of it the creatures which it must conceal, upon that sterile soil, that stale and outworn land. And it was no longer in lightness of heart, but with sullen anger that I aimed blows at the trees of Roussinville Wood, from among which no more living creatures made their appearance than if they had been trees painted on the stretched canvas background of a panorama, when unable to resign myself to having to return home without having held in my arms the woman I so quickly desired. I was yet obliged to retrace my steps towards Cambrai, and to admit to myself that the chance of her appearing in my path grew smaller every moment. And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have regarded me as mad, for I no longer thought of those desires which came to me on my walks, but were never realised, as being shared by others, or as having any existence apart from myself. They seemed nothing more now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my temperament. They were in no way connected now with nature, with a world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, just as the action of a novel is framed in the railway carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time. And it is perhaps, from another impression, which I received at Manjou van, some years later, an impression which at that time was without meaning, that there arose, long afterwards, my idea of that cruel side of human passion, called sadism. We shall see in due course, that for quite another reason, the memory of this impression was to play an important part in my life. It was during a spell of very hot weather. My parents, who had been obliged to go away for the whole day, had told me that I might stay out as late as I pleased, and having gone as far as the Manjou van pond, where I enjoyed seeing again the reflection of the tiled roof of the hut. I had leaned down in the shade, and gone to sleep among the bushes on the steep slope, that rose up behind the house, just where I had waited for my parents, years before, one day when they had gone to call a Monsieur Ventoy. It was almost dark when I awoke, and I wished to rise and go away, but I saw mademoiselle Ventoy, or thought at least, that I recognized her, for I had not seen her often at Combray, and then only when she was still a child, whence she was now growing into a young woman, who probably had just come in, standing in front of me, and only a few feet away from me, in that room in which her father had entertained mine, and which she had now made into a little sitting-room for herself. The window was partly open, the lamp was lighted, I could watch her every movement without her being able to see me. But, had I gone away, I must have made a rustling sound among the bushes, she would have heard me, and might have thought that I had been hiding there, in order to spy upon her. She was in deep mourning, for her father had but lately died. We had not gone to see her. My mother had not cared to go, on account of that virtue which alone in her, fixed any bounds to her benevolence, namely modesty. But she pitied the girl, from the depths of her heart. My mother had not forgotten the sad end of Monsieur Vantoy's life, his complete absorption, first in having to play both mother and nursery maid to his daughter, and later in the suffering which she had caused him. She could see the tortured expression which was never absent from the old man's face in those terrible in those terrible last years. She knew that he had definitely abandoned the task of transcribing in fair copies the whole of his later work, the poor little pieces we imagined, of an old music master, a retired village organist, which we assumed were of little or no value in themselves, that we did not despise them, because they were of such great value to him, and had been the chief motive of his life before he sacrificed them to his daughter. Pieces which, being mostly not even written down, but recorded only in his memory, while the rest were scribbled on loose sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must now remain unknown for ever. My mother thought also, of that other and still more cruel renunciation, to which Monsieur Ventoy had been driven, that of seeing the girl happily settled, with an honest and respectable future. When she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunt's old music master, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief so different in its bitterness, which Mademoiselle Ventoy must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father. Poor Monsieur Ventoy, my mother would say, he lived for his daughter, and now he has died for her, without getting his reward. Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what form? It can only come to him from her. At the far end of Mademoiselle Ventoy's sitting-room, on the mantel-piece, stood a small photograph of her father, which she went briskly to fetch, just as the sound of carriage wheels was heard from the road outside, then flunk herself down on a sofa, and drew close beside her a little table on which she placed the photograph. Just as, long ago, Monsieur Ventoy had placed beside him the piece of music which he would have liked to play over to my parents, and then her friend came in. Mademoiselle Ventoy greeted her without rising, clasping her hands behind her head, and drew her body to one side of the sofa, as though to make room. But no sooner had she done this than she appeared to feel that she was perhaps suggesting a particular position to her friend, with an emphasis which might well be regarded as important. She thought that her friend would prefer, no doubt, to sit down at some distance from her, upon a chair. She felt that she had been in discreet, a sensitive heart took right, stretching herself out again over the whole of the sofa. She closed her eyes and began to yawn, so as to indicate that it was a desire to sleep, and that alone which had made her lie down there. Despite the rude and hectoring familiarity with which she treated her companion, I could recognize in her the obsequious and reticent advances, the abrupt scruples and restraints which had characterised her father. Presently she rose and came to the window, where she pretended to be trying to close the shutters, and not succeeding. Leave them open, said her friend. I am hot, but it's too dreadful. People will see us, Mademoiselle Ventoy answered. And then she guessed, probably, that her friend would think that she had uttered these words simply in order to provoke her reply in certain other words, which she seemed indeed to wish to hear spoken, but from prudence would let her friend be the first to speak. And so, although I could not see her face clearly enough, I am sure that the expression must have appeared on it which my grandmother had once found so delightful. When she hastily went on, when I say, see us, I mean of course see us reading, it's so dreadful to think that in every trivial little thing you do, someone may be overlooking you. With the instinctive generosity of her nature, a courtesy beyond her control, she refrained from uttering the studied words which, she had felt, were indispensable from the full realisation of her desire. And perpetually, in the depths of her being, a shy and suppliant maiden would kneel before that other element, the old campaigner, battered by triumphant, would intercede with him, and oblige him to retire. Oh yes, it is so extremely likely that people are looking at us, at this time of night, in this densely populated district," said her friend with bitter irony, and what if they are? She went on, feeling bound to annotate with a malicious yet affectionate wink, these words which she was repeating, out of good nature, like a lesson prepared beforehand, which she knew it would please Mademoiselle Vantoy to hear, and what if they are, all the better that they should see us? Mademoiselle Vantoy shuddered and rose to her feet. In her sensitive and scrupulous heart, she was ignorant what words ought to flow spontaneously from her lips, so as to produce the scene for which her eager senses clamoured. She reached out as far as she could, across the limitations of her true character, to find the language appropriate to a vicious young woman, such as she longed to be thought, but the words which she imagined, such a young woman might have uttered with sincerity, sounded unreal in her own mouth. And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a stream-tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech. While she kept on interrupting herself with, you're sure you are cold, you aren't too hot, you don't want to sit and read by yourself. Your ladyship's thoughts seemed to be rather warm this evening, she concluded, doubtless repeating a phrase which she had heard used on some earlier occasion, by her friend. In the V-shaped opening of her creaked bodies, Mademoiselle Vantay felt the sting of her friend's sudden kiss. She gave a little scream and ran away, and then they began to chase one another about the room, scrambling over the furniture, their wide sleeves fluttering like wings, clucking and crowing like a pair of amorous fowls. At last Mademoiselle Vantay fell down exhausted upon the sofa. Where she was screened from me by the stooping body of her friend. But the latter now had her back turned to the little table, on which the old music master's portrait had been arranged. Mademoiselle Vantay realised that her friend would not see it unless her attention were drawn to it, and so exclaimed as if she herself had just noticed it for the first time. Oh! there's my father's picture looking at us! I can't think who can have put it there! I'm sure I've told them twenty times that is not the proper place for it. I remembered the words that M. Vantay had used to my parents in apologising for an obtrusive sheet of music. This photograph was, of course, in common use in their ritual observances, was subjected to daily profanation, for the friend replied in words which were evidently a liturgical response. Let him stay there. He can't trouble us any longer. Do you think he'd start whining? Do you think he'd pack you out of the house if he could see you now, with the window open, the ugly old monkey? To which Mademoiselle Vantay replied, Oh! please! a gentle approach which testified to the genuine goodness of her nature. Not that it was prompted by any resentment at hearing her father spoken of in this fashion, for that was evidently a feeling which she had trained herself by a long course of surface trees to keep in close subjection at such moments. But rather, because it was the bride or witch, so as to avoid all appearance of egotism, she herself used to curb the gratification which her friend was attempting to procure for her. It may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form of that criminal attitude towards life which she was endeavouring to adopt. But she could not resist the attraction of being treated with affection by a woman who had just shown herself so implacable towards the defenceless dead. She sprang on to the knees of her friend and held out a chaste brow to be kissed, precisely as a daughter would have done to her mother, feeling with exquisite joy that they would thus between them inflict the last turn of the screw of cruelty in robbing Monsieur Ventoy as though they were actually rifling his tomb of the sacred rites of fatherhood. Her friend took the girl's head in her hands and placed a kiss on her brow, with the docility prompted by the real affection she had for mademoiselle Ventoy, as well as by the desire to bring what distraction she could into the dull and melancholy life of an orphan. Do you know what I should like to do to that old horror? She said, taking up the photograph, she murmured in mademoiselle Ventoy's ear something that I could not distinguish. Oh, you would never dare, not dare to spit on it. On that shouted the friend with the deliberate brutality. I heard no more, for mademoiselle Ventoy, who now seemed weary, awkward, preoccupied, sincere, and rather sad, came back to the window and drew the shutters close. But I knew now what was the reward that Monsieur Ventoy, in return for all the suffering that he had endured in his lifetime on account of his daughter, had received from her after his death. And yet, I have since reflected that if Monsieur Ventoy had been able to be present at this scene, he might still, and in spite of everything, have continued to believe in his daughter's soundness of heart, and that he might even, in so doing, have been not altogether wrong. It was true that in all mademoiselle Ventoy's actions the appearance of evil was so strong and so consistent that it would have been hard to find it exhibited in such completeness, save in what is nowadays called a sadist. It is behind the footlights of a Paris theatre, and not under the homely lamp of an actual country house, that one expects to see a girl leading her friend on to spit upon the portrait of her father, who has lived and died for nothing and no one but herself. And when we find in real life a desire for melodramatic effect, it is generally the sardic instinct that is responsible for it. It is possible that, without being in the least inclined towards sadism, a girl might have shown the same outrageous cruelty as mademoiselle Ventoy in desecrating the memory and defying the wishes of her dead father, but she would not have given them deliberate expression in an act so crude in its symbolism, so lacking in subtlety. The criminal element in her behaviour would have been less evident to other people, and even to herself, since she would not have admitted to herself that she was doing wrong. But appearances apart, in mademoiselle Ventoy's soul, at least in the earlier stages, the evil element was probably not unmixed. A sadist of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be, for in that case the evil would not have been external, it would have seemed quite natural to her, and would not even have been distinguishable from herself. And as for virtue, respect for the dead, filial obedience, since she would never have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious delight in their profanation. Sadists of mademoiselle Ventoy's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so virtuous by nature, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, a privilege reserved for the wicked, and when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it, they endeavour to impersonate, to assume all the outward appearance of wicked people, for themselves and their partners in guilt, so as to gain the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. And I could understand how she must have longed for such an escape, when I realised that it was impossible for her to effect it. At the moment when she wished to be thought the very antithesis of her father, what she had once suggested to me were the mannerisms in thought and speech of the poor old music master. Indeed his photograph was nothing, what she really desecrated, what she corrupted into ministering to her pleasures, but what remained between them and her, and prevented her from any direct enjoyment of them, was the likeness between her face and his. His mother's blue eyes which she had handed down to her, like some trinket to be kept in the family, those little friendly movements and inclinations, which set up between the viciousness of Mademoiselle Ventoy and herself a freesiology, a mentality not designed for vice, which made her regarded as not in any way different from the numberless little social duties and courtesies to which she must devote herself every day. It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive. It was pleasure rather, that seemed evil, and as every time that she indulged in it, pleasure came to her attended by evil thoughts such as ordinarily, had no place in her virtuous mind. She came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify it with evil. Perhaps Mademoiselle Ventoy felt that at heart her friend was not altogether bad, nor really sincere when she gave vent to those blasphemous utterances. At any rate, she had the pleasure of receiving those kisses on her brow, those smiles, those glances, all feigned perhaps, but a kin in their base and vicious mode of expression to those which would have been discernable on the face of a creature formed not out of kindness and long suffering, but out of self-indulgence and cruelty. She was able to delude herself for a moment into believing that she was indeed amusing herself in the way in which, with so unnatural an accomplice, a girl might amuse herself, who really did experience that savage antipathy towards her father's memory. Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause, which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.