 Section 27 of Swan's Way. Section 27, but often enough, the things that he did not know that he dreaded now to learn, it was Odette herself who spontaneously and without thought of what she did revealed them to him. For the gap which her vices made between her actual life and the comparatively innocent life which Swan had believed, and often still believed, his mistress to lead, was far wider than she knew. A vicious person, always affecting the same error of virtue before people whom he is anxious to keep from having any suspicion of his vices, has no register, no gauge at hand from which he may ascertain how far those vices, their continuous growth being imperceptible by himself, have gradually segregated him from the normal ways of life. In the course of their cohabitation, in Odette's mind, with the memory of those of her actions which she concealed from Swan, her other, her innocuous actions were gradually colored, infected by these, without her being able to detect anything strange in them, without their causing any explosion in the particular region of herself in which she made them live. But when she related them to Swan, he was overwhelmed by the revelation of the duplicity to which they pointed. One day he was trying, without her to know that, to discover from her whether she had had any dealings with procurices. He was, as a matter of fact, convinced that she had not. The anonymous letter had put the idea into his mind, but in a purely mechanical way. It had been received there with no credulity, but it had, for all that, remained there. And Swan, wishing to be rid of the burden, a dead weight, but nonetheless disturbing, of this suspicion, hoped that Odette would now extirpate it for ever. Oh dear, no! Not that they don't simply persecute me to go to them. Her smile revealed a gratified vanity which she no longer saw that it was impossible, should appear legitimate, to Swan. There was one of them, waited more than two hours for me yesterday, said she would give me any money I asked. It seems there's an ambassador who said to her, I'll kill myself if you don't bring her to me, meaning me. They told her I'd gone out, but she waited and waited, and in the end I had to go myself and speak to her before she'd go away. I do wish you could have seen the way I tackled her. I made was in the next room, listening, and told me I shouted fit to bring the house down. But when you hear me say that I don't want to, the idea of such a thing, I don't like it at all. I should hope I'm still free to do as I please, and when I please, and where I please. If I needed the money I could understand. The porter has orders not to let her in again. He will tell her that I am out of town. Oh, I do wish I could have had you hidden somewhere in the room while I was talking to her. I know you'd have been pleased, my dear. There's some good in your little Odette, you see, after all, though people do say such dreadful things about her. Besides her very admissions, when she made any, of faults which she supposed him to have discovered, rather served Swan as a starting point for fresh doubts than they put an end to the old. For her admissions never exactly coincided with his doubts. In vain might Odette expurgate her confession of all its essential part. There would remain in the accessories something which Swan had never yet imagined, which crushed him anew, and was to enable him to alter the terms of the problem of his jealousy. And these admissions he could never forget. His spirit carried them along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bosom, like corpses in a river. And they poisoned it. She spoke to him once of a visit that Forchville had paid her on the day of the Paris-Merci Fête. What, you knew him as long ago as that? Oh yes, of course you did, he corrected himself, so as not to show that he had been ignorant of the fact. And suddenly he began to tremble at the thought that, on the day of the Paris-Merci Fête, when he had received that letter which he had so carefully preserved, she had been having luncheon, perhaps, with Forchville at the Maison d'Or. She swore that she had not. Still the Maison d'Or reminds me of something or other which I knew at the time wasn't true, he pursued, hoping to frighten her. Yes, that I hadn't been there at all that evening, when I told you I had just come from there, and you had been looking for me at prevoices. She replied, judging by his manner that he knew, with the firmness that was based not so much upon cynicism, as upon timidity, a fear of crossing swan, which her own self-respect made her anxious to conceal, and a desire to show him that she could be perfectly frank if she chose. And so she struck him with all the sharpness and force of a headsman wielding his axe, and yet could not be charged with cruelty, since she was quite unconscious of hurting him. She even began to laugh, though this may perhaps, it is true, have been chiefly to keep him from thinking that she was ashamed at all, or confused. It's quite true, I hadn't been to the Maison d'Or. I was coming away from Forchville's. I had, really, been to prevoices, that wasn't a story, and he met me there and asked me to come in and look at his prince. But someone else came to see him. I told you that I was coming from the Maison d'Or, because I was afraid you might be angry with me. It was rather nice of me, really, don't you see? I admit I did wrong, but at least I'm telling you all about it now, ain't I? But have I to gain by not telling you, straight, that I'd lunched with him on the day of the Paris-Merci Fête. If it were true, especially as at that time, we didn't know one another quite so well as we do now, did we, dear? He smiled back at her with the sudden, craven weakness of the utterly spiritless creature which these crushing words had made of him. And so, even in the months of which he had never dared to think again, because they had been too happy, in those months when she had loved him, she was already lying to him, besides which that moment, that first evening on which they had done a catlia, when she had told him that she was coming from the Maison d'Or. How many others must there have been, each of them covering a falsehood of which Swan had had no suspicion? He recalled how she had said to him once, I need only tell Madame Verduran that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There is always some excuse. Some himself too, probably, many times when she had glibly uttered such words as explain a delay or justify an alteration of the hour fixed for a meeting. Those moments must have hidden, without his having the least inkling of it at the time, an engagement that she had had with some other man, some man to whom she had said, I need only tell Swan that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There is always some excuse. And beneath all his most pleasant memories, beneath the simplest words that Odette had ever spoken to him in those old days, words which he had believed as though they were the words of a gospel, beneath her daily actions which she had recounted to him, with the most ordinary places, her dressmaker's flat, the avenue du poit, the hippodrome, dissembled there by virtue of that temporal superfluity which, after the most detailed account of how Odette has been spent, always leaves something over that may serve as a hiding place for certain unconfessed actions. He could feel the insinuation of a possible undercurrent of falsehood which debased for him all that had remained most precious, his happiest evenings, the Rue La Peruse itself which Odette must constantly have been leaving at other hours than those of which she told him, extending the power of the dark horror that had gripped him when he had heard her admission with regard to the Maison d'oree, and like the obscene gestures in the desolation of Nineveh, shattering stone by stone the whole edifice of his past. If now he turned aside whenever his memory repeated the cruel name of the Maison d'oree, it was because that name recalled to him no longer, as such a little time since, at Madame de Saint-Douvers's party, the good fortune which he long had lost, but a misfortune of which he was now first aware. Then it befell the Maison d'oree, as it had befallen the island in Du Bois, that gradually its name ceased to trouble him. For what we suppose to be our love, our jealousy, are neither of them single, continuous, and individual passions. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swan's love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed out of death, of infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time without seeing her, those that died would not have been replaced by others, but the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swan's heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion. On certain evenings she would suddenly resume towards him a kindness of which she would warn him sternly that he must take immediate advantage under penalty of not seeing it repeated for years to come. He must instantly accompany her home to do a catlia, and the desire which she pretended to have for him was so sudden, so inexplicable, so imperious, the kisses which she lavished on him were so demonstrative and so unfamiliar that this brutal and unnatural fondness made Swan just as unhappy as any lie or unkind action. One evening when he had thus in obedience to her command gone home with her, and while she was interspersing her kisses with passionate words in strange contrast to her habitual coldness, he thought suddenly that he heard a sound. He rose, searched everywhere and found nobody, but he had not the courage to return to his place by her side, whereupon she, in a towering rage, broke a vase, with, I never can do anything right with you, you impossible person. And he was left uncertain whether she had not actually had some man concealed in the room, whose jealousy she had wished to wound, or else to inflame his senses. Sometimes he repaired to gay houses, hoping to learn something about Odette, although he dared not mention her name. I have a little thing here, you're sure to like, the manageress would greet him, and he would stay for an hour or so, talking dofully to some poor girl who sat there astonished, that he went no further. One of them, who was still quite young and attractive, said to him once, of course, what I should like would be to find a real friend. Then he might be quite certain I should never go with any other man again. Indeed, do you think it possible for a woman really to be touched by a man's being and love with her, and never be unfaithful to him? asked Swan anxiously. Why, surely, it all depends on their characters. Swan could not help making the same remarks to these girls, as would have delighted the princess de l'homme. To the one who was in search of a friend, he said with a smile. But how nice of you, you've put on blue eyes to go with your sash. And you, too, you've got blue cuffs on. What a charming conversation we are having for a place of this sort. I'm not boring you, am I, or keeping you? No, I've nothing to do, thank you. If you bored me, I should say so. But I love hearing you talk. I am highly flattered. Aren't we behaving prettily, he asked the manageress, who had just looked in. Well, yes, that's just what I was saying to myself, how sensibly they're behaving. But that's how it is. People come to my house now, just to talk. The prince was telling me, only the other day, that he's far more comfortable here than with his wife. It seems that, nowadays, all the society ladies are like that. A perfect scandal, I call it. But I'll leave you in peace now. I know, when I'm not wanted, she ended discreetly, and left Swan with the girl who had the blue eyes. But presently he rose and said goodbye to her. She had ceased to interest him. She did not know Odette. The painter, having been ill, Dr. Qatar recommended a sea voyage. Several of the faithful spoke of accompanying him. The vergerants could not face the prospect of being left alone in Paris. So first of all, hired, and finally purchased, a yacht. Yes Odette was constantly going on a cruise. Whenever she had been away for any length of time, Swan would feel that he was beginning to detach himself from her. But as though this moral distance were proportionate to the physical distance between them, whenever he heard that Odette had returned to Paris, he could not rest without seeing her. Once when they had gone away, as everyone thought, for a month only, either they succumbed to a series of temptations, or else Mr. Verderin had cunningly arranged everything beforehand to please his wife, and disclosed his plans to the faithful only as time went on. Anyhow, from Algiers they flitted to Tunis, then to Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Asia Minor. They had been absent for nearly a year, and Swan felt perfectly at ease and almost happy, albeit Mr. Verderin had endeavored to persuade the pianist and Dr. Qatar that their respective aunt and patients had no need of them, and that in any event it was most rash to allow Madame Qatar to return to Paris, where Madame Verderin assured him a revolution had just broken out. He was obliged to grant them their liberty at Constantinople. And the painter came home with them. One day, shortly after the return of these four travelers, Swan, seeing an omnibus, approached him, labelled Luxembourg, and having some business there, had jumped onto it, and had found himself sitting opposite Madame Qatar, who was paying a round of visits to people whose day it was, in full review order, with a plume in her hat, a silk dress, a muff, and an umbrella, which due for a parasol, if the rain kept off, a car case, and a pair of white gloves fresh from the cleaners. Wearing these badges of rank, she would, in fine weather, go on foot from one house to another in the same neighborhood, but, when she had to proceed to another district, would make use of a transfer ticket on the omnibus. For the first minute or two, until the natural courtesy of the woman broke through the starched surface of the doctor's wife, not being certain, either, whether she ought to mention the Verderin before Swan, she produced, quite naturally, in her slow and awkward, but not unattractive voice, which every now and then was completely drowned by the rattling of the omnibus, topics selected from those which she had picked up, and would repeat in each of the score of houses, of the stairs of which she clambered in the course of an afternoon. I needn't ask you, M. Swan, whether a man so much in the movement as yourself has been to the Militant, to see the portrait by Machar that the whole of Paris is running after. Well, and what do you think of it? Whose camp are you in, those who bless or those who curse? It's the same in every house in Paris now. No one will speak of anything else but Machar's portrait. You aren't smart. You aren't really cultured. You aren't up to date unless you give an opinion on Machar's portrait. Swan, having replied that he had not seen this portrait, Madame Cotard was afraid that she might have hurt his feelings by obliging him to confess the omission. Oh, that's quite all right. At least you have the courage to be quite frank about it. You don't consider yourself disgraced because you haven't seen Machar's portrait. I do think that's so nice of you. Well now, I have seen it. Opinion is divided, you know. There are some people who find it rather labored, like whipped cream, they say. But I think it's just ideal. Of course, she's not a bit like the blue and yellow ladies that our friend Bich paints. That's quite clear. But I must tell you, perfectly frankly, you'll think me dreadfully old-fashioned, but I always say just what I think, that I don't understand his work. I can quite see the good points there are in his portrait of my husband. Oh, dear me, yes, it's certainly less odd than most of what he does. But even then he had to give the poor man a blue mustache. But, Machard, just listen to this now. The husband of my friend I am on my way to see at this very moment, which has given me the very great pleasure of your company, has promised her that if he is elected to the academy, he is one of the doctor's colleagues, he will get Machard to paint her portrait . So, she's got something to look forward to. I have another friend who insists that she'd rather have le Loire. I'm only a wretched Philistine, and I've no doubt Le Loire has perhaps more knowledge of painting even than Machard. But I do think that the most important thing about a portrait, especially when it's going to cost ten thousand francs, is that it should be like, and a pleasant likeness, if you know what I mean. Having exhausted this topic, to which she had been inspired by the loftiness of her plume, the monogram on her card case, the little number inked inside each of her gloves by the cleaner, and the difficulty of speaking to Swan about the verdurant. Madame Cotard, seeing that they had still a long way to go before they would reach the corner of the rue Bonaparte, where the conductor was to set her down, listened to the promptings of her heart, which counseled other words than these. Your ears must have been burning, she ventured, while we were on the yacht with Madame Verdurant. We were talking about you all the time, Swan was genuinely astonished, for he supposed that his name was never uttered in the verdurant's presence. You see, Madame Cotard went on, Madame de Crécy was there, need I say more. When Odette is anywhere, it's never long before she begins talking about you. And you know quite well, it isn't nasty things, she says. What? You don't believe me, she went on, noticing that Swan looked skeptical, and carried away by the sincerity of her conviction, without putting any evil meaning into the word which she used purely, in the sense in which one employs it, to speak of the affection that unites a pair of friends. What? She adores you. No, indeed, I'm sure it would never do to say anything against you when she was about, one would soon be taught one's place. Whatever we might be doing, if we were looking at a picture, for instance, she would say, if only we had him here, he's the man who could tell us whether it's genuine or not, there's no one like him for that. And all day long she would be saying, what can he be doing just now? I do hope he's doing a little work. It's too dreadful that a fellow with such gifts, as he has, should be so lazy. Forgive me, won't you? I can see him, this very moment, he's thinking of us, he's wondering where we are. Indeed, she used an expression, which I thought very pretty at the time, Madame Verduran asked her how in the world can you see what he's doing when he's a thousand miles away? And Odette answered, nothing is impossible to the eye of a friend. No, I assure you, I'm not saying it just to flatter you. You have a true friend in her, such as one doesn't often find. I can tell you, besides, in case you don't know it, that you're the only one. Madame Verduran told me as much herself on our last day with them. One talks more freely, don't you know, before a parting. I don't say that Odette isn't fond of us, but anything that we may say to her counts for very little, beside what Swan might say. Oh, Mercy, there's the conductor stopping for me. Here I have been chatting away to you, and would have gone right past the rue Bonaparte, and never noticed. Will you be so very kind to tell me whether my plume is straight? And Madame Cotard withdrew from her muff to offer it to Swan, a white-gloved hand from which they're floated with the transfer ticket, an atmosphere of fashionable life that pervaded the omnibus, blended with the harsher fragrance of newly-cleaned kid. And Swan felt himself overflowing with gratitude to her, as well as to Madame Verduran, and almost to Odette, for the feeling that he now entertained for her was no longer tinged with pain, was scarcely even to be described now as love. While from the platform of the omnibus he followed her with loving eyes, as she gallantly threaded her way along the rue Bonaparte, her plume erect, her skirt held up in one hand, while in the other she clasped her umbrella and her card case, so that its monogram could be seen, her muff dancing in the air before her as she went. To compete with and so to stimulate the moribund feelings that Swan had for Odette, Madame Cotard, a wiser physician in this case than ever her husband would have been, had grafted among them others more normal, feelings of gratitude, of friendship, which in Swan's mind were to make Odette seem again more human, more like other women, since other women could inspire the same feelings in him. Were to hasten her final transformation back into that Odette, loved with an undisturbed affection, who had taken him home one evening after a rebel at the painters, to drink orangeade with four chville, that Odette with whom Swan had calculated that he might live in happiness. In former times, having often thought with terror that a day must come when he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had determined to keep a sharp look out, and as soon as he felt that love was beginning to escape him, to cling tightly to it and to hold it back. But now, to the faintness of his love, there corresponded a simultaneous faintness in his desire to remain her lover, for a man cannot change. That is to say, become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be. Occasionally the name, if it caught his eye in a newspaper, of one of the men whom he supposed to have been Odette's lovers, reawakened his jealousy. But it was very slight, and in as much as it proved to him that he had not completely emerged from that period in which he had so keenly suffered, though in it he had also known a way of feeling so intensely happy, and that the accidents of his course might still enable him to catch an occasional glimpse, stealthily and at a distance, of its beauties. This jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable thrill as to the sad Parisian when he has left Venice behind him and must return to France, a last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But as a rule, with this particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain, while still he might, an uninterrupted view of it, he discovered that already it was too late. He would have looked back to distinguish, as it might be, a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had departed, but it is so difficult to enter into a state of complete duality, and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling which one has ceased to possess, that very soon the clouds gathering in his brain he could see nothing. He would abandon the attempt, would take the glasses from his nose and wipe them, and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with as little curiosity, with as much torpor as the drowsy traveler who pulls his cap down over his eyes so as to get some sleep in the railway carriage that is drawing him, he feels faster and faster out of the country in which he has lived for so long, in which he vowed that he would not allow to slip away from him without looking out to bid a last farewell. Indeed, like the same traveler, if he does not awake until he has crossed the frontier and is again in France, when Swan happened to alight, close at hand upon something which proved that Forcheville had been Odette's lover, he discovered that it caused him no pain. That love was now utterly remote, and he regretted that he had had no warning of the moment in which he had emerged from it forever. And just as before kissing Odette for the first time, he had sought to imprint upon his memory the face that for so long had been familiar before it was altered by the additional memory of their kiss. So he would have wished, and thought at least, to have been in a position to bid farewell, while she still existed, to that Odette who had inspired love in him and jealousy, to that Odette who had caused him so to suffer, and whom now he would never see again. He was mistaken. He was destined to see her once again a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep in the twilight of a dream. He was walking with Madame Verdurant, Dr. Guitare, a young man with the fez whom he failed to identify, the painter Odette, Napoleon III and my grandfather, along a path which followed the line of the coast and overhung the sea, now at a great height, now by a few feet only, so that they were continually going up and down. Those of the party who had reached the downward slope were no longer visible to those who were still climbing. What little daylight yet remained was failing, and it seemed as though a black night was immediately to fall on them, now and then the waves dashed against the cliff, and Swan could feel on his cheek a shower of freezing spray. Odette told him to wipe this off, but he could not, and felt confused and helpless in her company, as well because he was in his night-shirt. He hoped that in the darkness this might pass unnoticed. Madame Verdurant, however, fixed her astonished gaze upon him for an endless moment, in which he saw her face change its shape, her nose grow longer, while beneath it there sprouted a heavy moustache. He turned away to examine Odette. Her cheeks were pale, with little fiery spots, her features drawn and ringed with shadows, but she looked back at him with eyes welling with affection, ready to detach themselves like tears and to fall upon his face, and he felt that he loved her so much that he would have liked to carry her off with him at once. Suddenly Odette turned her wrist glanced at a tiny watch and said, I must go. She took leave of everyone in the same formal manner, without taking Swan aside, without telling him where they were to meet that evening or next day. He dared not ask. He would have liked to follow her. He was obliged, without turning back in her direction, to answer with a smile some question by Madame Verdurant. But his heart was frantically beating. He felt that he now hated Odette. He would gladly have crushed those eyes which, a moment ago, he had loved so dearly, have torn the blood into those lifeless cheeks. He continued to climb with Madame Verdurant. That is to say that each step took him farther from Odette, who was going downhill and in the other direction. A second passed, and it was many hours since she had left him. The painter remarked to Swan that Napoleon III had eclipsed himself immediately after Odette. They had obviously arranged it between them, he added. They must have agreed to meet at the foot of the cliff. But they wouldn't say goodbye together. It might have looked odd. She is his mistress. The strange young man burst into tears. Swan endeavored to console him. After all, she is quite right. He said to the young man, drying his eyes for him and taking off the fez to make him feel more at ease. I advised her to do that. Myself, a dozen times. Why be so distressed? He was obviously the man to understand her. So Swan reasoned with himself. For the young man, whom he had failed at first to identify, was himself also. Like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters. Him, who was the first person in the dream, and another whom he saw before him, capped with the fez. As for Napoleon III, it was to force feel that some vague association of ideas, then a certain modification of the Baron's usual physiognomy, and lastly the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honor across his breast, had made Swan give him the name. But actually, and in everything that the person who appeared in his dream represented and recalled to him, it was indeed force feel. For from an incomplete and changing set of images, Swan, in his sleep, drew false deductions, enjoying at the same time. Such creative power that he was able to reproduce himself by a simple act of division, like certain lower organisms. With the warmth that he felt in his own palm, he modelled the hollow of a strange hand, which he thought that he was clasping. And out of feelings and impressions of which he was not yet conscious, he brought about sudden vicissitudes which, by a chain of logical sequences, would produce, at definite points in his dream, the person required to receive his love or to startle him awake. In an instant, night grew black about him, an alarm rang. The inhabitants ran past him, escaping from their blazing houses. He could hear the thunder of the surging waves, and also of his own heart, which with equal violence was anxiously beating in his breast. Suddenly the speed of these palpitations redoubled. He felt a pain, a nausea, that were inexplicable. A peasant dreadfully burned, flung at him as he passed. Come and ask Charleux where Odette spent the night with her friend. He used to go about with her, and she tells him everything. It was they that started the fire. It was his valet come to awaken him and saying, Sir, it is eight o'clock, and the barber is here. I have told him to call again in an hour. But these words, as they dived down through the waves of sleep in which Swan was submerged, did not reach his consciousness without undergoing that refraction, which turns a ray of light at the bottom of a bowl of water, into another sun. Just as, a moment earlier, the sound of the doorbell, swelling in the depths of his abyss of sleep into the clanger of an alarm, had engendered the episode of the fire. Meanwhile the scenery of his dream stage scattered in dust. He opened his eyes, heard for the last time the boom of a wave in the sea, grown very distant. He touched his cheek. It was dry, and yet he could feel the sting of the cold spray and the taste of salt on his lips. He rose and dressed himself. He had made the barber come early, because he had written the day before to my grandfather to say that he was going that afternoon to Combray, having learned that Madame de Combray, Madame Isile de Grande, that had been, was spending a few days there. The association in her memory of her young and charming face, with a place in the country which she had not visited for so long, offered him a combined attraction which made him decide at last to leave Paris. As the different changes and chances that bring us into the company of certain other people in this life, do not coincide with the periods in which we are in love with those people, but overlapping them, they may occur before love has begun, and may be repeated after love is ended, the earliest appearances in our life, of a creature who is destined to afford us pleasure later on, assume retrospectively, in our eyes, a certain value as an indication, a warning, a pre-sage. It was in this fashion that Swan had often carried back his mind to the image of Odette, encountered in the theatre, on that first evening, when he had no thought of ever seeing her again, and that he now recalled the party at Madame de Santuvers, at which he had introduced General de Froberville to Madame de Combray. So manifold are our interests in life, that it is not uncommon that, on a single occasion, the foundations of a happiness which does not yet exist, are laid down simultaneously with aggravations of a grief from which we are still suffering, and, no doubt, that might have occurred to Swan elsewhere than at Madame de Santuvers, who indeed can say whether, in the event of his having gone that evening, somewhere else, other happinesses, other griefs, would not have come to him, which later would have appeared to have been inevitable. But what did seem to him to have been inevitable was what had indeed taken place, and he was not far short of seeing something providential in the fact that he had, at last, decided to go to Madame de Santuvers that evening, because his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention that life shows, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for any length of time, such as to discover what, actually, had been most to be wished for. His mind came to the conclusion that the sufferings through which he had passed that evening, and the pleasures at that time unsuspected, which were already being brought to birth, the exact balance between which was too difficult to establish, were linked by a sort of concatenation of necessity. But while an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair should not become disarranged on the journey, he thought once again of his dream. He saw, once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette's pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which, in the course of those successive bursts of affection, which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed of her, all the things which he had ceased to observe after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of those things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time, the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart to think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style. End of Section 27. Section 28 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. Place Names. The Name. Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during my long nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with the motes of an atmosphere, granular, pollinous, edible, and instinct with piety. Then my room in the Grand Hotel de Le Plage at Balbeck, the walls of which, washed with rippling, contained, like the polished sides of a basin in which the water glows with a blue lurking fire, a finer air, pure, as your tinted, saline. The Bavarian upholstera, who had been entrusted with the furnishing of this hotel, had varied his scheme of decoration in different rooms, and in that which I found myself occupying, had set against the walls, on three sides of it, a series of low bookcases with glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by law of nature which he had, perhaps forgotten to take into account, was reflected this or that section of the ever-changing view of the sea, so that the walls were lined with a freeze of seascapes, interrupted only by the polished mahogany of the actual shelves. And so effective was this, that the whole room had the appearance of one of those model bedrooms, which you see nowadays in housing exhibitions, decorated with works of art, which are calculated by their designer, to refresh the eyes of whoever may ultimately have to sleep in the rooms, the subjects being kept in some degree of harmony with the locality and surroundings of the houses for which the rooms are planned. And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real Baubec, than that other Baubec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy days, when the wind was so strong that Francoise, as she took me to the Champs-Élysées, would warn me not to walk too near the side of the street, or I might have my head knocked off by a falling slate, and would recount to me, with many lamentations, their terrible disasters and shipwrecks that were reported in the newspaper. I longed for nothing more than to behold a storm at sea, less as a mighty spectacle, than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature, or rather there were for me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be not artificially composed for my entertainment, but necessary and unalterable, the beauty of landscapes or of great works of art. I was not curious, I did not thirst to know anything save what I believed to be more genuine than myself, what had for me the supreme merit of showing me a fragment of the mind of a great genius, or of the force or the grace of nature as she appeared when left entirely to herself without human interference. Just as the lovely sound of her voice reproduced all by itself upon the phonograph could never console a man for the loss of his mother, so a mechanical imitation of a storm would have left me as cold as did the illuminated fountains at the exhibition. I required also, if the storm was to be absolutely genuine, that the shore from which I watched it should be a natural shore, not an embankment recently constructed by a municipality. Besides, nature, by all the feelings that she aroused in me, seemed to me the most opposite thing in the world to the mechanical inventions of mankind. The less she bore their imprint, the more room she offered for the expansion of my heart. And, as it happened, I had preserved the name of Balback, which La Grande had cited to us as that of a seaside place in the very midst of that funerary old coast, famed for the number of its wrecks, swathed for six months in the year in a shroud of fog and flying foam from the waves. You feel there below your feet still, here told me, far more even than at Finisterre, and even though hotels are now being superimposed upon it without power, however, to modify that oldest bone in the Earth's skeleton. You feel there that you are actually at the land's end of France, of Europe, of the old world, and it is the ultimate encampment of the fishermen, precisely like the fishermen who have lived since the world's beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of the sea fox and shadows of the night. One day, when at Compré, I had spoken of this coast, this Balback, before Monsieur Swann, hoping to learn from him whether it was the best point to select for seeing the most violent storms. He had replied, I should think I did know Balback. The Church of Balback built in the 12th and 13th centuries, and still half Romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman Gothic, and so exceptional that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspiration. And that region, which until then had seemed to me to be nothing else than a part of immemorial nature that had remained contemporaneous with the great phenomena of geology, and as remote from human history as the ocean itself, or the great bear, with its wild race of fishermen for whom no more than for their whales had there been any middle ages. It had been a great joy to me to see it suddenly take its place in the order of the centuries, with a stored consciousness of the Romanesque epoch, and to know that the Gothic trefoil had come to diversify those wild rocks also at the appointed hour, like those frail but hardy plants which in the polar regions, when the spring returns, scatter their stars about the eternal snows. And if Gothic art brought to those places and people a classification which otherwise they lacked, they too conferred one upon it in return. I tried to form a picture in my mind of how those fishermen had lived. The timid and unsuspected essay towards social intercourse which they had attempted there, clustered upon a promontory of the shores of hell, at the foot of the cliffs of death. And Gothic art seemed to me a more living thing now that, detaching it from the towns in which until then I had always imagined it. I could see how, in a particular instance, upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the most famous of the statues at Baalbek. Shaggy, blunt-faced apostles, the virgin from the porch. And I could scarcely breathe for joy at the thought that I might myself, one day, see them take a solid form against their eternal background of salt fog. Thereafter, on dear, tempestuous February nights, the wind, breathing into my heart, which it shook no less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the project of a visit to Baalbek. Blended in me the desire for Gothic architecture with that for a storm upon the sea. I should have liked to take, the very next day, the good, the generous train at 1.22. Of which never without a palpitating heart could I read in the railway company's bills or in advertisements of circular tours the hour of departure. It seemed to me to cut, at a precise point in every afternoon, a most fascinating groove, a mysterious mark, from which the diverted hours still led one on, of course, towards evening, towards tomorrow morning, but to an evening and morning which one would behold, not in Paris, but in one of those towns through which the train passed, and among which it allowed one to choose. For it stopped at Bayeur, at Coutances, at Vitres, at Questembeir, at Pont-Osson, at Baalbek, at Lanyon, at Lambal, at Benode, at Pont-Avon, at Quimpelle, and progressed magnificently surcharged with names which it offered me, so that among them all I did not know which to choose, so impossible was it to sacrifice any. But even without waiting for the train next day, I could, by rising and dressing myself with all speed, leave Paris that very evening should my parents permit, and arrive at Baalbek, as dawn spread westward over the raging sea, from whose driven foam I would seek shelter in that church in the Persian manner. But at the approach of the Easter holidays, when my parents had promised to let me spend them for once, in the north of Italy, low in place of those dreams of tempests by which I had been entirely possessed, not wishing to see anything but waves dashing in from all sides, mounting always higher upon the wildest of coasts, beside churches as rugged and precipitous as cliffs, in whose towers the sea birds would be wailing. Suddenly, effacing them, taking away all their charm, excluding them because they were its opposite, and could only have weakened its effect, was substituted in me, the converse dream of the most variegated of springs, not the spring of Combray, still pricking with all the needle-points of the winter's frost, but that which already covered with lilies and anemones the meadows of Fieselay, and gave Florence a dazzling golden background, like those in Fra Angelico's pictures. From that moment, only sunlight, perfumes, colors seemed to me to have any value for this alternation of images had affected a change of front in my desire, and as abrupt as those that occur sometimes in music, a complete change of tone in my sensibility. Thus it came about that a mere atmospheric variation would be sufficient to provoke in me that modulation, without there being any need for me to await the return of a season. For often we find a day in one that has strayed from another season, and makes us live in that other, summons at once into our presence, and makes us long for its peculiar pleasures, and interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting out of its turn too early or too late this leaf torn from another chapter in the interpolated calendar of happiness. But soon it happened that, like those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health can derive but an accidental and all to modest benefit, until the day when science takes control of them, and producing them at will places in our hands the power to order their appearance, withdrawn from the tutelage and independent of the consent of chance. Similarly the production of these dreams of the Atlantic and of Italy cease to depend entirely upon the changes of the seasons, and of the weather. I need only to make them reappear, pronounce the names Balbeck, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring to come in a book upon the name of Balbeck suffice to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for the Norman Gothic. Even on a stormy day the name of Florence or of Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the palace of the doges, and for Santa Maria del Fiore. But if their names thus permanently absorbed the image that I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws. And in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be. And by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I formed of certain points on the earth's surface, making them more special and in consequence more real. I did not then represent myself in towns, landscapes, historic buildings, as pictures more or less attractive, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which my soul was a thirst by the knowledge of which it would benefit. How much more individual still was the character that they assumed from being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper names such as people have. Words present us little pictures of things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an anthill. Things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort, but names present us of persons and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons. A confused picture, which draws from the names, from the brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters entirely blue or entirely red, in which on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction, or by a whim on the designer's part, a blue or red, not only the sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets. The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most long to visit after reading the Chartres, seemed to me compact and glossy, violet tinted, soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma, in which I should be lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact and glossy, violet tinted, soft, and that bore no relation to the houses in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid of that heavy syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air stirred, and of all that I had made it assume of stontalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets. And when I thought of Florence, it was of a town miraculously embalmed and flower-like, since it was called the City of the Lilies, and its cathedral, our Lady of the Flower. As for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on an old piece of Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which it was fashioned. Once these depicted still the representation of some long abolished custom, of some feudal rite, of the former condition of some place, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language, which had shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables, in which I never doubted that I should find spoken there at once, even by the innkeeper who would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch the turbulent sea unchained before the church, to whom I lent the aspect, disputatious, solemn and medieval, of some character in one of the old romances. Had my health definitely improved, had my parents allowed me, if not actually to go down to stay at Balbec, at least to take just once so as to become acquainted with the architecture and landscapes of Normandy or of Brittany, that one twenty-two train into which I had so often clambered in imagination, I should have preferred to stop and to alight from it at the most beautiful of its towns. But in vain might I compare and contrast them. How was one to choose any more than between individual people, who are not interchangeable, between Bayeur, so lofty in its noble coronet of rusty lace, whose highest point caught the light of the old gold of its second syllable, Fitre, whose acute accent barred its ancient glass with wooden lozenges, gentle Lambal, whose whiteness ranged from exchelle yellow to a pearly gray, Coutances, a Norman cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with a tower of butter, Lanion, with a rumble and buzz in the silence of its village street, of the fly on the wheel of the coach, Questembert, Pont-au-Saint, ridiculously silly and simple, white feathers and yellow beaks strewn along the road to those well-watered and poetic spots, Benaday, a name scarcely moored that seemed to be striving to draw the river down into the tangle of its seaweeds. Pont-au-Von, the snowy rosy flight of the wing of a lightly poised coiff, tremulously reflected in the greenish waters of a canal. Quimperlée, more firmly attached this, and since the Middle Ages, among the rivulets with which it babbled, threading their pearls upon a gray background, like the pattern made through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into blunt points of tarnished silver. These images were false, for another reason also. Namely that they were necessarily much simplified. Doubtless the object to which my imagination has spared, which my senses took in but incompletely, and without any immediate pleasure, I had committed to the safe custody of names. Doubtless because I had accumulated there a store of dreams, those names now magnetized my desires. But names themselves are not very comprehensive. The most that I could do was to include in each of them two or three of the principal curiosities of the town, which could lie there side by side, without interval or partition. In the name of Balbec, as in the magnifying glasses set in those penholders, which one buys at seaside places, I could distinguish waves surging round a church built in the Persian manner. Perhaps indeed the enforced simplicity of these images was one of the reasons for the hold that they had over me. When my father had decided one year that we should go for the Easter holidays to Florence and Venice, not finding room to introduce into the name of Florence the elements that ordinarily constitute a town, I was obliged to let a supernatural city emerge from the impregnation by certain vernal scenes of what I supposed to be in its essentials, the genius of Giotto, or the Moor, and because one cannot make a name extend much further in time than in space, like some of Giotto's paintings themselves, which show us at two separate moments the same person engaged in different actions. Here lying on his bed, there just about to mount his horse, the name of Florence was divided into two compartments. In one, beneath an architectural dais, I gazed upon a fresco over which was partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight, dusty, a slant, and gradually spreading. In the other, four, since I thought of names not as an inaccessible ideal, but as a real and enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge, the life not yet lived, the life intact and pure which I enclosed in them, gave to the most material pleasures to the simplest scenes the same attraction that they have in the works of the primitives. I moved swiftly, so as to arrive as soon as might be at the table that was spread for me, with fruit and a flask of chianti, across a ponte vecchio heaped with junk wheels, nazisai and anemones. That, for all that I was still in Paris, was what I saw, and not what was actually round about me. Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries for which we long occupy at any given moment a far larger place in our true life than the country in which we may happen to be. Doubtless, if at that time I had paid more attention to what was in my mind when I pronounced the words going to Florence, to Palma, to Pisa, to Venice, I should have realised that what I saw was in no sense a town, but something as different from anything that I knew, something as delicious as might be for a human race whose whole existence had passed in a series of late winter afternoons. That inconceivable marvel, a morning in spring. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, feeling all my nights and days differentiated this period in my life from those which had gone before it, and might easily have been confused with it by an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say who saw nothing. As in an opera, a fresh melody introduces a novel atmosphere which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre counting only the minutes as they passed, and besides even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not all equal. To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use like motor cars of different speeds. There are mountainous, uncomfortable days up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward sloping through which one can go at full tilt, singing as one goes. During this month, in which I went laboriously over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of chance, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for another person, I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith on the eve of his entry into paradise. Moreover, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with my organs of sense what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all, there were the more tempting to them in consequence more different from anything that they knew. It was that which recalled to me the reality of these visions which inflamed my desire all the more by seeming to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied, and for all that the motive force of my exaltation was alonging for aesthetic enjoyments, the guidebooks ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and more again than the guidebooks the railway timetables. What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I could see so near and yet inaccessible in my imagination, if the tract which separated it from me in myself was not one that I might cross could yet be reached by a circuit by a digression where I to take the plane to rest real path. When I repeated myself giving thus a special value to what I was going to see that Venice was the school of Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most complete museum of the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages, I felt happy indeed. As I was even more when on one of my walks as I stepped out briskly on account of the weather, which after several days of a precocious spring had relapsed into winter, like the weather that we had invariably found awaiting us at Conbray in Holy Week, seeing upon the boulevards that the chestnut trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked through them like a stream of water, were nonetheless beginning punctual guests arrayed already for the party and admitting no discouragement to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the irrepressible Virgil whose steady growth, the abortive power of the cold might hinder but could not succeed in mistrenic. I reflected that already the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of higher scents and anemones and that the spring sunshine was already tinging the waves of the Grand Canal with so dusky and azure, with emeralds so splendid that when they washed and were broken against the foot of one of Titian's paintings they could vie with it in the richness of their colouring. I could no longer contain my joy when my father in the intervals of tapping the barometer and complaining of the cold began to look out which were the best trains and when I understood that by making one's way after luncheon into the cold-grimed laboratory the wizard cell that undertook to contrive a complete transmutation of its surroundings one could awaken next morning in the city of marble and gold in which the building of the wall was of Jasper and the foundation of the wall and emerald so that it and the city of the lilies were not just artificial scenes which I could set up at my pleasure in front of my imagination but did actually exist at a certain distance from Paris which must inevitably be traversed if I wish to see them at their appointed place on the Earth's surface and at no other. In a word they were entirely real. They became even more real to me when my father by saying well you can stay in Venice from the 20th to the 29th and reach Florence on Easter morning. May them both emerge no longer only from the abstraction of space but from that imaginary time in which we place not one merely but several of our travels at once which do not greatly tax us since they are but possibilities that time which reconstructs itself so effectively that one can spend it again in one town after one has already spent it in another and consecrated to them some of those actual calendar days which are certificates of the genuineness of what one does on them for those unique days are consumed by being used they do not return one cannot live them again here when one has lived them elsewhere. I felt that it was towards the week that would begin with a Monday on which the laundress was to bring back the white waistcoat that I had stained with ink that they were hastening to busy themselves with the duty of emerging from that ideal time in which they did not as yet exist those two Queen cities of which I was soon to be able by the most absorbing kind of geometry to inscribe the domes and towers on a page of my own life but I was still on the way only to the supreme pinnacle of happiness. I reached it finally for not until then did the revelation burst upon me that on the clattering streets reddened by the light reflected from Georgianes frescoes it was not as I had despite so many promptings continue to imagine the men majestic and terrible as the sea bearing armor that gleamed with blondes beneath the folds of their blood red cloaks who would be walking in Venice next week on the Easter vigil but that I myself might be the minute personage whom in an enlarged photograph of Saint Mark's that had been lent to me the operator had portrayed in a bowler hat in front of the portico when I heard my father say it must be pretty cold still on the grand canal whatever you do don't forget to pack your winter greatcoat and your thick suit at these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy a thing that I had until then deemed impossible I felt myself to be penetrating indeed between those rocks of amethyst like a reef in the Indian Ocean by supreme muscular effort a long way in excess of my real strength stripping myself as of a shell that served no purpose of the air in my own room which surrounded me I replaced it by an equal quantity of a niche nair that marine atmosphere indescribable and peculiar as the atmosphere of the dreams which my imagination had secreted in the name of Venice I could feel at work within me a miraculous disincarnation it was at once accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels when one has a very sore throat and they had to put me to bed with a fever so persistent that the doctor not only assured my parents that a visit that spring to Florence and Venice was absolutely out of the question but warned them that even when I should have completely recovered I must for at least a year give up all idea of traveling and be kept from anything that was liable to excite me at alas he forbade also most categorically my being allowed to go to the theatre to hear Burma the sublime artist whose genius begot had proclaimed might by introducing me to something else that was perhaps as important and as beautiful have consoled me for not having been to Florence and Venice for not going to Balbeck my parents had to be content with sending me every day to the Champs Elysees in the custody of a person who would see that I did not tar myself this person was none other than Francois who had entered our service after the death of my Aunt Learney going to the Champs Elysees I found unendurable if only begot had described the place in one of his books I should no doubt have longed to see and know it like so many things else of which a simulacrum had first found its way into my imagination that kept things warm made them live gave them personality and I sought then to find their counterpart in reality but in this public garden there was nothing that attached itself to my dreams one day as I was weary of our usual place beside the wooden horses Francois had taken me for an excursion across the frontier guarded at regular intervals by the little bastions of the barley sugar women into those neighboring but foreign regions where the faces of the passers-by were strange where the goat carriage went past then she had gone away to lay down her things on a chair that stood with its back to a shrubbery of laurels while I waited for her I was pacing the broad lawn of meager close cropped grass already faded by the sun dominated at its far end by a statue rising from the fountain in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing with a shuttlecock when from the path another little girl who was putting on her cloak and covering up her battle door called out sharply good-bye Gilbert I'm going home now don't forget we're coming to you this evening after dinner the names your bed passed close by me evoking all the more forcibly her whom it labeled in that it did not merely refer to her as one speaks of a man in his absence but was directly addressed to her it passed thus close by me in action so to speak with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to its target carrying in its wake I could feel the knowledge the impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called her everything that while she uttered the words she more or less vividly reviewed possessed in her memory of their daily intimacy of the visits that they paid to each other of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible all the more painful to me from being conversely so familiar so tractable to this happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to penetrate its surface who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attire which that message had distilled by touching them with precision from certain invisible points in mademoiselle swan's life from the evening to come as it would be after dinner at her home forming on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemates a little cloud exquisitely coloured like the cloud that curling over one of pussan's gardens reflects minutely like a cloud in the opera teaming with chariots and horses some apparition of the life of the gods casting finally on that ragged grass at the spot on which she stood at once a scrap of withered lawn at a moment in the afternoon of the fair player who continued to beat up and catch her shuttlecock until a governess with a blue feather in her hat had caught her away a marvellous little band of light of the colour of heliotrope spread over the lawn like a carpet on which i could not tower of treading to and fro with lingering feet nostalgic and profane while france was shouted come on button up your coat look and let's get away and i remarked for the first time how common her speech was and that she had alas no blue feather in her hat only would she come again to the Champs Elyse next day she was not there but i saw her on the following days i spent all my time revolving around the spot where she was at play with her friends to such effect that once when they found they were not enough to make up a prisoner's base she sent one of them to ask me if i cared to complete their sight and from that day i played with her whenever she came but this did not happen every day there were days when she had been prevented from coming by her lessons by her catechism by a luncheon party by the whole of that life separated from my own which twice only condensed into the name of Gilbert i had felt past so painfully close to me in the Hawthorne Lane near Combray and on the grass of the Champs Elyse on such days she would have told us beforehand that we should not see her if it were because of her lessons she would say it is too tarsan i shall be able to come tomorrow you will all be enjoying yourselves here without me with an air of regret which to some extent can sort me if on the other hand she had been invited to a party and i not knowing this asked her whether she was coming to play with us she would reply indeed i hope not indeed i hope mama will let me go to my friends but on these days i did at least know that i should not see her whereas on others without any warning her mother would take her for a drive or some such thing and next day she would say oh yes i went out with mama as though it had been the most natural thing in the world and not the greatest possible misfortune for someone else there were also the days of bad weather on which her governess afraid on her own account of the rain would not bring Gilbert to the Champs Elyse and so if the heavens were doubtful from early morning i would not cease to interrogate them observing all the omens if i saw the lady opposite just inside her window putting on her hat i would say to myself that lady is going out it must therefore be whether in which one can go out i should not you'll bet do the same as that lady but the day grew dark my mother said that it might clear again that one burst of sunshine would be enough but that more probably it would rain and if it rained of what use would it be to go to the Champs Elyse and so from breakfast time my anxious eyes never left the uncertain clouded sky it remained dark outside the window the balcony was gray suddenly on its sullenstone i did not indeed see a less negative color but i felt as it were an effort towards a less negative color the pulsation of a hesitating gray that struggled to discharge its light a moment later the balcony was as pale and luminous as a standing water at dawn and a thousand shadows from the iron work of its balustrade had come to rest on it a breath of wind dispersed them the stone grew dark again but like tamed creatures they returned they began imperceptibly to grow lighter and by one of those continuous crescendos such as in music at the end of an overture carry a single note to the extreme fortissimo making it pass rapidly through all the intermediate stages i saw it attain to that fixed unalterable gold of fine days on which the sharply cut shadows of the wrought iron of the balustrade were outlined in black like a precious vegetation with a fineness in the delineation of their smallest details which seem to indicate a deliberate application an artist's satisfaction and with so much relief so velvety a bloom in the restfulness of their somber and happy mass that in truth those large and leafy shadows which lay reflected on that lake of sunshine seemed aware that they were pledges of happiness and peace of mind brief fading ivy climbing fugitive flora the most colorless the most depressing to many minds of all that creep on walls or decorate windows to me the dearest of them all from the day when it appeared upon our balcony like the very shadow of the presence of Gilbert who was perhaps already in the Champs Elysees and as soon as I arrived there would greet me with let's begin at once you're on my side frail swept away by a breath but at the same time in harmony not with the season with the hour a promise of that immediate pleasure which the day will deny or fulfill and thereby of the one paramount immediate pleasure the pleasure of loving and of being loved more soft more warm upon the stone than even mosses alive a ray of sunshine sufficing for its birth and for the birth of joy even in the heart of winter and on those days when all other vegetation had disappeared when the fine jerkens of green leather which cover the trunks of the old trees were hidden beneath the snow after the snow had ceased to fall but when the sky was still too much overcast for me to hope that Gilbert would venture out then suddenly inspiring my mother to say look it's quite fine now i think you might perhaps try going to the Champs Elysees after all on the mantle of snow that swathed the balcony the sun had appeared and was stitching seams of gold with embroidered patches of dark shadow that day we found no one there or else a solitary girl on the point of departure who assured me that Gilbert was not coming the chairs deserted by the imposing but uninspiring company of governesses stood empty only near the grass was sitting a lady of uncertain age who came in all weathers dressed always in an identical style splendid and somber to make whose acquaintance i would have at that period sacrificed had it lain in my power all the greatest opportunities in my life to come for Gilbert went up every day to speak to her she used to ask Gilbert for news of her dearest mother and it struck me that if i had known her i should have been for Gilbert someone wholly different someone who knew people in her parents world while her grandchildren played together at a little distance she would sit and read the deba which called my old deba as with a aristocratic familiarity she would say speaking of the police sergeant or the woman who let the chairs my old friend the police sergeant or the chairkeeper and i who are old friends end of section 28