 13. If the Mesa Glees Way was so easy, it was very different matter when we took the Gaumont Way. For that meant a long walk, and we must make sure first of the weather. When we seemed to have entered upon a spell of fine days, when France was, in desperation that not a drop was falling upon the poor crops, gazing up at the sky, and seeing there only a little white cloud floating here and there upon its calm as your surface, groaned aloud and exclaimed. You would say they were nothing more nor less than a lot of dogfish swimming about and sticking up their snouts. Ah, they never think of making it rain a little for the poor labourers. And then, when the corn is all ripe, down it will come, rattling all over the place, and think no more of where it is falling than if it was on the sea. When my father's appeals to the gardener had met with the same encouraging answer several times in succession, then some one would say at dinner, to-morrow, if the weather holds, we might go the Gaumont Way. And off we would set, immediately after luncheon, through the little garden gate which dropped us into the Rue des Perchamps, narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with grass plots over which two or three wasps would spend the day botanising, a street as quaint as its name, from which its odd characteristics and its personality were, I felt, derived, a street for which one might search in vain through the Combré of today, for the public school now rises upon its sight, but in my dreams of Combré, like those architects, pupils of Violet-le-Dougue, who fancying that they can detect beneath a renaissance rude loft, and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a Norman choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it probably was in the twelfth century. I leave not a stone of the modern edifice standing, I pierce through it and restore the Rue des Perchamps. And for such reconstruction, memory furnishes me with more detailed guidance than is generally at the disposal of restorers, the pictures which it has preserved, perhaps the last surviving in the world to-day, and soon to follow the rest into oblivion of what Combré looked like in my childhood days, pictures which, simply because it was the old Combré that traced their outlines upon my mind before it vanished, whereas moving, if I may compare a humble landscape with those glorious works, reproductions of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing on me, as those old engravings of the Chenacleau, or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo, and the portico of St. Mark's. We would pass, in the Rue de L'Azile, before the old hostry of the Wazel Flesche, into whose great courtyard once upon a time, would rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de Montpensier, de Ghermont, and de Montmorensie, when they had to come down to Combré for some litigation with their farmers, or to receive homage from them. We would come at length to the moor, among whose treetops I could distinguish the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, and I should have liked to be able to sit down and spend the whole day there, reading and listening to the bells, for it was so charming there, and so quiet that, when an hour struck, you would have said not that it broke in upon the calm of the day, but that it relieved the day of its superfluity, and that the steeple, with the indolent, painstaking exactitude of a person who has nothing else to do, had simply, in order to squeeze out and let fall the few golden drops which had slowly and naturally accumulated in the hot sunlight, pressed, at a given moment, the distended surface of the silence. The great charm of the Ghermont way was that we had beside us almost all the time the course of the vivant. We crossed it first, ten minutes after leaving the house, by a footbridge called the Pompierre, and every year, when we arrived at Combré, on Easter morning, after the sermon, if the weather was fine, I would run there to see, amid all the disorder that prevails on the morning of a great festival, the gorgeous preparations for which make the everyday household utensils that they have not contrived to banish, seem more sordid than ever. The river flowing past, sky blue already between banks still black and bare, its only companions a clump of daffodils come out before their time. A few prim roses, the first in flower, while here and there burned the blue flame of a violet, its stem bent beneath the weight of the drop of perfume stored in its tiny horn. The Pompierre led to a tow path which, at this point, would be overhung in summer by the bluish foliage of a hazel, under which a fisherman in a straw hat seemed to have taken root. At Combré, where I knew every one, and could always detect the blacksmith or grosser's boy through its disguise of a beadles uniform or coasters surplus, this fisherman was the only person whom I was never able to identify. He must have known my family, for he used to raise his hat when we passed, and then I would always be just on the point of asking his name, when someone would make a sign to me to be quiet or I would frighten the fish. We would follow the tow path, which ran along the top of a steep bank several feet above the stream. The ground on the other side was lower, and stretched in a series of broad meadows as far as the village and even to the distant railway station. Over these were strewn the remains, half buried in the long grass, of the castle of the old camps of Combré, who, during the Middle Ages, had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier and defence against attack from the lords of Guermont and Abbots of Martinville. Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad surface of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in their day, the bowmen had hurled down stones, the watchmen had gazed out over Nauve-Pont, Clare-Fontaine, Martinville-les-Sèques, Bayeaux-Lex-Empes, fiefs all of them of Guermont, a ring in which Combré was locked. But fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and commanded by boys from the Christian Brothers' school, who came there in their playtime or with lesson-books to be conned. Emblems of a past that had sunk down and well I vanished under the earth, that lay by the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong food for thought, making the name of Combré, canote to me not the little town of to-day only, but an historic city, vastly different, seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half concealed beneath the spangled veil of butter-cups. For the butter-cups grew past numbering on this spot, which they had chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in whole companies, yellow as the yoke of eggs, and glowing with an added luster, I felt, because, being powerless to consummate with my palette, the pleasure which the sight of them never felt to give me, I would let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their gilded expanse, until it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of absolute, unproductive beauty. And so it had been for my earliest childhood, when from the tow-path I had stretched out my arms towards them, before even I could pronounce their charming name, a name fit for the prince in some French fairytale, colonists, perhaps, in some far-distant sentry from Asia, but naturalised now for ever in the village, well-satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water's edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the railway station, yet keeping, nonetheless, as do some of our old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the Golden East. I would amuse myself by watching the glass jars which the boys used to lower into the vivon, to catch minnows, and which, filled by the current of the stream, in which they themselves also were enclosed, at once containers whose transparent sides were like solidified water and contents, plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing crystal, suggested an image of coolness, more delicious, and more provoking than the same water in the same jars would have done, standing upon a table laid for dinner, by showing it as perpetually in flight between the impalpable water in which my hands could not arrest it, and the insoluble glass in which my palate could not enjoy it. I decided that I would come there again with a line, and catch fish. I begged for and obtained a morsel of bread from my lunch and basket, and threw into the vivon pellets which had the power, it seemed, to bring about a chemical precipitation, for the water at once grew solid round about them in oval clusters of emaciated tadpoles, which, until then it had, no doubt, been holding in solution, invisible, but ready and alert to enter the stage of crystallization. Presently, the course of the vivon became choked with water-plants. At first they appeared singly. A lily, for instance, which the current, across whose path it had unfortunately grown, would never leave at rest for a moment, so that, like a ferryboat mechanically propelled, it would drift over to one bank, only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would be straightened out, lengthened, strained almost to breaking-point, until the current again caught it, its green mooring swung back over their anchorage, and brought the unhappy plant to what might vitally be called its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before moving off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after another, always in their same helpless state, suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my Aunt Learney, who present, without modification, year after year the spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagined themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always retained to the end, caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities. Their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round, such as these was the water lily, and also, like one of those riches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have inquired of them at greater length, and in fuller detail, from the victims themselves, had not virtual, straining on ahead, applied him to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents. But further on, the current slackened, where the stream ran through a property thrown open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds into which the vivon was here diverted, were a flower with water lilies. As the banks at this point were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen in its depths a clear, crude blue that was almost violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese croisserie. Here and there, on the surface, floated, blushing like a strawberry, the scarlet heart of a lily, set in a ring of white petals. Beyond these, the flowers were more frequent, but paler, less glossy, more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream, as though after the dreary stripping of the decorations used in some Watto festival, moss roses in lucent garlands. Elsewhere, a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily. Overnit pink or white, like rocket flowers, washed clean like porcelain, with housewifely care. While, a little further again, were others pressed close together in a floating garden bed, as though panaceas had flown out of a garden like butterflies, and were hovering with blue and burnish wings over the transparent shadowyness of this watery border. This sky-y border also, for it set beneath the flowers a soil of a colour more precious, more moving than their own. And both in the afternoon, when it sparkled beneath the lilies in the kaleidoscope of happiness, silent, restless, and alert, and towards evening, when it was filled like a distant haven with the roseate greens of the setting sun, incessantly changing and ever remaining in harmony, about the more permanent colour of the flowers themselves, with the utmost profundity, evanescence, and mystery, with a quiet suggestion of infinity. After noon or evening, it seemed to have set them flowering in the heart of the sky. After leaving this park, the vivon began to flow again more swiftly. How often have I watched and longed to imitate, when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lays stretched out on his back, his head down, in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly above him, showing upon his features a foretaste of happiness and peace. We would sit down among the oarises at the water's edge. In the holiday sky a lazy cloud streamed out to its full length. Now and then, crushed by the burden of idleness, a carp would heave up out of the water with an anxious gasp. It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards we would sit for a long time there, eating fruit, and bread, and chocolate, on the grass, of which came to our ears horizontal, faint, but solid, still, and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had melted not at all in the atmosphere, it was so well accustomed to traverse. But, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed the flowers at our feet. Sometimes, at the water's edge and embedded in trees, we would come upon a house of the kind called pleasure-houses. Isolated and lost, seeing nothing of the world, save the river which bathed its feet. A young woman whose pensive face and fashionable veils did not suggest a local origin, and who had doubtless come there, in the popular phrase, to bury herself, to taste the bitter sweetness of feeling, that her name, and still more the name of him whose heart she had once held, but had been unable to keep, were unknown there, stood framed in a window from which she had no outlook beyond the boat that was moored beside her door. She raised her eyes with an air of distraction when she heard, through the trees that lined the bank, the voices of passers-by of whom, before they came in sight, she might be certain that never had they known, nor would they know, the faithless lover, that nothing in their past lives bore his imprint, which nothing in their future would have occasion to receive. She felt that, in her renunciation of life, she had willingly abandoned those places in which she would at least have been able to see him whom she loved, for others where he had never trod. And I watched her, as she returned from some walk along a road where she had known that he would not appear, drawing from her submissive fingers long gloves of a precious, useless charm. Never, in the course of our walks along the Guermont Way, might we penetrate as far as the source of the vivant, of which I had often thought, which had in my mind so abstract, so ideal an existence, that I had been as much surprised when someone told me that it was actually to be found in the same department, and at a given number of miles from Cambrai, as I had been on the day when I had learned that there was another fixed point somewhere on the earth's surface, where, according to the ancients, open the jaws of hell. Nor could we ever reach that other goal, to which I long so much to attain, Guermont itself. I knew that it was the residence of its proprietors, the Duke and Duchess de Guermont. I knew that they were real personages, who did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them, I pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was the coronation of Esther, which hung in our church, or else in changing rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad in his window, where he passed from cabbage-green, when I was dipping my fingers in the holy water stoop, to plum-blue, when I had reached our row of chairs, or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Genevieve de Brabant, Ancestris of the Guermont family, which the magic lanterns sent wandering over the curtains of my room, or flung a loft upon the ceiling, in short, is wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age, and bathed, as in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the resounding syllable, Ant. And if, in spite of that, they were for me, in their capacity as a Duke and a Duchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality, was in its turn enormously distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermont, of which they were Duke and Duchess, or that sunlit Guermont way of our walks, the course of the vivon, its water lilies and its overshadowing trees, and an endless series of hot summer afternoons. And I knew that they bore not only the titles of Duke and Duchess de Guermont, but that since the fourteenth century, when, after vain attempts to conquer its earlier lords in battle, they had allied themselves by marriage, and so become counts of Combray, the first citizens consequently of the place, and yet the only ones among its citizens who did not reside in it, comped de Combray, possessing it on their string of names and titles, absorbing it in their personalities, and illustrating no doubt in themselves that strange and pious melancholy which was peculiar to Combray, proprietors of the town, though not of any particular house there, dwelling, presumably, out of doors in the street, between heaven and earth, like that she'll bear de Guermont, of whom I could see, in the stained glass of the abs of Saint-Hilaire, only the other side in dull black lacquer, if I raised my eyes to look for him, when I was going to Camus for a packet of salt. And then it happened that, going de Guermont way, I passed occasionally by a row of well-watered little gardens, over whose hedges rose clusters of dark blossom. I would stop before them, hoping to gain some precious addition to my experience, for I seemed to have before my eyes a fragment of that riverside country which I had long so much to see, and know, since coming upon a description of it by one of my favourite authors. And it was with that storybook land, with its imagined soil intersected by a hundred bubbling water-courses, that Guermont, changing its form in my mind, became identified after I heard Dr. Perspie's speak of the flowers and the charming rivulets and fountains that would be seen there in the Ducal Park. I used to dream that Madame de Guermont, taking a sudden capricious fancy for myself, invited me there, that all day long she stood fishing for trout by my side. And when evening came, holding my hand in her own, as we passed by the little gardens of her vassals, she would point out to me the flowers that leaned their red and purple spikes along the tops of the low walls, and would teach me all their names. She would make me tell her too, all about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock. I would see before me, the purity, nothing, would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that perhaps a malady of the brain was hindering its development. Sometimes I would depend upon my father's arranging everything for me. He was so powerful, in such favour with the people who really counted, that he made it possible for us to transgress laws, which François had taught me to regard as more ineluctable than the laws of life and death. As when we were allowed to postpone for a year the compulsory repointing of the walls of our house, alone among all the houses in that part of Paris, or when he obtained permission from the minister, from Madame Sazerat's son, who had been ordered to some watering-place, to take his degree two months before the proper time, among the candidates whose surnames began with A, instead of having to wait his turn as an S. If I had fallen seriously ill, if I had been captured by brigands, convinced that my father's understanding with the supreme powers was too complete, that his letters of introduction to the Almighty were too irresistible for my illness or captivity to turn out anything but vain illusions, in which there was no danger actually threatening me, I should have waited with perfect composure the inevitable hour of my return to comfortable realities, of my deliverance from bondage or restoration to health. Perhaps this want of talent, this black cavity which gaped in my mind when I ransacked it for the theme of my future writings, was itself no more, either, than an unsubstantial illusion, and would be brought to an end by the intervention of my father, who would arrange with the government, and with providence, that I should be the first writer of my day. But at other times, while my parents were growing impatient as seeing me loiter behind, instead of following them, my actual life, instead of seeming an artificial creation by my father, and one which he could modify as he chose, appeared on the contrary, to be comprised in a larger reality which had not been created for my benefit, from whose judgments there was no appeal, in the heart of which I was bound, helpless, without friend or ally, and beyond which no further possibilities lay concealed. It was evident to me then, that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renounced literature for ever, despite the encouragements that had been given me by block, this intimate, spontaneous feeling, this sense of the nullity of my intellect, prevailed against all the flattering speeches that might be lavished upon me as a wicked man, when everyone is loud in the praise of his good deeds, is gnawed by the secret remorse of conscience. One day my mother said, You are always talking about Madame de Gaumont. Well, Dr. Pespier did a great deal for her when she was ill four years ago, and so she is coming to conbray for his daughter's wedding. You will be able to see her in church. It was from Dr. Pespier, as it happened, that I had heard most about Madame de Gaumont, and he had even shown us the number of an illustrated paper in which she was depicted in the costume which she had worn at a fancy dress-ball given by the Princess de Leon. Suddenly, during the nuptial mass, the beadle, by moving to one side, enabled me to see, sitting in a chapel, a lady with fair hair and a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk, glossy and new and brilliant, and a little spot at the corner of her nose. And because on the surface of her face, which was red, as though she had been very warm, I could make out diluted and barely perceptible, details which resembled the portrait that had been shown to me, because, more especially, the particular features which I remarked in this lady, if I attempted to catalogue them, formulated themselves in precisely the same terms, a large nose, blue eyes, as Dr. Pespier had used when describing in my presence the Duchess de Gaumont, I said to myself, this lady is like the Duchess de Gaumont. Now the chapel from which she was following the service was that of Gilbert the Bad, beneath its flat tombstones, yellowed and bulging like silves of honey in a comb, rested the bones of the old cants of Rabont, and I remembered having heard it said that this chapel was reserved for the Gaumont family, whenever any of its members came to attend a ceremony at Combray. There was indeed, but one woman resembling the portrait of Madame de Gaumont, who on that day, the very day in which she was expected to come there, could be sitting in that chapel. It was she. My disappointment was immense. It arose from my not having borne in mind, when I thought of Madame de Gaumont, that I was picturing her to myself in the colours of a tapestry or a painted window, as living in another century, as being of another substance than the rest of the human race. Never had I taken into account that she might have a red face, a mauve scarf like Madame Césarette, and the oval curve of her cheeks reminded me so strongly of people whom I had seen at home, that the suspicion brushed against my mind, though it was immediately banished, that this lady, in her creative principle, in the molecules of her physical composition, was perhaps not substantially the duchess de Gaumont, but that her body, in ignorance of the name that people had given it, belonged to a certain type of femininity, which included also the wives of doctors and tradesmen. It is, it must be Madame de Gaumont, and no one else, were the words underlying the attentive and astonished expression with which I was gazing upon this image, naturally enough, bore no resemblance to those that had so often, under the same title of Madame de Gaumont, appear to me in dreams, since this one had not been, like the others, formed arbitrarily by myself, but had sprung into sight for the first time, only a moment ago, here in church, an image which was not of the same nature, was not colourable as well, like those others that allowed themselves to imbibe the orange tint of a sonorous syllable, but which was so real that everything, even to the farry little spot at the corner of her nose, gave an assurance of her subjection to the laws of life, as in a transformation seen on the stage, a crease in the dress of a fairy, a quivering of her tiny finger, the material presence of a living actress before our eyes, whereas we were uncertain till then, whether we were not looking merely at a projection of limelight from a lantern. Meanwhile, I was endeavouring to apply to this image, which the prominent nose, the piercing eyes pinned down and fixed in my field of vision, perhaps because it was they that had first struck it, that had made the first impression on its surface, before I had had time to wonder whether the woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be Madame de Gaumont. To this fresh and unchanging image, the idea, it is Madame de Gaumont. But I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and the image, as though there were two discs moving in separate planes, with a space between. But this Madame de Gaumont, of whom I had so often dreamed, now that I could see that she had a real existence independent of myself, acquired a fresh increase of power over my imagination, which, paralysed for a moment by contact with a reality so different from anything that it had expected, began to react and to say within me, great and glorious before the days of Charlemagne, de Gaumont had the right of life and death over their vassals. The Duchesse de Gaumont descends from Genevieve de Brabant. She does not know, nor would she consent to know, any of the people who are here today. And then, oh marvellous independence of the human gaze, tied to the human face by a cord so loose, so long, so elastic, that it can stray alone as far as it may choose. While Madame de Gaumont sat in the chapel above the tombs of her dead ancestors, her gaze lingered here and wandered there, rose to the capitals of the pillars, and even rested upon myself, like a ray of sunlight straying down the nave, but a ray of sunlight which, at the moment when I received its caress, appeared conscious of where it fell. As for Madame de Gaumont herself, since she remained there motionless, sitting like a mother who affects not to notice the rude or awkward conduct of her children who, in the course of their play, are speaking to people whom she does not know, it was impossible for me to determine whether she approved or condemned the vagrancy of her eyes in the careless detachment of her heart. End of section 13. Section 14 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 Cormman. Swan's Way. By Marcel Proust. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrief. Section 14. I felt it to be important that she should not leave the church before I had been able to look long enough upon her, reminding myself that for years past I had regarded the sight of her as a thing eminently to be desired, and I kept my eyes fixed on her. As though by gazing at her, I should be able to carry away, and incorporate, to store up, for later reference, in myself, the memory of that prominent nose, those red cheeks, of all those details which struck me as so much precious, authentic, unparalleled information with regard to her face. And now that, whenever I brought my mind to bear upon that face, and especially, perhaps, in my determination, that form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves, not to admit that I had been in any way deceived. I found only beauty there, setting her once again, since they were one and the same person, this lady who sat before me, and that duchess de gamotte, whom, until then, I had been used to conjure into an imagined shape, apart from, and above, that common run of humanity, with which the sight, pure and simple, of her in the flesh, had made me for a moment confound her. I grew indignant when I heard people saying in the congregation round me, she is better looking than Madame Sazarat, or than Madame Moselle Ventoy, as though she had been in any way comparable with them. At my gaze resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck, and overlooking the features which might have reminded me of the faces of other women, I cried out within myself, since I admired this deliberately unfinished sketch. How lovely she is, what true nobility! It is indeed a proud gamotte, the descendant of Genevieve de Brabant, that I have before me. And the care which I took to focus all my attention upon her face, succeeded in isolating it so completely that to-day, when I called that marriage ceremony to mind, I find it impossible to visualise any single person who was present except her. And the beadle who answered me in the affirmative when I inquired whether the lady was, indeed, Madame de Gamotte. But her, I can see her still quite clearly, especially at the moment when the procession felled into the sacristy, lighted by the intermittent hot sunshine of a windy and rainy day, where Madame de Gamotte found herself in the midst of all those combre people, whose names even she did not know, but whose inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud that she must, in return, feel for them a genuine pitting sympathy, at whom she might count on impressing even more forcibly by virtue of her simplicity and natural charm. And then, too, since she could not bring into play the deliberate glances, charged with a definite meaning, which one directs in a crowd towards people whom one knows, but must allow her vague thoughts to escape continually from her eyes in a flood of blue light which she was powerless to control. She was anxious not to distress in any way, not to seem to be despising those humbler mortals over whom that current flowed, by whom it was everywhere arrested. I can see again today, above her mauve scarf, silky and buoyant, the gentle astonishment in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to address it to anyone in particular, but so that every one might enjoy his share of it, the almost timid smile of a sovereign lady who seems to be making an apology for her presence among the vassals whom she loves. This smile rested upon myself who had never ceased to follow her with my eyes. And I, remembering the glance which she had let fall upon me during the service, blew as a ray of sunlight that had penetrated the window of she'll bear the bad, said myself, of course she is thinking about me. I fancied that I had found favour in her sight, that she would continue to think of me after she had left the church, and would perhaps grow pensive again that evening at Guermont on my account. And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to make us love a woman that she looks on us with contempt, as I suppose Mademoiselle Swan to have done, while we imagine that she cannot ever be ours. It is enough also, sometimes that she looks on us kindly, as Madame de Guermont did then, while we think of her as almost ours already. Her eyes waxed blue as a periwinkle flower, wholly beyond my reach, yet dedicated by her to me, and the sun, bursting out again from behind a threatening cloud, and darting the full force of its rays onto the square and into the sacristy, shed a geranium glow over the red carpet laid down for the wedding, along which Madame de Guermont smilingly advanced, and covered its woollen texture with a nap of rosy velvet, a bloom of light giving it that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness in the pomp of a joyful celebration, which characterise certain pages of lohengrin, certain paintings by Carpaccio, and make us understand how Baudelaire was able to apply to the sound of the trumpet the epithet delicious. How often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the Guermont way, and with what an intensified melancholy did I reflect on my lack of qualification for a literary career, and that I must abandon all hope of ever becoming a famous author. The regret that I felt for this, while I lingered alone to dream for a little by myself, made me suffer so acutely that, in order not to feel it, my mind of its own accord, by a sort of inhibition in the instant of pain, ceased entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction, of the poetic future on which my want of talent precluded me from counting. Then, quite apart from all those literary preoccupations, and without definite attachment to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover. As I felt that the mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there in front of them, motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt. And if I had then to hasten after my grandfather to proceed on my way, I would still seek to recover my sense of them by closing my eyes. I would concentrate upon recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the outer coverings. It was certainly not any impression of this kind that could or would restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual value, and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind, and in that way distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence, which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work, so urgent was the task imposed on my conscience by these impressions of form, or perfume, or colour, to strive for a perception of what lay hidden beneath them, that I was never long in seeking an excuse which would allow me to relax so strenuous an effort, and to spare myself the fatigue that it involved. As good luck would have it, my parents called me. I felt that I had not, for the moment, the calm environment necessary for a successful pursuit of my researches, and that it would be better to think no more of the matter until I reached home, and not to exhaust myself in the meantime to no purpose, and so I concerned myself no longer with the mystery that lay hidden in a form or a perfume, quite at ease in my mind since I was taking it home with me, protected by its visible and tangible covering, beneath which I should find it still alive, like the fish which, on days when I had been allowed to go out fishing, I used to carry back in my basket, buried in a couch of grass which kept them cool and fresh. Once in the house again I would begin to think of something else, and so my mind would become littered, as my room was with the flowers that I had gathered on my walks, or the odds and ends that people had given me, with a stone from the surface of which the sunlight was reflected, a roof, the sound of a bell, the smell of fallen leaves, a confused mass of different images, and to which must have perished long ago the reality of which I used to have some foreboding, but which I never had the energy to discover and bring to light. Once however, when we had prolonged our walk far beyond its ordinary limits, and so had been very glad to encounter, half-way home, as afternoon darkened into evening, Dr. Pears S.P.A., who drove past us at full speed in his carriage, saw and recognized us, stopped, and made us jump in beside him. I received an impression of this sort, which I did not abandon, without having first subjected it to an examination a little more thorough. I had been set on the box beside the coachman. We were going like the wind, because the doctor had still, before returning to Combray, to call at Martinville Le Sec, at the house of a patient, at whose door he asked us to wait for him. At a bend in the road I experienced suddenly that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught sight of the twin steeple of Martinville, on which the setting sun was playing, while the movement of the carriage, and the windings of the road, seemed to keep them continually changing their position, and then of a third steeple, that of Via Vique, which although separated from them by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, appeared nonetheless to be standing by their side. In ascertaining and noting the shape of their spires, the changes of aspect, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not penetrating to the full depth of my impression. That something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal. The steeples appeared so distant, and we ourselves seemed to come so little nearer them, that I was astonished when, a few minutes later, we drew up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for the pleasure which I had found in seeing them upon the horizon, and the business of trying to find out what that reason was seemed to me irksome. I wished only to keep in reserve in my brain those converging lines moving in the sunshine, and for the time being to think of them no more. And it is probable that, had I done so, those two steeples would have vanished for ever, in a great medley of trees and roofs and scents and sounds which I had noticed and set apart on account of the obscure sense of pleasure which they gave me, but without ever exploring them more fully. I got down from the box to talk to my parents while we were waiting for the doctor to reappear. Then it was time to start. I climbed up again to my place, turning my head to look back once more at my steeples, of which a little later I caught a farewell glimpse at a turn in the road. The coachman, who seemed little inclined for conversation, having barely acknowledged my remarks, I was obliged, in default of other society, to fall back on my own, and to attempt to recapture the vision of my steeples. And presently their outlines and their sunlit surface, as though they had been a sort of rind, were stripped apart. A little of what they had concealed from me became apparent. An idea came into my mind which had not existed for me a moment earlier, primed itself in words in my head, and the pleasure with which the first sight of them, just now, had filled me, was so much enhanced that, overpowered by a sort of intoxication, I could no longer think of anything but them. At this point, although we had now travelled a long way from Martinville, I turned my head and caught sight of them again, quite black this time, for the sun had meanwhile set. Every few minutes a turn in the road would sweep them out of sight. Then they showed themselves for their last time. And so I saw them, no more. Without admitting to myself that what lay buried within the steeples of Martinville must be something analogous to a charming phrase, since it was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to me. I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the doctor, and composed, in spite of the jolting of the carriage, to appease my conscience, and to satisfy my enthusiasm, the following little fragment which I have since discovered, and now reproduce, with only a slight revision here and there. Alone, rising from the level of the plain, and seemingly lost in that expanse of open country, climbed to the sky the twin steeples of Martinville. Presently we saw three, springing into position, confronting them by a daring vault, a third, a dilatory steeple, that of Via Vique, was come to join them. The minutes passed, we were moving rapidly, and yet the three steeples were always a long way ahead of us, like three birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in the sunlight. Then the steeple of Via Vique withdrew, took its proper distance, and the steeples of Martinville remained alone, gilded by the light of the setting sun, which, even at that distance, I could see playing and smiling upon their sloped sides. We had been so long in approaching them, that I was thinking of the time that must still elapse before we could reach them, when, of a sudden, the carriage, having turned a corner, set us down at their feet, and they had flung themselves so abruptly in our path that we had barely time to stop before being dashed against the porch of the church. We resumed our course. We had left Martinville some little time, and the village, after accompanying us for a few seconds, had already disappeared, when lingering alone on the horizon to watch our flight. Its steeples and that of Via Vique waved once again, in token or farewell, the sun-bathed pinnacles. Sometimes one would withdraw, so that the other two might watch us for a moment still. Then the road changed direction. They veered in the light like three golden pivots, and vanished from my gaze. But, a little later, when we were already close to Combray, the sun having set meanwhile, I caught sight of them for the last time, far away, and seeming no more now than three flowers painted upon the sky above the low line of fields. They made me think too, of three maidens in a legend, abandoned in a solitary place over which night had begun to fall. And while we drew away from them at a gallop, I could see them timidly seeking their way, and, after some awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes, drawing close to one another, slipping one behind another, showing nothing more now against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and resigned, and so vanishing in the night. I never thought again of this page. But at the moment when, on my corner of the box seat, where the doctor's coachman was in the habit of placing, in a hamper, the fouls which he had brought at Martinville Market, I had finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness, felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I myself were a hen, and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice. All day long, during these walks, I had been able to muse upon the pleasure that there would be in the friendship of the duchess de gamotte, in fishing for trout, in drifting by myself in a boat on the vivon, and greedy for happiness, I asked nothing more from life, in such moments, than that it should consist always of a series of joyous afternoons. But when, on our way home, I had caught sight of a farm, on the left of the road, at some distance from two other farms which were themselves close together, and from which, to return to Combray, we need only turn down an avenue of oaks, bordered on one side by a series of orchard-closes. Each one planted at regular intervals with apple trees which cast upon the ground, when they were lighted by the setting sun, the Japanese stencil of their shadows. Then, sharply, my heart would begin to beat, I would know that in half an hour we should be at home, and that there, as was the rule on days when we had taken the gamotte way, and dinner was, in consequence, serve late than usual, I should be sent to bed as soon as I had swallowed my soup, so that my mother, kept at table, just as though there had been company to dinner, would not come upstairs, to say good night to me in bed. The zone of melancholy, which I then entered, was totally distinct from that other zone, in which I had been bounding for joy a moment earlier, just as sometimes in the sky a band of pink is separated, as though by a line invisibly ruled, from a band of green or black. You may see a bird flying across the pink, it draws near the borderline, touches it, enters, and is lost upon the black. The longings by which I had just now been absorbed, to go to gamotte, to travel, to live a life of happiness, I was now so remote from them, that their fulfilment would have afforded me no pleasure. How readily would I have sacrificed them all, just to be able to cry all night long, in the arms of mamma. Shuddering with emotion, I could not take my agonised eyes from my mother's face, which was not to appear that evening in the bedroom, where I could see myself already lying in imagination, and wished only that I were lying dead. And this state would persist until the morrow, when the rays of morning leaning their bars of light, as the gardener might lean his ladder, against the wall overgrown with nasturtiums, which clambered up it as far as my window sill, I would leap out of bed to run down at once into the garden, with no thought of the fact that evening must return, and with it the hour when I must leave my mother. And so it was, from the gamotte way, that I learned to distinguish between these states, which reigned alternately in my mind, during certain periods, going so far as to divide every day between them, each one returning to dispossess the other, with the regularity of a fever and a hue, contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to myself, in one state, what I had desired, or dreaded, or even done in the other. So the masochist way, and the gamotte way, remain for me linked, with many of the little instance of that one of all the diverse lives, along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes, I mean, the life of the mind. Doubtless it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for their discovery, but that preparation was unconscious, and for us those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became apparent. The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition, lingers around the memory of them still, with its unconscious or unheeding air, and certainly when they were slowly scrutinized by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming child, as the face of a king is scrutinized by a petitioner lost in the crowd, that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose that it would be thanks to him, that they would be elected to survive in all their most ephemeral details, and yet the scent of Hawthorne, which strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the dog roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no echo upon a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side of a water-plant by the current, and formed only to burst. My exaltation of mind has borne them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all these successive years, while all around them, the once trodden ways, have vanished, while those who thronged those ways, and even the memory of those who thronged those trodden ways, are dead. Sometimes the fragment of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my mind, like a flowering all of Delos, and I am unable to say from what place, from what time, perhaps quite simply from which of my dreams it comes. But it is preeminently as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as firm sights on which I still may build, that I regard the mes eglise and gamont ways. It is because I used to think of certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along them, that the things, the people which they taught me to know, and these alone, I still take seriously, still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time, never seemed to me to be true flowers. The mes eglise way, with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple trees, the gamont way, with its river full of tadpoles, its water lilies, and its butter cups, have constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I feign would pass my life, in which my only requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find hidden among the cornfields, as St. André des Champs-les hidden, an old church, monumental, rustic, and yellow like a millstone, and the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple trees, which I may happen when I go walking to encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once established contact with my heart. And yet, because there is an element of individuality in places, when I am seized with the desire to see again the gamont way, it would not be satisfied where I led to the banks of a river in which were lilies as fair, or even fairer than those in the vivant, any more than on my return home in the evening, at the hour when they're awakened in me that anguish which, later on in life, transfers itself to the passion of love, and may even become its inseparable companion. I should have wished for any strange mother to come in and say good night to me, though she were far more beautiful and more intelligent than my own. No, just as the one thing necessary to send me to sleep contented, in that untroubled peace which no mistress in later years has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them, at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts, as I used to receive in her kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation, unburdened by any liability saved to myself. Was that it should be my mother who came, that she should incline towards me that face on which there was, beneath her eye, something that was, it appears, a blemish, and which I loved as much as all the rest. So what I want to see again is the gamotte way, as I knew it, with a farm that stood a little apart from the two neighbouring farms, pressed so close together at the entrance to the oak avenue. Those meadows upon whose surface, when it is polished by the sun to the mirroring radiance of a lake, are outlined the leaves of the apple trees. That whole landscape, whose individuality sometimes at night in my dreams binds me with a power that is almost fantastic, of which I can discover no trace when I awake. No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly combined in me groups of different impressions, for no reason save that they had made me feel several separate things at the same time. The maize-aglise and gamotte ways left me exposed in later life to much disillusionment, and even to many mistakes. For often I have wished to see a person again, without realising that it was simply because that person recalled me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in an aftermath of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel. But by the same qualities, and by their persistence in those of my impressions today, to which they can find an attachment, the two ways give to those impressions a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them too with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the maize-aglise way that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent lilac trees. And so I would often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful evenings there, of other days besides, the memory of which had been more lately restored to me by the taste, by what would have been called at Combray the perfume of a cup of tea, and by an association of memories, of a story which many years after I had left the little place had been told me of a love affair in which Swan had been involved before I was born, with that accuracy of detail which it is easier often to obtain when we are studying the lives of people who have been dead for centuries, than when we are trying to chronicle those of our own most intimate friends. An accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible to speak from one town to another, before we learned of the contrivance by which that impossibility has been overcome. All these memories, following one after another, were condensed into a single substance, but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between the three strata, between my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others, inspired more recently by a taste or perfume, and those which were actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at second hand. No fishes, indeed no geological faults, but at least those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain marbles point to differences of origin, age, and formation. It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the brief uncertainty of my waking dream. I would know in what room I was actually lying. Would have reconstructed it round about me in the darkness, and, fixing my orientation by memory alone, or with the assistance of a feeble glimmer of light, at the foot of which I placed the curtains and the window, would have reconstructed it complete, and with its furniture, as an architect and an upholsterer might do, working upon an original, discarded plan of the doors and windows, would have replaced the mirrors, and set the chest of drawers on its accustomed sight. But scarcely had daylight itself, and no longer the gleam from a last dying ember on a brass curtain-rod, which I had mistaken for daylight, traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across a blackboard, its first white correcting ray, when the window, with its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway, in which I had erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table, which my memory had clumsily fixed where the window ought to be, would hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the mantelpiece, and sweeping aside the wall of the passage, the well of the courtyard would be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the darkness, would have gone to join all those other dwellings of which I had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening, put to flight by that pale sign, traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted forefinger of day. End of section 14