Swann's Way
in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental,
mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was
conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that
it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the
same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How
could I seize upon and define it?
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the
first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time
to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object
of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has
called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat
indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which
I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon
the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact and at my
disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my
own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss
of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed
beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region
through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it
nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something
which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and
substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this
unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its
existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a
real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and
vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts
to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again
the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make
one further effort, to follow and recapture once again the fleeting
sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out
every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all
attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling
that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report,
I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just
denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before
the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty
space in front of it. I place in position before my mind's eye the still
recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within
me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise,
something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I
do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can
measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must
be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has
tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too
far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless
reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of
radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as
the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its
contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea;
cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of
what period in my past life.
Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this
memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment
has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the
very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has
stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who
can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task,
must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which
deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has
urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely
of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let
themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind.
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb
of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those
mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good
day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it
first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the
little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it;
perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without
tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image
had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among
others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned
and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the
forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry,
so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either
obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of
expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my
consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after
the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still,
alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more
persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a
long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their
moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the
tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of
recollection.
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in
her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I
did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory
made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where
her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to
the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out
behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had
been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to
night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon,
the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took
when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling
a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper
which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they
become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive
shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable,
so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park,
and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and
their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray
and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid,
sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
COMBRAY
Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it
from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no
more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it
and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about
its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as
a shepherd gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking
houses, which a fragment of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and
there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town
in a primitive painting. To live in, Combray was a trifle depressing,
like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackened stone of the
country, fronted with outside steps, capped with gables which projected
long shadows downwards, were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun
began to go down, to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows;
streets with the solemn names of Saints, not a few of whom figured
in the history of the early lords of Combray, such as the Rue
Saint-Hilaire, the Rue Saint-Jacques, in which my aunt's house stood,
the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, which ran past her railings, and the Rue
du Saint-Esprit, on to which the little garden gate opened; and these
Combray streets exist in so remote a quarter of my memory, painted in
colours so different from those in which the world is decked for me
to-day, that in fact one and all of them, and the church which towered
above them in the Square, seem to me now more unsubstantial than the
projections of my magic-lantern; while at times I feel that to be able
to cross the Rue Saint-Hilaire again, to engage a room in the Rue de
l'Oiseau, in the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesché, from whose windows
in the pavement used to rise a smell of cooking which rises still in
my mind, now and then, in the same warm gusts of comfort, would be to
secure a contact with the unseen world more marvellously supernatural
than it would be to make Golo's acquaintance and to chat with Geneviève
de Brabant.
My grandfather's cousin--by courtesy my great-aunt--with whom we used
to stay, was the mother of that aunt Léonie who, since her husband's (my
uncle Octave's) death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray,
then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed;
and who now never 'came down,' but lay perpetually in an indefinite
condition of grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions,
and religious observances. Her own room looked out over the Rue
Saint-Jacques, which ran a long way further to end in the Grand-Pré (as
distinct from the Petit-Pré, a green space in the centre of the town
where three streets met) and which, monotonous and grey, with the three
high steps of stone before almost every one of its doors, seemed like a
deep furrow cut by some sculptor of gothic images in the very block of
stone out of which he had fashioned a Calvary or a Crib. My aunt's life
was now practically confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she
would rest in the afternoon while they aired the other. They were rooms
of that country order which (just as in certain climes whole tracts of
air or ocean are illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which
we cannot see) fascinate our sense of smell with the countless odours
springing from their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret
system of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which
their atmosphere holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and
coloured by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside,
but already humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful,
limpid jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left
the orchard for the store-room, smells changing with the year, but
plenishing, domestic smells, which compensate for the sharpness of hoar
frost with the sweet savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as
a village clock, roving smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which
brings only an increase of anxiety, and in a prosiness which serves as
a deep source of poetry to the stranger who passes through their midst
without having lived amongst them. The air of those rooms was saturated
with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I
could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on