Swann's Way
me that a few seconds only had passed since the hour before; the latest
would inscribe itself, close to its predecessor, on the sky's surface,
and I would be unable to believe that sixty minutes could be squeezed
into the tiny arc of blue which was comprised between their two golden
figures. Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would
sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour
which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not
taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the
deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated
the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping
silence. Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in our
Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace
incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange
adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still
recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you,
and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little
drawn round and enclosed them (while I went on with my book and the heat
of the day declined) in the gradual crystallisation, slowly altering
in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent,
sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.
Sometimes I would be torn from my book, in the middle of the afternoon,
by the gardener's daughter, who came running like a mad thing,
overturning an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a
tooth, and screaming out "They're coming, they're coming!" so that
Françoise and I should run too and not miss anything of the show. That
was on days when the cavalry stationed in Combray went out for some
military exercise, going as a rule by the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde. While
our servants, sitting in a row on their chairs outside the garden
railings, stared at the people of Combray taking their Sunday walks and
were stared at in return, the gardener's daughter, through the gap which
there was between two houses far away in the Avenue de la Gare, would
have spied the glitter of helmets. The servants then hurried in
with their chairs, for when the troopers filed through the Rue
Sainte-Hildegarde they filled it from side to side, and their jostling
horses scraped against the walls of the houses, covering and drowning
the pavements like banks which present too narrow a channel to a river
in flood.
"Poor children," Françoise would exclaim, in tears almost before she
had reached the railings; "poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a
meadow. It's just shocking to think of," she would go on, laying a hand
over her heart, where presumably she had felt the shock.
"A fine sight, isn't it, Mme. Françoise, all these young fellows not
caring two straws for their lives?" the gardener would ask, just to
'draw' her. And he would not have spoken in vain.
"Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world is there that
we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never
offers us a second time? Oh dear, oh dear; you're right all the same;
it's quite true, they don't care! I can remember them in '70; in those
wretched wars they've no fear of death left in them; they're nothing
more nor less than madmen; and then they aren't worth the price of a
rope to hang them with; they're not men any more, they're lions." For
by her way of thinking, to compare a man with a lion, which she used to
pronounce 'lie-on,' was not at all complimentary to the man.
The Rue Sainte-Hildegarde turned too sharply for us to be able to see
people approaching at any distance, and it was only through the gap
between those two houses in the Avenue de la Gare that we could still
make out fresh helmets racing along towards us, and flashing in the
sunlight. The gardener wanted to know whether there were still many to
come, and he was thirsty besides, with the sun beating down upon his
head. So then, suddenly, his daughter would leap out, as though from
a beleaguered city, would make a sortie, turn the street corner, and,
having risked her life a hundred times over, reappear and bring us,
with a jug of liquorice-water, the news that there were still at least
a thousand of them, pouring along without a break from the direction
of Thiberzy and Méséglise. Françoise and the gardener, having 'made up'
their difference, would discuss the line to be followed in case of war.
"Don't you see, Françoise," he would say. "Revolution would be better,
because then no one would need to join in unless he liked."
"Oh, yes, I can see that, certainly; it's more straightforward."
The gardener believed that, as soon as war was declared, they would stop
all the railways.
"Yes, to be sure; so that we sha'n't get away," said Françoise.
And the gardener would assent, with "Ay, they're the cunning ones," for
he would not allow that war was anything but a kind of trick which the
state attempted to play on the people, or that there was a man in the
world who would not run away from it if he had the chance to do so.
But Françoise would hasten back to my aunt, and I would return to my
book, and the servants would take their places again outside the gate to
watch the dust settle on the pavement, and the excitement caused by the
passage of the soldiers subside. Long after order had been restored,
an abnormal tide of humanity would continue to darken the streets of
Combray. And in front of every house, even of those where it was not,
as a rule, 'done,' the servants, and sometimes even the masters would
sit and stare, festooning their doorsteps with a dark, irregular fringe,
like the border of shells and sea-weed which a stronger tide than usual
leaves on the beach, as though trimming it with embroidered crape, when
the sea itself has retreated.
Except on such days as these, however, I would as a rule be left to read
in peace. But the interruption which a visit from Swann once made, and
the commentary which he then supplied to the course of my reading,
which had brought me to the work of an author quite new to me, called
Bergotte, had this definite result that for a long time afterwards
it was not against a wall gay with spikes of purple blossom, but on a
wholly different background, the porch of a gothic cathedral, that I
would see outlined the figure of one of the women of whom I dreamed.
I had heard Bergotte spoken of, for the first time, by a friend older
than myself, for whom I had a strong admiration, a precious youth of the
name of Bloch. Hearing me confess my love of the _Nuit d'Octobre_, he
had burst out in a bray of laughter, like a bugle-call, and told me,
by way of warning: "You must conquer your vile taste for A. de Musset,
Esquire. He is a bad egg, one of the very worst, a pretty detestable
specimen. I am bound to admit, natheless," he added graciously, "that
he, and even the man Racine, did, each of them, once in his life,
compose a line which is not only fairly rhythmical, but has also what is
in my eyes the supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing. One is
_La blanche Oloossone et la blanche Camire_,
and the other
_La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë_."
They were submitted to my judgment, as evidence for the defence of the
two runagates, in an article by my very dear master Father Lecomte, who
is found pleasing in the sight of the immortal gods. By which token,
here is a book which I have not the time, just now, to read, a book
recommended, it would seem, by that colossal fellow. He regards, or so
they tell me, its author, one Bergotte, Esquire, as a subtle scribe,
more subtle, indeed, than any beast of the field; and, albeit he
exhibits on occasion a critical pacifism, a tenderness in suffering
fools, for which it is impossible to account, and hard to make
allowance, still his word has weight with me as it were the Delphic
Oracle. Read you then this lyrical prose, and, if the Titanic
master-builder of rhythm who composed _Bhagavat_ and the _Lévrier de
Magnus_ speaks not falsely, then, by Apollo, you may taste, even you, my
master, the ambrosial joys of Olympus." It was in an ostensible vein of
sarcasm that he had asked me to call him, and that he himself called me,
"my master." But, as a matter of fact, we each derived a certain amount
of satisfaction from the mannerism, being still at the age in which one
believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name.
Unfortunately I was not able to set at rest, by further talks with
Bloch, in which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts
he had engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from
which I, if you please, expected nothing less than the revelation of
truth itself) were all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For,
as it happened, Bloch was not invited to the house again. At first, he
had been well received there. It is true that my grandfather made out
that, whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and
brought him home with me, that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he
would not have objected on principle--indeed his own friend Swann was
of Jewish extraction--had he not found that the Jews whom I chose as
friends were not usually of the best type. And so I was hardly ever able
to bring a new friend home without my grandfather's humming the "O,
God of our fathers" from _La Juive_, or else "Israel, break thy chain,"
singing the tune alone, of course, to an "um-ti-tum-ti-tum, tra-la"; but
I used to be afraid of my friend's recognising the sound, and so being
able to reconstruct the words.
Before seeing them, merely on hearing their names, about which, as often
as not, there was nothing particularly Hebraic, he would divine not only
the Jewish origin of such of my friends as might indeed be of the chosen
people, but even some dark secret which was hidden in their family.
"And what do they call your friend who is coming this evening?"
"Dumont, grandpapa."
"Dumont! Oh, I'm frightened of Dumont."
And he would sing:
Archers, be on your guard!
Watch without rest, without sound,
and then, after a few adroit questions on points of detail, he would
call out "On guard! on guard," or, if it were the victim himself who
had already arrived, and had been obliged, unconsciously, by my
grandfather's subtle examination, to admit his origin, then my
grandfather, to shew us that he had no longer any doubts, would merely
look at us, humming almost inaudibly the air of
What! do you hither guide the feet
Of this timid Israelite?
or of
Sweet vale of Hebron, dear paternal fields,
or, perhaps, of
Yes, I am of the chosen race.
These little eccentricities on my grandfather's part implied no ill-will
whatsoever towards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for
other reasons. He had begun by annoying my father, who, seeing him come
in with wet clothes, had asked him with keen interest:
"Why, M. Bloch, is there a change in the weather; has it been raining? I
can't understand it; the barometer has been 'set fair.'"
Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am
absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so
resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer
trouble to inform me of them."
"My poor boy," said my father after Bloch had gone, "your friend is out
of his mind. Why, he couldn't even tell me what the weather was like. As
if there could be anything more interesting! He is an imbecile."
Next, Bloch had displeased my grandmother because, after luncheon, when
she complained of not feeling very well, he had stifled a sob and wiped
the tears from his eyes.
"You cannot imagine that he is sincere," she observed to me. "Why he