Swann's Way
a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the
outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark
tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire
keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great
cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which
would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a
cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat
whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature
as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from
the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the
fireplace which had therefore remained cold--or rooms in summer, where
I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the
moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the
foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it
might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised
in the focus of a sunbeam--or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful
that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it:
that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling
would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and
to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high
ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys,
and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind
was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of
the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of
a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not
there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which
stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not
looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of
vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end
to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the
exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous
funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched
out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils
sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the
colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression
of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even
completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly
reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but
unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end
with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is
fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never
contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
Certainly I was now well awake; my body had turned about for the last
time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding
objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom,
and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain
light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my fireplace, the window
overlooking the street, and both the doors. But it was no good my
knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid
moment of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still
believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; as
a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend
the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at
Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the
rest; remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what
I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.
At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should
have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my
mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my
melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy
idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally
wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while
we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders
and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness
of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many
colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory
window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of
lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary
impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself,
but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite
endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as
though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place
where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design,
issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the
slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the
castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by
a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the
transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through
a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front
of it stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation,
wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could
tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides
made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given
me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to
the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly
to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid
of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the
text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest
his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish
Golo's horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with
their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself,
being of the same supernatural substance as his steed's, overcame all
material obstacles--everything that seemed to bar his way--by taking
each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the
door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would
float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its
nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such a
transubstantiation.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which
seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed
around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express
the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into
a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until
I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect
of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very
melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to
me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to
open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious
had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body
for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the
dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard
but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the
same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of
my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the
dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than
ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.
But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed
talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little
parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my
grandmother, who held that "It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the
country," and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the
very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room with a book
instead of letting me stay out of doors. "That is not the way to make
him strong and active," she would say sadly, "especially this little
man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get." My
father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an
interest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not
to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard,
not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind. But my
grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in
torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker
armchairs, so that they should not get soaked--you would see my
grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing
back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to
imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, "At
last one can breathe!" and would run up and down the soaking paths--too
straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any
feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking
all morning if the weather were going to improve--with her keen, jerky
little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by
the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of
my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for
that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the
spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which
always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh
despair.
When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner there was
one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: that was if
(at one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her,
moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs
were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to her:
"Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" For,
simply to tease her (she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my
father's family that everyone made a joke of it), my great-aunt used to
make my grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops.
My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to
taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops
all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still
smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards
others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own
troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those
seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save
for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes,
which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow
upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by my
great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of her in
her weakness conquered before she began, but still making the futile
endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass--all these
were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well