Swann's Way
to offer us a letter of introduction, the prospect of which would never
have inspired him with such terror had he been absolutely certain--as,
from his knowledge of my grandmother's character, he really ought to
have been certain--that in no circumstances whatsoever would we have
dreamed of making use of it.
* * *
We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie
a visit before dinner. In the first weeks of our Combray holidays, when
the days ended early, we would still be able to see, as we turned
into the Rue du Saint-Esprit, a reflection of the western sky from the
windows of the house and a band of purple at the foot of the Calvary,
which was mirrored further on in the pond; a fiery glow which,
accompanied often by a cold that burned and stung, would associate
itself in my mind with the glow of the fire over which, at that very
moment, was roasting the chicken that was to furnish me, in place of the
poetic pleasure I had found in my walk, with the sensual pleasures of
good feeding, warmth and rest. But in summer, when we came back to the
house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our
visit to aunt Léonie its rays, sinking until they touched and lay along
her window-sill, would there be caught and held by the large inner
curtains and the bands which tied them back to the wall, and split and
scattered and filtered; and then, at last, would fall upon and inlay
with tiny flakes of gold the lemonwood of her chest-of-drawers,
illuminating the room in their passage with the same delicate, slanting,
shadowed beams that fall among the boles of forest trees. But on some
days, though very rarely, the chest-of-drawers would long since have
shed its momentary adornments, there would no longer, as we turned into
the Rue du Saint-Esprit, be any reflection from the western sky burning
along the line of window-panes; the pond beneath the Calvary would
have lost its fiery glow, sometimes indeed had changed already to an
opalescent pallor, while a long ribbon of moonlight, bent and broken
and broadened by every ripple upon the water's surface, would be lying
across it, from end to end. Then, as we drew near the house, we would
make out a figure standing upon the doorstep, and Mamma would say to me:
"Good heavens! There is Françoise looking out for us; your aunt must be
anxious; that means we are late."
And without wasting time by stopping to take off our 'things' we would
fly upstairs to my aunt Léonie's room to reassure her, to prove to her
by our bodily presence that all her gloomy imaginings were false, that,
on the contrary, nothing had happened to us, but that we had gone the
'Guermantes way,' and, good lord, when one took that walk, my aunt knew
well enough that one could never say at what time one would be home.
"There, Françoise," my aunt would say, "didn't I tell you that they must
have gone the Guermantes way? Good gracious! They must be hungry! And
your nice leg of mutton will be quite dried up now, after all the hours
it's been waiting. What a time to come in! Well, and so you went the
Guermantes way?"
"But, Leonie, I supposed you knew," Mamma would answer. "I thought
that Françoise had seen us go out by the little gate, through the
kitchen-garden."
For there were, in the environs of Combray, two 'ways' which we used to
take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually
leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen:
the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also 'Swann's
way,' because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of M.
Swann's estate, and the 'Guermantes way.' Of Méséglise-la-Vineuse, to
tell the truth, I never knew anything more than the way there, and
the strange people who would come over on Sundays to take the air in
Combray, people whom, this time, neither my aunt nor any of us would
'know at all,' and whom we would therefore assume to be 'people who must
have come over from Méséglise.' As for Guermantes, I was to know it well
enough one day, but that day had still to come; and, during the whole
of my boyhood, if Méséglise was to me something as inaccessible as the
horizon, which remained hidden from sight, however far one went, by the
folds of a country which no longer bore the least resemblance to the
country round Combray; Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than
the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way,' a
sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator.
And so to 'take the Guermantes way' in order to get to Méséglise, or
vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to
turn to the east in order to reach the west. Since my father used always
to speak of the 'Méséglise way' as comprising the finest view of a plain
that he knew anywhere, and of the 'Guermantes way' as typical of river
scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as
two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belongs
only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of
them appeared to me as a precious thing, which exhibited the special
excellence of the whole, while, immediately beside them, in the first
stages of our walk, before we had reached the sacred soil of one or the
other, the purely material roads, at definite points on which they
were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal scenery of a
river, were no more worth the trouble of looking at them than, to a keen
playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets which may
happen to run past the walls of a theatre. But, above all, I set between
them, far more distinctly than the mere distance in miles and yards and
inches which separated one from the other, the distance that there was
between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one
of those distances of the mind which time serves only to lengthen, which
separate things irremediably from one another, keeping them for ever
upon different planes. And this distinction was rendered still more
absolute because the habit we had of never going both ways on the same
day, or in the course of the same walk, but the 'Méséglise way' one time
and the 'Guermantes way' another, shut them up, so to speak, far apart
and unaware of each other's existence, in the sealed vessels--between
which there could be no communication--of separate afternoons.
When we had decided to go the 'Méséglise way' we would start (without
undue haste, and even if the sky were clouded over, since the walk was
not very long, and did not take us too far from home), as though we were
not going anywhere in particular, by the front-door of my aunt's house,
which opened on to the Rue du Saint-Esprit. We would be greeted by
the gunsmith, we would drop our letters into the box, we would tell
Théodore, from Françoise, as we passed, that she had run out of oil
or coffee, and we would leave the town by the road which ran along the
white fence of M. Swann's park. Before reaching it we would be met on
our way by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers.
Out of the fresh little green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised
inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or purple
blossom, which glowed, even in the shade, with the sunlight in which
they had been bathed. Some of them, half-concealed by the little
tiled house, called the Archers' Lodge, in which Swann's keeper lived,
overtopped its gothic gable with their rosy minaret. The nymphs of
spring would have seemed coarse and vulgar in comparison with these
young houris, who retained, in this French garden, the pure and vivid
colouring of a Persian miniature. Despite my desire to throw my arms
about their pliant forms and to draw down towards me the starry locks
that crowned their fragrant heads, we would pass them by without
stopping, for my parents had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann's
marriage, and, so as not to appear to be looking into his park, we
would, instead of taking the road which ran beside its boundary and then
climbed straight up to the open fields, choose another way, which led in
the same direction, but circuitously, and brought us out rather too far
from home.
One day my grandfather said to my 'father: "Don't you remember Swann's
telling us yesterday that his wife and daughter had gone off to Rheims
and that he was taking the opportunity of spending a day or two in
Paris? We might go along by the park, since the ladies are not at home;
that will make it a little shorter."
We stopped for a moment by the fence. Lilac-time was nearly over; some
of the trees still thrust aloft, in tall purple chandeliers, their tiny
balls of blossom, but in many places among their foliage where, only
a week before, they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam,
these were now spent and shrivelled and discoloured, a hollow scum, dry
and scentless. My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects
the appearance of the place was still the same, and how far it had
altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann, on the day
of his wife's death; and he seized the opportunity to tell us, once
again, the story of that walk.
In front of us a path bordered with nasturtiums rose in the full glare
of the sun towards the house. But to our right the park stretched away
into the distance, on level ground. Overshadowed by the tall trees which
stood close around it, an 'ornamental water' had been constructed by
Swann's parents but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is
the material upon which man has to work; certain spots will persist in
remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own especial sovereignty,
and will raise their immemorial standards among all the 'laid-out'
scenery of a park, just as they would have done far from any human
interference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf
them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position, and
superimposing itself upon the work of man's hands. And so it was that,
at the foot of the path which led down to this artificial lake, there
might be seen, in its two tiers woven of trailing forget-me-nots below
and of periwinkle flowers above, the natural, delicate, blue garland
which binds the luminous, shadowed brows of water-nymphs; while the
iris, its swords sweeping every way in regal profusion, stretched out
over agrimony and water-growing king-cups the lilied sceptres, tattered
glories of yellow and purple, of the kingdom of the lake.
The absence of Mlle. Swann, which--since it preserved me from the
terrible risk of seeing her appear on one of the paths, and of being
identified and scorned by this so privileged little girl who had
Bergotte for a friend and used to go with him to visit cathedrals--made
the exploration of Tansonville, now for the first time permitted me, a
matter of indifference to myself, seemed however to invest the property,
in my grandfather's and father's eyes, with a fresh and transient charm,
and (like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering) to
make the day extraordinarily propitious for a walk in this direction;
I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a
miracle, Mlle. Swann appear, with her father, so close to us that we
should not have time to escape, and should therefore be obliged to make
her acquaintance. And so, when I suddenly noticed a straw basket lying
forgotten on the grass by the side of a line whose float was bobbing
in the water, I made a great effort to keep my father and grandfather
looking in another direction, away from this sign that she might, after
all, be in residence. Still, as Swann had told us that he ought not,