Swann's Way
of the burden of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us in
an indistinct form which does not teach us how it should be interpreted.
When I attempt to reckon up all that I owe to the 'Méséglise way,' all
the humble discoveries of which it was either the accidental setting or
the direct inspiration and cause, I am reminded that it was in that same
autumn, on one of those walks, near the bushy precipice which guarded
Montjouvain from the rear, that I was struck for the first time by
this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of
expression. After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had put up a
brisk fight, as I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, and reached
a little hut, roofed with tiles, in which M. Vinteuil's gardener kept
his tools, the sun shone out again, and its golden rays, washed clean
by the shower, blazed once more in the sky, on the trees, on the wall
of the hut, and on the still wet tiles of the roof, which had a chicken
perching upon its ridge. The wind pulled out sideways the wild grass
that grew in the wall, and the chicken's downy feathers, both of which
things let themselves float upon the wind's breath to their full extent,
with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless matter. The
tiled roof cast upon the pond, whose reflections were now clear again
in the sunlight, a square of pink marble, the like of which I had never
observed before. And, seeing upon the water, where it reflected the
wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my
enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: "Damn, damn, damn, damn!"
But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content
myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more
clearly into the sources of my enjoyment.
And it was at that moment, too--thanks to a peasant who went past,
apparently in a bad enough humour already, but more so when he nearly
received my umbrella in his face, and who replied without any cordiality
to my "Fine day, what! good to be out walking!"--that I learned
that identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts of all men
simultaneously, by a pre-established order. Later on I discovered that,
whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the
friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment
have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and
wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed. And if I had been
thinking with affection of my parents, and forming the most sensible and
proper plans for giving them pleasure, they would have been using
the same interval of time to discover some misdeed that I had already
forgotten, and would begin to scold me severely, just as I flung myself
upon them with a kiss.
Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would be
added an alternative feeling, so that I could not be clear in my mind to
which I should give the casting vote; a feeling stimulated by the desire
to see rise up before my eyes a peasant-girl whom I might clasp in my
arms. Coming abruptly, and without giving me time to trace it accurately
to its source among so many ideas of a very different kind, the pleasure
which accompanied this desire seemed only a degree superior to what was
given me by my other thoughts. I found an additional merit in everything
that was in my mind at the moment, in the pink reflection of the tiled
roof, the wild grass in the wall, the village of Roussainville into
which I had long desired to penetrate, the trees of its wood and the
steeple of its church, created in them by this fresh emotion which made
them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that
had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear me more swiftly
towards them when it filled my sails with a potent, unknown, and
propitious breeze. But if this desire that a woman should appear added
for me something more exalting than the charms of nature, they in their
turn enlarged what I might, in the woman's charm, have found too much
restricted. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers
also, and that, as for the spirit of those horizons, of the village of
Roussainville, of the books which I was reading that year, it was her
kiss which would make me master of them all; and, my imagination drawing
strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding
through all the realms of my imagination, my desire had no longer any
bounds. Moreover--just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature,
the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas
of things set on one side, we believe with the profoundest faith in the
originality, in the individual existence of the place in which we may
happen to be--the passing figure which my desire evoked seemed to be
not any one example of the general type of 'woman,' but a necessary and
natural product of the soil. For at that time everything which was not
myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious,
more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear
to full-grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made
no distinction. I had a desire for a peasant-girl from Méséglise or
Roussainville, for a fisher-girl from Balbec, just as I had a desire for
Balbec and Méséglise. The pleasure which those girls were empowered to
give me would have seemed less genuine, I should have had no faith in
it any longer, if I had been at liberty to modify its conditions as I
chose. To meet in Paris a fisher-girl from Balbec or a peasant-girl from
Méséglise would have been like receiving the present of a shell which
I had never seen upon the beach, or of a fern which I had never found
among the woods, would have stripped from the pleasure which she was
about to give me all those other pleasures in the thick of which my
imagination had enwrapped her. But to wander thus among the woods of
Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods
and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty.
That girl whom I never saw save dappled with the shadows of their
leaves, was to me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the
rest, and one whose structure would enable me to approach more closely
than in them to the intimate savour of the land from which she had
sprung. I could believe this all the more readily (and also that
the caresses by which she would bring that savour to my senses were
themselves of a particular kind, yielding a pleasure which I could
never derive from any but herself) since I was still, and must for long
remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact
of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has
tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one
regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that
is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and
formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one
seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in
anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself,
but only how to escape from oneself. Obscurely awaited, immanent and
concealed, it rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it
makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender
glance, in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to us, more
than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for the kindness of
heart of our companion and for her touching predilection of ourselves,
which we measure by the benefits, by the happiness that she showers upon
us.
Alas, it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keep of Roussainville,
that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village,
appealing to it as to the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my
earliest desire when, from the top floor of our house at Combray, from
the little room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered out and seen
nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window,
while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for
unknown climes, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of
self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of
my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to
my death, even--until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among
the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window,
tumbled all about my body. In vain I called upon it now. In vain I
compressed the whole landscape into my field of vision, draining it with
an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it a female creature. I
might go alone as far as the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs: never did
I find there the girl whom I should inevitably have met, had I been with
my grandfather, and so unable to engage her in conversation. I would fix
my eyes, without limit of time, upon the trunk of a distant tree, from
behind which she must appear and spring towards me; my closest scrutiny
left the horizon barren as before; night was falling; without any hope
now would I concentrate my attention, as though to force up out of it
the creatures which it must conceal, upon that sterile soil, that stale
and outworn land; and it was no longer in lightness of heart, but with
sullen anger that I aimed blows at the trees of Roussainville wood, from
among which no more living creatures made their appearance than if they
had been trees painted on the stretched canvas background of a panorama,
when, unable to resign myself to having to return home without having
held in my arms the woman I so greatly desired, I was yet obliged to
retrace my steps towards Combray, and to admit to myself that the chance
of her appearing in my path grew smaller every moment. And if she had
appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have
regarded me as mad, for I no longer thought of those desires which came
to me on my walks, but were never realized, as being shared by others,
or as having any existence apart from myself. They seemed nothing more
now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my
temperament. They were in no way connected now with nature, with the
world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and
significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional
framework, just as the action of a novel is framed in the railway
carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time.
And it is perhaps from another impression which I received at
Montjouvain, some years later, an impression which at that time was
without meaning, that there arose, long afterwards, my idea of that
cruel side of human passion called 'sadism.' We shall see, in due
course, that for quite another reason the memory of this impression was
to play an important part in my life. It was during a spell of very hot
weather; my parents, who had been obliged to go away for the whole day,
had told me that I might stay out as late as I pleased; and having
gone as far as the Montjouvain pond, where I enjoyed seeing again the
reflection of the tiled roof of the hut, I had lain down in the shade
and gone to sleep among the bushes on the steep slope that rose up
behind the house, just where I had waited for my parents, years before,
one day when they had gone to call on M. Vinteuil. It was almost dark
when I awoke, and I wished to rise and go away, but I saw Mlle. Vinteuil
(or thought, at least, that I recognised her, for I had not seen her
often at Combray, and then only when she was still a child, whereas
she was now growing into a young woman), who probably had just come in,