Swann's Way
which a wholly wicked person could not be, for in that case the evil
would not have been external, it would have seemed quite natural to her,
and would not even have been distinguishable from herself; and as for
virtue, respect for the dead, filial obedience, since she would never
have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious
delight in their profanation. 'Sadists' of Mlle. Vinteuil's sort are
creatures so purely sentimental, so virtuous by nature, that even
sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, a privilege reserved
for the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it
they endeavour to impersonate, to assume all the outward appearance of
wicked people, for themselves and their partners in guilt, so as to gain
the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own
gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. And
I could understand how she must have longed for such an escape when I
realised that it was impossible for her to effect it. At the moment when
she wished to be thought the very antithesis of her father, what she at
once suggested to me were the mannerisms, in thought and speech, of
the poor old music-master. Indeed, his photograph was nothing; what she
really desecrated, what she corrupted into ministering to her pleasures,
but what remained between them and her and prevented her from any
direct enjoyment of them, was the likeness between her face and his, his
mother's blue eyes which he had handed down to her, like some trinket to
be kept in the family, those little friendly movements and inclinations
which set up between the viciousness of Mlle. Vinteuil and herself a
phraseology, a mentality not designed for vice, which made her regard it
as not in any way different from the numberless little social duties and
courtesies to which she must devote herself every day. It was not evil
that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it
was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil. And as, every time that she
indulged in it, pleasure came to her attended by evil thoughts such as,
ordinarily, had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to
see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify it with Evil.
Perhaps Mlle. Vinteuil felt that at heart her friend was not altogether
bad, not really sincere when she gave vent to those blasphemous
utterances. At any rate, she had the pleasure of receiving those kisses
on her brow, those smiles, those glances; all feigned, perhaps, but akin
in their base and vicious mode of expression to those which would have
been discernible on the face of a creature formed not out of kindness
and long-suffering, but out of self-indulgence and cruelty. She was
able to delude herself for a moment into believing that she was indeed
amusing herself in the way in which, with so unnatural an accomplice, a
girl might amuse herself who really did experience that savage antipathy
towards her father's memory. Perhaps she would not have thought of
wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was
so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself,
as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings
which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one
true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.
If the 'Méséglise way' was so easy, it was a very different matter when
we took the 'Guermantes way,' for that meant a long walk, and we must
make sure, first, of the weather. When we seemed to have entered upon a
spell of fine days, when Françoise, in desperation that not a drop was
falling upon the 'poor crops,' gazing up at the sky and seeing there
only a little white cloud floating here and there upon its calm, azure
surface, groaned aloud and exclaimed: "You would say they were nothing
more nor less than a lot of dogfish swimming about and sticking up their
snouts! Ah, they never think of making it rain a little for the poor
labourers! And then when the corn is all ripe, down it will come,
rattling all over the place, and think no more of where it is falling
than if it was on the sea!"--when my father's appeals to the gardener
had met with the same encouraging answer several times in succession,
then some one would say, at dinner: "To-morrow, if the weather holds,
we might go the Guermantes way." And off we would set, immediately after
luncheon, through the little garden gate which dropped us into the Rue
des Perchamps, narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with grass-plots
over which two or three wasps would spend the day botanising, a street
as quaint as its name, from which its odd characteristics and its
personality were, I felt, derived; a street for which one might search
in vain through the Combray of to-day, for the public school now rises
upon its site. But in my dreams of Combray (like those architects,
pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying that they can detect, beneath
a Renaissance rood-loft and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a
Norman choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it probably
was in the twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern edifice
standing, I pierce through it and 'restore' the Rue des Perchamps. And
for such reconstruction memory furnishes me with more detailed guidance
than is generally at the disposal of restorers; the pictures which it
has preserved--perhaps the last surviving in the world to-day, and soon
to follow the rest into oblivion--of what Combray looked like in my
childhood's days; pictures which, simply because it was the old Combray
that traced their outlines upon my mind before it vanished, are as
moving--if I may compare a humble landscape with those glorious works,
reproductions of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing on me--as
those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile
Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist,
the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's.
We would pass, in the Rue de l'Oiseau, before the old hostelry of the
Oiseau Flesché, into whose great courtyard, once upon a time, would
rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de Montpensier, de Guermantes,
and de Montmorency, when they had to come down to Combray for some
litigation with their farmers, or to receive homage from them. We would
come at length to the Mall, among whose treetops I could distinguish the
steeple of Saint-Hilaire. And I should have liked to be able to sit down
and spend the whole day there, reading and listening to the bells, for
it was so charming there and so quiet that, when an hour struck, you
would have said not that it broke in upon the calm of the day, but that
it relieved the day of its superfluity, and that the steeple, with the
indolent, painstaking exactitude of a person who has nothing else to do,
had simply, in order to squeeze out and let fall the few golden drops
which had slowly and naturally accumulated in the hot sunlight, pressed,
at a given moment, the distended surface of the silence.
The great charm of the 'Guermantes' way was that we had beside us,
almost all the time, the course of the Vivonne. We crossed it first, ten
minutes after leaving the house, by a foot-bridge called the Pont-Vieux.
And every year, when we arrived at Combray, on Easter morning, after the
sermon, if the weather was fine, I would run there to see (amid all the
disorder that prevails on the morning of a great festival, the gorgeous
preparations for which make the everyday household utensils that they
have not contrived to banish seem more sordid than ever) the river
flowing past, sky-blue already between banks still black and bare, its
only companions a clump of daffodils, come out before their time, a few
primroses, the first in flower, while here and there burned the blue
flame of a violet, its stem bent beneath the weight of the drop of
perfume stored in its tiny horn. The Pont-Vieux led to a tow-path which,
at this point, would be overhung in summer by the bluish foliage of a
hazel, under which a fisherman in a straw hat seemed to have taken
root. At Combray, where I knew everyone, and could always detect the
blacksmith or grocer's boy through his disguise of a beadle's uniform
or chorister's surplice, this fisherman was the only person whom I was
never able to identify. He must have known my family, for he used to
raise his hat when we passed; and then I would always be just on the
point of asking his name, when some one would make a sign to me to be
quiet, or I would frighten the fish. We would follow the tow-path which
ran along the top of a steep bank, several feet above the stream. The
ground on the other side was lower, and stretched in a series of broad
meadows as far as the village and even to the distant railway-station.
Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of
the castle of the old Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages,
had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier and defence
against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of Martinville.
Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad
surface of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in
their day, the bowmen had hurled down stones, the watchmen had gazed out
over Novepont, Clairefontaine, Martinville-le-Sec, Bailleau-l'Exempt,
fiefs all of them of Guermantes, a ring in which Combray was locked;
but fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and
commanded by boys from the Christian Brothers' school, who came there
in their playtime, or with lesson-books to be conned; emblems of a past
that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth, that lay by
the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong
food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not the
little town of to-day only, but an historic city vastly different,
seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible
features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups.
For the buttercups grew past numbering on this spot which they had
chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in
whole companies, yellow as the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added
lustre, I felt, because, being powerless to consummate with my palate
the pleasure which the sight of them never failed to give me, I would
let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their gilded expanse, until
it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of
absolute, unproductive beauty; and so it had been from my earliest
childhood, when from the tow-path I had stretched out my arms towards
them, before even I could pronounce their charming name--a name fit for
the Prince in some French fairy-tale; colonists, perhaps, in some far
distant century from Asia, but naturalised now for ever in the village,
well satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine
and the water's edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the
railway-station; yet keeping, none the less, as do some of our old
paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the
golden East.
I would amuse myself by watching the glass jars which the boys used
to lower into the Vivonne, to catch minnows, and which, filled by the
current of the stream, in which they themselves also were enclosed, at
once 'containers' whose transparent sides were like solidified water
and 'contents' plunged into a still larger container of liquid,
flowing crystal, suggested an image of coolness more delicious and more
provoking than the same water in the same jars would have done, standing
upon a table laid for dinner, by shewing it as perpetually in flight