Swann's Way
between the impalpable water, in which my hands could not arrest it, and
the insoluble glass, in which my palate could not enjoy it. I decided
that I would come there again with a line and catch fish; I begged for
and obtained a morsel of bread from our luncheon basket; and threw into
the Vivonne pellets which had the power, it seemed, to bring about a
chemical precipitation, for the water at once grew solid round about
them in oval clusters of emaciated tadpoles, which until then it had, no
doubt, been holding in solution, invisible, but ready and alert to enter
the stage of crystallisation.
Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants.
At first they appeared singly, a lily, for instance, which the current,
across whose path it had unfortunately grown, would never leave at rest
for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it
would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally
repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would
be straightened out, lengthened, strained almost to breaking-point until
the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their
anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called
its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before
moving off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after
another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims
of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt
Léonie, who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle
of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine
themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always
retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and
eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate
its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange,
ineluctable, fatal daily round. Such as these was the water-lily,
and also like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated
indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who
would have inquired of them at greater length and in fuller detail from
the victims themselves, had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him
to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.
But farther on the current slackened, where the stream ran through a
property thrown open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of
aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds into which the Vivonne was
here diverted were aflower with water-lilies. As the banks at this
point were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a
background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we
were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen
in its depths a clear, crude blue that was almost violet, suggesting a
floor of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there, on the surface, floated,
blushing like a strawberry, the scarlet heart of a lily set in a ring of
white petals.
Beyond these the flowers were more frequent, but paler, less glossy,
more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in
festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream,
as though after the dreary stripping of the decorations used in some
Watteau festival, moss-roses in loosened garlands. Elsewhere a corner
seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily; of a neat pink or
white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain, with housewifely
care; while, a little farther again, were others, pressed close together
in a floating garden-bed, as though pansies had flown out of a garden
like butterflies and were hovering with blue and burnished wings over
the transparent shadowiness of this watery border; this skiey border
also, for it set beneath the flowers a soil of a colour more precious,
more moving than their own; and both in the afternoon, when it sparkled
beneath the lilies in the kaleidoscope of a happiness silent, restless,
and alert, and towards evening, when it was filled like a distant heaven
with the roseate dreams of the setting sun, incessantly changing and
ever remaining in harmony, about the more permanent colour of the
flowers themselves, with the utmost profundity, evanescence, and
mystery--with a quiet suggestion of infinity; afternoon or evening, it
seemed to have set them flowering in the heart of the sky.
After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly.
How often have I watched, and longed to imitate, when I should be free
to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay stretched
out on his back, his head down, in the bottom of his boat, letting it
drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly
above him, shewing upon his features a foretaste of happiness and peace.
We would sit down among the irises at the water's edge. In the holiday
sky a lazy cloud streamed out to its full length. Now and then, crushed
by the burden of idleness, a carp would heave up out of the water, with
an anxious gasp. It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards
we would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and
chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint,
but solid still and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire,
which had melted not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed
to traverse, but, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all
their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed the flowers at our feet.
Sometimes, at the water's edge and embedded in trees, we would come upon
a house of the kind called 'pleasure houses,' isolated and lost, seeing
nothing of the world, save the river which bathed its feet. A young
woman, whose pensive face and fashionable veils did not suggest a local
origin, and who had doubtless come there, in the popular phrase, 'to
bury herself,' to taste the bitter sweetness of feeling that her name,
and still more the name of him whose heart she had once held, but had
been unable to keep, were unknown there, stood framed in a window from
which she had no outlook beyond the boat that was moored beside her
door. She raised her eyes with an air of distraction when she heard,
through the trees that lined the bank, the voices of passers-by of whom,
before they came in sight, she might be certain that never had they
known, nor would they know, the faithless lover, that nothing in their
past lives bore his imprint, which nothing in their future would have
occasion to receive. One felt that in her renunciation of life she had
willingly abandoned those places in which she would at least have been
able to see him whom she loved, for others where he had never trod. And
I watched her, as she returned from some walk along a road where she had
known that he would not appear, drawing from her submissive fingers long
gloves of a precious, useless charm.
Never, in the course of our walks along the 'Guermantes way,' might
we penetrate as far as the source of the Vivonne, of which I had often
thought, which had in my mind so abstract, so ideal an existence, that I
had been as much surprised when some one told me that it was actually
to be found in the same department, and at a given number of miles from
Combray, as I had been on the day when I had learned that there was
another fixed point somewhere on the earth's surface, where, according
to the ancients, opened the jaws of Hell. Nor could we ever reach that
other goal, to which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself. I
knew that it was the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse
de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who did actually
exist, but whenever I thought about them I pictured them to myself
either in tapestry, as was the 'Coronation of Esther' which hung in our
church, or else in changing, rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad in
his window, where he passed from cabbage green, when I was dipping my
fingers in the holy water stoup, to plum blue when I had reached our row
of chairs, or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève
de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the magic lantern
sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the
ceiling--in short, always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age,
and bathed, as in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the
resounding syllable 'antes.' And if, in spite of that, they were for
me, in their capacity as a duke and a duchess, real people, though of
an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality was in its turn enormously
distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermantes
of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit 'Guermantes way'
of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its
overshadowing trees, and an endless series of hot summer afternoons.
And I knew that they bore not only the titles of Duc and Duchesse de
Guermantes, but that since the fourteenth century, when, after vain
attempts to conquer its earlier lords in battle, they had allied
themselves by marriage, and so became Counts of Combray, the first
citizens, consequently, of the place, and yet the only ones among
its citizens who did not reside in it--Comtes de Combray, possessing
Combray, threading it on their string of names and titles, absorbing it
in their personalities, and illustrating, no doubt, in themselves that
strange and pious melancholy which was peculiar to Combray; proprietors
of the town, though not of any particular house there; dwelling,
presumably, out of doors, in the street, between heaven and earth, like
that Gilbert de Guermantes, of whom I could see, in the stained glass of
the apse of Saint-Hilaire, only the 'other side' in dull black lacquer,
if I raised my eyes to look for him, when I was going to Camus's for a
packet of salt.
And then it happened that, going the 'Guermantes way,' I passed
occasionally by a row of well-watered little gardens, over whose hedges
rose clusters of dark blossom. I would stop before them, hoping to gain
some precious addition to my experience, for I seemed to have before my
eyes a fragment of that riverside country which I had longed so much
to see and know since coming upon a description of it by one of my
favourite authors. And it was with that story-book land, with its
imagined soil intersected by a hundred bubbling watercourses, that
Guermantes, changing its form in my mind, became identified, after I
heard Dr. Percepied speak of the flowers and the charming rivulets and
fountains that were to be seen there in the ducal park. I used to dream
that Mme. de Guermantes, taking a sudden capricious fancy for myself,
invited me there, that all day long she stood fishing for trout by my
side. And when evening came, holding my hand in her own, as we passed by
the little gardens of her vassals, she would point out to me the flowers
that leaned their red and purple spikes along the tops of the low walls,
and would teach me all their names. She would make me tell her, too, all
about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me
that, since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high time to
decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked
myself the question, and tried to discover some subjects to which I
could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind
would stop like a clock, I would see before me vacuity, nothing, would
feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that, perhaps, a
malady of the brain was hindering its development. Sometimes I would
depend upon my father's arranging everything for me. He was so powerful,