Swann's Way
awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes, drawing close
to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing more,
now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and
resigned, and so vanishing in the night.
I never thought again of this page, but at the moment when, on my
corner of the box-seat, where the Doctor's coachman was in the habit
of placing, in a hamper, the fowls which he had bought at Martinville
market, I had finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness,
felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the
steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I
myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top
of my voice.
All day long, during these walks, I had been able to muse upon the
pleasure that there would be in the friendship of the Duchesse de
Guermantes, in fishing for trout, in drifting by myself in a boat on the
Vivonne; and, greedy for happiness, I asked nothing more from life, in
such moments, than that it should consist always of a series of joyous
afternoons. But when, on our way home, I had caught sight of a farm, on
the left of the road, at some distance from two other farms which were
themselves close together, and from which, to return to Combray, we need
only turn down an avenue of oaks, bordered on one side by a series of
orchard-closes, each one planted at regular intervals with apple-trees
which cast upon the ground, when they were lighted by the setting sun,
the Japanese stencil of their shadows; then, sharply, my heart would
begin to beat, I would know that in half an hour we should be at
home, and that there, as was the rule on days when we had taken the
'Guermantes way' and dinner was, in consequence, served later than
usual, I should be sent to bed as soon as I had swallowed my soup, so
that my mother, kept at table, just as though there had been company to
dinner, would not come upstairs to say good night to me in bed. The zone
of melancholy which I then entered was totally distinct from that other
zone, in which I had been bounding for joy a moment earlier, just as
sometimes in the sky a band of pink is separated, as though by a line
invisibly ruled, from a band of green or black. You may see a bird
flying across the pink; it draws near the border-line, touches it,
enters and is lost upon the black. The longings by which I had just
now been absorbed, to go to Guermantes, to travel, to live a life of
happiness--I was now so remote from them that their fulfilment would
have afforded me no pleasure. How readily would I have sacrificed them
all, just to be able to cry, all night long, in the arms of Mamma!
Shuddering with emotion, I could not take my agonised eyes from my
mother's face, which was not to appear that evening in the bedroom where
I could see myself already lying, in imagination; and wished only that
I were lying dead. And this state would persist until the morrow, when,
the rays of morning leaning their bars of light, as the gardener might
lean his ladder, against the wall overgrown with nasturtiums, which
clambered up it as far as my window-sill, I would leap out of bed to run
down at once into the garden, with no thought of the fact that evening
must return, and with it the hour when I must leave my mother. And so
it was from the 'Guermantes way' that I learned to distinguish between
these states which reigned alternately in my mind, during certain
periods, going so far as to divide every day between them, each one
returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever and
ague: contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means
of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to
myself, in one state what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the
other.
So the 'Méséglise way' and the 'Guermantes way' remain for me linked
with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives
along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in
sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of
the mind. Doubtless it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the
truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have
opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for
their discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us
those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became
apparent. The flowers which played then among the grass, the water
which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as
environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still
with its unconscious or unheeding air; and, certainly, when they were
slowly scrutinised by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming
child--as the face of a king is scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the
crowd--that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose
that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in
all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which
strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the
dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no
echo, upon a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side of a waterplant by
the current, and formed only to burst--my exaltation of mind has borne
them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all these
successive years, while all around them the one-trodden ways have
vanished, while those who thronged those ways, and even the memory of
those who thronged those trodden ways, are dead. Sometimes the fragment
of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in
such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my
mind, like a flowering isle of Delos, and I am unable to say from
what place, from what time--perhaps, quite simply, from which of my
dreams--it comes. But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my
mental soil, as firm sites on which I still may build, that I regard
the Méséglise and Guermantes 'ways.' It is because I used to think of
certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along them, that
the things, the people which they taught me to know, and these alone,
I still take seriously, still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith
which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape
in the memory alone, the flowers that people shew me nowadays for the
first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The 'Méséglise way'
with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its
apple-trees, the 'Guermantes way' with its river full of tadpoles, its
water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time
the picture of the land in which I fain would pass my life, in which my
only requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a boat,
see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find hidden among
the cornfields--as Saint-André-des-Champs lay hidden--an old church,
monumental, rustic, and yellow like a mill-stone; and the cornflowers,
the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may happen, when I go walking, to
encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on
the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart. And
yet, because there is an element of individuality in places, when I am
seized with a desire to see again the 'Guermantes way,' it would not
be satisfied were I led to the banks of a river in which were lilies
as fair, or even fairer than those in the Vivonne, any more than on my
return home in the evening, at the hour when there awakened in me that
anguish which, later on in life, transfers itself to the passion of
love, and may even become its inseparable companion, I should have
wished for any strange mother to come in and say good night to me,
though she were far more beautiful and more intelligent than my own. No:
just as the one thing necessary to send me to sleep contented (in that
untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able
to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes
in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her
kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation,
unburdened by any liability save to myself) was that it should be my
mother who came, that she should incline towards me that face on which
there was, beneath her eye, something that was, it appears, a blemish,
and which I loved as much as all the rest--so what I want to see again
is the 'Guermantes way' as I knew it, with the farm that stood a little
apart from the two neighbouring farms, pressed so close together, at the
entrance to the oak avenue; those meadows upon whose surface, when it
is polished by the sun to the mirroring radiance of a lake, are outlined
the leaves of the apple-trees; that whole landscape whose individuality
sometimes, at night, in my dreams, binds me with a power that is almost
fantastic, of which I can discover no trace when I awake.
No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly combined in
me groups of different impressions, for no reason save that they had
made me feel several separate things at the same time, the Méséglise
and Guermantes 'ways' left me exposed, in later life, to much
disillusionment, and even to many mistakes. For often I have wished to
see a person again without realising that it was simply because that
person recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom; and I have been
led to believe, and to make some one else believe in an aftermath of
affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel. But by
the same qualities, and by their persistence in those of my impressions,
to-day, to which they can find an attachment, the two 'ways' give to
those impressions a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the
rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for
me alone. When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a
tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the
'Méséglise way' that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling,
through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent
lilac-trees.
And so I would often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at
Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful evenings there; of other days
besides, the memory of which had been more lately restored to me by the
taste--by what would have been called at Combray the 'perfume'---of a
cup of tea; and, by an association of memories, of a story which, many
years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love
affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born; with that
accuracy of detail which it is easier, often, to obtain when we are
studying the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than when
we are trying to chronicle those of our own most intimate friends, an
accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible
to speak from one town to another, before we learned of the contrivance
by which that impossibility has been overcome. All these memories,
following one after another, were condensed into a single substance,
but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between the
three strata, between my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others,
inspired more recently by a taste or 'perfume,' and those which were
actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at
second hand--no fissures, indeed, no geological faults, but at least
those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain
marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation.
It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the