Swann's Way
as Persian in its inspiration." And that region, which, until then, had
seemed to me to be nothing else than a part of immemorial nature, that
had remained contemporaneous with the great phenomena of geology--and as
remote from human history as the Ocean itself, or the Great Bear, with
its wild race of fishermen for whom, no more than for their whales,
had there been any Middle Ages--it had been a great joy to me to see
it suddenly take its place in the order of the centuries, with a stored
consciousness of the romanesque epoch, and to know that the gothic
trefoil had come to diversify those wild rocks also, at the appointed
hour, like those frail but hardy plants which, in the Polar regions,
when the spring returns, scatter their stars about the eternal snows.
And if gothic art brought to those places and people a classification
which, otherwise, they lacked, they too conferred one upon it in return.
I tried to form a picture in my mind of how those fishermen had lived,
the timid and unsuspected essay towards social intercourse which they
had attempted there, clustered upon a promontory of the shores of Hell,
at the foot of the cliffs of death; and gothic art seemed to me a more
living thing now that, detaching it from the towns in which, until then,
I had always imagined it, I could see how, in a particular instance,
upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it
flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the
most famous of the statues at Balbec,--shaggy, blunt-faced Apostles,
the Virgin from the porch,--and I could scarcely breathe for joy at the
thought that I might myself, one day, see them take a solid form against
their eternal background of salt fog. Thereafter, on dear, tempestuous
February nights, the wind--breathing into my heart, which it shook no
less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the project of a visit to
Balbec--blended in me the desire for gothic architecture with that for a
storm upon the sea.
I should have liked to take, the very next day, the good, the generous
train at one twenty-two, of which never without a palpitating heart
could I read, in the railway company's bills or in advertisements of
circular tours, the hour of departure: it seemed to me to cut, at
a precise point in every afternoon, a most fascinating groove, a
mysterious mark, from which the diverted hours still led one on, of
course, towards evening, towards to-morrow morning, but to an evening
and morning which one would behold, not in Paris but in one of those
towns through which the train passed and among which it allowed one
to choose; for it stopped at Bayeux, at Coutances, at Vitré, at
Questambert, at Pontorson, at Balbec, at Lannion, at Lamballe, at
Benodet, at Pont-Aven, at Quimperle, and progressed magnificently
surcharged with names which it offered me, so that, among them all, I
did not know which to choose, so impossible was it to sacrifice any.
But even without waiting for the train next day, I could, by rising and
dressing myself with all speed, leave Paris that very evening, should
my parents permit, and arrive at Balbec as dawn spread westward over the
raging sea, from whose driven foam I would seek shelter in that church
in the Persian manner. But at the approach of the Easter holidays, when
my parents had promised to let me spend them, for once, in the North
of Italy, lo! in place of those dreams of tempests, by which I had been
entirely possessed, not wishing to see anything but waves dashing in
from all sides, mounting always higher, upon the wildest of coasts,
beside churches as rugged and precipitous as cliffs, in whose towers
the sea-birds would be wailing; suddenly, effacing them, taking away
all their charm, excluding them because they were its opposite and could
only have weakened its effect, was substituted in me the converse dream
of the most variegated of springs, not the spring of Combray, still
pricking with all the needle-points of the winter's frost, but that
which already covered with lilies and anemones the meadows of Fiesole,
and gave Florence a dazzling golden background, like those in Fra
Angelico's pictures. From that moment, only sunlight, perfumes, colours,
seemed to me to have any value; for this alternation of images had
effected a change of front in my desire, and--as abrupt as those that
occur sometimes in music,--a complete change of tone in my sensibility.
Thus it came about that a mere atmospheric variation would be sufficient
to provoke in me that modulation, without there being any need for me to
await the return of a season. For often we find a day, in one, that has
strayed from another season, and makes us live in that other, summons at
once into our presence and makes us long for its peculiar pleasures, and
interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting,
out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf, torn from another
chapter, in the interpolated calendar of Happiness. But soon it happened
that, like those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health
can derive but an accidental and all too modest benefit, until the day
when science takes control of them, and, producing them at will, places
in our hands the power to order their appearance, withdrawn from
the tutelage and independent of the consent of chance; similarly the
production of these dreams of the Atlantic and of Italy ceased to depend
entirely upon the changes of the seasons and of the weather. I need
only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice,
Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the
longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in
spring, to come in a book upon the name of Balbec sufficed to awaken
in me the desire for storms at sea and for the Norman gothic; even on a
stormy day the name of Florence or of Venice would awaken the desire for
sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria
del Fiore.
But if their names thus permanently absorbed the image that I had formed
of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating
its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of
this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different
from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be,
and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated
the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my
travels. They magnified the idea that I formed of certain points on the
earth's surface, making them more special, and in consequence more
real. I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, historic
buildings, as pictures more or less attractive, cut out here and there
of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them
as on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which
my soul was athirst, by the knowledge of which it would benefit. How
much more individual still was the character that they assumed from
being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper
names such as people have. Words present to us little pictures of
things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls
of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by
a carpenter's bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things chosen as typical of
everything else of the same sort. But names present to us--of persons
and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique,
like persons--a confused picture, which draws from the names, from
the brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which it is
uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely
red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used
in their reproduction, or by a whim on the designer's part, are blue or
red not only the sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the
people in the streets. The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most
longed to visit, after reading the _Chartreuse_, seeming to me compact
and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, if anyone were to speak of such or
such a house in Parma, in which I should be lodged, he would give me the
pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact
and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, and that bore no relation to the houses
in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid
of that heavy syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air
stirred, and of all that I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness
and the reflected hue of violets. And when I thought of Florence, it was
of a town miraculously embalmed, and flower-like, since it was called
the City of the Lilies, and its Cathedral, Our Lady of the Flower. As
for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on an old piece of
Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which
it was fashioned, one sees depicted still the representation of some
long-abolished custom, of some feudal right, of the former condition of
some place, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language, which had
shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables and which I never doubted
that I should find spoken there at once, even by the inn-keeper who
would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch
the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church; to whom I lent the
aspect, disputatious, solemn and mediaeval, of some character in one of
the old romances.
Had my health definitely improved, had my parents allowed me, if not
actually to go down to stay at Balbec, at least to take, just once, so
as to become acquainted with the architecture and landscapes of Normandy
or of Brittany, that one twenty-two train into which I had so often
clambered in imagination, I should have preferred to stop, and to alight
from it, at the most beautiful of its towns; but in vain might I
compare and contrast them; how was one to choose, any more than between
individual people, who are not interchangeable, between Bayeux, so lofty
in its noble coronet of rusty lace, whose highest point caught the light
of the old gold of its second syllable; Vitré, whose acute accent barred
its ancient glass with wooden lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness
ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman
Cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with
a tower of butter; Lannion with the rumble and buzz, in the silence of
its village street, of the fly on the wheel of the coach; Questambert,
Pontorson, ridiculously silly and simple, white feathers and yellow
beaks strewn along the road to those well-watered and poetic spots;
Benodet, a name scarcely moored that seemed to be striving to draw the
river down into the tangle of its seaweeds; Pont-Aven, the snowy, rosy
flight of the wing of a lightly poised coif, tremulously reflected in
the greenish waters of a canal; Quimperlé, more firmly attached, this,
and since the Middle Ages, among the rivulets with which it babbled,
threading their pearls upon a grey background, like the pattern made,
through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into
blunt points of tarnished silver?
These images were false for another reason also; namely, that they
were necessarily much simplified; doubtless the object to which my
imagination aspired, which my senses took in but incompletely and
without any immediate pleasure, I had committed to the safe custody
of names; doubtless because I had accumulated there a store of dreams,
those names now magnetised my desires; but names themselves are not very
comprehensive; the most that I could do was to include in each of them
two or three of the principal curiosities of the town, which would