Swann's Way
lie there side by side, without interval or partition; in the name of
Balbec, as in the magnifying glasses set in those penholders which
one buys at sea-side places, I could distinguish waves surging round
a church built in the Persian manner. Perhaps, indeed, the enforced
simplicity of these images was one of the reasons for the hold that they
had over me. When my father had decided, one year, that we should go
for the Easter holidays to Florence and Venice, not finding room
to introduce into the name of Florence the elements that ordinarily
constitute a town, I was obliged to let a supernatural city emerge from
the impregnation by certain vernal scenes of what I supposed to be,
in its essentials, the genius of Giotto. All the more--and because one
cannot make a name extend much further in time than in space--like some
of Giotto's paintings themselves which shew us at two separate moments
the same person engaged in different actions, here lying on his bed,
there just about to mount his horse, the name of Florence was divided
into two compartments. In one, beneath an architectural dais, I gazed
upon a fresco over which was partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight,
dusty, aslant, and gradually spreading; in the other (for, since
I thought of names not as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and
enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge, the life not yet
lived, the life intact and pure which I enclosed in them, gave to the
most material pleasures, to the simplest scenes, the same attraction
that they have in the works of the Primitives), I moved swiftly--so as
to arrive, as soon as might be, at the table that was spread for me,
with fruit and a flask of Chianti--across a Ponte Vecchio heaped with
jonquils, narcissi and anemones. That (for all that I was still in
Paris) was what I saw, and not what was actually round about me. Even
from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries for
which we long occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our
true life than the country in which we may happen to be. Doubtless, if,
at that time, I had paid more attention to what was in my mind when I
pronounced the words "going to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice,"
I should have realised that what I saw was in no sense a town, but
something as different from anything that I knew, something as delicious
as might be for a human race whose whole existence had passed in a
series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel, a morning
in spring. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all my
nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those which
had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it by
an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say, who saw
nothing), as in an opera a fresh melody introduces a novel atmosphere
which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than
read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre,
counting only the minutes as they passed. And besides, even from the
point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not all equal.
To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as
mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different 'speeds.' There are
mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to
pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt,
singing as one goes. During this month--in which I went laboriously
over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of
Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me
drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been
love, love for another person--I never ceased to believe that they
corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me
conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a
Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve of his entry into
Paradise. Moreover, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that
there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with my organs of sense
what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by
my senses at all--though all the more tempting to them, in consequence,
more different from anything that they knew--it was that which recalled
to me the reality of these visions, which inflamed my desire all the
more by seeming to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied.
And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for
aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than
books on aesthetics, and, more again than the guide-books, the railway
time-tables. What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I
could see, so near and yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the tract
which separated it from me, in myself, was not one that I might cross,
could yet be reached by a circuit, by a digression, were I to take
the plain, terrestrial path. When I repeated to myself, giving thus a
special value to what I was going to see, that Venice was the "School of
Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most complete museum of the domestic
architecture of the Middle Ages," I felt happy indeed. As I was even
more when, on one of my walks, as I stepped out briskly on account
of the weather, which, after several days of a precocious spring, had
relapsed into winter (like the weather that we had invariably found
awaiting us at Combray, in Holy Week),--seeing upon the boulevards that
the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked
through them like a stream of water, were none the less beginning,
punctual guests, arrayed already for the party, and admitting no
discouragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the
irrepressible verdure whose steady growth the abortive power of the
cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining--I reflected that
already the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of hyacinths
and anemones, and that the spring sunshine was already tinging the waves
of the Grand Canal with so dusky an azure, with emeralds so splendid
that when they washed and were broken against the foot of one of
Titian's paintings they could vie with it in the richness of their
colouring. I could no longer contain my joy when my father, in the
intervals of tapping the barometer and complaining of the cold, began
to look out which were the best trains, and when I understood that by
making one's way, after luncheon, into the coal-grimed laboratory, the
wizard's cell that undertook to contrive a complete transmutation of its
surroundings, one could awaken, next morning, in the city of marble
and gold, in which "the building of the wall was of jasper and the
foundation of the wall an emerald." So that it and the City of the
Lilies were not just artificial scenes which I could set up at my
pleasure in front of my imagination, but did actually exist at a certain
distance from Paris which must inevitably be traversed if I wished to
see them, at their appointed place on the earth's surface, and at no
other; in a word they were entirely real. They became even more real
to me when my father, by saying: "Well, you can stay in Venice from the
20th to the 29th, and reach Florence on Easter morning," made them both
emerge, no longer only from the abstraction of Space, but from that
imaginary Time in which we place not one, merely, but several of
our travels at once, which do not greatly tax us since they are but
possibilities,--that Time which reconstructs itself so effectively that
one can spend it again in one town after one has already spent it in
another--and consecrated to them some of those actual, calendar days
which are certificates of the genuineness of what one does on them, for
those unique days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one
cannot live them again here when one has lived them elsewhere; I felt
that it was towards the week that would begin with the Monday on which
the laundress was to bring back the white waistcoat that I had stained
with ink, that they were hastening to busy themselves with the duty
of emerging from that ideal Time in which they did not, as yet, exist,
those two Queen Cities of which I was soon to be able, by the most
absorbing kind of geometry, to inscribe the domes and towers on a
page of my own life. But I was still on the way, only, to the supreme
pinnacle of happiness; I reached it finally (for not until then did the
revelation burst upon me that on the clattering streets, reddened by the
light reflected from Giorgione's frescoes, it was not, as I had, despite
so many promptings, continued to imagine, the men "majestic and terrible
as the sea, bearing armour that gleamed with bronze beneath the folds
of their blood-red cloaks," who would be walking in Venice next week, on
the Easter vigil; but that I myself might be the minute personage whom,
in an enlarged photograph of St. Mark's that had been lent to me, the
operator had portrayed, in a bowler hat, in front of the portico), when
I heard my father say: "It must be pretty cold, still, on the Grand
Canal; whatever you do, don't forget to pack your winter greatcoat and
your thick suit." At these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy;
a thing that I had until then deemed impossible, I felt myself to be
penetrating indeed between those "rocks of amethyst, like a reef in the
Indian Ocean"; by a supreme muscular effort, a long way in excess of my
real strength, stripping myself, as of a shell that served no purpose,
of the air in my own room which surrounded me, I replaced it by an equal
quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere, indescribable and
peculiar as the atmosphere of the dreams which my imagination had
secreted in the name of Venice; I could feel at work within me a
miraculous disincarnation; it was at once accompanied by that vague
desire to vomit which one feels when one has a very sore throat; and
they had to put me to bed with a fever so persistent that the doctor
not only assured my parents that a visit, that spring, to Florence and
Venice was absolutely out of the question, but warned them that, even
when I should have completely recovered, I must, for at least a year,
give up all idea of travelling, and be kept from anything that was
liable to excite me.
And, alas, he forbade also, most categorically, my being allowed to go
to the theatre, to hear Berma; the sublime artist, whose genius Bergotte
had proclaimed, might, by introducing me to something else that was,
perhaps, as important and as beautiful, have consoled me for not having
been to Florence and Venice, for not going to Balbec. My parents had
to be content with sending me, every day, to the Champs-Elysées, in
the custody of a person who would see that I did not tire myself; this
person was none other than Françoise, who had entered our service
after the death of my aunt Léonie. Going to the Champs-Elysées I found
unendurable. If only Bergotte had described the place in one of his
books, I should, no doubt, have longed to see and to know it, like so
many things else of which a simulacrum had first found its way into
my imagination. That kept things warm, made them live, gave them
personality, and I sought then to find their counterpart in reality,
but in this public garden there was nothing that attached itself to my
dreams.
* * *
One day, as I was weary of our usual place, beside the wooden horses,
Françoise had taken me for an excursion--across the frontier guarded at
regular intervals by the little bastions of the barley-sugar women--into
those neighbouring but foreign regions, where the faces of the
passers-by were strange, where the goat-carriage went past; then she had
gone away to lay down her things on a chair that stood with its back to