Swann's Way
were a stage higher in the scale of art. But although the photographer
had been prevented from reproducing directly the masterpieces or the
beauties of nature, and had there been replaced by a great artist, he
resumed his odious position when it came to reproducing the artist's
interpretation. Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity,
my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still
further. She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved,
preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of
association apart from themselves, such, for example, as shew us a
masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day, as
Morghen's print of the 'Cenacolo' of Leonardo before it was spoiled
by restoration. It must be admitted that the results of this method of
interpreting the art of making presents were not always happy. The idea
which I formed of Venice, from a drawing by Titian which is supposed to
have the lagoon in the background, was certainly far less accurate than
what I have since derived from ordinary photographs. We could no
longer keep count in the family (when my great-aunt tried to frame an
indictment of my grandmother) of all the armchairs she had presented
to married couples, young and old, which on a first attempt to sit down
upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipient.
But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too
closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still
be discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past. And
even what in such pieces supplied a material need, since it did so in a
manner to which we are no longer accustomed, was as charming to her as
one of those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a
metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our
modern tongue. In precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George
Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms
of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use
and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.
And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as
she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or
some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on
the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys
through the realms of time.
Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen _François le Champi_, whose
reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it a distinct personality
in my eyes and a mysterious attraction. I had not then read any real
novels. I had heard it said that George Sand was a typical novelist.
That prepared me in advance to imagine that _François le Champi_
contained something inexpressibly delicious. The course of the
narrative, where it tended to arouse curiosity or melt to pity, certain
modes of expression which disturb or sadden the reader, and which, with
a little experience, he may recognise as 'common form' in novels, seemed
to me then distinctive--for to me a new book was not one of a number of
similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no
cause of existence beyond himself--an intoxicating whiff of the peculiar
essence of _François le Champi_. Beneath the everyday incidents, the
commonplace thoughts and hackneyed words, I could hear, or overhear, an
intonation, a rhythmic utterance fine and strange. The 'action' began:
to me it seemed all the more obscure because in those days, when I read
to myself, I used often, while I turned the pages, to dream of something
quite different. And to the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge
of the story more were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was
reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out. And so all the odd
changes which take place in the relations between the miller's wife and
the boy, changes which only the birth and growth of love can explain,
seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery, the key to which (as I
could readily believe) lay in that strange and pleasant-sounding name of
_Champi_, which draped the boy who bore it, I knew not why, in its own
bright colour, purpurate and charming. If my mother was not a faithful
reader, she was, none the less, admirable when reading a work in which
she found the note of true feeling by the respectful simplicity of her
interpretation and by the sound of her sweet and gentle voice. It was
the same in her daily life, when it was not works of art but men and
women whom she was moved to pity or admire: it was touching to observe
with what deference she would banish from her voice, her gestures, from
her whole conversation, now the note of joy which might have distressed
some mother who had long ago lost a child, now the recollection of an
event or anniversary which might have reminded some old gentleman of the
burden of his years, now the household topic which might have bored some
young man of letters. And so, when she read aloud the prose of George
Sand, prose which is everywhere redolent of that generosity and moral
distinction which Mamma had learned from my grandmother to place above
all other qualities in life, and which I was not to teach her until
much later to refrain from placing, in the same way, above all other
qualities in literature; taking pains to banish from her voice any
weakness or affectation which might have blocked its channel for that
powerful stream of language, she supplied all the natural tenderness,
all the lavish sweetness which they demanded to phrases which seemed
to have been composed for her voice, and which were all, so to speak,
within her compass. She came to them with the tone that they required,
with the cordial accent which existed before they were, which dictated
them, but which is not to be found in the words themselves, and by these
means she smoothed away, as she read on, any harshness there might be
or discordance in the tenses of verbs, endowing the imperfect and the
preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the
melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing
to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now
slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their
difference of quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this
quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.
My agony was soothed; I let myself be borne upon the current of this
gentle night on which I had my mother by my side. I knew that such a
night could not be repeated; that the strongest desire I had in the
world, namely, to keep my mother in my room through the sad hours of
darkness, ran too much counter to general requirements and to the wishes
of others for such a concession as had been granted me this evening to
be anything but a rare and casual exception. To-morrow night I should
again be the victim of anguish and Mamma would not stay by my side. But
when these storms of anguish grew calm I could no longer realise
their existence; besides, tomorrow evening was still a long way off;
I reminded myself that I should still have time to think about things,
albeit that remission of time could bring me no access of power, albeit
the coming event was in no way dependent upon the exercise of my will,
and seemed not quite inevitable only because it was still separated from
me by this short interval.
* * *
And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at
night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than
this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy
background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign
will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other
parts of which remain plunged in darkness: broad enough at its base, the
little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows of the path along
which would come M. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the
hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase,
so hard to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the tapering
'elevation' of an irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom,
with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter;
in a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all
its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy
background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting
one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in
the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had
consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though
there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night. I must own
that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other
scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts
which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an
exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures
which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of
the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this
residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.
Permanently dead? Very possibly.
There is a large element of hazard in these matters, and a second
hazard, that of our own death, often prevents us from awaiting for any
length of time the favours of the first.
I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the
souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior
being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so
effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we
happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which
forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our
name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken.
We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our
life.
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to
recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.
The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of
intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material
object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object,
it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves
must die.
Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was
comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had
any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my
mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did
not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular
reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump
little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they
had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon,
mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing
morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked
a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with
it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I
stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached,
with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life
had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity
illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has
of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not