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
in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental,
mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was
conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that
it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the
same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How
could I seize upon and define it?
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the
first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time
to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object
of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has
called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat
indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which
I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon
the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact and at my
disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my
own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss
of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed
beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region
through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it
nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something
which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and
substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this
unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its
existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a
real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and
vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts
to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again
the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make
one further effort, to follow and recapture once again the fleeting
sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out
every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all
attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling
that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report,
I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just
denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before
the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty
space in front of it. I place in position before my mind's eye the still
recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within
me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise,
something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I
do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can
measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must
be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has
tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too
far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless
reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of
radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as
the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its
contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea;
cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of
what period in my past life.
Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this
memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment
has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the
very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has
stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who
can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task,
must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which
deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has
urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely
of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let
themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind.
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb
of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those
mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good
day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it
first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the
little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it;
perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without
tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image
had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among
others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned
and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the
forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry,
so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either
obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of
expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my
consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after
the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still,
alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more
persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a
long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their
moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the
tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of
recollection.
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in
her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I
did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory
made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where
her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to
the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out
behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had
been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to
night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon,
the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took
when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling
a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper
which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they
become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive
shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable,
so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park,
and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and
their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray
and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid,
sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
COMBRAY
Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it
from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no
more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it
and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about
its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as
a shepherd gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking
houses, which a fragment of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and
there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town
in a primitive painting. To live in, Combray was a trifle depressing,
like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackened stone of the
country, fronted with outside steps, capped with gables which projected
long shadows downwards, were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun
began to go down, to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows;
streets with the solemn names of Saints, not a few of whom figured
in the history of the early lords of Combray, such as the Rue
Saint-Hilaire, the Rue Saint-Jacques, in which my aunt's house stood,
the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, which ran past her railings, and the Rue
du Saint-Esprit, on to which the little garden gate opened; and these
Combray streets exist in so remote a quarter of my memory, painted in
colours so different from those in which the world is decked for me
to-day, that in fact one and all of them, and the church which towered
above them in the Square, seem to me now more unsubstantial than the
projections of my magic-lantern; while at times I feel that to be able
to cross the Rue Saint-Hilaire again, to engage a room in the Rue de
l'Oiseau, in the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesché, from whose windows
in the pavement used to rise a smell of cooking which rises still in
my mind, now and then, in the same warm gusts of comfort, would be to
secure a contact with the unseen world more marvellously supernatural
than it would be to make Golo's acquaintance and to chat with Geneviève
de Brabant.
My grandfather's cousin--by courtesy my great-aunt--with whom we used
to stay, was the mother of that aunt Léonie who, since her husband's (my
uncle Octave's) death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray,
then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed;
and who now never 'came down,' but lay perpetually in an indefinite
condition of grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions,
and religious observances. Her own room looked out over the Rue
Saint-Jacques, which ran a long way further to end in the Grand-Pré (as
distinct from the Petit-Pré, a green space in the centre of the town
where three streets met) and which, monotonous and grey, with the three
high steps of stone before almost every one of its doors, seemed like a
deep furrow cut by some sculptor of gothic images in the very block of
stone out of which he had fashioned a Calvary or a Crib. My aunt's life
was now practically confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she
would rest in the afternoon while they aired the other. They were rooms
of that country order which (just as in certain climes whole tracts of
air or ocean are illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which
we cannot see) fascinate our sense of smell with the countless odours
springing from their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret
system of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which
their atmosphere holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and
coloured by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside,
but already humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful,
limpid jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left
the orchard for the store-room, smells changing with the year, but
plenishing, domestic smells, which compensate for the sharpness of hoar
frost with the sweet savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as
a village clock, roving smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which
brings only an increase of anxiety, and in a prosiness which serves as
a deep source of poetry to the stranger who passes through their midst
without having lived amongst them. The air of those rooms was saturated
with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I
could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on
those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could
taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray: before
I went in to wish my aunt good day I would be kept waiting a little time
in the outer room, where the sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to
warm itself before the fire, lighted already between its two brick sides
and plastering all the room and everything in it with a smell of soot,
making the room like one of those great open hearths which one finds in
the country, or one of the canopied mantelpieces in old castles under
which one sits hoping that in the world outside it is raining or
snowing, hoping almost for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of
shelter and security to the comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to
and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs, each
one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking
like a pie the appetising smells with which the air of the room was
thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had
already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed them and glazed them and
fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable
country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour
the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells
of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper
I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the
nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the
flowered quilt.
In the next room I could hear my aunt talking quietly to herself. She
never spoke save in low tones, because she believed that there was
something broken in her head and floating loose there, which she might
displace by talking too loud; but she never remained for long, even when
alone, without saying something, because she believed that it was good
for her throat, and that by keeping the blood there in circulation it
would make less frequent the chokings and other pains to which she
was liable; besides, in the life of complete inertia which she led she
attached to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance,
endowed them with a Protean ubiquity which made it difficult for her to
keep them secret, and, failing a confidant to whom she might communicate
them, she used to promulgate them to herself in an unceasing monologue
which was her sole form of activity. Unfortunately, having formed the
habit of thinking aloud, she did not always take care to see that there
was no one in the adjoining room, and I would often hear her saying
to herself: "I must not forget that I never slept a wink"--for "never
sleeping a wink" was her great claim to distinction, and one admitted
and respected in our household vocabulary; in the morning Françoise
would not 'call' her, but would simply 'come to' her; during the day,
when my aunt wished to take a nap, we used to say just that she wished
to 'be quiet' or to 'rest'; and when in conversation she so far forgot
herself as to say "what made me wake up," or "I dreamed that," she would
flush and at once correct herself.