shut) of my uncle Adolphe; instead, after hanging about on the outskirts
of the back-kitchen until Françoise appeared on its threshold and
announced: "I am going to let the kitchen-maid serve the coffee and take
up the hot water; it is time I went off to Mme. Octave," I would then
decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read.
The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution
to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and
continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human
shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the
same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such
quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to dress
them was a poor sickly creature, some way 'gone' in pregnancy when
we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that
Françoise allowed her to run so many errands in the town and to do so
much work in the house, for she was beginning to find a difficulty in
bearing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger every day,
whose splendid outline could be detected through the folds of her ample
smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of
the allegorical figures in his paintings, of which M. Swann had given
me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he
inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: "Well, how goes it with
Giotto's Charity?" And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled
and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical,
squared outlines of her cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins,
so strong and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are
personified in the Arena Chapel. And I can see now that those Virtues
and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just as
the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which
she carried in her body, without appearing to understand what it meant,
without any rendering in her facial expression of all its beauty and
spiritual significance, but carried as if it were an ordinary and rather
heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is
about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena
beneath the label 'Caritas,' and a reproduction of whose portrait hung
upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, incarnates that virtue, for
it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever have found
expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the
painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at
her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to
extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on a heap of
sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart
to God, or shall we say 'handing' it to Him, exactly as a cook might
hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen to
some one who had called down to ask her for it from the ground-level
above. The 'Invidia,' again, should have had some look on her face of
envy. But in this fresco, too, the symbol occupies so large a place and
is represented with such realism; the serpent hissing between the lips
of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that
the muscles of her face are strained and contorted, like a child's who
is filling a balloon with his breath, and that Envy, and we ourselves
for that matter, when we look at her, since all her attention and ours
are concentrated on the action of her lips, have no time, almost, to
spare for envious thoughts.
Despite all the admiration that M. Swann might profess for these figures
of Giotto, it was a long time before I could find any pleasure in seeing
in our schoolroom (where the copies he had brought me were hung) that
Charity devoid of charity, that Envy who looked like nothing so much
as a plate in some medical book, illustrating the compression of the
glottis or uvula by a tumour in the tongue, or by the introduction of
the operator's instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular
features were the very same as those which adorned the faces of certain
good and pious and slightly withered ladies of Combray whom I used to
see at mass, many of whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces
of Injustice. But in later years I understood that the arresting
strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes lay in the great part
played in each of them by its symbols, while the fact that these
were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought symbolised was nowhere
expressed), but as real things, actually felt or materially handled,
added something more precise and more literal to their meaning,
something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they imparted.
And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our attention
incessantly drawn to her belly by the load which filled it; and in the
same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of
death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal,
intestinal aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it
happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them
to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a
difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to
which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
There must have been a strong element of reality in those Virtues and
Vices of Padua, since they appeared to me to be as much alive as
the pregnant servant-girl, while she herself appeared scarcely less
allegorical than they. And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack)
of participation by a person's soul in the significant marks of its own
special virtue has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which,
if not strictly psychological, may at least be called physiognomical.
Later on, when, in the course of my life, I have had occasion to meet
with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical
charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and
slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern
no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and
no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the
sublime face of true goodness.
Then while the kitchen-maid--who, all unawares, made the superior
qualities of Françoise shine with added lustre, just as Error, by
force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth--took in coffee which
(according to Mamma) was nothing more than hot water, and then carried
up to our rooms hot water which was barely tepid, I would be lying
stretched out on my bed, a book in my hand, in my room which trembled
with the effort to defend its frail, transparent coolness against the
afternoon sun, behind its almost closed shutters through which, however,
a reflection of the sunlight had contrived to slip in on its golden
wings, remaining motionless, between glass and woodwork, in a corner,
like a butterfly poised upon a flower. It was hardly light enough for
me to read, and my feeling of the day's brightness and splendour was
derived solely from the blows struck down below, in the Rue de la Cure,
by Camus (whom Françoise had assured that my aunt was not 'resting' and
that he might therefore make a noise), upon some old packing-cases from
which nothing would really be sent flying but the dust, though the din
of them, in the resonant atmosphere that accompanies hot weather, seemed
to scatter broadcast a rain of blood-red stars; and from the flies who
performed for my benefit, in their small concert, as it might be the
chamber music of summer; evoking heat and light quite differently from
an air of human music which, if you happen to have heard it during a
fine summer, will always bring that summer back to your mind, the flies'
music is bound to the season by a closer, a more vital tie--born of
sunny days, and not to be reborn but with them, containing something
of their essential nature, it not merely calls up their image in our
memory, but gives us a guarantee that they do really exist, that they
are close around us, immediately accessible.
This dim freshness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street
what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say, equally luminous,
and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which
my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed in
fragments only; and so was quite in harmony with my state of repose,
which (thanks to the adventures related in my books, which had just
excited it) bore, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running
water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity and life.
But my grandmother, even if the weather, after growing too hot, had
broken, and a storm, or just a shower, had burst over us, would come up
and beg me to go outside. And as I did not wish to leave off my book, I
would go on with it in the garden, under the chestnut-tree, in a little
sentry-box of canvas and matting, in the farthest recesses of which I
used to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who might
be coming to call upon the family.
And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole,
in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain
invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside? When I saw
any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain
between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which
prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material
form; for it would volatilise itself in some way before I could touch
it, just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet
never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by
a zone of evaporation. Upon the sort of screen, patterned with different
states and impressions, which my consciousness would quietly unfold
while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden
aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon
spread out before my eyes at the foot of the garden, what was from the
first the most permanent and the most intimate part of me, the lever
whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my belief in the
philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire
to appropriate these to myself, whatever the book might be. For even if
I had purchased it at Combray, having seen it outside Borange's, whose
grocery lay too far from our house for Françoise to be able to deal
there, as she did with Camus, but who enjoyed better custom as a
stationer and bookseller; even if I had seen it, tied with string to
keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly parts and pamphlets which
adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more
teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, I should have noticed
and bought it there simply because I had recognised it as a book which
had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the school-master or the
school-friend who, at that particular time, seemed to me to be
entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me,
half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but
permanent object of my thoughts.
Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be
constantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the
discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in
which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with
more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole
lifetime. These were the events which took place in the book I was
reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what
Françoise would have called 'real people.' But none of the feelings
which the joys or misfortunes of a 'real' person awaken in us can be
awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes;
and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding
that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated
structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted
in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided
improvement. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him,
is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to
say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities
have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is
only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that
we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small
section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of
feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think
of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human
spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which
the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the
actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in
the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in
ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall,
while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened
breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that
state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is
multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might
a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than
those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour
he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of
which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting
to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have
been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops
our perception of them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and
that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by
imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural
phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish,
successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the
actual sensation of change.
Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than this human
element, would come the view, more or less projected before my eyes,
of the country in which the action of the story was taking place, which
made a far stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual
landscape which would meet my eyes when I raised them from my book. In
this way, for two consecutive summers I used to sit in the heat of our
Combray garden, sick with a longing inspired by the book I was then
reading for a land of mountains and rivers, where I could see an endless
vista of sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments of
wood lay mouldering in beds of watercress; and nearby, rambling and
clustering along low walls, purple flowers and red. And since there was
always lurking in my mind the dream of a woman who would enrich me with
her love, that dream in those two summers used to be quickened with the
freshness and coolness of running water; and whoever she might be, the
woman whose image I called to mind, purple flowers and red would at once
spring up on either side of her like complementary colours.
This was not only because an image of which we dream remains for ever
distinguished, is adorned and enriched by the association of colours not
its own which may happen to surround it in our mental picture; for the
scenes in the books I read were to me not merely scenery more vividly
portrayed by my imagination than any which Combray could spread before
my eyes but otherwise of the same kind. Because of the selection that
the author had made of them, because of the spirit of faith in which
my mind would exceed and anticipate his printed word, as it might
be interpreting a revelation, these scenes used to give me the
impression--one which I hardly ever derived from any place in which
I might happen to be, and never from our garden, that undistinguished
product of the strictly conventional fantasy of the gardener whom my
grandmother so despised--of their being actually part of Nature herself,
and worthy to be studied and explored.
Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the
country it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous
advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have
the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul,
still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem
to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it,
to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear
endlessly, all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from
without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to
discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual
glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned,
and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm
which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas;
sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so
as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well
know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them. And
so, if I always imagined the woman I loved as in a setting of whatever
places I most longed, at the time, to visit; if in my secret longings
it was she who attracted me to them, who opened to me the gate of an
unknown world, that was not by the mere hazard of a simple association
of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were
only moments--which I isolate artificially to-day as though I
were cutting sections, at different heights, in a jet of water,
rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or motion--were only drops
in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all the forces of my
life.
And then, as I continue to trace the outward course of these impressions
from their close-packed intimate source in my consciousness, and
before I come to the horizon of reality which envelops them, I discover
pleasures of another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of tasting
the good scent on the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor; and,
when an hour chimed from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of watching what
was already spent of the afternoon fall drop by drop until I heard the
last stroke which enabled me to add up the total sum, after which the
silence that followed seemed to herald the beginning, in the blue sky
above me, of that long part of the day still allowed me for reading,
until the good dinner which Françoise was even now preparing should come
to strengthen and refresh me after the strenuous pursuit of its hero
through the pages of my book. And, as each hour struck, it would seem to
me that a few seconds only had passed since the hour before; the latest
would inscribe itself, close to its predecessor, on the sky's surface,
and I would be unable to believe that sixty minutes could be squeezed
into the tiny arc of blue which was comprised between their two golden
figures. Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would
sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour
which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not
taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the
deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated
the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping
silence. Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in our
Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace
incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange
adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still
recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you,
and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little
drawn round and enclosed them (while I went on with my book and the heat
of the day declined) in the gradual crystallisation, slowly altering
in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent,
sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.
Sometimes I would be torn from my book, in the middle of the afternoon,
by the gardener's daughter, who came running like a mad thing,
overturning an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a
tooth, and screaming out "They're coming, they're coming!" so that
Françoise and I should run too and not miss anything of the show. That
was on days when the cavalry stationed in Combray went out for some
military exercise, going as a rule by the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde. While
our servants, sitting in a row on their chairs outside the garden
railings, stared at the people of Combray taking their Sunday walks and
were stared at in return, the gardener's daughter, through the gap which
there was between two houses far away in the Avenue de la Gare, would
have spied the glitter of helmets. The servants then hurried in
with their chairs, for when the troopers filed through the Rue
Sainte-Hildegarde they filled it from side to side, and their jostling
horses scraped against the walls of the houses, covering and drowning
the pavements like banks which present too narrow a channel to a river
in flood.
"Poor children," Françoise would exclaim, in tears almost before she
had reached the railings; "poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a
meadow. It's just shocking to think of," she would go on, laying a hand
over her heart, where presumably she had felt the shock.
"A fine sight, isn't it, Mme. Françoise, all these young fellows not
caring two straws for their lives?" the gardener would ask, just to
'draw' her. And he would not have spoken in vain.
"Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world is there that
we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never
offers us a second time? Oh dear, oh dear; you're right all the same;
it's quite true, they don't care! I can remember them in '70; in those
wretched wars they've no fear of death left in them; they're nothing
more nor less than madmen; and then they aren't worth the price of a
rope to hang them with; they're not men any more, they're lions." For
by her way of thinking, to compare a man with a lion, which she used to
pronounce 'lie-on,' was not at all complimentary to the man.
The Rue Sainte-Hildegarde turned too sharply for us to be able to see
people approaching at any distance, and it was only through the gap
between those two houses in the Avenue de la Gare that we could still
make out fresh helmets racing along towards us, and flashing in the
sunlight. The gardener wanted to know whether there were still many to
come, and he was thirsty besides, with the sun beating down upon his
head. So then, suddenly, his daughter would leap out, as though from
a beleaguered city, would make a sortie, turn the street corner, and,
having risked her life a hundred times over, reappear and bring us,
with a jug of liquorice-water, the news that there were still at least
a thousand of them, pouring along without a break from the direction
of Thiberzy and Méséglise. Françoise and the gardener, having 'made up'
their difference, would discuss the line to be followed in case of war.
"Don't you see, Françoise," he would say. "Revolution would be better,
because then no one would need to join in unless he liked."
"Oh, yes, I can see that, certainly; it's more straightforward."
The gardener believed that, as soon as war was declared, they would stop
all the railways.
"Yes, to be sure; so that we sha'n't get away," said Françoise.
And the gardener would assent, with "Ay, they're the cunning ones," for
he would not allow that war was anything but a kind of trick which the
state attempted to play on the people, or that there was a man in the
world who would not run away from it if he had the chance to do so.
But Françoise would hasten back to my aunt, and I would return to my
book, and the servants would take their places again outside the gate to
watch the dust settle on the pavement, and the excitement caused by the
passage of the soldiers subside. Long after order had been restored,
an abnormal tide of humanity would continue to darken the streets of
Combray. And in front of every house, even of those where it was not,
as a rule, 'done,' the servants, and sometimes even the masters would
sit and stare, festooning their doorsteps with a dark, irregular fringe,
like the border of shells and sea-weed which a stronger tide than usual
leaves on the beach, as though trimming it with embroidered crape, when
the sea itself has retreated.
Except on such days as these, however, I would as a rule be left to read
in peace. But the interruption which a visit from Swann once made, and
the commentary which he then supplied to the course of my reading,
which had brought me to the work of an author quite new to me, called
Bergotte, had this definite result that for a long time afterwards
it was not against a wall gay with spikes of purple blossom, but on a
wholly different background, the porch of a gothic cathedral, that I
would see outlined the figure of one of the women of whom I dreamed.
I had heard Bergotte spoken of, for the first time, by a friend older
than myself, for whom I had a strong admiration, a precious youth of the
name of Bloch. Hearing me confess my love of the _Nuit d'Octobre_, he
had burst out in a bray of laughter, like a bugle-call, and told me,
by way of warning: "You must conquer your vile taste for A. de Musset,
Esquire. He is a bad egg, one of the very worst, a pretty detestable
specimen. I am bound to admit, natheless," he added graciously, "that
he, and even the man Racine, did, each of them, once in his life,
compose a line which is not only fairly rhythmical, but has also what is
in my eyes the supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing. One is
_La blanche Oloossone et la blanche Camire_,
and the other
_La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë_."
They were submitted to my judgment, as evidence for the defence of the
two runagates, in an article by my very dear master Father Lecomte, who
is found pleasing in the sight of the immortal gods. By which token,
here is a book which I have not the time, just now, to read, a book
recommended, it would seem, by that colossal fellow. He regards, or so
they tell me, its author, one Bergotte, Esquire, as a subtle scribe,
more subtle, indeed, than any beast of the field; and, albeit he
exhibits on occasion a critical pacifism, a tenderness in suffering
fools, for which it is impossible to account, and hard to make
allowance, still his word has weight with me as it were the Delphic
Oracle. Read you then this lyrical prose, and, if the Titanic
master-builder of rhythm who composed _Bhagavat_ and the _Lévrier de
Magnus_ speaks not falsely, then, by Apollo, you may taste, even you, my
master, the ambrosial joys of Olympus." It was in an ostensible vein of
sarcasm that he had asked me to call him, and that he himself called me,
"my master." But, as a matter of fact, we each derived a certain amount
of satisfaction from the mannerism, being still at the age in which one
believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name.