terrible risk of seeing her appear on one of the paths, and of being
identified and scorned by this so privileged little girl who had
Bergotte for a friend and used to go with him to visit cathedrals--made
the exploration of Tansonville, now for the first time permitted me, a
matter of indifference to myself, seemed however to invest the property,
in my grandfather's and father's eyes, with a fresh and transient charm,
and (like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering) to
make the day extraordinarily propitious for a walk in this direction;
I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a
miracle, Mlle. Swann appear, with her father, so close to us that we
should not have time to escape, and should therefore be obliged to make
her acquaintance. And so, when I suddenly noticed a straw basket lying
forgotten on the grass by the side of a line whose float was bobbing
in the water, I made a great effort to keep my father and grandfather
looking in another direction, away from this sign that she might, after
all, be in residence. Still, as Swann had told us that he ought not,
really, to go away just then, as he had some people staying in the
house, the line might equally belong to one of these guests. Not a
footstep was to be heard on any of the paths. Somewhere in one of the
tall trees, making a stage in its height, an invisible bird, desperately
attempting to make the day seem shorter, was exploring with a long,
continuous note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it
received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of
silence and of immobility that, one would have said, it had arrested
for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more
quickly. The sunlight fell so implacably from a fixed sky that one was
naturally inclined to slip away out of the reach of its attentions, and
even the slumbering water, whose repose was perpetually being invaded by
the insects that swarmed above its surface, while it dreamed, no doubt,
of some imaginary maelstrom, intensified the uneasiness which the sight
of that floating cork had wrought in me, by appearing to draw it at
full speed across the silent reaches of a mirrored firmament; now almost
vertical, it seemed on the point of plunging down out of sight, and
I had begun to ask myself whether, setting aside the longing and the
terror that I had of making her acquaintance, it was not actually my
duty to warn Mlle. Swann that the fish was biting--when I was obliged
to run after my father and grandfather, who were calling me, and were
surprised that I had not followed them along the little path, climbing
up hill towards the open fields, into which they had already turned. I
found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom.
The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer
visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their
altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the
ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a window; the scent
that swept out over me from them was as rich, and as circumscribed in
its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and
the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of
glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating 'nerves'
in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in church,
framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the perpendicular tracery
of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white, like
strawberry-beds in spring. How simple and rustic, in comparison with
these, would seem the dog-roses which, in a few weeks' time, would be
climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the
smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be undone and
scattered by the first breath of wind.
But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in,
to marshal before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose
in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb
myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with
the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as
certain intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation
of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting
me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play
over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their
secret. I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return
to them with renewed strength. My eyes followed up the slope which,
outside the hedge, rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed
and been lost by its fellows, or a few cornflowers that had fallen
lazily behind, and decorated the ground here and there with their
flowers like the border of a tapestry, in which may be seen at intervals
hints of the rustic theme which appears triumphant in the panel itself;
infrequent still, spaced apart as the scattered houses which warn us
that we are approaching a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse
of waving corn beneath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single
poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and holding against the breeze
its scarlet ensign, over the buoy of rich black earth from which it
sprang, made my heart beat as does a wayfarer's when he perceives, upon
some low-lying ground, an old and broken boat which is being caulked and
made seaworthy, and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of
it, "The Sea!"
And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands
before those masterpieces of painting which, one imagines, one will
be better able to 'take in' when one has looked away, for a moment, at
something else; but in vain did I shape my fingers into a frame, so as
to have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes; the sentiment which
they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing
to free itself, to float across and become one with the flowers. They
themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any
other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing. And then, inspiring
me with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite
painter quite different from any of those that we already know, or,
better still, when some one has taken us and set us down in front of a
picture of which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch,
or when a piece of music which we have heard played over on the piano
bursts out again in our ears with all the splendour and fullness of an
orchestra, my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the hedge
of Tansonville, said: "You are fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink
one; isn't it pretty?"
And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink, and
lovelier even than the white. It, too, was in holiday attire, for one of
those days which are the only true holidays, the holy days of religion,
because they are not appointed by any capricious accident, as secular
holidays are appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for
such observances, which have nothing about them that is essentially
festal--but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the
flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to
leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about
the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them 'in colour,'
and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of
Combray, to the 'plain,' if one was to judge by the scale of prices
at the 'stores' in the Square, or at Camus's, where the most expensive
biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. And for my own part I set a
higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed
to tinge it with crushed strawberries. And these flowers had chosen
precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some
exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival, which colours,
inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those
whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of children, and for that
reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other
tints, even after the child's mind has realised that they offer no
gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the
dressmaker. And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before
the white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was in no
artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal
intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself
who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from
a village shop, labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some
procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too
ravishing in colour, this rustic 'pompadour.' High up on the branches,
like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets
of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on
the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler
in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of
pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly
than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the
hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to
blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone. Taking its place
in the hedge, but as different from the rest as a young girl in holiday
attire among a crowd of dowdy women in everyday clothes, who are staying
at home, equipped and ready for the 'Month of Mary,' of which it seemed
already to form a part, it shone and smiled in its cool, rosy garments,
a Catholic bush indeed, and altogether delightful.
The hedge allowed us a glimpse, inside the park, of an alley bordered
with jasmine, pansies, and verbenas, among which the stocks held open
their fresh plump purses, of a pink as fragrant and as faded as old
Spanish leather, while on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted
green, coiling across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over the
flowers whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan
of infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops. Suddenly I stood still, unable
to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our
eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes
possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish
hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her
hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish
freckles. Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know,
and indeed have never since learned how to reduce to its objective
elements any strong impression, since I had not, as they say, enough
'power of observation' to isolate the sense of their colour, for a long
time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright
eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her
complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps, if her eyes had not been
quite so black--which was what struck one most forcibly on first meeting
her--I should not have been, as I was, especially enamoured of their
imagined blue.
I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger
from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out,
petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture,
bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the
body; then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and
father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her, by
making me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously
appealing look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to
see, to know me. She cast a glance forwards and sideways, so as to take
stock of my grandfather and father, and doubtless the impression she
formed of them was that we were all absurd people, for she turned away
with an indifferent and contemptuous air, withdrew herself so as to
spare her face the indignity of remaining within their field of
vision; and while they, continuing to walk on without noticing her, had
overtaken and passed me, she allowed her eyes to wander, over the space
that lay between us, in my direction, without any particular expression,
without appearing to have seen me, but with an intensity, a half-hidden
smile which I was unable to interpret, according to the instruction I
had received in the ways of good breeding, save as a mark of infinite
disgust; and her hand, at the same time, sketched in the air an
indelicate gesture, for which, when it was addressed in public to a
person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which
I carried in my mind supplied only one meaning, namely, a deliberate
insult.
"Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?" called out in a piercing
tone of authority a lady in white, whom I had not seen until that
moment, while, a little way beyond her, a gentleman in a suit of linen
'ducks,' whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed
to be starting from his head; the little girl's smile abruptly faded,
and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in
my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable and sly.
And so was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me like a
talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her whom
its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality, whereas, a
moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen. So it came
to me, uttered across the heads of the stocks and jasmines, pungent and
cool as the drops which fell from the green watering-pipe; impregnating
and irradiating the zone of pure air through which it had passed, which
it set apart and isolated from all other air, with the mystery of the
life of her whom its syllables designated to the happy creatures that
lived and walked and travelled in her company; unfolding through the
arch of the pink hawthorn, which opened at the height of my shoulder,
the quintessence of their familiarity--so exquisitely painful to
myself--with her, and with all that unknown world of her existence, into
which I should never penetrate.
For a moment (while we moved away, and my grandfather murmured: "Poor
Swann, what a life they are leading him; fancy sending him away so
that she can be left alone with her Charlus--for that was Charlus: I
recognised him at once! And the child, too; at her age, to be mixed up
in all that!") the impression left on me by the despotic tone in which
Gilberte's mother had spoken to her, without her replying, by exhibiting
her to me as being obliged to yield obedience to some one else, as not
being indeed superior to the whole world, calmed my sufferings somewhat,
revived some hope in me, and cooled the ardour of my love. But very soon
that love surged up again in me like a reaction by which my humiliated
heart was endeavouring to rise to Gilberte's level, or to draw her down
to its own. I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the
inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep
some memory of me. I knew her to be so beautiful that I should have
liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and
shout, "I think you are hideous, grotesque; you are utterly disgusting!"
However, I walked away, carrying with me, then and for ever afterwards,
as the first illustration of a type of happiness rendered inaccessible
to a little boy of my kind by certain laws of nature which it was
impossible to transgress, the picture of a little girl with reddish
hair, and a skin freckled with tiny pink marks, who held a trowel in
her hand, and smiled as she directed towards me a long and subtle and
inexpressive stare. And already the charm with which her name, like a
cloud of incense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn through
which she and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to
conquer, to cover, to embalm, to beautify everything with which it had
any association: her grandparents, whom my own had been so unspeakably
fortunate as to know, the glorious profession of a stockholder, even
the melancholy neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysées, where she lived in
Paris.
"Léonie," said my grandfather on our return, "I wish we had had you with
us this afternoon. You would never have known Tansonville. If I had had
the courage I would have cut you a branch of that pink hawthorn you used
to like so much." And so my grandfather told her the story of our walk,
either just to amuse her, or perhaps because there was still some hope
that she might be stimulated to rise from her bed and to go out of
doors. For in earlier days she had been very fond of Tansonville, and,
moreover, Swann's visits had been the last that she had continued to
receive, at a time when she had already closed her doors to all the
world. And just as, when he called, in these later days, to inquire for
her (and she was still the only person in our household whom he would
ask to see), she would send down to say that she was tired at the moment
and resting, but that she would be happy to see him another time,
so, this evening, she said to my grandfather, "Yes, some day when the
weather is fine I shall go for a drive as far as the gate of the park."
And in saying this she was quite sincere. She would have liked to see
Swann and Tansonville again; but the mere wish to do so sufficed for all
that remained of her strength, which its fulfilment would have more
than exhausted. Sometimes a spell of fine weather made her a little more
energetic, she would rise and put on her clothes; but before she had
reached the outer room she would be 'tired' again, and would insist on
returning to her bed. The process which had begun in her--and in her a
little earlier only than it must come to all of us--was the great and
general renunciation which old age makes in preparation for death, the
chrysalis stage of life, which may be observed wherever life has been
unduly prolonged; even in old lovers who have lived for one another with
the utmost intensity of passion, and in old friends bound by the closest
ties of mental sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the
necessary journey, or even to cross the street to see one another, cease
to correspond, and know well that they will communicate no more in this
world. My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not
see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but
this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more
readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made
it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by
the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to
measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to
her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the
blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose.
My aunt did not go to see the pink hawthorn in the hedge, but at all
hours of the day I would ask the rest of my family whether she was
not going to go, whether she used not, at one time, to go often to
Tansonville, trying to make them speak of Mlle. Swann's parents and
grandparents, who appeared to me to be as great and glorious as gods.
The name, which had for me become almost mythological, of Swann--when I
talked with my family I would grow sick with longing to hear them
utter it; I dared not pronounce it myself, but I would draw them into a
discussion of matters which led naturally to Gilberte and her family, in
which she was involved, in speaking of which I would feel myself not too
remotely banished from her company; and I would suddenly force my father
(by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather's business
had been in our family before his day, or that the hedge with the pink
hawthorn which my aunt Léonie wished to visit was on common ground) to
correct my statements, to say, as though in opposition to me and of his
own accord: "No, no, the business belonged to _Swann's_ father, that
hedge is part of _Swann's_ park." And then I would be obliged to pause
for breath; so stifling was the pressure, upon that part of me where it
was for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment when I heard
it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other name, because
it was burdened with the weight of all the occasions on which I had
secretly uttered it in my mind. It caused me a pleasure which I was
ashamed to have dared to demand from my parents, for so great was it
that to have procured it for me must have involved them in an immensity
of effort, and with no recompense, since for them there was no pleasure
in the sound. And so I would prudently turn the conversation. And by
a scruple of conscience, also. All the singular seductions which I had
stored up in the sound of that word Swann, I found again as soon as it
was uttered. And then it occurred to me suddenly that my parents could
not fail to experience the same emotions, that they must find themselves
sharing my point of view, that they perceived in their turn, that they
condoned, that they even embraced my visionary longings, and I was as
wretched as though I had ravished and corrupted the innocence of their
hearts.
That year my family fixed the day of their return to Paris rather
earlier than usual. On the morning of our departure I had had my
hair curled, to be ready to face the photographer, had had a new hat
carefully set upon my head, and had been buttoned into a velvet jacket;
a little later my mother, after searching everywhere for me, found me
standing in tears on that steep little hillside close to Tansonville,
bidding a long farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches
to my bosom, and (like a princess in a tragedy, oppressed by the weight
of all her senseless jewellery) with no gratitude towards the officious
hand which had, in curling those ringlets, been at pains to collect all
my hair upon my forehead; trampling underfoot the curl-papers which I
had torn from my head, and my new hat with them. My mother was not at
all moved by my tears, but she could not suppress a cry at the sight of
my battered headgear and my ruined jacket. I did not, however, hear her.
"Oh, my poor little hawthorns," I was assuring them through my sobs, "it
is not you that want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you.
You, you have never done me any harm. So I shall always love you." And,
drying my eyes, I promised them that, when I grew up, I would never copy
the foolish example of other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring
days, instead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would make
excursions into the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in bloom.
Once in the fields we never left them again during the rest of our
Méséglise walk. They were perpetually crossed, as though by invisible
streams of traffic, by the wind, which was to me the tutelary genius of
Combray. Every year, on the day of our arrival, in order to feel that I
really was at Combray, I would climb the hill to find it running again
through my clothing, and setting me running in its wake. One always
had the wind for companion when one went the 'Méséglise way,' on
that swelling plain which stretched, mile beyond mile, without any
disturbance of its gentle contour. I knew that Mlle. Swann used often
to go and spend a few days at Laon, and, for all that it was many
miles away, the distance was obviated by the absence of any intervening
obstacle; when, on hot afternoons, I would see a breath of wind emerge
from the farthest horizon, bowing the heads of the corn in distant
fields, pouring like a flood over all that vast expanse, and finally
settling down, warm and rustling, among the clover and sainfoin at my
feet, that plain which was common to us both seemed then to draw us
together, to unite us; I would imagine that the same breath had passed
by her also, that there was some message from her in what it was
whispering to me, without my being able to understand it, and I would
catch and kiss it as it passed. On my left was a village called Champieu
(_Campus Pagani_, according to the Curé). On my right I could see
across the cornfields the two crocketed, rustic spires of
Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, plated,
honeycombed, yellowed, and roughened as two ears of wheat.
At regular intervals, among the inimitable ornamentation of their
leaves, which can be mistaken for those of no other fruit-tree, the
apple-trees were exposing their broad petals of white satin, or hanging
in shy bunches their unopened, blushing buds. It was while going
the 'Méséglise way' that I first noticed the circular shadow which
apple-trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable
threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slantingly downwards
from beneath their leaves, and which I would see my father slash through
with his stick without ever making them swerve from their straight path.