we took the 'Guermantes way,' for that meant a long walk, and we must
make sure, first, of the weather. When we seemed to have entered upon a
spell of fine days, when Françoise, in desperation that not a drop was
falling upon the 'poor crops,' gazing up at the sky and seeing there
only a little white cloud floating here and there upon its calm, azure
surface, groaned aloud and exclaimed: "You would say they were nothing
more nor less than a lot of dogfish swimming about and sticking up their
snouts! Ah, they never think of making it rain a little for the poor
labourers! And then when the corn is all ripe, down it will come,
rattling all over the place, and think no more of where it is falling
than if it was on the sea!"--when my father's appeals to the gardener
had met with the same encouraging answer several times in succession,
then some one would say, at dinner: "To-morrow, if the weather holds,
we might go the Guermantes way." And off we would set, immediately after
luncheon, through the little garden gate which dropped us into the Rue
des Perchamps, narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with grass-plots
over which two or three wasps would spend the day botanising, a street
as quaint as its name, from which its odd characteristics and its
personality were, I felt, derived; a street for which one might search
in vain through the Combray of to-day, for the public school now rises
upon its site. But in my dreams of Combray (like those architects,
pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying that they can detect, beneath
a Renaissance rood-loft and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a
Norman choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it probably
was in the twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern edifice
standing, I pierce through it and 'restore' the Rue des Perchamps. And
for such reconstruction memory furnishes me with more detailed guidance
than is generally at the disposal of restorers; the pictures which it
has preserved--perhaps the last surviving in the world to-day, and soon
to follow the rest into oblivion--of what Combray looked like in my
childhood's days; pictures which, simply because it was the old Combray
that traced their outlines upon my mind before it vanished, are as
moving--if I may compare a humble landscape with those glorious works,
reproductions of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing on me--as
those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile
Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist,
the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's.
We would pass, in the Rue de l'Oiseau, before the old hostelry of the
Oiseau Flesché, into whose great courtyard, once upon a time, would
rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de Montpensier, de Guermantes,
and de Montmorency, when they had to come down to Combray for some
litigation with their farmers, or to receive homage from them. We would
come at length to the Mall, among whose treetops I could distinguish the
steeple of Saint-Hilaire. And I should have liked to be able to sit down
and spend the whole day there, reading and listening to the bells, for
it was so charming there and so quiet that, when an hour struck, you
would have said not that it broke in upon the calm of the day, but that
it relieved the day of its superfluity, and that the steeple, with the
indolent, painstaking exactitude of a person who has nothing else to do,
had simply, in order to squeeze out and let fall the few golden drops
which had slowly and naturally accumulated in the hot sunlight, pressed,
at a given moment, the distended surface of the silence.
The great charm of the 'Guermantes' way was that we had beside us,
almost all the time, the course of the Vivonne. We crossed it first, ten
minutes after leaving the house, by a foot-bridge called the Pont-Vieux.
And every year, when we arrived at Combray, on Easter morning, after the
sermon, if the weather was fine, I would run there to see (amid all the
disorder that prevails on the morning of a great festival, the gorgeous
preparations for which make the everyday household utensils that they
have not contrived to banish seem more sordid than ever) the river
flowing past, sky-blue already between banks still black and bare, its
only companions a clump of daffodils, come out before their time, a few
primroses, the first in flower, while here and there burned the blue
flame of a violet, its stem bent beneath the weight of the drop of
perfume stored in its tiny horn. The Pont-Vieux led to a tow-path which,
at this point, would be overhung in summer by the bluish foliage of a
hazel, under which a fisherman in a straw hat seemed to have taken
root. At Combray, where I knew everyone, and could always detect the
blacksmith or grocer's boy through his disguise of a beadle's uniform
or chorister's surplice, this fisherman was the only person whom I was
never able to identify. He must have known my family, for he used to
raise his hat when we passed; and then I would always be just on the
point of asking his name, when some one would make a sign to me to be
quiet, or I would frighten the fish. We would follow the tow-path which
ran along the top of a steep bank, several feet above the stream. The
ground on the other side was lower, and stretched in a series of broad
meadows as far as the village and even to the distant railway-station.
Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of
the castle of the old Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages,
had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier and defence
against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of Martinville.
Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad
surface of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in
their day, the bowmen had hurled down stones, the watchmen had gazed out
over Novepont, Clairefontaine, Martinville-le-Sec, Bailleau-l'Exempt,
fiefs all of them of Guermantes, a ring in which Combray was locked;
but fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and
commanded by boys from the Christian Brothers' school, who came there
in their playtime, or with lesson-books to be conned; emblems of a past
that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth, that lay by
the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong
food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not the
little town of to-day only, but an historic city vastly different,
seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible
features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups.
For the buttercups grew past numbering on this spot which they had
chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in
whole companies, yellow as the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added
lustre, I felt, because, being powerless to consummate with my palate
the pleasure which the sight of them never failed to give me, I would
let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their gilded expanse, until
it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of
absolute, unproductive beauty; and so it had been from my earliest
childhood, when from the tow-path I had stretched out my arms towards
them, before even I could pronounce their charming name--a name fit for
the Prince in some French fairy-tale; colonists, perhaps, in some far
distant century from Asia, but naturalised now for ever in the village,
well satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine
and the water's edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the
railway-station; yet keeping, none the less, as do some of our old
paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the
golden East.
I would amuse myself by watching the glass jars which the boys used
to lower into the Vivonne, to catch minnows, and which, filled by the
current of the stream, in which they themselves also were enclosed, at
once 'containers' whose transparent sides were like solidified water
and 'contents' plunged into a still larger container of liquid,
flowing crystal, suggested an image of coolness more delicious and more
provoking than the same water in the same jars would have done, standing
upon a table laid for dinner, by shewing it as perpetually in flight
between the impalpable water, in which my hands could not arrest it, and
the insoluble glass, in which my palate could not enjoy it. I decided
that I would come there again with a line and catch fish; I begged for
and obtained a morsel of bread from our luncheon basket; and threw into
the Vivonne pellets which had the power, it seemed, to bring about a
chemical precipitation, for the water at once grew solid round about
them in oval clusters of emaciated tadpoles, which until then it had, no
doubt, been holding in solution, invisible, but ready and alert to enter
the stage of crystallisation.
Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants.
At first they appeared singly, a lily, for instance, which the current,
across whose path it had unfortunately grown, would never leave at rest
for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it
would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally
repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would
be straightened out, lengthened, strained almost to breaking-point until
the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their
anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called
its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before
moving off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after
another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims
of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt
Léonie, who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle
of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine
themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always
retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and
eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate
its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange,
ineluctable, fatal daily round. Such as these was the water-lily,
and also like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated
indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who
would have inquired of them at greater length and in fuller detail from
the victims themselves, had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him
to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.
But farther on the current slackened, where the stream ran through a
property thrown open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of
aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds into which the Vivonne was
here diverted were aflower with water-lilies. As the banks at this
point were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a
background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we
were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen
in its depths a clear, crude blue that was almost violet, suggesting a
floor of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there, on the surface, floated,
blushing like a strawberry, the scarlet heart of a lily set in a ring of
white petals.
Beyond these the flowers were more frequent, but paler, less glossy,
more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in
festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream,
as though after the dreary stripping of the decorations used in some
Watteau festival, moss-roses in loosened garlands. Elsewhere a corner
seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily; of a neat pink or
white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain, with housewifely
care; while, a little farther again, were others, pressed close together
in a floating garden-bed, as though pansies had flown out of a garden
like butterflies and were hovering with blue and burnished wings over
the transparent shadowiness of this watery border; this skiey border
also, for it set beneath the flowers a soil of a colour more precious,
more moving than their own; and both in the afternoon, when it sparkled
beneath the lilies in the kaleidoscope of a happiness silent, restless,
and alert, and towards evening, when it was filled like a distant heaven
with the roseate dreams of the setting sun, incessantly changing and
ever remaining in harmony, about the more permanent colour of the
flowers themselves, with the utmost profundity, evanescence, and
mystery--with a quiet suggestion of infinity; afternoon or evening, it
seemed to have set them flowering in the heart of the sky.
After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly.
How often have I watched, and longed to imitate, when I should be free
to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay stretched
out on his back, his head down, in the bottom of his boat, letting it
drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly
above him, shewing upon his features a foretaste of happiness and peace.
We would sit down among the irises at the water's edge. In the holiday
sky a lazy cloud streamed out to its full length. Now and then, crushed
by the burden of idleness, a carp would heave up out of the water, with
an anxious gasp. It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards
we would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and
chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint,
but solid still and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire,
which had melted not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed
to traverse, but, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all
their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed the flowers at our feet.
Sometimes, at the water's edge and embedded in trees, we would come upon
a house of the kind called 'pleasure houses,' isolated and lost, seeing
nothing of the world, save the river which bathed its feet. A young
woman, whose pensive face and fashionable veils did not suggest a local
origin, and who had doubtless come there, in the popular phrase, 'to
bury herself,' to taste the bitter sweetness of feeling that her name,
and still more the name of him whose heart she had once held, but had
been unable to keep, were unknown there, stood framed in a window from
which she had no outlook beyond the boat that was moored beside her
door. She raised her eyes with an air of distraction when she heard,
through the trees that lined the bank, the voices of passers-by of whom,
before they came in sight, she might be certain that never had they
known, nor would they know, the faithless lover, that nothing in their
past lives bore his imprint, which nothing in their future would have
occasion to receive. One felt that in her renunciation of life she had
willingly abandoned those places in which she would at least have been
able to see him whom she loved, for others where he had never trod. And
I watched her, as she returned from some walk along a road where she had
known that he would not appear, drawing from her submissive fingers long
gloves of a precious, useless charm.
Never, in the course of our walks along the 'Guermantes way,' might
we penetrate as far as the source of the Vivonne, of which I had often
thought, which had in my mind so abstract, so ideal an existence, that I
had been as much surprised when some one told me that it was actually
to be found in the same department, and at a given number of miles from
Combray, as I had been on the day when I had learned that there was
another fixed point somewhere on the earth's surface, where, according
to the ancients, opened the jaws of Hell. Nor could we ever reach that
other goal, to which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself. I
knew that it was the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse
de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who did actually
exist, but whenever I thought about them I pictured them to myself
either in tapestry, as was the 'Coronation of Esther' which hung in our
church, or else in changing, rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad in
his window, where he passed from cabbage green, when I was dipping my
fingers in the holy water stoup, to plum blue when I had reached our row
of chairs, or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève
de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the magic lantern
sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the
ceiling--in short, always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age,
and bathed, as in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the
resounding syllable 'antes.' And if, in spite of that, they were for
me, in their capacity as a duke and a duchess, real people, though of
an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality was in its turn enormously
distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermantes
of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit 'Guermantes way'
of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its
overshadowing trees, and an endless series of hot summer afternoons.
And I knew that they bore not only the titles of Duc and Duchesse de
Guermantes, but that since the fourteenth century, when, after vain
attempts to conquer its earlier lords in battle, they had allied
themselves by marriage, and so became Counts of Combray, the first
citizens, consequently, of the place, and yet the only ones among
its citizens who did not reside in it--Comtes de Combray, possessing
Combray, threading it on their string of names and titles, absorbing it
in their personalities, and illustrating, no doubt, in themselves that
strange and pious melancholy which was peculiar to Combray; proprietors
of the town, though not of any particular house there; dwelling,
presumably, out of doors, in the street, between heaven and earth, like
that Gilbert de Guermantes, of whom I could see, in the stained glass of
the apse of Saint-Hilaire, only the 'other side' in dull black lacquer,
if I raised my eyes to look for him, when I was going to Camus's for a
packet of salt.
And then it happened that, going the 'Guermantes way,' I passed
occasionally by a row of well-watered little gardens, over whose hedges
rose clusters of dark blossom. I would stop before them, hoping to gain
some precious addition to my experience, for I seemed to have before my
eyes a fragment of that riverside country which I had longed so much
to see and know since coming upon a description of it by one of my
favourite authors. And it was with that story-book land, with its
imagined soil intersected by a hundred bubbling watercourses, that
Guermantes, changing its form in my mind, became identified, after I
heard Dr. Percepied speak of the flowers and the charming rivulets and
fountains that were to be seen there in the ducal park. I used to dream
that Mme. de Guermantes, taking a sudden capricious fancy for myself,
invited me there, that all day long she stood fishing for trout by my
side. And when evening came, holding my hand in her own, as we passed by
the little gardens of her vassals, she would point out to me the flowers
that leaned their red and purple spikes along the tops of the low walls,
and would teach me all their names. She would make me tell her, too, all
about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me
that, since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high time to
decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked
myself the question, and tried to discover some subjects to which I
could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind
would stop like a clock, I would see before me vacuity, nothing, would
feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that, perhaps, a
malady of the brain was hindering its development. Sometimes I would
depend upon my father's arranging everything for me. He was so powerful,
in such favour with the people who 'really counted,' that he made it
possible for us to transgress laws which Françoise had taught me to
regard as more ineluctable than the laws of life and death, as when we
were allowed to postpone for a year the compulsory repainting of the
walls of our house, alone among all the houses in that part of Paris,
or when he obtained permission from the Minister for Mme. Sazerat's
son, who had been ordered to some watering-place, to take his degree two
months before the proper time, among the candidates whose surnames began
with 'A,' instead of having to wait his turn as an 'S.' If I had fallen
seriously ill, if I had been captured by brigands, convinced that my
father's understanding with the supreme powers was too complete, that
his letters of introduction to the Almighty were too irresistible for my
illness or captivity to turn out anything but vain illusions, in which
there was no danger actually threatening me, I should have awaited
with perfect composure the inevitable hour of my return to comfortable
realities, of my deliverance from bondage or restoration to health.
Perhaps this want of talent, this black cavity which gaped in my mind
when I ransacked it for the theme of my future writings, was itself no
more, either, than an unsubstantial illusion, and would be brought to
an end by the intervention of my father, who would arrange with the
Government and with Providence that I should be the first writer of
my day. But at other times, while my parents were growing impatient
at seeing me loiter behind instead of following them, my actual life,
instead of seeming an artificial creation by my father, and one which he
could modify as he chose, appeared, on the contrary, to be comprised in
a larger reality which had not been created for my benefit, from whose
judgments there was no appeal, in the heart of which I was bound,
helpless, without friend or ally, and beyond which no further
possibilities lay concealed. It was evident to me then that I existed in
the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die
like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one
of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I
renounced literature for ever, despite the encouragements that had been
given me by Bloch. This intimate, spontaneous feeling, this sense of the
nullity of my intellect, prevailed against all the flattering speeches
that might be lavished upon me, as a wicked man, when everyone is loud
in the praise of his good deeds, is gnawed by the secret remorse of
conscience.
One day my mother said: "You are always talking about Mme. de
Guermantes. Well, Dr. Percepied did a great deal for her when she was
ill, four years ago, and so she is coming to Combray for his daughter's
wedding. You will be able to see her in church." It was from Dr.
Percepied, as it happened, that I had heard most about Mme. de
Guermantes, and he had even shewn us the number of an illustrated paper
in which she was depicted in the costume which she had worn at a fancy
dress ball given by the Princesse de Léon.