enabled me to see, sitting in a chapel, a lady with fair hair and a
large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk, glossy
and new and brilliant, and a little spot at the corner of her nose. And
because on the surface of her face, which was red, as though she had
been very warm, I could make out, diluted and barely perceptible,
details which resembled the portrait that had been shewn to me; because,
more especially, the particular features which I remarked in this lady,
if I attempted to catalogue them, formulated themselves in precisely the
same terms:--_a large nose, blue eyes_, as Dr. Percepied had used when
describing in my presence the Duchesse de Guermantes, I said to myself:
"This lady is like the Duchesse de Guermantes." Now the chapel from
which she was following the service was that of Gilbert the Bad; beneath
its flat tombstones, yellowed and bulging like cells of honey in a comb,
rested the bones of the old Counts of Brabant; and I remembered having
heard it said that this chapel was reserved for the Guermantes family,
whenever any of its members came to attend a ceremony at Combray; there
was, indeed, but one woman resembling the portrait of Mme. de Guermantes
who on that day, the very day on which she was expected to come there,
could be sitting in that chapel: it was she! My disappointment was
immense. It arose from my not having borne in mind, when I thought of
Mme. de Guermantes, that I was picturing her to myself in the colours of
a tapestry or a painted window, as living in another century, as being
of another substance than the rest of the human race. Never had I taken
into account that she might have a red face, a mauve scarf like Mme.
Sazerat; and the oval curve of her cheeks reminded me so strongly of
people whom I had seen at home that the suspicion brushed against my
mind (though it was immediately banished) that this lady in her creative
principle, in the molecules of her physical composition, was perhaps
not substantially the Duchesse de Guermantes, but that her body, in
ignorance of the name that people had given it, belonged to a certain
type of femininity which included, also, the wives of doctors and
tradesmen. "It is, it must be Mme. de Guermantes, and no one else!" were
the words underlying the attentive and astonished expression with
which I was gazing upon this image, which, naturally enough, bore no
resemblance to those that had so often, under the same title of 'Mme. de
Guermantes,' appeared to me in dreams, since this one had not been, like
the others, formed arbitrarily by myself, but had sprung into sight for
the first time, only a moment ago, here in church; an image which was
not of the same nature, was not colourable at will, like those others
that allowed themselves to imbibe the orange tint of a sonorous
syllable, but which was so real that everything, even to the fiery
little spot at the corner of her nose, gave an assurance of her
subjection to the laws of life, as in a transformation scene on the
stage a crease in the dress of a fairy, a quivering of her tiny finger,
indicate the material presence of a living actress before our eyes,
whereas we were uncertain, till then, whether we were not looking merely
at a projection of limelight from a lantern.
Meanwhile I was endeavouring to apply to this image, which the prominent
nose, the piercing eyes pinned down and fixed in my field of vision
(perhaps because it was they that had first struck it, that had made the
first impression on its surface, before I had had time to wonder
whether the woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be Mme. de
Guermantes), to this fresh and unchanging image the idea: "It is Mme. de
Guermantes"; but I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and
the image, as though they were two discs moving in separate planes,
with a space between. But this Mme. de Guermantes of whom I had so often
dreamed, now that I could see that she had a real existence independent
of myself, acquired a fresh increase of power over my imagination,
which, paralysed for a moment by contact with a reality so different
from anything that it had expected, began to react and to say within me:
"Great and glorious before the days of Charlemagne, the Guermantes
had the right of life and death over their vassals; the Duchesse de
Guermantes descends from Geneviève de Brabant. She does not know, nor
would she consent to know, any of the people who are here to-day."
And then--oh, marvellous independence of the human gaze, tied to the
human face by a cord so loose, so long, so elastic that it can stray,
alone, as far as it may choose--while Mme. de Guermantes sat in the
chapel above the tombs of her dead ancestors, her gaze lingered here
and wandered there, rose to the capitals of the pillars, and even rested
upon myself, like a ray of sunlight straying down the nave, but a ray
of sunlight which, at the moment when I received its caress, appeared
conscious of where it fell. As for Mme. de Guermantes herself, since
she remained there motionless, sitting like a mother who affects not to
notice the rude or awkward conduct of her children who, in the course
of their play, are speaking to people whom she does not know, it was
impossible for me to determine whether she approved or condemned the
vagrancy of her eyes in the careless detachment of her heart.
I felt it to be important that she should not leave the church before
I had been able to look long enough upon her, reminding myself that for
years past I had regarded the sight of her as a thing eminently to be
desired, and I kept my eyes fixed on her, as though by gazing at her
I should be able to carry away and incorporate, to store up, for later
reference, in myself the memory of that prominent nose, those red
cheeks, of all those details which struck me as so much precious,
authentic, unparalleled information with regard to her face. And now
that, whenever I brought my mind to bear upon that face--and
especially, perhaps, in my determination, that form of the instinct
of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in
ourselves, not to admit that I had been in any way deceived--I found
only beauty there; setting her once again (since they were one and the
same person, this lady who sat before me and that Duchesse de Guermantes
whom, until then, I had been used to conjure into an imagined shape)
apart from and above that common run of humanity with which the sight,
pure and simple, of her in the flesh had made me for a moment confound
her, I grew indignant when I heard people saying, in the congregation
round me: "She is better looking than Mme. Sazerat" or "than Mlle.
Vinteuil," as though she had been in any way comparable with them. And
my gaze resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her
neck, and overlooking the features which might have reminded me of
the faces of other women, I cried out within myself, as I admired this
deliberately unfinished sketch: "How lovely she is! What true nobility!
it is indeed a proud Guermantes, the descendant of Geneviève de Brabant,
that I have before me!" And the care which I took to focus all my
attention upon her face succeeded in isolating it so completely that
to-day, when I call that marriage ceremony to mind, I find it impossible
to visualise any single person who was present except her, and the
beadle who answered me in the affirmative when I inquired whether the
lady was, indeed, Mme. de Guermantes. But her, I can see her still quite
clearly, especially at the moment when the procession filed into the
sacristy, lighted by the intermittent, hot sunshine of a windy and rainy
day, where Mme. de Guermantes found herself in the midst of all
those Combray people whose names, even, she did not know, but whose
inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud that she must, in
return, feel for them a genuine, pitying sympathy, and whom she might
count on impressing even more forcibly by virtue of her simplicity and
natural charm. And then, too, since she could not bring into play the
deliberate glances, charged with a definite meaning, which one directs,
in a crowd, towards people whom one knows, but must allow her vague
thoughts to escape continually from her eyes in a flood of blue light
which she was powerless to control, she was anxious not to distress in
any way, not to seem to be despising those humbler mortals over whom
that current flowed, by whom it was everywhere arrested. I can see
again to-day, above her mauve scarf, silky and buoyant, the gentle
astonishment in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to
address it to anyone in particular, but so that everyone might enjoy his
share of it, the almost timid smile of a sovereign lady who seems to
be making an apology for her presence among the vassals whom she loves.
This smile rested upon myself, who had never ceased to follow her with
my eyes. And I, remembering the glance which she had let fall upon me
during the service, blue as a ray of sunlight that had penetrated the
window of Gilbert the Bad, said to myself, "Of course, she is thinking
about me." I fancied that I had found favour in her sight, that she
would continue to think of me after she had left the church, and would,
perhaps, grow pensive again, that evening, at Guermantes, on my account.
And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to
make us love a woman that she looks on us with contempt, as I supposed
Mlle. Swann to have done, while we imagine that she cannot ever be ours,
it is enough, also, sometimes that she looks on us kindly, as Mme. de
Guermantes did then, while we think of her as almost ours already. Her
eyes waxed blue as a periwinkle flower, wholly beyond my reach, yet
dedicated by her to me; and the sun, bursting out again from behind
a threatening cloud and darting the full force of its rays on to the
Square and into the sacristy, shed a geranium glow over the red carpet
laid down for the wedding, along which Mme. de Guermantes smilingly
advanced, and covered its woollen texture with a nap of rosy velvet, a
bloom of light, giving it that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness
in the pomp of a joyful celebration, which characterises certain pages
of _Lohengrin_, certain paintings by Carpaccio, and makes us understand
how Baudelaire was able to apply to the sound of the trumpet the epithet
'delicious.'
How often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the
'Guermantes way,' and with what an intensified melancholy did I reflect
on my lack of qualification for a literary career, and that I must
abandon all hope of ever becoming a famous author. The regret that I
felt for this, while I lingered alone to dream for a little by myself,
made me suffer so acutely that, in order not to feel it, my mind of
its own accord, by a sort of inhibition in the instant of pain, ceased
entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction, of the poetic future on
which my want of talent precluded me from counting. Then, quite apart
from all those literary preoccupations, and without definite attachment
to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a
stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the
special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they
appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something
which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which,
despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover. As I felt that the
mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there in front
of them, motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with
my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt. And if I had then to hasten
after my grandfather, to proceed on my way, I would still seek to
recover my sense of them by closing my eyes; I would concentrate upon
recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which,
without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming,
ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were
themselves no more than the outer coverings. It was certainly not any
impression of this kind that could or would restore the hope I had lost
of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them
was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual
value, and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an
unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind; and
in that way distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own
impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme
for some great literary work. So urgent was the task imposed on my
conscience by these impressions of form or perfume or colour--to strive
for a perception of what lay hidden beneath them, that I was never
long in seeking an excuse which would allow me to relax so strenuous an
effort and to spare myself the fatigue that it involved. As good luck
would have it, my parents called me; I felt that I had not, for the
moment, the calm environment necessary for a successful pursuit of my
researches, and that it would be better to think no more of the matter
until I reached home, and not to exhaust myself in the meantime to no
purpose. And so I concerned myself no longer with the mystery that lay
hidden in a form or a perfume, quite at ease in my mind, since I was
taking it home with me, protected by its visible and tangible covering,
beneath which I should find it still alive, like the fish which, on days
when I had been allowed to go out fishing, I used to carry back in my
basket, buried in a couch of grass which kept them cool and fresh. Once
in the house again I would begin to think of something else, and so my
mind would become littered (as my room was with the flowers that I had
gathered on my walks, or the odds and ends that people had given me)
with a stone from the surface of which the sunlight was reflected, a
roof, the sound of a bell, the smell of fallen leaves, a confused mass
of different images, under which must have perished long ago the reality
of which I used to have some foreboding, but which I never had the
energy to discover and bring to light. Once, however, when we had
prolonged our walk far beyond its ordinary limits, and so had been very
glad to encounter, half way home, as afternoon darkened into evening,
Dr. Percepied, who drove past us at full speed in his carriage, saw and
recognised us, stopped, and made us jump in beside him, I received an
impression of this sort which I did not abandon without having first
subjected it to an examination a little more thorough. I had been set
on the box beside the coachman, we were going like the wind because
the Doctor had still, before returning to Combray, to call at
Martinville-le-Sec, at the house of a patient, at whose door he asked
us to wait for him. At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that
special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught
sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting sun was
playing, while the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road
seemed to keep them continually changing their position; and then of a
third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them
by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the
distance, appeared none the less to be standing by their side.
In ascertaining and noting the shape of their spires, the changes
of aspect, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not
penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay
behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at
once to contain and to conceal.
The steeples appeared so distant, and we ourselves seemed to come so
little nearer them, that I was astonished when, a few minutes later, we
drew up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for
the pleasure which I had found in seeing them upon the horizon, and
the business of trying to find out what that reason was seemed to me
irksome; I wished only to keep in reserve in my brain those converging
lines, moving in the sunshine, and, for the time being, to think of
them no more. And it is probable that, had I done so, those two steeples
would have vanished for ever, in a great medley of trees and roofs and
scents and sounds which I had noticed and set apart on account of the
obscure sense of pleasure which they gave me, but without ever exploring
them more fully. I got down from the box to talk to my parents while we
were waiting for the Doctor to reappear. Then it was time to start; I
climbed up again to my place, turning my head to look back, once more,
at my steeples, of which, a little later, I caught a farewell glimpse
at a turn in the road. The coachman, who seemed little inclined for
conversation, having barely acknowledged my remarks, I was obliged,
in default of other society, to fall back on my own, and to attempt to
recapture the vision of my steeples. And presently their outlines and
their sunlit surface, as though they had been a sort of rind, were
stripped apart; a little of what they had concealed from me became
apparent; an idea came into my mind which had not existed for me a
moment earlier, framed itself in words in my head; and the pleasure
with which the first sight of them, just now, had filled me was so much
enhanced that, overpowered by a sort of intoxication, I could no longer
think of anything but them. At this point, although we had now travelled
a long way from Martinville, I turned my head and caught sight of them
again, quite black this time, for the sun had meanwhile set. Every few
minutes a turn in the road would sweep them out of sight; then they
shewed themselves for the last time, and so I saw them no more.
Without admitting to myself that what lay buried within the steeples of
Martinville must be something analogous to a charming phrase, since it
was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to
me, I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the Doctor, and composed,
in spite of the jolting of the carriage, to appease my conscience and to
satisfy my enthusiasm, the following little fragment, which I have since
discovered, and now reproduce, with only a slight revision here and
there.
Alone, rising from the level of the plain, and seemingly lost in
that expanse of open country, climbed to the sky the twin steeples of
Martinville. Presently we saw three: springing into position confronting
them by a daring volt, a third, a dilatory steeple, that of Vieuxvicq,
was come to join them. The minutes passed, we were moving rapidly, and
yet the three steeples were always a long way ahead of us, like
three birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in
the sunlight. Then the steeple of Vieuxvicq withdrew, took its proper
distance, and the steeples of Martinville remained alone, gilded by
the light of the setting sun, which, even at that distance, I could
see playing and smiling upon their sloped sides. We had been so long in
approaching them that I was thinking of the time that must still elapse
before we could reach them when, of a sudden, the carriage, having
turned a corner, set us down at their feet; and they had flung
themselves so abruptly in our path that we had barely time to stop
before being dashed against the porch of the church.
We resumed our course; we had left Martinville some little time, and
the village, after accompanying us for a few seconds, had already
disappeared, when, lingering alone on the horizon to watch our flight,
its steeples and that of Vieuxvicq waved once again, in token of
farewell, their sun-bathed pinnacles. Sometimes one would withdraw,
so that the other two might watch us for a moment still; then the road
changed direction, they veered in the light like three golden pivots,
and vanished from my gaze. But, a little later, when we were already
close to Combray, the sun having set meanwhile, I caught sight of them
for the last time, far away, and seeming no more now than three flowers
painted upon the sky above the low line of fields. They made me think,
too, of three maidens in a legend, abandoned in a solitary place over
which night had begun to fall; and while we drew away from them at a
gallop, I could see them timidly seeking their way, and, after some
awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes, drawing close
to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing more,
now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and
resigned, and so vanishing in the night.
I never thought again of this page, but at the moment when, on my
corner of the box-seat, where the Doctor's coachman was in the habit
of placing, in a hamper, the fowls which he had bought at Martinville
market, I had finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness,
felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the
steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I
myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top
of my voice.
All day long, during these walks, I had been able to muse upon the
pleasure that there would be in the friendship of the Duchesse de
Guermantes, in fishing for trout, in drifting by myself in a boat on the
Vivonne; and, greedy for happiness, I asked nothing more from life, in
such moments, than that it should consist always of a series of joyous
afternoons. But when, on our way home, I had caught sight of a farm, on
the left of the road, at some distance from two other farms which were
themselves close together, and from which, to return to Combray, we need
only turn down an avenue of oaks, bordered on one side by a series of
orchard-closes, each one planted at regular intervals with apple-trees
which cast upon the ground, when they were lighted by the setting sun,
the Japanese stencil of their shadows; then, sharply, my heart would
begin to beat, I would know that in half an hour we should be at
home, and that there, as was the rule on days when we had taken the
'Guermantes way' and dinner was, in consequence, served later than
usual, I should be sent to bed as soon as I had swallowed my soup, so
that my mother, kept at table, just as though there had been company to
dinner, would not come upstairs to say good night to me in bed. The zone
of melancholy which I then entered was totally distinct from that other
zone, in which I had been bounding for joy a moment earlier, just as
sometimes in the sky a band of pink is separated, as though by a line
invisibly ruled, from a band of green or black. You may see a bird
flying across the pink; it draws near the border-line, touches it,
enters and is lost upon the black. The longings by which I had just
now been absorbed, to go to Guermantes, to travel, to live a life of
happiness--I was now so remote from them that their fulfilment would
have afforded me no pleasure. How readily would I have sacrificed them
all, just to be able to cry, all night long, in the arms of Mamma!
Shuddering with emotion, I could not take my agonised eyes from my
mother's face, which was not to appear that evening in the bedroom where
I could see myself already lying, in imagination; and wished only that
I were lying dead. And this state would persist until the morrow, when,
the rays of morning leaning their bars of light, as the gardener might
lean his ladder, against the wall overgrown with nasturtiums, which
clambered up it as far as my window-sill, I would leap out of bed to run
down at once into the garden, with no thought of the fact that evening
must return, and with it the hour when I must leave my mother. And so
it was from the 'Guermantes way' that I learned to distinguish between
these states which reigned alternately in my mind, during certain
periods, going so far as to divide every day between them, each one
returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever and
ague: contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means
of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to
myself, in one state what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the
other.