than at Finistère (and even though hotels are now being superimposed
upon it, without power, however, to modify that oldest bone in the
earth's skeleton) you feel there that you are actually at the land's
end of France, of Europe, of the Old World. And it is the ultimate
encampment of the fishermen, precisely like the fishermen who have
lived since the world's beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of
the sea-fogs and shadows of the night." One day when, at Combray, I had
spoken of this coast, this Balbec, before M. Swann, hoping to learn from
him whether it was the best point to select for seeing the most violent
storms, he had replied: "I should think I did know Balbec! The church
at Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still
half romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our
Norman gothic, and so exceptional that one is tempted to describe it
as Persian in its inspiration." And that region, which, until then, had
seemed to me to be nothing else than a part of immemorial nature, that
had remained contemporaneous with the great phenomena of geology--and as
remote from human history as the Ocean itself, or the Great Bear, with
its wild race of fishermen for whom, no more than for their whales,
had there been any Middle Ages--it had been a great joy to me to see
it suddenly take its place in the order of the centuries, with a stored
consciousness of the romanesque epoch, and to know that the gothic
trefoil had come to diversify those wild rocks also, at the appointed
hour, like those frail but hardy plants which, in the Polar regions,
when the spring returns, scatter their stars about the eternal snows.
And if gothic art brought to those places and people a classification
which, otherwise, they lacked, they too conferred one upon it in return.
I tried to form a picture in my mind of how those fishermen had lived,
the timid and unsuspected essay towards social intercourse which they
had attempted there, clustered upon a promontory of the shores of Hell,
at the foot of the cliffs of death; and gothic art seemed to me a more
living thing now that, detaching it from the towns in which, until then,
I had always imagined it, I could see how, in a particular instance,
upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it
flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the
most famous of the statues at Balbec,--shaggy, blunt-faced Apostles,
the Virgin from the porch,--and I could scarcely breathe for joy at the
thought that I might myself, one day, see them take a solid form against
their eternal background of salt fog. Thereafter, on dear, tempestuous
February nights, the wind--breathing into my heart, which it shook no
less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the project of a visit to
Balbec--blended in me the desire for gothic architecture with that for a
storm upon the sea.
I should have liked to take, the very next day, the good, the generous
train at one twenty-two, of which never without a palpitating heart
could I read, in the railway company's bills or in advertisements of
circular tours, the hour of departure: it seemed to me to cut, at
a precise point in every afternoon, a most fascinating groove, a
mysterious mark, from which the diverted hours still led one on, of
course, towards evening, towards to-morrow morning, but to an evening
and morning which one would behold, not in Paris but in one of those
towns through which the train passed and among which it allowed one
to choose; for it stopped at Bayeux, at Coutances, at Vitré, at
Questambert, at Pontorson, at Balbec, at Lannion, at Lamballe, at
Benodet, at Pont-Aven, at Quimperle, and progressed magnificently
surcharged with names which it offered me, so that, among them all, I
did not know which to choose, so impossible was it to sacrifice any.
But even without waiting for the train next day, I could, by rising and
dressing myself with all speed, leave Paris that very evening, should
my parents permit, and arrive at Balbec as dawn spread westward over the
raging sea, from whose driven foam I would seek shelter in that church
in the Persian manner. But at the approach of the Easter holidays, when
my parents had promised to let me spend them, for once, in the North
of Italy, lo! in place of those dreams of tempests, by which I had been
entirely possessed, not wishing to see anything but waves dashing in
from all sides, mounting always higher, upon the wildest of coasts,
beside churches as rugged and precipitous as cliffs, in whose towers
the sea-birds would be wailing; suddenly, effacing them, taking away
all their charm, excluding them because they were its opposite and could
only have weakened its effect, was substituted in me the converse dream
of the most variegated of springs, not the spring of Combray, still
pricking with all the needle-points of the winter's frost, but that
which already covered with lilies and anemones the meadows of Fiesole,
and gave Florence a dazzling golden background, like those in Fra
Angelico's pictures. From that moment, only sunlight, perfumes, colours,
seemed to me to have any value; for this alternation of images had
effected a change of front in my desire, and--as abrupt as those that
occur sometimes in music,--a complete change of tone in my sensibility.
Thus it came about that a mere atmospheric variation would be sufficient
to provoke in me that modulation, without there being any need for me to
await the return of a season. For often we find a day, in one, that has
strayed from another season, and makes us live in that other, summons at
once into our presence and makes us long for its peculiar pleasures, and
interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting,
out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf, torn from another
chapter, in the interpolated calendar of Happiness. But soon it happened
that, like those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health
can derive but an accidental and all too modest benefit, until the day
when science takes control of them, and, producing them at will, places
in our hands the power to order their appearance, withdrawn from
the tutelage and independent of the consent of chance; similarly the
production of these dreams of the Atlantic and of Italy ceased to depend
entirely upon the changes of the seasons and of the weather. I need
only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice,
Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the
longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in
spring, to come in a book upon the name of Balbec sufficed to awaken
in me the desire for storms at sea and for the Norman gothic; even on a
stormy day the name of Florence or of Venice would awaken the desire for
sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria
del Fiore.
But if their names thus permanently absorbed the image that I had formed
of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating
its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of
this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different
from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be,
and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated
the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my
travels. They magnified the idea that I formed of certain points on the
earth's surface, making them more special, and in consequence more
real. I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, historic
buildings, as pictures more or less attractive, cut out here and there
of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them
as on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which
my soul was athirst, by the knowledge of which it would benefit. How
much more individual still was the character that they assumed from
being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper
names such as people have. Words present to us little pictures of
things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls
of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by
a carpenter's bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things chosen as typical of
everything else of the same sort. But names present to us--of persons
and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique,
like persons--a confused picture, which draws from the names, from
the brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which it is
uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely
red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used
in their reproduction, or by a whim on the designer's part, are blue or
red not only the sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the
people in the streets. The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most
longed to visit, after reading the _Chartreuse_, seeming to me compact
and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, if anyone were to speak of such or
such a house in Parma, in which I should be lodged, he would give me the
pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact
and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, and that bore no relation to the houses
in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid
of that heavy syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air
stirred, and of all that I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness
and the reflected hue of violets. And when I thought of Florence, it was
of a town miraculously embalmed, and flower-like, since it was called
the City of the Lilies, and its Cathedral, Our Lady of the Flower. As
for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on an old piece of
Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which
it was fashioned, one sees depicted still the representation of some
long-abolished custom, of some feudal right, of the former condition of
some place, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language, which had
shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables and which I never doubted
that I should find spoken there at once, even by the inn-keeper who
would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch
the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church; to whom I lent the
aspect, disputatious, solemn and mediaeval, of some character in one of
the old romances.
Had my health definitely improved, had my parents allowed me, if not
actually to go down to stay at Balbec, at least to take, just once, so
as to become acquainted with the architecture and landscapes of Normandy
or of Brittany, that one twenty-two train into which I had so often
clambered in imagination, I should have preferred to stop, and to alight
from it, at the most beautiful of its towns; but in vain might I
compare and contrast them; how was one to choose, any more than between
individual people, who are not interchangeable, between Bayeux, so lofty
in its noble coronet of rusty lace, whose highest point caught the light
of the old gold of its second syllable; Vitré, whose acute accent barred
its ancient glass with wooden lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness
ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman
Cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with
a tower of butter; Lannion with the rumble and buzz, in the silence of
its village street, of the fly on the wheel of the coach; Questambert,
Pontorson, ridiculously silly and simple, white feathers and yellow
beaks strewn along the road to those well-watered and poetic spots;
Benodet, a name scarcely moored that seemed to be striving to draw the
river down into the tangle of its seaweeds; Pont-Aven, the snowy, rosy
flight of the wing of a lightly poised coif, tremulously reflected in
the greenish waters of a canal; Quimperlé, more firmly attached, this,
and since the Middle Ages, among the rivulets with which it babbled,
threading their pearls upon a grey background, like the pattern made,
through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into
blunt points of tarnished silver?
These images were false for another reason also; namely, that they
were necessarily much simplified; doubtless the object to which my
imagination aspired, which my senses took in but incompletely and
without any immediate pleasure, I had committed to the safe custody
of names; doubtless because I had accumulated there a store of dreams,
those names now magnetised my desires; but names themselves are not very
comprehensive; the most that I could do was to include in each of them
two or three of the principal curiosities of the town, which would
lie there side by side, without interval or partition; in the name of
Balbec, as in the magnifying glasses set in those penholders which
one buys at sea-side places, I could distinguish waves surging round
a church built in the Persian manner. Perhaps, indeed, the enforced
simplicity of these images was one of the reasons for the hold that they
had over me. When my father had decided, one year, that we should go
for the Easter holidays to Florence and Venice, not finding room
to introduce into the name of Florence the elements that ordinarily
constitute a town, I was obliged to let a supernatural city emerge from
the impregnation by certain vernal scenes of what I supposed to be,
in its essentials, the genius of Giotto. All the more--and because one
cannot make a name extend much further in time than in space--like some
of Giotto's paintings themselves which shew us at two separate moments
the same person engaged in different actions, here lying on his bed,
there just about to mount his horse, the name of Florence was divided
into two compartments. In one, beneath an architectural dais, I gazed
upon a fresco over which was partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight,
dusty, aslant, and gradually spreading; in the other (for, since
I thought of names not as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and
enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge, the life not yet
lived, the life intact and pure which I enclosed in them, gave to the
most material pleasures, to the simplest scenes, the same attraction
that they have in the works of the Primitives), I moved swiftly--so as
to arrive, as soon as might be, at the table that was spread for me,
with fruit and a flask of Chianti--across a Ponte Vecchio heaped with
jonquils, narcissi and anemones. That (for all that I was still in
Paris) was what I saw, and not what was actually round about me. Even
from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries for
which we long occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our
true life than the country in which we may happen to be. Doubtless, if,
at that time, I had paid more attention to what was in my mind when I
pronounced the words "going to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice,"
I should have realised that what I saw was in no sense a town, but
something as different from anything that I knew, something as delicious
as might be for a human race whose whole existence had passed in a
series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel, a morning
in spring. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all my
nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those which
had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it by
an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say, who saw
nothing), as in an opera a fresh melody introduces a novel atmosphere
which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than
read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre,
counting only the minutes as they passed. And besides, even from the
point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not all equal.
To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as
mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different 'speeds.' There are
mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to
pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt,
singing as one goes. During this month--in which I went laboriously
over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of
Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me
drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been
love, love for another person--I never ceased to believe that they
corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me
conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a
Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve of his entry into
Paradise. Moreover, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that
there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with my organs of sense
what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by
my senses at all--though all the more tempting to them, in consequence,
more different from anything that they knew--it was that which recalled
to me the reality of these visions, which inflamed my desire all the
more by seeming to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied.
And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for
aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than
books on aesthetics, and, more again than the guide-books, the railway
time-tables. What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I
could see, so near and yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the tract
which separated it from me, in myself, was not one that I might cross,
could yet be reached by a circuit, by a digression, were I to take
the plain, terrestrial path. When I repeated to myself, giving thus a
special value to what I was going to see, that Venice was the "School of
Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most complete museum of the domestic
architecture of the Middle Ages," I felt happy indeed. As I was even
more when, on one of my walks, as I stepped out briskly on account
of the weather, which, after several days of a precocious spring, had
relapsed into winter (like the weather that we had invariably found
awaiting us at Combray, in Holy Week),--seeing upon the boulevards that
the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked
through them like a stream of water, were none the less beginning,
punctual guests, arrayed already for the party, and admitting no
discouragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the
irrepressible verdure whose steady growth the abortive power of the
cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining--I reflected that
already the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of hyacinths
and anemones, and that the spring sunshine was already tinging the waves
of the Grand Canal with so dusky an azure, with emeralds so splendid
that when they washed and were broken against the foot of one of
Titian's paintings they could vie with it in the richness of their
colouring. I could no longer contain my joy when my father, in the
intervals of tapping the barometer and complaining of the cold, began
to look out which were the best trains, and when I understood that by
making one's way, after luncheon, into the coal-grimed laboratory, the
wizard's cell that undertook to contrive a complete transmutation of its
surroundings, one could awaken, next morning, in the city of marble
and gold, in which "the building of the wall was of jasper and the
foundation of the wall an emerald." So that it and the City of the
Lilies were not just artificial scenes which I could set up at my
pleasure in front of my imagination, but did actually exist at a certain
distance from Paris which must inevitably be traversed if I wished to
see them, at their appointed place on the earth's surface, and at no
other; in a word they were entirely real. They became even more real
to me when my father, by saying: "Well, you can stay in Venice from the
20th to the 29th, and reach Florence on Easter morning," made them both
emerge, no longer only from the abstraction of Space, but from that
imaginary Time in which we place not one, merely, but several of
our travels at once, which do not greatly tax us since they are but
possibilities,--that Time which reconstructs itself so effectively that
one can spend it again in one town after one has already spent it in
another--and consecrated to them some of those actual, calendar days
which are certificates of the genuineness of what one does on them, for
those unique days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one
cannot live them again here when one has lived them elsewhere; I felt
that it was towards the week that would begin with the Monday on which
the laundress was to bring back the white waistcoat that I had stained
with ink, that they were hastening to busy themselves with the duty
of emerging from that ideal Time in which they did not, as yet, exist,
those two Queen Cities of which I was soon to be able, by the most
absorbing kind of geometry, to inscribe the domes and towers on a
page of my own life. But I was still on the way, only, to the supreme
pinnacle of happiness; I reached it finally (for not until then did the
revelation burst upon me that on the clattering streets, reddened by the
light reflected from Giorgione's frescoes, it was not, as I had, despite
so many promptings, continued to imagine, the men "majestic and terrible
as the sea, bearing armour that gleamed with bronze beneath the folds
of their blood-red cloaks," who would be walking in Venice next week, on
the Easter vigil; but that I myself might be the minute personage whom,
in an enlarged photograph of St. Mark's that had been lent to me, the
operator had portrayed, in a bowler hat, in front of the portico), when
I heard my father say: "It must be pretty cold, still, on the Grand
Canal; whatever you do, don't forget to pack your winter greatcoat and
your thick suit." At these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy;
a thing that I had until then deemed impossible, I felt myself to be
penetrating indeed between those "rocks of amethyst, like a reef in the
Indian Ocean"; by a supreme muscular effort, a long way in excess of my
real strength, stripping myself, as of a shell that served no purpose,
of the air in my own room which surrounded me, I replaced it by an equal
quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere, indescribable and
peculiar as the atmosphere of the dreams which my imagination had
secreted in the name of Venice; I could feel at work within me a
miraculous disincarnation; it was at once accompanied by that vague
desire to vomit which one feels when one has a very sore throat; and
they had to put me to bed with a fever so persistent that the doctor
not only assured my parents that a visit, that spring, to Florence and
Venice was absolutely out of the question, but warned them that, even
when I should have completely recovered, I must, for at least a year,
give up all idea of travelling, and be kept from anything that was
liable to excite me.
And, alas, he forbade also, most categorically, my being allowed to go
to the theatre, to hear Berma; the sublime artist, whose genius Bergotte
had proclaimed, might, by introducing me to something else that was,
perhaps, as important and as beautiful, have consoled me for not having
been to Florence and Venice, for not going to Balbec. My parents had
to be content with sending me, every day, to the Champs-Elysées, in
the custody of a person who would see that I did not tire myself; this
person was none other than Françoise, who had entered our service
after the death of my aunt Léonie. Going to the Champs-Elysées I found
unendurable. If only Bergotte had described the place in one of his
books, I should, no doubt, have longed to see and to know it, like so
many things else of which a simulacrum had first found its way into
my imagination. That kept things warm, made them live, gave them
personality, and I sought then to find their counterpart in reality,
but in this public garden there was nothing that attached itself to my
dreams.
* * *