when I was at table, in drawing my finger along my nose and in rubbing
my eyes. My father would exclaim: "The child's a perfect idiot, he's
becoming quite impossible." More than all else I should have liked to
be as bald as Swann. He appeared to me to be a creature so extraordinary
that I found it impossible to believe that people whom I knew and often
saw knew him also, and that in the course of the day anyone might run
against him. And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did
every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she had done that
afternoon, merely by the words: "By the way, guess whom I saw at the
Trois Quartiers--at the umbrella counter--Swann!" caused to burst open
in the midst of her narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom.
What a melancholy satisfaction to learn that, that very afternoon,
threading through the crowd his supernatural form, Swann had gone to
buy an umbrella. Among the events of the day, great and small, but
all equally unimportant, that one alone aroused in me those peculiar
vibrations by which my love for Gilberte was invariably stirred. My
father complained that I took no interest in anything, because I did not
listen while he was speaking of the political developments that might
follow the visit of King Theodosius, at that moment in France as
the nation's guest and (it was hinted) ally. And yet how intensely
interested I was to know whether Swann had been wearing his hooded cape!
"Did you speak to him?" I asked.
"Why, of course I did," answered my mother, who always seemed afraid
lest, were she to admit that we were not on the warmest of terms with
Swann, people would seek to reconcile us more than she cared for, in
view of the existence of Mme. Swann, whom she did not wish to know. "It
was he who came up and spoke to me. I hadn't seen him."
"Then you haven't quarrelled?"
"Quarrelled? What on earth made you think that we had quarrelled?"
she briskly parried, as though I had cast doubt on the fiction of her
friendly relations with Swann, and was planning an attempt to 'bring
them together.'
"He might be cross with you for never asking him here."
"One isn't obliged to ask everyone to one's house, you know; has he ever
asked me to his? I don't know his wife."
"But he used often to come, at Combray."
"I should think he did! He used to come at Combray, and now, in Paris,
he has something better to do, and so have I. But I can promise you, we
didn't look in the least like people who had quarrelled. We were kept
waiting there for some time, while they brought him his parcel. He
asked after you; he told me you had been playing with his daughter--"
my mother went on, amazing me with the portentous revelation of my own
existence in Swann's mind; far more than that, of my existence in so
complete, so material a form that when I stood before him, trembling
with love, in the Champs-Elysées, he had known my name, and who my
mother was, and had been able to blend with my quality as his daughter's
playmate certain facts with regard to my grandparents and their
connections, the place in which we lived, certain details of our past
life, all of which I myself perhaps did not know. But my mother did not
seem to have noticed anything particularly attractive in that counter at
the Trois Quartiers where she had represented to Swann, at the moment
in which he caught sight of her, a definite person with whom he had
sufficient memories in common to impel him to come up to her and to
speak.
Nor did either she or my father seem to find any occasion now to mention
Swann's family, the grandparents of Gilberte, nor to use the title of
stockbroker, topics as which nothing else gave me so keen a pleasure.
My imagination had isolated and consecrated in the social Paris a
certain family, just as it had set apart in the structural Paris a
certain house, on whose porch it had fashioned sculptures and made its
windows precious. But these ornaments I alone had eyes to see. Just as
my father and mother looked upon the house in which Swann lived as one
that closely resembled the other houses built at the same period in the
neighbourhood of the Bois, so Swann's family seemed to them to be in the
same category as many other families of stockbrokers. Their judgment was
more or less favourable according to the extent to which the family in
question shared in merits that were common to the rest of the universe,
and there was about it nothing that they could call unique. What, on the
other hand, they did appreciate in the Swanns they found in equal, if
not in greater measure elsewhere. And so, after admitting that the house
was in a good position, they would go on to speak of some other house
that was in a better, but had nothing to do with Gilberte, or of
financiers on a larger scale than her grandfather had been; and if they
had appeared, for a moment, to be of my opinion, that was a mistake
which was very soon corrected. For in order to distinguish in all
Gilberte's surroundings an indefinable quality analogous, in the scale
of emotions, to what in the scale of colours is called infra-red, a
supplementary sense of perception was required, with which love, for the
time being, had endowed me; and this my parents lacked.
On the days when Gilberte had warned me that she would not be coming to
the Champs-Elysées, I would try to arrange my walks so that I should
be brought into some kind of contact with her. Sometimes I would lead
Françoise on a pilgrimage to the house in which the Swanns lived, making
her repeat to me unendingly all that she had learned from the governess
with regard to Mme. Swann. "It seems, she puts great faith in medals.
She would never think of starting on a journey if she had heard an
owl hoot, or the death-watch in the wall, or if she had seen a cat
at midnight, or if the furniture had creaked. Oh yes! she's a most
religious lady, she is!" I was so madly in love with Gilberte that if,
on our way, I caught sight of their old butler taking the dog out, my
emotion would bring me to a standstill, I would fasten on his white
whiskers eyes that melted with passion. And Françoise would rouse me
with: "What's wrong with you now, child?" and we would continue on our
way until we reached their gate, where a porter, different from every
other porter in the world, and saturated, even to the braid on his
livery, with the same melancholy charm that I had felt to be latent in
the name of Gilberte, looked at me as though he knew that I was one
of those whose natural unworthiness would for ever prevent them from
penetrating into the mysteries of the life inside, which it was his duty
to guard, and over which the ground-floor windows appeared conscious of
being protectingly closed, with far less resemblance, between the nobly
sweeping arches of their muslin curtains, to any other windows in the
world than to Gilberte's glancing eyes. On other days we would go along
the boulevards, and I would post myself at the corner of the Rue Duphot;
I had heard that Swann was often to be seen passing there, on his way
to the dentist's; and my imagination so far differentiated Gilberte's
father from the rest of humanity, his presence in the midst of a crowd
of real people introduced among them so miraculous an element, that even
before we reached the Madeleine I would be trembling with emotion at
the thought that I was approaching a street from which that supernatural
apparition might at any moment burst upon me unawares.
But most often of all, on days when I was not to see Gilberte, as I
had heard that Mme. Swann walked almost every day along the Allée des
Acacias, round the big lake, and in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, I
would guide Françoise in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. It was
to me like one of those zoological gardens in which one sees assembled
together a variety of flora, and contrasted effects in landscape; where
from a hill one passes to a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a trench,
another hill, a marsh, but knows that they are there only to enable
the hippopotamus, zebra, crocodile, rabbit, bear and heron to disport
themselves in a natural or a picturesque setting; this, the Bois,
equally complex, uniting a multitude of little worlds, distinct and
separate--placing a stage set with red trees, American oaks, like an
experimental forest in Virginia, next to a fir-wood by the edge of the
lake, or to a forest grove from which would suddenly emerge, in her
lissom covering of furs, with the large, appealing eyes of a dumb
animal, a hastening walker--was the Garden of Woman; and like the
myrtle-alley in the Aeneid, planted for their delight with trees of one
kind only, the Allée des Acacias was thronged by the famous Beauties
of the day. As, from a long way off, the sight of the jutting crag from
which it dives into the pool thrills with joy the children who know
that they are going to behold the seal, long before I reached the
acacia-alley, their fragrance, scattered abroad, would make me feel that
I was approaching the incomparable presence of a vegetable personality,
strong and tender; then, as I drew near, the sight of their topmost
branches, their lightly tossing foliage, in its easy grace, its
coquettish outline, its delicate fabric, over which hundreds of flowers
were laid, like winged and throbbing colonies of precious insects; and
finally their name itself, feminine, indolent and seductive, made my
heart beat, but with a social longing, like those waltzes which remind
us only of the names of the fair dancers, called aloud as they entered
the ball-room. I had been told that I should see in the alley certain
women of fashion, who, in spite of their not all having husbands, were
constantly mentioned in conjunction with Mme. Swann, but most often by
their professional names;--their new names, when they had any, being
but a sort of incognito, a veil which those who would speak of them were
careful to draw aside, so as to make themselves understood. Thinking
that Beauty--in the order of feminine elegance--was governed by occult
laws into the knowledge of which they had been initiated, and that they
had the power to realise it, I accepted before seeing them, like the
truth of a coming revelation, the appearance of their clothes, of their
carriages and horses, of a thousand details among which I placed my
faith as in an inner soul which gave the cohesion of a work of art to
that ephemeral and changing pageant. But it was Mme. Swann whom I wished
to see, and I waited for her to go past, as deeply moved as though
she were Gilberte, whose parents, saturated, like everything in her
environment, with her own special charm, excited in me as keen a passion
as she did herself, indeed a still more painful disturbance (since their
point of contact with her was that intimate, that internal part of
her life which was hidden from me), and furthermore, for I very soon
learned, as we shall see in due course, that they did not like my
playing with her, that feeling of veneration which we always have for
those who hold, and exercise without restraint, the power to do us an
injury.
I assigned the first place, in the order of aesthetic merit and of
social grandeur, to simplicity, when I saw Mme. Swann on foot, in a
'polonaise' of plain cloth, a little toque on her head trimmed with a
pheasant's wing, a bunch of violets in her bosom, hastening along the
Allée des Acacias as if it had been merely the shortest way back to her
own house, and acknowledging with a rapid glance the courtesy of the
gentlemen in carriages, who, recognising her figure at a distance, were
raising their hats to her and saying to one another that there was never
anyone so well turned out as she. But instead of simplicity it was to
ostentation that I must assign the first place if, after I had compelled
Françoise, who could hold out no longer, and complained that her legs
were 'giving' beneath her, to stroll up and down with me for another
hour, I saw at length, emerging from the Porte Dauphine, figuring for
me a royal dignity, the passage of a sovereign, an impression such as
no real Queen has ever since been able to give me, because my notion of
their power has been less vague, and more founded upon experience--borne
along by the flight of a pair of fiery horses, slender and shapely as
one sees them in the drawings of Constantin Guys, carrying on its box an
enormous coachman, furred like a cossack, and by his side a diminutive
groom, like Toby, "the late Beaudenord's tiger," I saw--or rather I
felt its outlines engraved upon my heart by a clean and killing stab--a
matchless victoria, built rather high, and hinting, through the extreme
modernity of its appointments, at the forms of an earlier day, deep down
in which lay negligently back Mme. Swann, her hair, now quite pale with
one grey lock, girt with a narrow band of flowers, usually violets, from
which floated down long veils, a lilac parasol in her hand, on her lips
an ambiguous smile in which I read only the benign condescension
of Majesty, though it was pre-eminently the enticing smile of the
courtesan, which she graciously bestowed upon the men who bowed to her.
That smile was, in reality, saying to one: "Oh yes, I do remember, quite
well; it was wonderful!" to another: "How I should have loved to! We
were unfortunate!", to a third: "Yes, if you like! I must just keep in
the line for a minute, then as soon as I can I will break away." When
strangers passed she still allowed to linger about her lips a lazy
smile, as though she expected or remembered some friend, which made them
say: "What a lovely woman!". And for certain men only she had a sour,
strained, shy, cold smile which meant: "Yes, you old goat, I know
that you've got a tongue like a viper, that you can't keep quiet for a
moment. But do you suppose that I care what you say?" Coquelin passed,
talking, in a group of listening friends, and with a sweeping wave of
his hand bade a theatrical good day to the people in the carriages. But
I thought only of Mme. Swann, and pretended to have not yet seen her,
for I knew that, when she reached the pigeon-shooting ground, she would
tell her coachman to 'break away' and to stop the carriage, so that she
might come back on foot. And on days when I felt that I had the courage
to pass close by her I would drag Françoise off in that direction; until
the moment came when I saw Mme. Swann, letting trail behind her the long
train of her lilac skirt, dressed, as the populace imagine queens to be
dressed, in rich attire such as no other woman might wear, lowering
her eyes now and then to study the handle of her parasol, paying scant
attention to the passers-by, as though the important thing for her, her
one object in being there, was to take exercise, without thinking that
she was seen, and that every head was turned towards her. Sometimes,
however, when she had looked back to call her dog to her, she would
cast, almost imperceptibly, a sweeping glance round about.
Those even who did not know her were warned by something exceptional,
something beyond the normal in her--or perhaps by a telepathic
suggestion such as would move an ignorant audience to a frenzy of
applause when Berma was 'sublime'--that she must be some one well-known.
They would ask one another, "Who is she?", or sometimes would
interrogate a passing stranger, or would make a mental note of how she
was dressed so as to fix her identity, later, in the mind of a friend
better informed than themselves, who would at once enlighten them.
Another pair, half-stopping in their walk, would exchange:
"You know who that is? Mme. Swann! That conveys nothing to you? Odette
de Crécy, then?"
"Odette de Crécy! Why, I thought as much. Those great, sad eyes... But I
say, you know, she can't be as young as she was once, eh? I remember, I
had her on the day that MacMahon went."
"I shouldn't remind her of it, if I were you. She is now Mme. Swann, the
wife of a gentleman in the Jockey Club, a friend of the Prince of Wales.
Apart from that, though, she is wonderful still."
"Oh, but you ought to have known her then; Gad, she was lovely!
She lived in a very odd little house with a lot of Chinese stuff.
I remember, we were bothered all the time by the newsboys, shouting
outside; in the end she made me get up and go."
Without listening to these memories, I could feel all about her the
indistinct murmur of fame. My heart leaped with impatience when I
thought that a few seconds must still elapse before all these people,
among whom I was dismayed not to find a certain mulatto banker who (or
so I felt) had a contempt for me, were to see the unknown youth, to
whom they had not, so far, been paying the slightest attention, salute
(without knowing her, it was true, but I thought that I had sufficient
authority since my parents knew her husband and I was her daughter's
playmate) this woman whose reputation for beauty, for misconduct, and
for elegance was universal. But I was now close to Mme. Swann; I pulled
off my hat with so lavish, so prolonged a gesture that she could not
repress a smile. People laughed. As for her, she had never seen me with
Gilberte, she did not know my name, but I was for her--like one of the
keepers in the Bois, like the boatman, or the ducks on the lake, to
which she threw scraps of bread--one of the minor personages, familiar,
nameless, as devoid of individual character as a stage-hand in a
theatre, of her daily walks abroad.
On certain days when I had missed her in the Allée des Acacias I would
be so fortunate as to meet her in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite,
where women went who wished to be alone, or to appear to be wishing to
be alone; she would not be alone for long, being soon overtaken by some
man or other, often in a grey 'tile' hat, whom I did not know, and
who would talk to her for some time, while their two carriages crawled
behind.
* * *
That sense of the complexity of the Bois de Boulogne which made it an
artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of the
word, a Garden, I captured again, this year, as I crossed it on my way
to Trianon, on one of those mornings, early in November, when in Paris,
if we stay indoors, being so near and yet prevented from witnessing the
transformation scene of autumn, which is drawing so rapidly to a close
without our assistance, we feel a regret for the fallen leaves that
becomes a fever, and may even keep us awake at night. Into my closed
room they had been drifting already for a month, summoned there by
my desire to see them, slipping between my thoughts and the object,
whatever it might be, upon which I was trying to concentrate them,
whirling in front of me like those brown spots that sometimes, whatever
we may be looking at, will seem to be dancing or swimming before our
eyes. And on that morning, not hearing the splash of the rain as on the
previous days, seeing the smile of fine weather at the corners of my
drawn curtains, as from the corners of closed lips may escape the secret
of their happiness, I had felt that I could actually see those yellow
leaves, with the light shining through them, in their supreme beauty;
and being no more able to restrain myself from going to look at the
trees than, in my childhood's days, when the wind howled in the chimney,
I had been able to resist the longing to visit the sea, I had risen and
left the house to go to Trianon, passing through the Bois de Boulogne.
It was the hour and the season in which the Bois seems, perhaps, most
multiform, not only because it is then most divided, but because it
is divided in a different way. Even in the unwooded parts, where the
horizon is large, here and there against the background of a dark
and distant mass of trees, now leafless or still keeping their summer
foliage unchanged, a double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed, as in a
picture just begun, to be the only thing painted, so far, by an artist
who had not yet laid any colour on the rest, and to be offering their
cloister, in full daylight, for the casual exercise of the human figures
that would be added to the picture later on.