small, stunted, lopped, but stubborn in its resistance, was tossing
in the breeze an ugly mane of red. Elsewhere, again, might be seen
the first awakening of this Maytime of the leaves, and those of an
ampelopsis, a smiling miracle, like a red hawthorn flowering in winter,
had that very morning all 'come out,' so to speak, in blossom. And the
Bois had the temporary, unfinished, artificial look of a nursery garden
or a park in which, either for some botanic purpose or in preparation
for a festival, there have been embedded among the trees of commoner
growth, which have not yet been uprooted and transplanted elsewhere, a
few rare specimens, with fantastic foliage, which seem to be clearing
all round themselves an empty space, making room, giving air, diffusing
light. Thus it was the time of year at which the Bois de Boulogne
displays more separate characteristics, assembles more distinct elements
in a composite whole than at any other. It was also the time of day.
In places where the trees still kept their leaves, they seemed to have
undergone an alteration of their substance from the point at which they
were touched by the sun's light, still, at this hour in the morning,
almost horizontal, as it would be again, a few hours later, at the
moment when, just as dusk began, it would flame up like a lamp, project
afar over the leaves a warm and artificial glow, and set ablaze the few
topmost boughs of a tree that would itself remain unchanged, a sombre
incombustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest. At one spot the
light grew solid as a brick wall, and like a piece of yellow Persian
masonry, patterned in blue, daubed coarsely upon the sky the leaves of
the chestnuts; at another, it cut them off from the sky towards which
they stretched out their curling, golden fingers. Half-way up the trunk
of a tree draped with wild vine, the light had grafted and brought to
blossom, too dazzling to be clearly distinguished, an enormous posy,
of red flowers apparently, perhaps of a new variety of carnation. The
different parts of the Bois, so easily confounded in summer in the
density and monotony of their universal green, were now clearly divided.
A patch of brightness indicated the approach to almost every one of
them, or else a splendid mass of foliage stood out before it like an
oriflamme. I could make out, as on a coloured map, Armenonville, the
Pré Catalan, Madrid, the Race Course and the shore of the lake. Here and
there would appear some meaningless erection, a sham grotto, a mill, for
which the trees made room by drawing away from it, or which was borne
upon the soft green platform of a grassy lawn. I could feel that the
Bois was not really a wood, that it existed for a purpose alien to the
life of its trees; my sense of exaltation was due not only to admiration
of the autumn tints but to a bodily desire. Ample source of a joy which
the heart feels at first without being conscious of its cause, without
understanding that it results from no external impulse! Thus I gazed
at the trees with an unsatisfied longing which went beyond them and,
without my knowledge, directed itself towards that masterpiece of
beautiful strolling women which the trees enframed for a few hours every
day. I walked towards the Allée des Acacias. I passed through forest
groves in which the morning light, breaking them into new sections,
lopped and trimmed the trees, united different trunks in marriage, made
nosegays of their branches. It would skilfully draw towards it a pair of
trees; making deft use of the sharp chisel of light and shade, it would
cut away from each of them half of its trunk and branches, and, weaving
together the two halves that remained, would make of them either a
single pillar of shade, defined by the surrounding light, or a single
luminous phantom whose artificial, quivering contour was encompassed
in a network of inky shadows. When a ray of sunshine gilded the highest
branches, they seemed, soaked and still dripping with a sparkling
moisture, to have emerged alone from the liquid, emerald-green
atmosphere in which the whole grove was plunged as though beneath the
sea. For the trees continued to live by their own vitality, and when
they had no longer any leaves, that vitality gleamed more brightly still
from the nap of green velvet that carpeted their trunks, or in the white
enamel of the globes of mistletoe that were scattered all the way up to
the topmost branches of the poplars, rounded as are the sun and moon in
Michelangelo's 'Creation.' But, forced for so many years now, by a sort
of grafting process, to share the life of feminine humanity, they called
to my mind the figure of the dryad, the fair worldling, swiftly walking,
brightly coloured, whom they sheltered with their branches as she
passed beneath them, and obliged to acknowledge, as they themselves
acknowledged, the power of the season; they recalled to me the happy
days when I was young and had faith, when I would hasten eagerly to the
spots where masterpieces of female elegance would be incarnate for a few
moments beneath the unconscious, accommodating boughs. But the beauty
for which the firs and acacias of the Bois de Boulogne made me long,
more disquieting in that respect than the chestnuts and lilacs of
Trianon which I was going to see, was not fixed somewhere outside myself
in the relics of an historical period, in works of art, in a little
temple of love at whose door was piled an oblation of autumn leaves
ribbed with gold. I reached the shore of the lake; I walked on as far as
the pigeon-shooting ground. The idea of perfection which I had within me
I had bestowed, in that other time, upon the height of a victoria, upon
the raking thinness of those horses, frenzied and light as wasps upon
the wing, with bloodshot eyes like the cruel steeds of Diomed, which
now, smitten by a desire to see again what I had once loved, as ardent
as the desire that had driven me, many years before, along the same
paths, I wished to see renewed before my eyes at the moment when Mme.
Swann's enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his
fist, and as infantile as Saint George in the picture, endeavoured to
curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which they
thundered along the ground. Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars
driven each by a moustached mechanic, with a tall footman towering by
his side. I wished to hold before my bodily eyes, that I might know
whether they were indeed as charming as they appeared to the eyes of
memory, little hats, so low-crowned as to seem no more than garlands
about the brows of women. All the hats now were immense; covered with
fruits and flowers and all manner of birds. In place of the lovely gowns
in which Mme. Swann walked like a Queen, appeared Greco-Saxon tunics,
with Tanagra folds, or sometimes, in the Directoire style, 'Liberty
chiffons' sprinkled with flowers like sheets of wallpaper. On the heads
of the gentlemen who might have been eligible to stroll with Mme. Swann
in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, I found not the grey 'tile' hats
of old, nor any other kind. They walked the Bois bare-headed. And seeing
all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the faith
which, applied to them, would have given them consistency, unity,
life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without
reality, containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have
endeavoured as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in
a picture. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief,
and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes,
there survives it--more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence
of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena--an
idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did
once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the
divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent
cause--the death of the gods.
"Oh, horrible!" I exclaimed to myself: "Does anyone really imagine that
these motor-cars are as smart as the old carriage-and-pair? I dare say.
I am too old now--but I was not intended for a world in which women
shackle themselves in garments that are not even made of cloth. To what
purpose shall I walk among these trees if there is nothing left now of
the assembly that used to meet beneath the delicate tracery of reddening
leaves, if vulgarity and fatuity have supplanted the exquisite thing
that once their branches framed? Oh, horrible! My consolation is to
think of the women whom I have known, in the past, now that there is
no standard left of elegance. But how can the people who watch these
dreadful creatures hobble by, beneath hats on which have been heaped
the spoils of aviary or garden-bed,--how can they imagine the charm that
there was in the sight of Mme. Swann, crowned with a close-fitting lilac
bonnet, or with a tiny hat from which rose stiffly above her head a
single iris?" Could I ever have made them understand the emotion that
I used to feel on winter mornings, when I met Mme. Swann on foot, in an
otter-skin coat, with a woollen cap from which stuck out two blade-like
partridge-feathers, but enveloped also in the deliberate, artificial
warmth of her own house, which was suggested by nothing more than the
bunch of violets crushed into her bosom, whose flowering, vivid and blue
against the grey sky, the freezing air, the naked boughs, had the same
charming effect of using the season and the weather merely as a setting,
and of living actually in a human atmosphere, in the atmosphere of this
woman, as had in the vases and beaupots of her drawing-room, beside the
blazing fire, in front of the silk-covered sofa, the flowers that looked
out through closed windows at the falling snow? But it would not have
sufficed me that the costumes alone should still have been the same as
in those distant years. Because of the solidarity that binds together
the different parts of a general impression, parts that our memory keeps
in a balanced whole, of which we are not permitted to subtract or to
decline any fraction, I should have liked to be able to pass the rest
of the day with one of those women, over a cup of tea, in a little house
with dark-painted walls (as Mme. Swann's were still in the year after
that in which the first part of this story ends) against which would
glow the orange flame, the red combustion, the pink and white flickering
of her chrysanthemums in the twilight of a November evening, in moments
similar to those in which (as we shall see) I had not managed to
discover the pleasures for which I longed. But now, albeit they had led
to nothing, those moments struck me as having been charming enough in
themselves. I sought to find them again as I remembered them. Alas!
there was nothing now but flats decorated in the Louis XVI style, all
white paint, with hortensias in blue enamel. Moreover, people did not
return to Paris, now, until much later. Mme. Swann would have written to
me, from a country house, that she would not be in town before February,
had I asked her to reconstruct for me the elements of that memory which
I felt to belong to a distant era, to a date in time towards which it
was forbidden me to ascend again the fatal slope, the elements of that
longing which had become, itself, as inaccessible as the pleasure that
it had once vainly pursued. And I should have required also that they
be the same women, those whose costume interested me because, at a time
when I still had faith, my imagination had individualised them and had
provided each of them with a legend. Alas! in the acacia-avenue--the
myrtle-alley--I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now
than grim spectres of what once they had been, wandering to and fro, in
desperate search of heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They
had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths.
The sun's face was hidden. Nature began again to reign over the Bois,
from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian
Garden of Woman; above the gimcrack windmill the real sky was grey; the
wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like
a real lake; large birds passed swiftly over the Bois, as over a real
wood, and with shrill cries perched, one after another, on the great
oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with Dodonaic majesty,
seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest, and
helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the
pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose
the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not
being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer
existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire
and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places
that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which
we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a
thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our
life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a
particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as
the years.