In Search of Lost Time (62 page)

These images were false for another reason also; namely that they were necessarily quite simplified; doubtless whatever it was that my imagination aspired to and that my senses took in only incompletely and without any immediate pleasure, I had enclosed in the sanctuary of a name; doubtless because I had accumulated there a store of dreams, these names now magnetized my desires; but names themselves are not very spacious; the most I could do was include in them two or three of the towns' principal curiosities, which would be juxtaposed there with nothing to connect them; in the name Balbec, as in the magnifying glass of the penholders you buy at a seaside resort, I saw waves rising around a Persian-style church. Perhaps indeed the simplification of these images was one of the reasons they came to have such a hold on me. When my father decided, one year, that we would go to spend the Easter holidays in Florence and Venice, not having enough room to insert into the name Florence the elements that usually make up a town, I was forced to produce a supernatural city from the fecundation, by certain springtime fragrances, of what I believed to be, in its essence, the spirit of Giotto. At the very most – and because one cannot attach to a name much more time than space – like certain of Giotto's paintings themselves which show us the same figure at two different moments in the action, here lying in his bed, there getting ready to mount his horse, the name Florence was divided into two compartments. In one, under an architectural canopy, I was contemplating a fresco on part of which was superimposed a curtain of morning sunlight, dusty, oblique and gradually spreading; in the other (for, since I did not think of names as an inaccessible ideal but as a real atmosphere into which I was going to immerse myself, the life not yet lived, the pure and intact life that I enclosed in them gave to the most material pleasures, to the simplest scenes, the attraction they have in the works of the primitives), I was walking quickly – the
sooner to reach the lunch that was waiting for me with fruits and wine from Chianti – across a Ponte Vecchio crowded with jonquils, narcissus and anemones. That (even though I was in Paris) was what I saw, and not what was actually around me. Even from a simple realistic point of view, the countries we long for occupy a far larger place in our actual life, at any given moment, than the country in which we happen to be. Doubtless, had I myself paid more attention at the time to what was in my mind when I pronounced the words go to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice, I would have realized that what I saw was not a town at all, but something as different from anything I knew, something as delightful, as might be, for a human race whose whole life had passed in late afternoons of winter, that unknown marvel: a spring morning. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling my nights and my days, differentiated this period of my life from those that had gone before it (and might have been confused with it in the eyes of an observer who sees things only from outside, that is to say who sees nothing), as in an opera a melodic motif introduces something new that one could not have suspected if one had only read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre only counting the quarter-hours as they passed. And besides, even from this point of view, of mere quantity, in our lives the days are not all equal. As they travel through the days, temperaments that are at all nervous, as mine was, have available to them, like automobiles, different speeds. There are arduous mountainous days that one spends an infinite time climbing, and downward-sloping days that one can descend at full tilt singing. During that month – in which I replayed over and over like a melody, without ever becoming sated, those images of Florence, Venice and Pisa for which the desire they excited in me retained something as profoundly individual as if it had been love, love of a person – I did not cease to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of me, and they introduced me to a hope as beautiful as that which a Christian of the earliest era might have nourished on the eve of entering Paradise. Thus without my worrying about the contradiction of wanting to look at and touch with the organs of my senses what I had created in a day-dream and not perceived with my senses – though all the more tempting to them in consequence, more different from
anything they knew – it was whatever reminded me of the reality of these images that most inflamed my desire, because it was a sort of promise that my desire would be gratified. And, even though the motive for my exhilaration was a desire for artistic delights, the guidebooks sustained it even more than the books about aesthetics, and still more than the guidebooks, the railway time-table. What moved me was to think that if this Florence which I saw near but inaccessible in my imagination was separated from me, in myself, by a crossing that was not viable, I could reach it indirectly, by a detour, by taking the land route. Certainly when I repeated to myself, thus giving so much value to what I was going to see, that Venice was ‘the school of Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most complete museum of medieval domestic architecture',
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I felt happy. Yet I was even happier when, out on an errand and walking quickly because of the weather, which, after a few days of precocious spring, had turned back into winter (like the weather we usually found at Combray in Holy Week) – seeing on the boulevards that the chestnut trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere as liquid as water, were nonetheless beginning, punctual guests, already in formal dress and admitting no discouragement, to round and chisel the frozen masses of irresistible greenery whose steady growth the abortive power of the cold might hinder but could not restrain – I thought that already the Ponte Vecchio was abundantly strewn with hyacinths and anemones and the spring sunshine was already dyeing the waves of the Grand Canal with so dark an azure and such noble emeralds that when they came to break at the feet of Titian's paintings, they might rival them in richness of colour. I could no longer contain my joy when my father, even as he consulted the barometer and deplored the cold, began to find out which would be the best trains, and when I realized that by making our way after lunch into that charcoal laboratory, that magic chamber charged with working the complete transmutation of all its surroundings, we could wake the next morning in the city of marble and gold ‘bossed with jasper and paved with emeralds'.
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So that it and the City of Lilies were not merely fictive pictures which one could set up at will before one's imagination, but existed at a certain distance from Paris that one absolutely had to cross if one wanted to see them, at a certain
determined place on the earth, and at no other, in a word were quite real. They became even more so for me, when my father, by saying: ‘So, you could stay in Venice from April 20th to the 29th and arrive in Florence on Easter morning' made them both emerge no longer merely from abstract Space, but from that imaginary Time in which we situate, not one journey at a time but others simultaneously, without too much emotion since they are only possibilities – that Time which recreates itself so effectively that we can spend it again in one town after we have spent it in another – and devoted to them some of those specific days which are the certificate of authenticity of the objects on which one employs them, for those unique days are consumed by use, they do not come back, one cannot live them here when one has lived them there; I felt that it was towards the week which began on the Monday when the washerwoman was to bring back the white waistcoat I had covered with ink that the two Queen Cities were heading, to become absorbed in it as they emerged from that ideal time in which they did not yet exist, the two Queen Cities of which I was soon going to be able, by the most moving kind of geometry, to inscribe the domes and towers on the map of my own life. But I was still merely on the way to the last degree of bliss; I reached it finally (for only then did the revelation come to me that on those splashy streets, reddened by reflections from Giorgione's frescoes,
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it was not, as I had, despite so many admonitions, continued to imagine, men ‘majestic and terrible as the sea, bearing armour that gleamed with bronze beneath the folds of their blood-red cloaks'
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who would be walking through Venice next week, on the eve of Easter, but that I myself might be the minuscule figure, in a large photograph of St Mark's that had been lent to me, whom the illustrator represented, in a bowler hat, in front of the porches), when I heard my father say: ‘It must be quite cold, still, on the Grand Canal; you would do well to put your winter overcoat and your heavy jacket in your trunk just in case.' At these words I was lifted into a kind of ecstasy; I felt myself to be truly making my way, as I had until then thought impossible, between those ‘rocks of amethyst like a reef in the Indian Ocean';
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by a supreme feat of gymnastics beyond my strength, divesting myself, as of a useless carapace, of the air of my bedroom that surrounded me, I replaced it
by equal parts of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere as indescribable and particular as the atmosphere of dreams, which my imagination had enclosed in the name of Venice, I felt myself undergoing a miraculous disincarnation; it was immediately accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels when one has come down with a severe sore throat, and they had to put me to bed with a fever so tenacious that the doctor declared they would not only have to give up the idea of allowing me to leave for Florence and Venice now but, even when I was entirely well again, spare me for at least a year any plans for travelling and any cause of excitement.

And also, alas, he forbade them absolutely to allow me to go to the theatre to hear La Berma; the sublime artist, whom Bergotte had regarded as a genius, would have, by introducing me to something that was perhaps as important and as beautiful, consoled me for not having been to Florence and Venice, for not going to Balbec. They had to confine themselves to sending me to the Champs-Élysées every day under the supervision of a person who would keep me from tiring myself, and that was Françoise, who had entered our service after the death of my Aunt Léonie. To go to the Champs-Élysées was unbearable to me. If only Bergotte had described it in one of his books, I probably would have wanted to get to know it, like all the things whose ‘double' someone had begun by putting into my imagination. It warmed them, made them live, gave them a personality, and I wanted to find them again in reality; but in this public garden nothing was attached to my dreams.

One day, because I was bored in our usual spot, next to the merry-go-round, Françoise had taken me on an excursion – beyond the frontier guarded at equal intervals by the little bastions of the barley-sugar sellers – into those neighbouring but foreign regions where the faces are unfamiliar, where the goat cart passes; then she had gone back to get her things from her chair, which stood with its back to a clump of laurels; as I waited for her, I was trampling the broad lawn, sparse and shorn, yellowed by the sun, at the far end of which a statue stands above the pool, when, from the path, addressing a little girl with red hair playing with a shuttlecock in front of the basin, another girl, while putting on her cloak and stowing her racket,
shouted to her, in a sharp voice: ‘Good-bye, Gilberte, I'm going home, don't forget we're coming to your house tonight after dinner.' That name, Gilberte, passed by close to me, evoking all the more forcefully the existence of the girl it designated in that it did not merely name her as an absent person to whom one is referring, but hailed her directly; thus it passed close by me, in action so to speak, with a power that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the approach of its goal; – transporting along with it, I felt, the knowledge, the notions about the girl to whom it was addressed, that belonged not to me, but to the friend who was calling her, everything that, as she uttered it, she could see again or at least held in her memory, of their daily companionship, of the visits they paid to each other, and all that unknown experience which was even more inaccessible and painful to me because conversely it was so familiar and so tractable to that happy girl who grazed me with it without my being able to penetrate it and hurled it up in the air in a shout; – letting float in the air the delicious emanation it had already, by touching them precisely, released from several invisible points in the life of Mlle Swann, from the evening to come, such as it might be, after dinner, at her house; – forming, in its celestial passage among the children and maids, a little cloud of precious colour, like that which, curling over a lovely garden by Poussin,
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reflects minutely like a cloud in an opera, full of horses and chariots, some manifestation of the life of the gods; – casting finally, on that bald grass, at the spot where it was at once a patch of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the blonde shuttlecock player (who did not stop launching the shuttlecock and catching it again until a governess wearing a blue ostrich feather called her), a marvellous little band the colour of heliotrope as impalpable as a reflection and laid down like a carpet over which I did not tire of walking back and forth with lingering, nostalgic and desecrating steps, while Françoise cried out to me: ‘Come on now, button up your coat and let's make ourselves scarce', and I noticed for the first time with irritation that she had a vulgar way of speaking, and alas, no blue feather in her hat.

But would she come back to the Champs-Élysées? The next day she was not there; but I saw her there on the following days; I spent all my time circling around the spot where she played with her friends,
so that once when they found they were short of players for their game of prisoners' base, she sent to ask if I wanted to make up the number on their side, and after that I played with her each time she was there. But this was not every day; there were days when she was kept from coming by her lessons, by the catechism, a tea, that whole life separate from mine which twice, condensed in the name of Gilberte, I had felt pass so painfully close to me, on the steep path at Combray and on the lawn at the Champs-Élysées. On those days, she would announce in advance that we would not be seeing her; if it was because of her studies, she would say: ‘It's an awful bore, I won't be able to come tomorrow; you'll all be having fun without me,' with a sorrowful air that consoled me a little; but on the other hand when she was invited to a party and I, not knowing, asked her if she would be coming out to play, she would answer: ‘I should certainly hope not! I certainly hope Mama will let me go to my friend's.' At least on those days, I knew I would not see her, whereas other times, it was quite unexpectedly that her mother would take her shopping, and the next day she would say: ‘Oh yes! I went out with Mama,' as though it were a natural thing and not, for someone else, the greatest possible misfortune. There were also the days of bad weather when her governess, who herself could not endure the rain, did not want to take her to the Champs-Élysées.