The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle

by Marcel Proust

  I enjoyed watching the glass jars which the village boys used to lower into the Vivonne to catch minnows, and which, filled by the stream, in which they in their turn were enclosed, at once “containers” whose transparent sides were like solidified water and “contents” plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing crystal, conjured up an image of coolness more delicious and more provoking than they would have done standing upon a table laid for dinner, by showing it as perpetually in flight between the impalpable water in which my hands could not grasp it and the insoluble glass in which my palate could not enjoy it. I made up my mind to come there again with a fishing-line; meanwhile I procured some bread from our picnic basket, and threw pellets of it into the Vivonne which seemed to bring about a process of super-saturation, for the water at once solidified round them in oval clusters of emaciated tadpoles, which until then it had no doubt been holding in solution, invisible and on the verge of entering the stage of crystallisation.

  Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants. At first they appeared singly—a lily, for instance, which the current, across whose path it was unhappily placed, would never leave at rest for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would uncoil, lengthen, reach out, strain almost to breaking-point until the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before moving off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt Léonie, who present year after year the unchanging spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they constantly imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking off but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable and baneful dietetics. Such as these was the water-lily, and reminiscent also of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have inquired about them at greater length and in fuller detail from the victims themselves had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.

  But further on the current slackened, at a point where the stream ran through a property thrown open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds into which the Vivonne was here diverted were aflower with water-lilies. As the banks hereabouts were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen in its depths a clear, crude blue verging on violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there on the surface, blushing like a strawberry, floated a water-lily flower with a scarlet centre and white edges. Further on, the flowers were more numerous, paler, less glossy, more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream, as after the sad dismantling of some fête galante, moss-roses in loosened garlands. Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily, of a neat pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain with housewifely care while, a little further again, others, pressed close together in a veritable floating flower-bed, suggested garden pansies that had settled here like butterflies and were fluttering their blue and burnished wings over the transparent depths of this watery garden—this celestial garden, too, for it gave the flowers a soil of a colour more precious, more moving than their own, and, whether sparkling beneath the water-lilies in the afternoon in a kaleidoscope of silent, watchful and mobile contentment, or glowing, towards evening, like some distant haven, with the roseate dreaminess of the setting sun, ceaselessly changing yet remaining always in harmony, around the less mutable colours of the flowers themselves, with all that is most profound, most evanescent, most mysterious—all that is infinite—in the passing hour, it seemed to have made them blossom in the sky itself

  After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly. How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!

  We would sit down among the irises at the water’s edge. In the holiday sky an idle cloud languorously dawdled. From time to time, oppressed by boredom, a carp would heave itself out of the water with an anxious gasp. It was time for our picnic. Before starting homewards we would sit there for a long time, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on the grass over which came to us, faint, horizontal, but dense and metallic still, echoes of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had not melted into the air they had traversed for so long, and, ribbed by the successive palpitation of all their sound-waves, throbbed as they grazed the flowers at our feet.

  Sometimes, at the water’s edge and surrounded by trees, we would come upon what is called a “country house,” lonely and secluded, seeing nothing of the world but the river which bathed its feet. A young woman whose pensive face and elegant veils did not suggest a local origin, and who had doubtless come, in the popular phrase, “to bury herself” there, to taste the bitter sweetness of knowing that her name, and still more the name of him whose heart she had once held but had been unable to keep, were unknown there, stood framed in a window from which she had no outlook beyond the boat that was moored beside her door. She raised her eyes listlessly on hearing, through the trees that lined the bank, the voices of passers-by of whom, before they came in sight, she might be certain that never had they known, nor ever would know, the faithless lover, that nothing in their past lives bore his imprint, and nothing in their future would have occasion to receive it. One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod. And I watched her, returning from some walk along a path where she knew that he would not appear, drawing from her resigned hands long and uselessly elegant gloves.

  Never, in the course of our walks along the Guermantes way, were we able to penetrate as far as the source of the Vivonne, of which I had often thought and which had in my mind so abstract, so ideal an existence that I had been as surprised when someone told me that it was actually to be found in the same department, at a given number of miles from Combray, as I had been when I learned that there was another fixed point somewhere on the earth’s surface, where, according to the ancients, opened the jaws of Hell. Nor could we ever get as far as that other goal which I so longed to reach, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was the residence of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them I pictured them either in tapestry, like the Comtesse de Guermantes in the “Coronation of Esther” which hung in our church, or else in iridescent colours, like Gilbert the Bad in the stained-glass window where he changed from cabbage green, when I was dipping my fingers in the holy water stoup, to plum blue when I had reached our row of chairs, or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the ceiling—in short, invariably wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age and bathed, as in a sunset, in the amber light which glowed from the resounding syllable “antes.” And if in spite of that they were for me, in their capacity as a duke and duchess, r
eal people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality of theirs was on the other hand enormously distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit “Guermantes way” of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and an endless series of summer afternoons. And I knew that they bore not only the title of Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, but that since the fourteenth century, when, after vain attempts to conquer its earlier lords in battle, they had allied themselves to them by marriage and so become Counts of Combray, the first citizens, consequently, of the place, and yet the only ones who did not reside in it—Comtes de Combray, possessing Combray, threading it on their string of names and titles, absorbing it in their personalities, and imbued, no doubt, with that strange and pious melancholy which was peculiar to Combray; proprietors of the town, though not of any particular house there; dwelling, presumably, outside, in the street, between heaven and earth, like that Gilbert de Guermantes of whom I could see, in the stained glass of the apse of Saint-Hilaire, only the reverse side in dull black lacquer, if I raised my eyes to look for him on my way to Camus’s for a packet of salt.

  And then it happened that, along the Guermantes way, I sometimes passed beside well-watered little enclosures, over whose hedges rose clusters of dark blossom. I would stop, hoping to gain some precious addition to my experience, for I seemed to have before my eyes a fragment of that fluvial country which I had longed so much to see and know since coming upon a description of it by one of my favourite authors. And it was with that storybook land, with its imagined soil intersected by a hundred bubbling watercourses, that Guermantes, changing its aspect in my mind, became identified, after I heard Dr Percepied speak of the flowers and the charming rivulets and fountains that were to be seen there in the ducal park. I used to dream that Mme de Guermantes, taking a sudden capricious fancy to me, invited me there, that all day long she stood fishing for trout by my side. And when evening came, holding my hand in hers, as we passed by the little gardens of her vassals she would point out to me the flowers that leaned their red and purple spikes along the tops of the low walls, and would teach me all their names. She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I intended to compose. And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or that perhaps some malady of the brain was hindering its development. Sometimes I would rely on my father to settle it all for me. He was so powerful, in such high favour with people in office, that he made it possible for us to transgress laws which Françoise had taught me to regard as more ineluctable than the laws of life and death, as when we were allowed to postpone for a year the compulsory repointing of the walls of our house, alone among all the houses in that part of Paris, or when he obtained permission from the Minister for Mme Sazerat’s son, who had been ordered to some watering-place, to take his baccalaureate two months in advance, among the candidates whose surnames began with “A,” instead of having to wait his turn as an “S.” If I had fallen seriously ill, if I had been captured by brigands, convinced that my father’s understanding with the supreme powers was too complete, that his letters of introduction to the Almighty were too irresistible for my illness or captivity to turn out to be anything but vain illusions, in which no danger actually threatened me, I should have awaited with perfect composure the inevitable hour of my return to comfortable realities, of my deliverance from bondage or restoration to health; and perhaps this lack of genius, this black cavity which gaped in my mind when I ransacked it for the theme of my future writings, was itself no more than an insubstantial illusion, and would vanish with the intervention of my father, who must have agreed with the Government and with Providence that I should be the foremost writer of the day. But at other times, while my parents were growing impatient at seeing me loiter behind instead of following them, my present life, instead of seeming an artificial creation of my father’s which he could modify as he chose, appeared, on the contrary, to be comprised in a larger reality which had not been created for my benefit, from whose judgments there was no appeal, within which I had no friend or ally, and beyond which no further possibilities lay concealed. It seemed to me then that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renounced literature for ever, despite the encouragement Bloch had given me. This intimate, spontaneous feeling, this sense of the nullity of my intellect, prevailed against all the flattering words that might be lavished upon me, as a wicked man whose good deeds are praised by all is gnawed by secret remorse.

  One day my mother said to me: “You’re always talking about Mme de Guermantes. Well, Dr Percepied took great care of her when she was ill four years ago, and so she’s coming to Combray for his daughter’s wedding. You’ll be able to see her in church.” It was from Dr Percepied, as it happened, that I had heard most about Mme de Guermantes, and he had even shown us the number of an illustrated paper in which she was depicted in the costume she had worn at a fancy dress ball given by the Princesse de Léon.

  Suddenly, during the nuptial mass, the verger, by moving to one side, enabled me to see in one of the chapels a fair-haired lady with a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk, glossy and new and bright, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose. And because on the surface of her face, which was red, as though she had been very hot, I could discern, diluted and barely perceptible, fragments of resemblance with the portrait that had been shown 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 the flat tombstones of which, 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; hence there was only 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 conceivably 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 stained-glass window, as living in another century, as being of another substance than the rest of the human race. Never had it occurred to me 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 crossed my mind (though it was immediately banished) that in her causal principle, in the molecules of her physical composition, this lady 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 female type which included also the wives of doctors and tradesmen. “So that’s Mme de Guermantes—that’s all she is!” were the words underlying the attentive and astonished expression with which I gazed upon this image which, naturally enough, bore no resemblance to those that had so often, under the same title of “Mme de Guermantes,” appeared in my dreams, since it had not, like the others, been formed arbitrarily by myself but had leapt to my eyes 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 o
thers that allowed themselves to be impregnated with the amber hue of a sonorous syllable, but was so real that everything, down to the fiery little spot at the corner of her nose, attested to her subjection to the laws of life, as, in a transformation scene on the stage, a crease in the fairy’s dress, a quivering of her tiny finger, betray the physical presence of a living actress, whereas we were uncertain, till then, whether we were not looking merely at a projection from a lantern.

  But at the same time, 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’s 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 an even greater power over my imagination, which, paralysed for a moment by contact with a reality so different from what it had expected, began to react and to say to 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 today.”