And alas, he also imposed a formal ban on 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 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 being 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 get to know it, like so many things else of which a simulacrum had first found its way into my imagination. This breathed life into them, gave them a personality, and I sought then to rediscover them in reality; but in this public garden there was nothing that attached itself to my dreams.
One day, as I was bored with our usual place beside the roundabout, Françoise had taken me for an excursion—across the frontier guarded at regular intervals by the little bastions of the barley-sugar women—into those neighbouring but foreign regions where the faces of the passers-by were strange, where the goat-carriage went past; then she had gone back to collect her things from her chair that stood with its back to a shrubbery of laurels. While I waited for her I was pacing the broad lawn of meagre, close-cropped, sun-baked grass, dominated, at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing battledore and shuttlecock, when from the path another little girl, who was putting on her coat and covering up her racquet, called out sharply: “Good-bye, Gilberte, I’m going home now; don’t forget we’re coming to you this evening, after dinner.” The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the girl whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the proximity of its target—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impressions concerning her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called it out, everything that, as she uttered the words, she recalled, or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let it brush past me without my being able to penetrate it, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry—wafting through the air the exquisite emanation which it had distilled, by touching them with the utmost precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle Swann’s life, from the evening to come, just as it would be, after dinner, at her home—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, delicately coloured, resembling one of those clouds that, billowing over a Poussin landscape, reflect minutely, like a cloud in the opera teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods—casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot where it was at one and the same time a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair battledore player (who continued to launch and retrieve her shuttlecock until a governess with a blue feather in her hat had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, the colour of heliotrope, impalpable as a reflection and superimposed like a carpet on which I could not help but drag my lingering, nostalgic and desecrating feet, while Françoise shouted: “Come on, do up your coat and let’s clear off!” and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.
But would she come back to the Champs-Elysées? Next day she was not there; but I saw her on the following days, and spent all my time revolving round the spot where she played with her friends, to such effect that once, when they found that there were not enough of them to make up a prisoner’s base, she sent one of them to ask me if I cared to complete their side, and from that day I played with her whenever she came. But this did not happen every day; there were days when she was prevented from coming by her lessons, by her catechism, by a tea-party, by the whole of that life, separated from my own, which twice only, condensed into the name Gilberte, I had felt pass so painfully close to me, in the hawthorn lane near Combray and on the grass of the Champs-Elysées. On such days she would tell us in advance that we would not be seeing her; if it was because of her lessons, she would say: “It’s too tiresome, I shan’t be able to come tomorrow; you’ll all be enjoying yourselves here without me,” with an air of regret which to some extent consoled me; if, on the other hand, she had been invited to a party, and I, not knowing this, asked her whether she was coming to play with us, she would reply: “I should jolly well hope not! I hope Mamma will let me go to my friend’s.” But on these days I did at least know that I would not see her, whereas on others, without any warning, her mother would take her shopping, and next day she would say: “Oh, yes! I went out with Mamma,” as though it had been the most natural thing in the world, and not the greatest possible misfortune for someone else. There were also the days of bad weather on which her governess, afraid on her own account of the rain, would not bring Gilberte to the Champs-Elysées.
And so, if the sky was overcast, from early morning I would not cease to examine it, observing all the omens. If I saw the lady opposite putting on her hat beside her window, I would say to myself: “That lady is going out; so it must be weather in which one can go out. Why shouldn’t Gilberte do the same as that lady?” But the weather would cloud over. My mother would say that it might clear again, that one burst of sunshine would be enough, but that more probably it would rain; and if it rained, what was the use of going to the Champs-Elysées? And so, from lunch-time onwards, my anxious eyes never left the unsettled, clouded sky. It remained dark. The balcony in front of the window was grey. Suddenly, on its sullen stone, I would not exactly see a less leaden colour, but I would feel as it were a striving towards a less leaden colour, the pulsation of a hesitant ray that struggled to discharge its light. A moment later, the balcony was as pale and luminous as a pool at dawn, and a thousand shadows from the iron-work of its balustrade had alighted on it. A breath of wind would disperse them, and the stone darkened again, but, as though they had been tamed, they would return; imperceptibly the stone whitened once more, and as in one of those uninterrupted crescendos which, in music, at the end of an overture, carry a single note to the supreme fortissimo by making it pass rapidly through all the intermediate stages, I would see it reach that fixed, unalterable gold of fine days, on which the clear-cut shadow of the wrought iron of the balustrade was outlined in black like some capricious vegetation, with a delicacy in the delineation of its smallest details that seemed to indicate a deliberate application, an artist’s satisfaction, and with so much relief, so velvety a bloom in the restfulness of its dark, felicitous masses that in truth those broad and leafy reflections on that lake of sunshine seemed aware that they were pledges of tranquillity and happiness.
Brief, fading ivy, climbing, fugitive flora!—the most colourless, the most depressing, to many minds, of all that creep on walls or decorate windows; to me the dearest of them all ever since the day when it appeared upon our balcony, like the very shadow of the presence of Gilberte, who was perhaps already in the Champs-Elysées, and as soon as I arrived there would greet me with: “Let’s begin at once; you’re on my side”; frail, swept away by a breath, but at the same time in harmony, not with the season, but with the hour; promise of that immediate happiness which the day will deny or fulfil, and thereby of the one paramount immediate happiness, the happiness of love; softer, warmer upon the stone even than moss; robust, a ray of sunlight sufficing for it to spring into life and blossom into joy, even in the heart of winter.
And even on those days when all other vegetation had disappeared, when the fine green
hide which covered the trunks of the old trees was hidden beneath the snow, and, though the latter had ceased to fall, the sky was still too overcast for me to hope that Gilberte would venture out, then suddenly—inspiring my mother to say: “Look, it’s quite fine now; I think you might perhaps try going to the Champs-Elysées after all”—on the mantle of snow that swathed the balcony, the sun would appear and weave a tracery of golden threads and black shadows. On one such day we found no one, or only a solitary little girl on the point of departure, who assured me that Gilberte was not coming. The chairs, deserted by the imposing but shivering assembly of governesses, stood empty. Alone, beside the lawn, sat a lady of a certain age who came in all weathers, dressed always in an identical style, splendid and sombre, to make whose acquaintance I would at that time have sacrificed, had it lain in my power, all the greatest advantages and privileges of my future life. For Gilberte went up to greet her every day; she used to ask Gilberte for news of her “adorable mother”; and it struck me that, if I had known her, I should have been for Gilberte someone wholly different, someone who knew people in her parents’ world. While her grandchildren played together at a little distance, she would sit and read the Journal des Débats, which she called “My old Débats,” and with aristocratic affectation would say, speaking of the policeman or the woman who let the chairs, “My old friend the policeman,” or “The chair-keeper and I, who are old friends.”
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