Further off, at a place where the trees were still all green, one alone, 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 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 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 in the gathering dusk it flames up like a lamp, projects afar over the leaves a warm and artificial glow, and sets ablaze the few topmost boughs of a tree that itself remains unchanged, a sombre incombustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest. At one point it thickened the leaves of the chestnut-trees as it were like bricks, and, like a piece of yellow Persian masonry patterned in blue, cemented them crudely against the sky; at another, it detached them from the sky, towards which they stretched out their curling, golden fingers. Half-way up the trunk of a tree draped with Virginia creeper, it had grafted and brought to blossom, too dazzling to be clearly distinguished, an enormous bouquet as of red flowers, perhaps 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. Open spaces made visible the approach to almost every one of them, or else a splendid mass of foliage stood out before it like an oriflamme. One could make out, as on a coloured map, Armenonville, the Pré Catelan, 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 standing aside from it, or which was borne upon the soft green platform of a grassy lawn. One sensed that the Bois was not only a wood, that it existed for a purpose alien to the life of its trees; the exhilaration that I felt was due not only to admiration of the autumn tints but to an obscure desire—wellspring 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 that went beyond them and, without my knowledge, directed itself towards that masterpiece of the fair walkers which the trees enshrine for a few hours each day. I walked towards the Allée des Acacias. I passed through 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 trunks and branches, and, weaving together the two halves that remained, would make of them either a single pillar of shade, defined by the surrounding sunlight, 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, which, when they had no longer any leaves, gleamed more brightly still on the nap of green velvet that carpeted their trunks, or in the white enamel of the globes of mistletoe that were scattered among the topmost boughs of the poplars, rounded like the sun and moon in Michelangelo’s “Creation.” But, forced for so many years now, by a sort of grafting process, to share in the life of feminine humanity, they called to my mind the figure of the dryad, the fair worldling, swiftly walking, brightly coloured, whom they shelter with their branches as she passes beneath them, obliging her to acknowledge, as they themselves acknowledge, the power of the season; they recalled to me the happy days of my unquestioning youth, 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 about 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 on 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 anew 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 St George in the picture, endeavoured to curb the ardour of the quivering steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered over 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, to see whether they were indeed as charming as they appeared to the eyes of memory, little women’s hats, so low-crowned as to seem no more than garlands. All the hats now were immense, covered with all manner of fruits and flowers and birds. In place of the beautiful dresses in which Mme Swann walked like a queen, Graeco-Saxon tunics, pleated à la Tanagra, or sometimes in the Directoire style, accentuated Liberty chiffons sprinkled with flowers like wallpaper. On the heads of the gentlemen who might have been strolling with Mme Swann in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, I no longer found the grey “toppers” of old, nor indeed any other kind of hat. They went out bare-headed. And seeing all these new components of the spectacle, I had no longer a belief to infuse into them to give them consistency, unity and life; they passed before me in a desultory, haphazard, meaningless fashion, containing in themselves no beauty which my eyes might have tried, as in the old days, to re-create. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no faith, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes, there survives it—more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things—a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause—the death of the gods.
How horrible! I exclaimed to myself. Can anyone find these motor-cars as elegant 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 gather beneath this delicate tracery of reddening leaves, if vulgarity and folly have supplanted the exquisite thing that their branches once framed. How horrible! My consolation is to think of the women whom I knew in the past, now that there is no elegance left. But how could the people who watch these dreadful creatures hobble by beneath hats on which have been heaped the spoils of aviary or kitchen-garden, how could they even imagine the charm that there was in the sight of Mme Swann in a simple mauve bonnet or a little hat with a single iris sticking up out of it? Could I even have made them understand the emotion that I used to feel on winter morning
s, 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 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 jardinières of her drawing-room, beside the blazing fire, in front of the silk-covered settee, 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 those in distant years. Because of the solidarity that binds together the different parts of a general impression 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 an apartment 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, even though they had led to nothing, those moments struck me as having been charming enough in themselves. I wanted to find them again as I remembered them. Alas! there was nothing now but flats decorated in the Louis XVI style, all white, with a sprinkling of blue hydrangeas. Moreover, people did not return to Paris, now, until much later. Mme Swann would have written to me from a country house to say that she would not be in town before February, long after the chrysanthemum season, had I asked her to reconstruct for me the elements of that memory which I felt to belong to a particular distant year, a particular vintage towards which it was forbidden me to ascend again the fatal slope, the elements of that longing which had itself become as inaccessible as the pleasure that it had once vainly pursued. And I should have required also that they should be the same women, those whose costume interested me because, at the 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 they had once been, wandering, desperately searching for heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long since fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun had gone. Nature was resuming its 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 flew 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 Dodonian majesty, seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of this deconsecrated 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 we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
NOTES • SYNOPSIS
Notes
1 Bressant: a well-known actor (1815–1886) who introduced a new hair-style which involved wearing the hair short in front and fairly long behind.
2 O ciel, que de vertus vous nous faites haïr. From Corneille’s Mort de Pompée.
3 à contre-coeur: reluctantly.
4 Le Miracle de Théophile: verse play by the thirteenth-century troubadour, Rutebeuf. Les quatres fils Aymon or Renaud de Montauban: twelfth-century chanson de geste.
5 bleu: express letter transmitted by pneumatic tube (in Paris).
6 The first edition of Du côté de chez Swann had “pour Chartres” instead of “pour Reims.” Proust moved Combray (which as we know was modelled on Illiers, near Chartres) to the fighting zone between Laon and Rheims when he decided to incorporate the 1914–1918 war into his book.
7 Indirect quotation from Racine’s Phèdre, Act I, Scene 3:
Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pèsent!
Quelle importune main en formant tous ces noeuds
A pris soin sur mon front d’assembler mes cheveux?
8 In English in the original. Odette’s speech is peppered with English expressions.
9 “Home” is in English in the original, as is “smart” on this page.
10 La Reine Topaze: a light opera by Victor Massé presented at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1856.
11 Serge Panine: play by Georges Ohnet (1848–1918), adapted from a novel of the same name, which had a great success in 1881 in spite of its mediocre literary qualities.
Olivier Métra: composer of such popular works as La Valse des Roses and a famous lancers quadrille, and conductor at the Opéra-Comique.
12 Serpent à sonnettes means rattlesnake.
13 Pays du Tendre (or, more correctly, Pays de Tendre): the country of the sentiments, the tender emotions, mapped (the carte de Tendre) by Mlle de Scudéry in her novel, Clélie (1654–1670).
14 The rather forced joke on the name Cambremer conceives of it as being made up of abbreviations of Cambronne and merde (shit). Le mot de Cambronne (said to have been flung defiantly at the enemy by a general at Waterloo) is the traditional euphemism for merde.
15 Pneumatique or petit bleu: see note above.
Synopsis
COMBRAY
Awakenings. Bedrooms of the past, at Combray, at Tansonville, at Balbec. Habit.
Bedtime at Combray. The magic lantern; Geneviève de Brabant. Family evenings. The little closet smelling of orris-root. The good-night kiss. Visits from Swann; his father; his unsuspected social life. “Our social personality is a creation of other people’s thoughts”. Mme de Villeparisis’s house in Paris; “the tailor and his daughter”. Aunts Céline and Flora. Françoise’s code. Swann and I. My upbringing: “principles” of my grandmother and my mother; arbitrary behaviour of my father. My grandmother’s presents; her ideas about books. A reading of George Sand.
Resurrection of Combray through involuntary memory. The madeleine dipped in a cup of tea.
Combray. Aunt Léonie’s two rooms; her lime-tea. Françoise. The church. M. Legrandin. Eulalie. Sunday lunches. Uncle Adolphe’s sanctum. Love of the theatre: titles on posters. Meeting with “the lady in pink”. My family quarrel with Uncle Adolphe. The kitchen-maid: Giotto’s “Charity”. Reading in the garden. The gardener’s daughter and the passing cavalry. Bloch and Bergotte. Bloch and my family. Reading Bergotte. Swann’s friendship with Bergotte. Berma. Swann’s mannerisms of speech and attitudes of mind. Prestige of Mlle Swann as a friend of Bergotte’s. The Curé’s visits to Aunt Léonie. Eulalie and Françoise. The kitchen-maid’s confinement. Aunt Léonie’s nightmare. Saturday lunches. The hawthorns on the altar in Combray church. M. Vinteuil. His “boyish”-looking daughter. Walks round Combray by moonlight. Aunt Léonie and Louis XIV. Strange behaviour of M. Legrandin. Plan for a holiday at Balbec. Swann’s (or the Méséglise) way and the Guermantes way.
Swann’s Way. View over the plain. The lilacs of Tansonville. The hawthorn lane. Apparition of Gilberte. The lady in white and the man in white “ducks” (Mme Swann and M. de Charlus). Dawn of love for Gilberte: glamour of the name “Swann”. Farewell to the hawthorns. Mlle Vinteuil’s frien
d comes to Montjouvain. M. Vinteuil’s sorrow. The rain. The porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, Françoise and Théodore. Death of Aunt Léonie; Françoise’s wild grief. Exultation in the solitude of autumn. Disharmony between our feelings and their habitual expression. “The same emotions do not spring up simultaneously in everyone”. Stirrings of desire. The little closet smelling of orris-root. Scene of sadism at Montjouvain.
The Guermantes Way. River landscape: the Vivonne; the water-lilies. The Guermantes; Geneviève de Brabant “the ancestress of the Guermantes family”. Daydreams and discouragement of a future writer. The Duchesse de Guermantes in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad. The secrets hidden behind shapes, scents and colours. The steeples of Martinville; first joyful experience of literary creation. Transition from joy to sadness. Does reality take shape in the memory alone?.
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