Swann's Way

by Proust, Marcel

  But if these names absorbed forever the image I had of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subjecting its reappearance in me to their own laws; in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but also more different from what the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could be in reality, and, by increasing the arbitrary joys of my imagination, aggravated the future disappointment of my travels. They exalted the idea I was forming of certain places on the earth, by making them more particular, consequently more real. I did not at the time represent to myself cities, landscapes, monuments as more or less pleasant pictures, cut out here and there from the same material, but each of them as an unknown thing, different in essence from the others, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individuality still did they assume from being designated by names, names that were theirs alone, proper names like the names people have. Words present us with little pictures of things, clear and familiar, like those that are hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort. But names present a confused image of people—and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people—an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the color with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets. Because the name of Parma, one of the towns I had most wanted to visit ever since I had read La Chartreuse,6 seemed to me compact, smooth, mauve, and soft, if anyone mentioned a certain house in Parma in which I would be staying, he gave me the pleasure of thinking I would be living in a house that was smooth, compact, mauve, and soft, that bore no relation to the houses of any real town in Italy, since I had composed it in my imagination with the help only of that heavy syllable, Parme, in which no air circulates, and of all that I had made it absorb of Stendhalian softness and the tint of violets. And when I thought of Florence, it was of a town miraculously fragrant and like the petals of a flower, because it was called the City of Lilies and its cathedral Saint-Mary-of-the-Flowers. As for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on a piece of old Norman pottery that retains the color of the earth from which it was taken, one can still see depicted the representation of some outmoded custom, of some feudal right, of some locality in an earlier condition, of an abandoned habit of pronunciation which had formed its heteroclite syllables and which I did not doubt I would rediscover spoken there even by the innkeeper who would serve me coffee with milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch the furious sea in front of the church, and to whom I would ascribe the disputatious, solemn, and medieval aspect of a character from a fabliau.7

  If my health improved and my parents allowed me, if not to go stay in Balbec, at least to take just once, in order to acquaint myself with the architecture and landscapes of Normandy or Brittany, that one-twenty-two train which I had boarded so many times in my imagination, I would have wished by preference to stop in the most beautiful towns; but compare them as I might, how could I choose, any more than between individual people, who are not interchangeable, between Bayeux, so lofty in its noble red-tinged lace, its summit illuminated by the old gold of its last syllable; Vitré,8 whose acute accent barred its ancient glass with black wood lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness goes from eggshell yellow to pearl gray; Coutances, a Norman cathedral, which its final, fat, yellowing diphthong crowns with a tower of butter; Lannion with the sound, in its village silence, of the coach followed by the fly;9 Questambert, Pontorson, naive and ridiculous, white feathers and yellow beaks scattered along the road to those poetic river spots; Benodet, a name scarcely moored, which the river seems to want to carry away among its algae; Pont-Aven, a pink-and-white flight of the wing of a lightly poised coif reflected trembling in the greeny waters of a canal; Quimperlé, more firmly attached, ever since the Middle Ages, among the streams about which it babbles as they bead it with a pearly grisaille like that which is sketched, through the spiderwebs of a stained-glass window, by rays of sunlight which have turned into blunted points of burnished silver?

  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 for the hold that they had over me. When my father decided, one year, that we would go 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 in 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 been spent in the 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 theater 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 slightly nervous, as mine was, have available to them, like automobiles, different “speeds.” There are arduous mountainous days which one spends an infinite time climbing, and downward-sloping days which 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 daydream 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 although the motive for my exhilaration was a desire for artistic delights, the guidebooks sustained it even more than the books on aesthetics and, more than the guidebooks, the railway timetable. What moved me was the thought that if this Florence which I could see near but inaccessible in my imagination was separated from me, in myself, by a tract which I could not cross, I could reach it indirectly, by a detour, by taking the land route. Certainly when I repeated to myself, thus giving such a high 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,” 10 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 an atmosphere as icy and as liquid as water, were nonetheless beginning, punctual guests, already in formal dress, and not allowing themselves to be discouraged, to chisel out of their frozen masses the round shapes of the irresistible greenery whose steady growth the abortive power of the cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining—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 color. I could no longer contain my joy when my father, even as he consulted the barometer and deplored the cold, began to seek out which would be the best trains, and when I realized that by making one’s way, after lunch, into the coal-blackened laboratory, the magic chamber charged with working the complete transmutation of everything around it, one could wake the next morning in the city of marble and gold “bossed with jasper and paved with emeralds.”11 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 the twentieth of April until the twenty-ninth 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 and without too much emotion since they are only possibilities—that Time which re-creates 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 particular 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 toward 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 absorb themselves in it as they emerged from that ideal time in which they did not yet exist—those two Queen Cities the domes and towers of which I was soon going to be able, by the most moving kind of geometry, to inscribe 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 wave-splashed streets, reddened by reflections from Giorgione’s frescoes,12 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”13 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”;14 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 traveling and any cause of excitement.

  And also, alas, he forbade them absolutely to allow me to go to the theater 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 someone who would keep me from tiring myself out, and that person 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 would warm them, bring them to life, give them a personality, and I would want to find them again in reality; but in this public garden nothing formed a part of 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 neighboring 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 pacing 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 reddish 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.” The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the existence of the girl it designated in that it did not merely name her, as one speaks of someone who is absent, but addressed her directly; thus it passed close by me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the approach of its target;—transporting along with it, I felt, the knowledge, the notions concerning her 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 saw again or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily companionship, of the visits they paid to each other, of the whole of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible and all the more painful to me for being conversely so familiar and so malleable for that happy girl who brushed 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 released, by touching them so precisely, from several invisible points in the life of Mlle. Swann, from the evening that was to come, such as it might be, after dinner, at her house;—forming, in its celestial passage among the children and the nursemaids, a little cloud of precious color, like that which, billowing over a lovely garden by Poussin,15 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 blond shuttlecock player (who did not stop launching the shuttlecock and catching it again until a governess wearing a blue ostrich feather called her), a marvelous little band the color 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.