In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  And then I returned to the hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those masterpieces which, one imagines, one will be better able to “take in” when one has looked away for a moment at something else; but in vain did I make a screen with my hands, the better to concentrate upon the flowers, the feeling they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free itself, to float across and become one with them. They themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing. And then, inspiring me with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite painter quite different from those we already know, or, better still, when we are shown a painting of which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch, or when a piece of music which we have heard only on the piano appears to us later clothed in all the colours of the orchestra, my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the Tansonville hedge, said to me: “You’re fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink one—isn’t it lovely?”

  And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose blossom was pink, and lovelier even than the white. It, too, was in holiday attire—for one of those days which are the only true holidays, the holy days of religion, because they are not assigned by some arbitrary caprice, as secular holidays are, to days which are not specially ordained for them, which have nothing about them that is essentially festal—but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them “in colour,” and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of Combray, if one was to judge by the scale of prices at the “stores” in the Square, or at Camus’s, where the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. For my own part, I set a higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed strawberries. And these flowers had chosen precisely one of those colours of some edible and delicious thing, or of some fond embellishment of a costume for a major feast, which, inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of children, and for that reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other tints, even after the child’s mind has realised that they offer no gratification to the appetite and have not been selected by the dressmaker. And indeed I had felt at once, as I had felt with the white blossom, but with even greater wonderment, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human fabrication, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it, with the simplicity of a woman from a village shop labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some procession, by overloading the bush with these little rosettes, almost too ravishing in colour, this rustic pompadour. High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender shafts rose in a forest from the altar on major feast-days, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a bowl of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the thorn-bush which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could do so in pink alone. Embedded in the hedge, but as different from it as a young girl in festal attire among a crowd of dowdy women in everyday clothes who are staying at home, all ready for the “Month of Mary” of which it seemed already to form a part, it glowed there, smiling in its fresh pink garments, deliciously demure and Catholic.

  The hedge afforded a glimpse, inside the park, of an alley bordered with jasmine, pansies, and verbenas, among which the stocks held open their fresh plump purses, of a pink as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish leather, while a long green hose, coiling across the gravel, sent up from its sprinkler a vertical and prismatic fan of multicoloured droplets. Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when we are faced with a vision that appeals not to our eyes only but requires a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being. A little girl with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a spade in her hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles. Her black eyes gleamed, and since I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I had not, as they say, enough “power of observation” to isolate the notion of their colour, for a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps if her eyes had not been quite so black—which was what struck one most forcibly on first seeing her—I should not have been, as I was, so especially enamoured of their imagined blue.

  I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but at whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, a gaze eager to reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the body; then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and my father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her by telling me to run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously imploring look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to see, to know me. She cast a glance forwards and sideways, so as to take stock of my grandfather and my father, and doubtless the impression she formed was that we were all ridiculous people, for she turned away with an indifferent and disdainful air, and stood sideways so as to spare her face the indignity of remaining within their field of vision; and while they, continuing to walk on without noticing her, overtook and passed me, she went on staring out of the corner of her eye in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to see me, but with a fixity and a half-hidden smile which I could only interpret, from the notions I had been vouchsafed of good breeding, as a mark of infinite contempt; and her hand, at the same time, sketched in the air an indelicate gesture, for which, when it was addressed in public to a person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which I carried in my mind supplied only one meaning, namely, a deliberate insult.

  “Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?” called out in a piercing tone of authority a lady in white whom I had not seen until that moment, while, a little way beyond her, a gentleman in a suit of linen “ducks,” whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head. The little girl’s smile abruptly faded, and, seizing her spade, she made off without turning to look again in my direction, with an air of docility, inscrutable and sly.

  Thus was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me like a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover the girl that its syllables had just endowed with an identity, whereas the moment before she had been merely an uncertain image. So it came to me, uttered across the heads of the stocks and jasmines, pungent and cool as the drops which fell from the green watering-pipe; impregnating and irradiating the zone of pure air through which it had passed—and which it set apart and isolated—with the mystery of the life of her whom its syllables designated to the happy beings who lived and walked and travelled in her company; unfolding beneath the arch of the pink hawthorn, at the height of my shoulder, the quintessence of their familiarity—so exquisitely painful to myself—with her and with the unknown world of her existence into which I should never penetrate.

  For a moment (as we moved away and my grandfather murmured: “Poor Swann, what a life they are leading him—sending him away so that she can be alone with her Charlus—for it was he, I recognised him at once! And the child, too; at her age, to be mixed up in all that!”) the impression left on me by the despotic tone in which Gilberte’s mother had spoken to her without her answering back, by exhibiting her to me as being
obliged to obey someone else, as not being superior to the whole world, calmed my anguish somewhat, revived some hope in me, and cooled the ardour of my love. But very soon that love surged up again in me like a reaction by which my humiliated heart sought to rise to Gilberte’s level or to bring her down to its own. I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. I thought her so beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, “I think you’re hideous, grotesque; how I loathe you!” But I walked away, carrying with me, then and for ever afterwards, as the first illustration of a type of happiness rendered inaccessible to a little boy of my kind by certain laws of nature which it was impossible to transgress, the picture of a little girl with reddish hair and a freckled skin, who held a spade in her hand and smiled as she directed towards me a long, sly, expressionless stare. And already the charm with which her name, like a whiff of incense, had imbued that archway in the pink hawthorn through which she and I had together heard its sound, was beginning to impregnate, to overlay, to perfume everything with which it had any association: her grandparents, whom my own had had the unutterable good fortune to know, the sublime profession of stockbroker, the melancholy neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysées, where she lived in Paris.

  “Léonie,” said my grandfather on our return, “I wish we had had you with us this afternoon. You would never have known Tansonville. If I had dared, I would have cut you a branch of that pink hawthorn you used to like so much.” And so my grandfather told my aunt about our walk, either to divert her, or because he had not yet given up hope of persuading her to rise from her bed and to go out of doors. For in earlier days she had been very fond of Tansonville, and moreover Swann’s visits had been the last that she had continued to receive, at a time when she had already closed her doors to all the world. And just as, when he now called to inquire after her (she was the only person in our household whom he still asked to see), she would send down to say that she was tired at the moment and resting, but that she would be happy to see him another time, so, this evening, she said to my grandfather, “Yes, some day when the weather is fine I shall go for a drive as far as the gate of the park.” And in saying this she was quite sincere. She would have liked to see Swann and Tansonville again; but the mere wish to do so sufficed for all that remained of her strength, which its fulfilment would have more than exhausted. Sometimes a spell of fine weather made her a little more energetic, and she would get up and dress; but before she had reached the outer room she would be tired again, and would insist on returning to her bed. The process which had begun in her—and in her a little earlier only than it must come to all of us—was the great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world. My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would never see Swann again, that she would never leave the house again, but this ultimate reclusion seemed to be made bearable to her by the very factor which, to our minds, ought to have made it more painful; namely, that this reclusion was forced upon her by the gradual diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily and which, by making every action, every movement exhausting if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed and restoring charm of repose.

  My aunt did not go to see the pink hawthorn in the hedge, but at all hours of the day I would ask the rest of my family whether she was not going to do so, whether she used not, at one time, to go often to Tansonville, trying to make them speak of Mlle Swann’s parents and grandparents, who appeared to me to be as great and glorious as gods. The name Swann had for me become almost mythological, and when I talked with my family I would grow sick with longing to hear them utter it; I dared not pronounce it myself, but I would draw them into the discussion of matters which led naturally to Gilberte and her family, in which she was involved, in speaking of which I would feel myself not too remotely exiled from her; and I would suddenly force my father (by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather’s appointment had been in our family before his day, or that the hedge with the pink hawthorn which my aunt Léonie wished to visit was on common land) to correct my assertions, to say, as though in opposition to me and of his own accord: “No, no, that appointment belonged to Swann’s father, that hedge is part of Swann’s park.” And then I would be obliged to catch my breath, so suffocating was the pressure, upon that part of me where it was for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment when I heard it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other, because it was heavy with the weight of all the occasions on which I had secretly uttered it in my mind. It caused me a pleasure which I was ashamed to have dared to demand from my parents, for so great was this pleasure that to have procured it for me must have caused them a good deal of effort, and with no recompense, since it was no pleasure for them. And so I would turn the conversation, out of tact, and out of scruple too. All the singular seductions with which I had invested the name Swann came back to me as soon as they uttered it. And then it seemed to me suddenly that my parents could not fail to experience the same emotions, that they must find themselves sharing my point of view, that they perceived in their turn, that they condoned, that they even embraced my visionary longings, and I was as wretched as though I had ravished and corrupted the innocence of their hearts.

  That year my family fixed the day of our return to Paris rather earlier than usual. On the morning of our departure I had had my hair curled, to be ready to face the photographer, had had a new hat carefully set upon my head, and had been buttoned into a velvet jacket; a little later my mother, after searching everywhere for me, found me standing in tears on the steep little path near Tansonville, bidding farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches in my arms and, like a princess in a tragedy oppressed by the weight of these vain ornaments, with no gratitude towards the importunate hand which, in curling all those ringlets, had been at pains to arrange my hair upon my forehead,7 trampling underfoot the curl-papers which I had torn from my head, and my new hat with them. My mother was not at all moved by my tears, but she could not suppress a cry at the sight of my battered headgear and my ruined jacket. I did not, however, hear her. “Oh, my poor little hawthorns,” I was assuring them through my sobs, “it isn’t you who want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you. You, you’ve never done me any harm. So I shall always love you.” And, drying my eyes, I promised them that, when I grew up, I would never copy the foolish example of other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring days, instead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would set off for the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in bloom.

  Once in the fields, we never left them again during the rest of our Méséglise walk. They were perpetually traversed, as though by an invisible wanderer, by the wind which was to me the tutelary genius of Combray. Every year, on the day of our arrival, in order to feel that I really was at Combray, I would climb the hill to greet it as it swept through the furrows and swept me along in its wake. One always had the wind for companion when one went the Méséglise way, on that gently undulating plain where for mile after mile it met no rising ground. I knew that Mlle Swann used often to go and spend a few days at Laon; for all that it was many miles away, the distance was counterbalanced by the absence of any intervening obstacle, and when, on hot afternoons, I saw a breath of wind emerge from the furthest horizon, bowing the heads of the corn in distant fields, pouring like a flood over all that vast expanse, and finally come to rest, warm and rustling, among the clover and sainfoin at my feet, that plain which was common to us both seemed then to draw us together, to u
nite us; I would imagine that the same breath of wind had passed close to her, that it was some message from her that it was whispering to me, without my being able to understand it, and I would kiss it as it passed. On my left was a village called Champieu (Campus Pagani, according to the Curé). On my right I could see across the cornfields the two chiselled rustic spires of Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, chequered, honeycombed, yellowing and friable as two ears of wheat.