Swann's Way. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. - HTML preview

Part 4

Place-Names: The Name

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Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind

during my long nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed

more utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with the

motes of an atmosphere granular, pollenous, edible and instinct with

piety, than my room in the Grand Hôtel de la Plage, at Balbec, the walls

of which, washed with ripolin, contained, like the polished sides of a

basin in which the water glows with a blue, lurking fire, a finer air, pure,

azure-tinted, saline. The Bavarian upholsterer who had been entrusted

with the furnishing of this hotel had varied his scheme of decoration in

different rooms, and in that which I found myself occupying had set

against the walls, on three sides of it, a series of low book-cases with

glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by a law of nature

which he had, perhaps, forgotten to take into account, was reflected this

or that section of the ever-changing view of the sea, so that the walls

were lined with a frieze of seascapes, interrupted only by the polished

mahogany of the actual shelves. And so effective was this that the whole

room had the appearance of one of those model bedrooms which you see

nowadays in Housing Exhibitions, decorated with works of art which

are calculated by their designer to refresh the eyes of whoever may ulti-

mately have to sleep in the rooms, the subjects being kept in some degree

of harmony with the locality and surroundings of the houses for which

the rooms are planned.

And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real

Balbec than that other Balbec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy

days, when the wind was so strong that Françoise, as she took me to the

Champs-Elysées, would warn me not to walk too near the side of the

street, or I might have my head knocked off by a falling slate, and would

recount to me, with many lamentations, the terrible disasters and ship-

wrecks that were reported in the newspaper. I longed for nothing more

than to behold a storm at sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a mo-

mentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there were for me

no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be not artificially com-

posed for my entertainment, but necessary and unalterable,—the beauty

of landscapes or of great works of art. I was not curious, I did not thirst

to know anything save what I believed to be more genuine than myself,

what had for me the supreme merit of shewing me a fragment of the

mind of a great genius, or of the force or the grace of nature as she ap-

peared when left entirely to herself, without human interference. Just as

the lovely sound of her voice, reproduced, all by itself, upon the phono-

graph, could never console a man for the loss of his mother, so a

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mechanical imitation of a storm would have left me as cold as did the il-

luminated fountains at the Exhibition. I required also, if the storm was to

be absolutely genuine, that the shore from which I watched it should be

a natural shore, not an embankment recently constructed by a municipal-

ity. Besides, nature, by all the feelings that she aroused in me, seemed to

me the most opposite thing in the world to the mechanical inventions of

mankind The less she bore their imprint, the more room she offered for

the expansion of my heart. And, as it happened, I had preserved the

name of Balbec, which Legrandin had cited to us, as that of a sea-side

place in the very midst of "that funereal coast, famed for the number of

its wrecks, swathed, for six months in the year, in a shroud of fog and

flying foam from the waves.

"You feel, there, below your feet still," he had told me, "far more even than at Finistère (and even though hotels are now being superimposed

upon it, without power, however, to modify that oldest bone in the

earth's skeleton) you feel there that you are actually at the land's end of

France, of Europe, of the Old World. And it is the ultimate encampment

of the fishermen, precisely like the fishermen who have lived since the

world's beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of the sea-fogs and

shadows of the night." One day when, at Combray, I had spoken of this

coast, this Balbec, before M. Swann, hoping to learn from him whether it

was the best point to select for seeing the most violent storms, he had

replied: "I should think I did know Balbec! The church at Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still half romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman gothic, and so

exceptional that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspira-

tion." And that region, which, until then, had seemed to me to be nothing

else than a part of immemorial nature, that had remained contemporan-

eous with the great phenomena of geology—and as remote from human

history as the Ocean itself, or the Great Bear, with its wild race of fisher-

men for whom, no more than for their whales, had there been any

Middle Ages—it had been a great joy to me to see it suddenly take its

place in the order of the centuries, with a stored consciousness of the

romanesque epoch, and to know that the gothic trefoil had come to di-

versify those wild rocks also, at the appointed hour, like those frail but

hardy plants which, in the Polar regions, when the spring returns, scatter

their stars about the eternal snows. And if gothic art brought to those

places and people a classification which, otherwise, they lacked, they too

conferred one upon it in return. I tried to form a picture in my mind of

how those fishermen had lived, the timid and unsuspected essay

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towards social intercourse which they had attempted there, clustered

upon a promontory of the shores of Hell, at the foot of the cliffs of death;

and gothic art seemed to me a more living thing now that, detaching it

from the towns in which, until then, I had always imagined it, I could see

how, in a particular instance, upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken

root and grown until it flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see re-

productions of the most famous of the statues at Balbec,—shaggy, blunt-

faced Apostles, the Virgin from the porch,—and I could scarcely breathe

for joy at the thought that I might myself, one day, see them take a solid

form against their eternal background of salt fog. Thereafter, on dear,

tempestuous February nights, the wind— breathing into my heart,

which it shook no less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the

project of a visit to Balbec—blended in me the desire for gothic architec-

ture with that for a storm upon the sea.

I should have liked to take, the very next day, the good, the generous

train at one twenty-two, of which never without a palpitating heart

could I read, in the railway company's bills or in advertisements of circu-

lar tours, the hour of departure: it seemed to me to cut, at a precise point

in every afternoon, a most fascinating groove, a mysterious mark, from

which the diverted hours still led one on, of course, towards evening,

towards to-morrow morning, but to an evening and morning which one

would behold, not in Paris but in one of those towns through which the

train passed and among which it allowed one to choose; for it stopped at

Bayeux, at Coutances, at Vitré, at Questambert, at Pontorson, at Balbec,

at Lannion, at Lamballe, at Benodet, at Pont-Aven, at Quimperle, and

progressed magnificently surcharged with names which it offered me, so

that, among them all, I did not know which to choose, so impossible was

it to sacrifice any. But even without waiting for the train next day, I

could, by rising and dressing myself with all speed, leave Paris that very

evening, should my parents permit, and arrive at Balbec as dawn spread

westward over the raging sea, from whose driven foam I would seek

shelter in that church in the Persian manner. But at the approach of the

Easter holidays, when my parents bad promised to let me spend them,

for once, in the North of Italy, lo! in place of those dreams of tempests,

by which I had been entirely possessed, not wishing to see anything but

waves dashing in from all sides, mounting always higher, upon the wild-

est of coasts, beside churches as rugged and precipitous as cliffs, in

whose towers the sea-birds would be wailing; suddenly, effacing them,

taking away all their charm, excluding them because they were its op-

posite and could only have weakened its effect, was substituted in me

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the converse dream of the most variegated of springs, not the spring of

Combray, still pricking with all the needle-points of the winter's frost,

but that which already covered with lilies and anemones the meadows of

Fiesole, and gave Florence a dazzling golden background, like those in

Fra Angelico's pictures. From that moment, only sunlight, perfumes, col-

ours, seemed to me to have any value; for this alternation of images had

effected a change of front in my desire, and—as abrupt as those that oc-

cur sometimes in music,—a complete change of tone in my sensibility.

Thus it came about that a mere atmospheric variation would be sufficient

to provoke in me that modulation, without there being any need for me

to await the return of a season. For often we find a day, in one, that has

strayed from another season, and makes us live in that other, summons

at once into our presence and makes us long for its peculiar pleasures,

and interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by insert-

ing, out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf, torn from another

chapter, in the interpolated calendar of Happiness. But soon it happened

that, like those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health

can derive but an accidental and all too modest benefit, until the day

when science takes control of them, and, producing them at will, places

in our hands the power to order their appearance, withdrawn from the

tutelage and independent of the consent of chance; similarly the produc-

tion of these dreams of the Atlantic and of Italy ceased to depend en-

tirely upon the changes of the seasons and of the weather. I need only, to

make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice, Florence,

within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the longing in-

spired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring, to come

in a book upon the name of Balbec sufficed to awaken in me the desire

for storms at sea and for the Norman gothic; even on a stormy day the

name of Florence or of Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for

lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore.

But if their names thus permanently absorbed the image that I had

formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subor-

dinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in con-

sequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more

different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in

reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination,

aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out

upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I formed of certain points

on the earth's surface, making them more special, and in consequence

more real. I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, historic

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buildings, as pictures more or less attractive, cut out here and there of a

substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as

on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which my

soul was athirst, by the knowledge of which it would benefit. How much

more individual still was the character that they assumed from being

designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper

names such as people have. Words present to us little pictures of things,

lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls of school-

rooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's

bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things chosen as typical of everything else of

the same sort. But names present to us—of persons and of towns which

they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons—a con-

fused picture, which draws from the names, from the brightness or dark-

ness of their sound, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one

of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the

limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction, or by a

whim on the designer's part, are blue or red not only the sky and the sea,

but the ships and the church and the people in the streets. The name of

Parma, one of the towns that I most longed to visit, after reading the

Chartreuse, seeming to me compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma, in which I should be

lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a

dwelling that was compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, and that bore

no relation to the houses in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine

it only by the aid of that heavy syllable of the name of Parma, in which

no breath of air stirred, and of all that I had made it assume of Stendhali-

an sweetness and the reflected hue of violets. And when I thought of

Florence, it was of a town miraculously embalmed, and flower-like, since

it was called the City of the Lilies, and its Cathedral, Our Lady of the

Flower. As for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on an old

piece of Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from

which it was fashioned, one sees depicted still the representation of some

long-abolished custom, of some feudal right, of the former condition of

some place, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language, which had

shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables and which I never

doubted that I should find spoken there at once, even by the inn-keeper

who would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival, taking me down

to watch the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church; to whom I lent

the aspect, disputatious, solemn and mediaeval, of some character in one

of the old romances.

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Had my health definitely improved, had my parents allowed me, if

not actually to go down to stay at Balbec, at least to take, just once, so as

to become acquainted with the architecture and landscapes of Nor-

mandy or of Brittany, that one twenty-two train into which I had so often

clambered in imagination, I should have preferred to stop, and to alight

from it, at the most beautiful of its towns; but in vain might I compare

and contrast them; how was one to choose, any more than between indi-

vidual people, who are not interchangeable, between Bayeux, so lofty in

its noble coronet of rusty lace, whose highest point caught the light of the

old gold of its second syllable; Vitré, whose acute accent barred its an-

cient glass with wooden lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness

ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman

Cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with

a tower of butter; Lannion with the rumble and buzz, in the silence of its

village street, of the fly on the wheel of the coach; Questambert, Pontor-

son, ridiculously silly and simple, white feathers and yellow beaks

strewn along the road to those well-watered and poetic spots; Benodet, a

name scarcely moored that seemed to be striving to draw the river down

into the tangle of its seaweeds; Pont-Aven, the snowy, rosy flight of the

wing of a lightly poised coif, tremulously reflected in the greenish waters

of a canal; Quimperlé, more firmly attached, this, and since the Middle

Ages, among the rivulets with which it babbled, threading their pearls

upon a grey background, like the pattern made, through the cobwebs

upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into blunt points of tar-

nished silver?

These images were false for another reason also; namely, that they

were necessarily much simplified; doubtless the object to which my ima-

gination aspired, which my senses took in but incompletely and without

any immediate pleasure, I had committed to the safe custody of names;

doubtless because I had accumulated there a store of dreams, those

names now magnetised my desires; but names themselves are not very

comprehensive; the most that I could do was to include in each of them

two or three of the principal curiosities of the town, which would lie

there side by side, without interval or partition; in the name of Balbec, as

in the magnifying glasses set in those penholders which one buys at sea-

side places, I could distinguish waves surging round a church built in

the Persian manner. Perhaps, indeed, the enforced simplicity of these im-

ages was one of the reasons for the hold that they had over me. When

my father had decided, one year, that we should go for the Easter holi-

days to Florence and Venice, not finding room to introduce into the

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name of Florence the elements that ordinarily constitute a town, I was

obliged to let a supernatural city emerge from the impregnation by cer-

tain vernal scenes of what I supposed to be, in its essentials, the genius of

Giotto. All the more—and because one cannot make a name extend

much further in time than in space—like some of Giotto's paintings

themselves which shew us at two separate moments the same person en-

gaged in different actions, here lying on his bed, there just about to

mount his horse, the name of Florence was divided into two compart-

ments. In one, beneath an architectural dais, I gazed upon a fresco over

which was partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight, dusty, aslant,

and gradually spreading; in the other (for, since I thought of names not

as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and enveloping substance into

which I was about to plunge, the life not yet lived, the life intact and

pure which I enclosed in them, gave to the most material pleasures, to

the simplest scenes, the same attraction that they have in the works of

the Primitives), I moved swiftly—so as to arrive, as soon as might be, at

the table that was spread for me, with fruit and a flask of Chianti—across

a Ponte Vecchio heaped with jonquils, narcissi and anemones. That (for

all that I was still in Paris) was what I saw, and not what was actually

round about me. Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view,

the countries for which we long occupy, at any given moment, a far lar-

ger place in our true life than the country in which we may happen to be.

Doubtless, if, at that time, I had paid more attention to what was in my

mind when I pronounced the words "going to Florence, to Parma, to

Pisa, to Venice," I should have realised that what I saw was in no sense a town, but something as different from anything that I knew, something

as delicious as might be for a human race whose whole existence had

passed in a series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel, a

morning in spring. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all

my nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those

which had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it

by an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say, who

saw nothing), as in an opera a fresh melody introduces a novel atmo-

sphere which one could never have suspected if one had done no more

than read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre,

counting only the minutes as they passed. And besides, even from the

point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not all equal. To

reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was,

make use, like motor-cars, of different 'speeds.' There are mountainous,

uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and

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days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt, singing as

one goes. During this month—in which I went laboriously over, as over

a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of Florence, Venice,

Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept

something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for another

person—I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality in-

dependent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope

as could have been cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith,

on the eve of his entry into Paradise. Moreover, without my paying any

heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at and to

touch with my organs of sense what had been elaborated by the spell of

my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all—though all the more

tempting to them, in consequence, more different from anything that

they knew—it was that which recalled to me the reality of these visions,

which inflamed my desire all the more by seeming to hint a promise that

my desire should be satisfied. And for all that the motive force of my ex-

altation was a longing for aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books min-

istered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again than

the guide-books, the railway time-tables. What moved me was the

thought that this Florence which I could see, so near and yet inaccessible,

in my imagination, if the tract which separated it from me, in myself,

was not one that I might cross, could yet be reached by a circuit, by a di-

gression, were I to take the plain, terrestrial path. When I repeated to

myself, giving thus a special value to what I was going to see, that

Venice was the "School of Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most com-

plete museum of the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages," I felt

happy indeed. As I was even more when, on one of my walks, as I

stepped out briskly on account of the weather, which, after several days

of a precocious spring, had relapsed into winter (like the weather that we

had invariably found awaiting us at Combray, in Holy Week),—seeing

upon the boulevards that the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial

atmosphere that soaked through them like a stream of water, were none

the less beginning, punctual guests, arrayed already for the party, and

admitting no discouragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen

lumps the irrepressible verdure whose steady growth the abortive power

of the cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining—I reflected

that already the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of

hyacinths and anemones, and that the spring sunshine was already ting-

ing the waves of the Grand Canal with so dusky an azure, with emeralds

so splendid that when they washed and were broken against the foot of

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one of Titian's paintings they could vie with it in the richness of their col-

ouring. I could no longer contain my joy when my father, in the intervals

of tapping the barometer and complaining of the cold, began to look out

which were the best trains, and when I understood that by making one's

way, after luncheon, into the coal-grimed laboratory, the wizard's cell

that undertook to contrive a complete transmutation of its surroundings,

one could awaken, next morning, in the city of marble and gold, in

which "the building of the wall was of jasper and the foundation of the

wall an emerald." So that it and the City of the Lilies were not just artificial scenes which I could set up at my pleasure in front of my imagina-

tion, but did actually exist at a certain distance from Paris which must in-

evitably be traversed if I wished to see them, at their appointed place on

the earth's surface, and at no other; in a word they were entirely real.

They became even more real to me when my father, by saying: "Well,

you can stay in Venice from the 20th to the 29th, and reach Florence on

Easter morning," made them both emerge, no longer only from the ab-

straction of Space, but from that imaginary Time in which we place not

one, merely, but several of our travels at once, which do not greatly tax

us since they are but possibilities,—that Time which reconstructs itself