balls of blossom, but in many places among their foliage where, only a
week before, they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam,
these were now spent and shrivelled and discoloured, a hollow scum,
dry and scentless. My grandfather pointed out to my father in what re-
spects the appearance of the place was still the same, and how far it had
altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann, on the day
of his wife's death; and he seized the opportunity to tell us, once again,
the story of that walk.
In front of us a path bordered with nasturtiums rose in the full glare of
the sun towards the house. But to our right the park stretched away into
the distance, on level ground. Overshadowed by the tall trees which
stood close around it, an 'ornamental water' had been constructed by
Swann's parents but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the
material upon which man has to work; certain spots will persist in re-
maining surrounded by the vassals of their own especial sovereignty,
and will raise their immemorial standards among all the 'laid-out'
scenery of a park, just as they would have done far from any human in-
terference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf them,
springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position, and super-
imposing itself upon the work of man's hands. And so it was that, at the
foot of the path which led down to this artificial lake, there might be
seen, in its two tiers woven of trailing forget-me-nots below and of peri-
winkle flowers above, the natural, delicate, blue garland which binds the
luminous, shadowed brows of water-nymphs; while the iris, its swords
sweeping every way in regal profusion, stretched out over agrimony and
water-growing king-cups the lilied sceptres, tattered glories of yellow
and purple, of the kingdom of the lake.
The absence of Mlle. Swann, which—since it preserved me from the
terrible risk of seeing her appear on one of the paths, and of being identi-
fied and scorned by this so privileged little girl who had Bergotte for a
friend and used to go with him to visit cathedrals—made the exploration
of Tansonville, now for the first time permitted me, a matter of indiffer-
ence to myself, seemed however to invest the property, in my
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grandfather's and father's eyes, with a fresh and transient charm, and
(like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering) to
make the day extraordinarily propitious for a walk in this direction; I
should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a mir-
acle, Mlle. Swann appear, with her father, so close to us that we should
not have time to escape, and should therefore be obliged to make her ac-
quaintance. And so, when I suddenly noticed a straw basket lying for-
gotten on the grass by the side of a line whose float was bobbing in the
water, I made a great effort to keep my father and grandfather looking in
another direction, away from this sign that she might, after all, be in res-
idence. Still, as Swann had told us that he ought not, really, to go away
just then, as he had some people staying in the house, the line might
equally belong to one of these guests. Not a footstep was to be heard on
any of the paths. Somewhere in one of the tall trees, making a stage in its
height, an invisible bird, desperately attempting to make the day seem
shorter, was exploring with a long, continuous note the solitude that
pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer,
so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility that, one would
have said, it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been
trying to make pass more quickly. The sunlight fell so implacably from a
fixed sky that one was naturally inclined to slip away out of the reach of
its attentions, and even the slumbering water, whose repose was per-
petually being invaded by the insects that swarmed above its surface,
while it dreamed, no doubt, of some imaginary maelstrom, intensified
the uneasiness which the sight of that floating cork had wrought in me,
by appearing to draw it at full speed across the silent reaches of a
mirrored firmament; now almost vertical, it seemed on the point of
plunging down out of sight, and I had begun to ask myself whether, set-
ting aside the longing and the terror that I had of making her acquaint-
ance, it was not actually my duty to warn Mlle. Swann that the fish was
biting—when I was obliged to run after my father and grandfather, who
were calling me, and were surprised that I had not followed them along
the little path, climbing up hill towards the open fields, into which they
had already turned. I found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance
of hawthorn-blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose
walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were
heaped upon their altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light
upon the ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a win-
dow; the scent that swept out over me from them was as rich, and as cir-
cumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-
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altar, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little
bunch of glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating
'nerves' in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in
church, framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the perpendicular
tracery of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white,
like strawberry-beds in spring. How simple and rustic, in comparison
with these, would seem the dog-roses which, in a few weeks' time,
would be climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed
in the smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be un-
done and scattered by the first breath of wind.
But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to
marshal! before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose in
order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb my-
self in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the
light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain in-
tervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation of the same
charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it
any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred
times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret. I turned
away from them for a moment so as to be able to return to them with re-
newed strength. My eyes followed up the slope which, outside the
hedge, rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed and been lost
by its fellows, or a few cornflowers that had fallen lazily behind, and
decorated the ground here and there with their flowers like the border of
a tapestry, in which may be seen at intervals hints of the rustic theme
which appears triumphant in the panel itself; infrequent still, spaced
apart as the scattered houses which warn us that we are approaching a
village, they betokened to me the vast expanse of waving corn beneath
the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting upon its
slender rigging and holding against the breeze its scarlet ensign, over the
buoy of rich black earth from which it sprang, made my heart beat as
does a wayfarer's when he perceives, upon some low-lying ground, an
old and broken boat which is being caulked and made seaworthy, and
cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of it, "The Sea!"
And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood before them as one
stands before those masterpieces of painting 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 shape my fingers into a frame, so as
to have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes; the sentiment which
they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing
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to free itself, to float across and become one with the flowers. They them-
selves 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 any of those that we already know, or, better still,
when some one has taken us and set us down in front of a picture of
which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch, or when a
piece of music which we have heard played over on the piano bursts out
again in our ears with all the splendour and fullness of an orchestra, my
grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the hedge of Tansonville,
said: "You are fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink one; isn't it
pretty?"
And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were 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 appointed by any capricious accident, as secular holidays
are appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for such ob-
servances, 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, to the 'plain,' 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. And 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 the colour of some edible and
delicious thing, or of some exquisite addition to one's costume for a great
festival, which colours, inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their
superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of chil-
dren, 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 of-
fer no gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the
dressmaker. And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before the white
blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was in no artificial man-
ner, by no device of human construction, that the festal intention of these
flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself who had spontan-
eously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from a village shop,
labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some procession) by
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burying the bush in 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 stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals, a
thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each dis-
closing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red
stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the
special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it bud-
ded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink
flowers alone. Taking its place in the hedge, but as different from the rest
as a young girl in holiday attire among a crowd of dowdy women in
everyday clothes, who are staying at home, equipped and ready for the
'Month of Mary,' of which it seemed already to form a part, it shone and
smiled in its cool, rosy garments, a Catholic bush indeed, and altogether
delightful.
The hedge allowed us 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 Span-
ish leather, while on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted green,
coiling across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over the flowers
whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan of
infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops. Suddenly I stood still, unable to
move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our
eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes pos-
session of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish hair,
who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her
hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pink-
ish freckles. Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know,
and indeed have never since learned how to reduce to its objective ele-
ments any strong impression, since I had not, as they say, enough 'power
of observation' to isolate the sense of their colour, for a long time after-
wards, 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 meeting her—I
should not have been, as I was, especially enamoured of their imagined
blue.
I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger
from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean
out, petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch,
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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 grand-
father and father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her,
by making me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously
appealing 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 father, and doubtless the impression she
formed of them was that we were all absurd people, for she turned away
with an indifferent and contemptuous air, withdrew herself 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, had overtaken
and passed me, she allowed her eyes to wander, over the space that lay
between us, in my direction, without any particular expression, without
appearing to have seen me, but with an intensity, a half-hidden smile
which I was unable to interpret, according to the instruction I had re-
ceived in the ways of good breeding, save as a mark of infinite disgust;
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 mo-
ment, 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 trowel, she made off without turning to look again hi
my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable and sly.
And so was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me
like a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover
her whom its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality,
whereas, a moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen.
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, which it set apart and isolated from all other air, with the mys-
tery of the life of her whom its syllables designated to the happy
creatures that lived and walked and travelled in her company; unfolding
through the arch of the pink hawthorn, which opened at the height of
my shoulder, the quintessence of their familiarity—so exquisitely painful
135
to myself—with her, and with all that unknown world of her existence,
into which I should never penetrate.
For a moment (while we moved away, and my grandfather mur-
mured: "Poor Swann, what a life they are leading him; fancy sending
him away so that she can be left alone with her Charlus—for that was
Charlus: 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 replying, by ex-
hibiting her to me as being obliged to yield obedience to some one else,
as not being indeed superior to the whole world, calmed my sufferings
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 was endeavouring to rise to Gilberte's level, or to
draw her down to its own. I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the
time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her
to keep some memory of me. I knew her to be 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 are hideous, grotesque; you are utterly disgusting!"
However, I walked away, carrying with me, then and for ever after-
wards, as the first illustration of a type of happiness rendered inaccess-
ible to a little boy of my kind by certain laws of nature which it was im-
possible to transgress, the picture of a little girl with reddish hair, and a
skin freckled with tiny pink marks, who held a trowel in her hand, and
smiled as she directed towards me a long and subtle and inexpressive
stare. And already the charm with which her name, like a cloud of in-
cense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn through which she
and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to conquer, to cover,
to embalm, to beautify everything with which it had any association: her
grandparents, whom my own had been so unspeakably fortunate as to
know, the glorious profession of a stockholder, even 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 had the courage I would have cut you a branch of that pink
hawthorn you used to like so much." And so my grandfather told her the
story of our walk, either just to amuse her, or perhaps because there was
still some hope that she might be stimulated to rise from her bed and to
go out of doors. For in earlier days she had been very fond of Tanson-
ville, and, moreover, Swann's visits had been the last that she had contin-
ued to receive, at a time when she had already closed her doors to all the
136
world. And just as, when he called, in these later days, to inquire for her
(and she was still the only person in our household whom he would ask
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 re-
mained of her strength, which its fulfilment would have more than ex-
hausted. Sometimes a spell of fine weather made her a little more ener-
getic, she would rise and put on her clothes; 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 earli-
er only than it must come to all of us—was the great and general renun-
ciation which old age makes in preparation for death, the chrysalis stage
of life, which may be observed wherever life has been unduly prolonged;
even in old lovers who have lived for one another with the utmost in-
tensity of passion, and in old friends bound by the closest ties of mental
sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make, the necessary jour-
ney, or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond,
and know well that they will communicate no more in this world. My
aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann
again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ulti-
mate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness
for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more un-
bearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the
gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to
measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring'
to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the
blessed, strengthening and refreshing 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 go, whether she used not, at one time, to go often to Tanson-
ville, trying to make them speak of Mile. Swann's parents and grandpar-
ents, who appeared to me to be as great and glorious as gods. The name,
which had for me become almost mythological, of Swann—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 a discus-
sion 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
137
remotely banished from her company; and I would suddenly force my
father (by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather's busi-
ness 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
ground) to correct my statements, to say, as though in opposition to me
and of his own accord: "No, no, the business belonged to Swann's father, that hedge is part of Swann's park." And then I would be obliged to pause for breath; so stifling 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 name, be-
cause it was burdened 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 it
that to have procured it for me must have involved them in an immens-
ity of effort, and with no recompense, since for them there was no pleas-
ure in the sound. And so I would prudently turn the conversation. And
by a scruple of conscience, also. All the singular seductions which I had
stored up in the sound of that word Swann, I found again as soon as it
was uttered. And then it occurred 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 con-
doned, 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 their 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 that steep little hillside close to Tansonville, bidding a long
farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches to my bosom,