As I came away from the church I saw by the old bridge a cluster of
girls from the village who, probably because it was Sunday, were
standing about in their best clothes, rallying the young men who went
past. Not so well dressed as the others, but seeming to enjoy some
ascendancy over them—for she scarcely answered when they spoke to
her—with a more serious and a more determined air, there was a tall
one who, hoisted upon the parapet of the bridge with her feet hanging
down, was holding on her lap a small vessel full of fish which she had
presumably just been catching. She had a tanned complexion, gentle
eyes but with a look of contempt for her surroundings, a small nose,
delicately and attractively modelled. My eyes rested upon her skin;
and my lips, had the need arisen, might have believed that they had
followed my eyes. But it was not only to her body that I should have
liked to attain, there was also her person, which abode within her,
and with which there is but one form of contact, namely to attract its
attention, but one sort of penetration, to awaken an idea in it.
And this inner self of the charming fisher–girl seemed to be still
closed to me, I was doubtful whether I had entered it, even after I
had seen my own image furtively reflect itself in the twin mirrors of
her gaze, following an index of refraction that was as unknown to me
as if I had been placed in the field of vision of a deer. But just as
it would not have sufficed that my lips should find pleasure in hers
without giving pleasure to them also, so I should have wished that the
idea of me which was to enter this creature, was to fasten itself in
her, should attract to me not merely her attention but her admiration,
her desire, and should compel her to keep me in her memory until the
day when I should be able to meet her again. Meanwhile I could see,
within a stone's–throw, the square in which Mme. de Villeparisis's
carriage must be waiting for me. I had not a moment to lose; and
already I could feel that the girls were beginning to laugh at the
sight of me thus held suspended before them. I had a five–franc piece
in my pocket. I drew it out, and, before explaining to the girl the
errand on which I proposed to send her, so as to have a better chance
of her listening to me, I held the coin for a moment before her eyes.
"Since you seem to belong to the place," I said to her, "I wonder if
you would be so good as to take a message for me. I want you to go to
a pastry–cook's—which is apparently in a square, but I don't know
where that is—where there is a carriage waiting for me. One moment!
To make quite sure, will you ask if the carriage belongs to the
Marquise de Villeparisis? But you can't miss it; it's a carriage and
pair."
That was what I wished her to know, so that she should regard me as
someone of importance. But when I had uttered the words 'Marquise' and
'carriage and pair,' suddenly I had a great sense of calm. I felt that
the fisher–girl would remember me, and I felt vanishing, with my fear
of not being able to meet her again, part also of my desire to meet
her. It seemed to me that I had succeeded in touching her person with
invisible lips, and that I had pleased her. And this assault and
capture of her mind, this immaterial possession had taken from her
part of her mystery, just as physical possession does.
We came down towards Hudimesnil; suddenly I was overwhelmed with that
profound happiness which I had not often felt since Combray; happiness
analogous to that which had been given me by—among other things—the
steeples of Martinville. But this time it remained incomplete. I had
just seen, standing a little way back from the steep ridge over which
we were passing, three trees, probably marking the entrance to a shady
avenue, which made a pattern at which I was looking now not for the
first time; I could not succeed in reconstructing the place from which
they had been, as it were, detached, but I felt that it had been
familiar to me once; so that my mind having wavered between some
distant year and the present moment, Balbec and its surroundings began
to dissolve and I asked myself whether the whole of this drive were
not a make–believe, Balbec a place to which I had never gone save in
imagination, Mme. de Villeparisis a character in a story and the three
old trees the reality which one recaptures on raising one's eyes from
the book which one has been reading and which describes an environment
into which one has come to believe that one has been bodily
transported.
I looked at the three trees; I could see them plainly, but my mind
felt that they were concealing something which it had not grasped, as
when things are placed out of our reach, so that our fingers,
stretched out at arm's–length, can only touch for a moment their outer
surface, and can take hold of nothing. Then we rest for a little while
before thrusting out our arm with refreshed vigour, and trying to
reach an inch or two farther. But if my mind was thus to collect
itself, to gather strength, I should have to be alone. What would I
not have given to be able to escape as I used to do on those walks
along the Guermantes way, when I detached myself from my parents! It
seemed indeed that I ought to do so now. I recognised that kind of
pleasure which requires, it is true, a certain effort on the part of
the mind, but in comparison with which the attractions of the inertia
which inclines us to renounce that pleasure seem very slight. That
pleasure, the object of which I could but dimly feel, that pleasure
which I must create for myself, I experienced only on rare occasions,
but on each of these it seemed to me that the things which had
happened in the interval were of but scant importance, and that in
attaching myself to the reality of that pleasure alone I could at
length begin to lead a new life. I laid my hand for a moment across
my eyes, so as to be able to shut them without Mme. de Villeparisis's
noticing. I sat there, thinking of nothing, then with my thoughts
collected, compressed and strengthened I sprang farther forward in the
direction of the trees, or rather in that inverse direction at the end
of which I could see them growing within myself. I felt again behind
them the same object, known to me and yet vague, which I could not
bring nearer. And yet all three of them, as the carriage moved on, I
could see coming towards me. Where had I looked at them before? There
was no place near Combray where an avenue opened off the road like
that. The site which they recalled to me, there was no room for it
either in the scenery of the place in Germany where I had gone one
year with my grandmother to take the waters. Was I to suppose, then,
that they came from years already so remote in my life that the
landscape which accompanied them had been entirely obliterated from my
memory, and that, like the pages which, with sudden emotion, we
recognise in a book which we imagined that we had never read, they
surged up by themselves out of the forgotten chapter of my earliest
infancy? Were they not rather to be numbered among those dream
landscapes, always the same, at least for me in whom their unfamiliar
aspect was but the objectivation in my dreams of the effort that I had
been making while awake either to penetrate the mystery of a place
beneath the outward appearance of which I was dimly conscious of there
being something more, as had so often happened to me on the Guermantes
way, or to succeed in bringing mystery back to a place which I had
longed to know and which, from the day on which I had come to know it,
had seemed to me to be wholly superficial, like Balbec? Or were they
but an image freshly extracted from a dream of the night before, but
already so worn, so altered that it seemed to me to come from
somewhere far more distant? Or had I indeed never seen them before;
did they conceal beneath their surface, like the trees, like the tufts
of grass that I had seen beside the Guermantes way, a meaning as
obscure, as hard to grasp as is a distant past, so that, whereas they
are pleading with me that I would master a new idea, I imagined that I
had to identify something in my memory? Or again were they concealing
no hidden thought, and was it simply my strained vision that made me
see them double in time as one occasionally sees things double in
space? I could not tell. And yet all the time they were coming towards
me; perhaps some fabulous apparition, a ring of witches or of norns
who would propound their oracles to me. I chose rather to believe that
they were phantoms of the past, dear companions of my childhood,
vanished friends who recalled our common memories. Like ghosts they
seemed to be appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back
to life. In their simple, passionate gesticulation I could discern the
helpless anguish of a beloved person who has lost the power of speech,
and feels that he will never be able to say to us what he wishes to
say and we can never guess. Presently, at a cross–roads, the carriage
left them. It was bearing me away from what alone I believed to be
true, what would have made me truly happy; it was like my life.
I watched the trees gradually withdraw, waving their despairing arms,
seeming to say to me: "What you fail to learn from us to–day, you will
never know. If you allow us to drop back into the hollow of this road
from which we sought to raise ourselves up to you, a whole part of
yourself which we were bringing to you will fall for ever into the
abyss." And indeed if, in the course of time, I did discover the kind
of pleasure and of disturbance which I had just been feeling once
again, and if one evening—too late, but then for all time—I fastened
myself to it, of those trees themselves I was never to know what they
had been trying to give me nor where else I had seen them. And when,
the road having forked and the carriage with it, I turned my back on
them and ceased to see them, with Mme. de Villeparisis asking me what
I was dreaming about, I was as wretched as though I had just lost a
friend, had died myself, had broken faith with the dead or had denied
my God.
It was time to be thinking of home. Mme. de Villeparisis, who had a
certain feeling for nature, colder than that of my grandmother but
capable of recognising, even outside museums and noblemen's houses,
the simple and majestic beauty of certain old and venerable things,
told her coachman to take us back by the old Balbec road, a road
little used but planted with old elm–trees which we thought quite
admirable.
Once we had got to know this road, for a change we would return—that
is, if we had not taken it on the outward journey—by another which
ran through the woods of Chantereine and Canteloup. The invisibility
of the numberless birds that took up one another's song close beside
us in the trees gave me the same sense of being at rest that one has
when one shuts one's eyes. Chained to my back–seat like Prometheus on
his rock I listened to my Oceanides. And when it so happened that I
caught a glimpse of one of those birds as it passed from one leaf to
another, there was so little apparent connexion between it and the
songs that I heard that I could not believe that I was beholding their
cause in that little body, fluttering, startled and unseeing.
This road was like many others of the same kind which are to be found
in France, climbing on a fairly steep gradient to its summit and then
gradually falling for the rest of the way. At the time, I found no
great attraction in it, I was only glad to be going home. But it
became for me later on a frequent source of joy by remaining in my
memory as a lodestone to which all the similar roads that I was to
take, on walks or drives or journeys, would at once attach themselves
without breach of continuity and would be able, thanks to it, to
communicate directly with my heart. For as soon as the carriage or the
motor–car turned into one of these roads that seemed to be merely the
continuation of the road along which I had driven with Mme. de
Villeparisis, the matter to which I found my consciousness directly
applying itself, as to the most recent event in my past, would be (all
the intervening years being quietly obliterated) the impressions that
I had had on those bright summer afternoons and evenings, driving
round Balbec, when the leaves smelt good, a mist rose from the ground,
and beyond the village close at hand one could see through the trees
the sun setting as though it had been merely some place farther along
the road, a forest place and distant, which we should not have time to
reach that evening. Harmonised with what I was feeling now in another
place, on a similar road, surrounded by all the accessory sensations
of breathing deep draughts of air, of curiosity, indolence, appetite,
lightness of heart which were common to them both, and excluding all
others, these impressions would be reinforced, would take on the
consistency of a particular type of pleasure, and almost of a setting
of life which, as it happened, I rarely had the luck to–come across,
but in which these awakened memories placed, amid the reality that my
senses could perceive, no small part of a reality suggested, dreamed,
unseizable, to give me, among those regions through which I was
passing, more than an aesthetic feeling, a transient but exalted
ambition to stay there and to live there always. How often since then,
simply because I could smell green leaves, has not being seated on a
back–seat opposite Mme. de Villeparisis, meeting the Princesse de
Luxembourg who waved a greeting to her from her own carriage, coming
back to dinner at the Grand Hotel appeared to me as one of those
indescribable happinesses which neither the present nor the future can
restore to us, which we may taste once only in a lifetime.
Often dusk would have fallen before we reached the hotel. Timidly I
would quote to Mme. de Villeparisis, pointing to the moon in the sky,
some memorable expression of Chateaubriand or Vigny or Victor Hugo:
'Shedding abroad that ancient secret of melancholy' or 'Weeping like
Diana by the brink of her streams' or 'The shadows nuptial, solemn and
august.'