The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (16 page)

While the kitchen-maid—who, all unawares, made the superior qualities of Françoise shine with added lustre, just as Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth—served coffee which (according to Mamma) was nothing more than hot water, and then carried up to our rooms hot water which was barely lukewarm, I would be lying stretched out on my bed with a book in my hand. My room quivered with the effort to defend its frail, transparent coolness against the afternoon sun behind its almost closed shutters through which, however, a gleam of daylight had contrived to insinuate
its golden wings, remaining motionless in a corner between glass and woodwork, like a butterfly poised upon a flower. It was hardly light enough for me to read, and my sense of the day’s brightness and splendour was derived solely from the blows struck down below, in the Rue de la Cure, by Camus (whom Françoise had assured that my aunt was not “resting” and that he might therefore make a noise) upon some dusty packing-cases which, reverberating in the sonorous atmosphere that accompanies hot weather, seemed to scatter broadcast a rain of blood-red stars; and also from the flies who performed for my benefit, in their tiny chorus, as it were the chamber music of summer, evoking it quite differently from a snatch of human music which, heard by chance in high summer, will remind you of it later, whereas the music of the flies is bound to the season by a more compelling tie—born of the sunny days, and not to be reborn but with them, containing something of their essential nature, it not merely calls up their image in our memory, but guarantees their return, their actual, circumjacent, immediately accessible presence.

This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity.

But my grandmother, even if the weather, after growing
too hot, had broken, and a storm, or just a shower, had burst over us, would come up and beg me to go outside. And as I did not wish to interrupt my reading, I would go on with it in the garden, under the chestnut-tree, in a hooded chair of wicker and canvas in the depths of which I used to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who might be coming to call upon the family.

And then my thoughts, too, formed a similar sort of recess, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even while I looked at what went on outside. When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation. On the sort of screen dappled with different states and impressions which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my being to the wholly external view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the bottom of the garden, what was my primary, my innermost impulse, the lever whose incessant movements controlled everything else, was my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever the book might be. For even if I had bought it at Combray, having seen it outside Borange’s—whose grocery lay too far from our house for Françoise to be
able to shop there, as she did at Camus’s, but was better stocked as a stationer and bookseller—tied with string to keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly serials and pamphlets which adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, it was because I had recognised it as a book which had been well spoken of by the schoolmaster or the school-friend who at that particular time seemed to me to be entrusted with the secret of truth and beauty, things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but permanent object of my thoughts.

Next to this central belief which, while I was reading, would be constantly reaching out from my inner self to the outer world, towards the discovery of truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime. These were the events taking place in the book I was reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what Françoise would have called “real people.” But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of real people would be a decided improvement. A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our
sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one’s soul can assimilate. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, as we feverishly turn over the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than this human element, would come the landscape, more or less projected before my eyes, in which the plot of the story was taking place, and which made a far stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual landscape which met my eyes when I raised them from my book. Thus for two consecutive summers I sat in the heat of our Combray garden, sick with a longing inspired by the book I was then reading for a land of mountains and rivers, where I could see innumerable sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments of wood lay mouldering in beds of watercress; and near by, rambling and clustering along low walls, purple and red flowers. And since there was always lurking in my mind the dream of a woman who would enrich me with her love, that dream in those two summers was quickened with the fresh coolness of running water; and whoever she might be, the woman whose image I called to mind, flowers, purple and red, would at once spring up on either side of her like complementary colours.

This was not only because an image of which we dream remains for ever stamped, is adorned and enriched, by the association of colours not its own which may happen to surround it in our mental picture; for the landscapes in the books I read were to me not merely landscapes more vividly portrayed in my imagination than any which Combray could spread before my eyes but otherwise of the same kind. Because of the choice that the author had made of them, because of the spirit of faith in which my mind would exceed and anticipate his printed word, as it might be interpreting a revelation, they seemed to me—an impression I hardly ever derived from
the place where I happened to be, especially from our garden, that undistinguished product of the strictly conventional fantasy of the gardener whom my grandmother so despised—to be actually part of nature itself, and worthy to be studied and explored.

Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to transcend it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly all around us that unvarying sound which is not an echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array in order to bring our influence to bear on other human beings who, we very well know, are situated outside ourselves where we can never reach them. And so, if I always imagined the woman I loved in the setting I most longed at the time to visit, if I wished that it were she who showed it to me, who opened to me the gates of an unknown world, it was not by the mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were only moments—which I isolate artificially today as though I were cutting sections
at different heights in a jet of water, iridescent but seemingly without flow or motion—in a single, undeviating, irresistible outpouring of all the forces of my life.

Finally, continuing to trace from the inside outwards these states simultaneously juxtaposed in my consciousness, and before reaching the horizon of reality which enveloped them, I discover pleasures of another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of sniffing the fragrance of the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor, and, when an hour chimed from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of seeing what was already spent of the afternoon fall drop by drop until I heard the last stroke which enabled me to add up the total, after which the long silence that followed seemed to herald the beginning, in the blue sky above me, of all that part of the day that still remained to me for reading, until the good dinner which Françoise was even now preparing and which would strengthen and refresh me after the strenuous pursuit of the hero through the pages of my book. And as each hour struck, it would seem to me that a few moments only had passed since the hour before; the latest would inscribe itself close to its predecessor on the sky’s surface, and I was unable to believe that sixty minutes could have been squeezed into the tiny arc of blue which was comprised between their two golden figures. Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something that had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had deceived my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.
Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in the garden at Combray, carefully purged by me of every commonplace incident of my personal existence, which I had replaced with a life of strange adventures and aspirations in a land watered with living streams, you still recall that life to me when I think of you, and you embody it in effect by virtue of having gradually encircled and enclosed it—while I went on with my reading and the heat of the day declined—in the crystalline succession, slowly changing and dappled with foliage, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.

Sometimes I would be torn from my book in the middle of the afternoon by the gardener’s daughter, who came running wildly, overturning an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a tooth, and screaming “They’re coming, they’re coming!” so that Françoise and I should run too and not miss anything of the show. That was on the days when the cavalry from the local garrison passed through Combray on their way to manoeuvres, going as a rule by the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde. While our servants, sitting in a row on their chairs outside the garden railings, stared at the people of Combray taking their Sunday walk and were stared at in return, the gardener’s daughter, through the gap between two distant houses in the Avenue de la Gare, had spied the glitter of helmets. The servants had then hurried in with their chairs, for when the troopers paraded down the Rue Sainte-Hilde-garde they filled it from side to side, and their jostling horses scraped against the walls of the houses, covering and submerging the pavements like banks which present too narrow a channel to a river in flood.

“Poor boys,” Françoise would exclaim, in tears almost
before she had reached the railings, “poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a meadow. It’s just shocking to think of,” she would add, laying a hand over her heart, where presumably she had felt the shock.

“A fine sight, isn’t it, Mme Françoise, all these young fellows not caring two straws for their lives?” the gardener would ask, just to “draw” her. And he would not have spoken in vain.