In Search of Lost Time (61 page)

But while, an hour after he had woken, he was giving instructions to the hairdresser to see that his haircut would not become tousled on the train, he thought about his dream again, and saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette's pale complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, everything which – in the course of the successive expressions of tenderness which had made of his abiding love for Odette a long oblivion of the first image he had formed of her – he had ceased to notice since the earliest days of their acquaintance, days to which no doubt, while he slept, his memory had returned to search for their exact sensation. And with the intermittent coarseness that reappeared in him as soon as he was no longer unhappy and the level of his morality dropped accordingly, he exclaimed to himself: ‘To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!'

Among the bedrooms whose images I summoned up most often in my nights of insomnia, none resembled less the rooms at Combray, dusted with an atmosphere that was grainy, pollinated, edible and devout, than the room at the Grand-Hôtel de la Plage, at Balbec, whose enamel-painted walls contained, like the polished sides of a swimming-pool which tints the water blue, a pure azure salt sea air. The Bavarian decorator who had been commissioned to furnish the hotel had varied the design schemes of the rooms and on three sides, along the walls, in the one I was occupying, had placed low bookcases, with glass panes, in which, depending on the spot they occupied, and by an effect he had not foreseen, one or another part of the changing picture of the sea was reflected, unfurling a frieze of bright seascapes, which was interrupted only by the solid pieces of mahogany. So much so that the whole room had the look of one of those model dormitories presented in ‘
modern style
'
¹
furniture shows, where they are hung with works of art assumed to be likely to delight the eyes of the person who will be sleeping there, and representing subjects in keeping with the type of site where the room will be found.

But nothing resembled less this real Balbec, either, than the one I had often dreamed of, on stormy days, when the wind was so strong that Françoise as she took me to the Champs-Élysées warned me not to walk too close to the walls or the tiles might fall on my head and moaned to me about the great disasters and shipwrecks reported in the newspapers. I had no greater desire than to see a storm at sea, not so much because it would be a beautiful spectacle as because it would be a moment of nature's real life unveiled; or rather for me there were no beautiful spectacles except the ones which I knew were not artificially
contrived for my pleasure, but were necessary, unchangeable – the beauties of landscapes or of great art. I was curious, I was avid to know only those things which I believed to be more real than myself, which had for me the value of showing me a little of the mind of a great genius, or of the force or grace of nature as it is manifested when left to itself, without the interference of men. In the same way that the lovely sound of her voice, reproduced in isolation by the phonograph, would not console us for having lost our mother, so a storm mechanically imitated would have left me as indifferent as the illuminated fountains at the Exposition.
²
And so that the storm would be absolutely real, I also wanted the shore itself to be a natural shore, not a pier recently created by some municipality. In fact, because of all the feelings it awakened in me, nature seemed to me the thing most opposite to the mechanical productions of men. The less it bore their imprint the more room it offered in which my heart could expand. Now, I had remembered the name Balbec, which had been mentioned to us by Legrandin, as that of a seaside resort very close to ‘those funereal cliffs, famous for their many wrecks, wrapped six months of the year in a shroud of fog and the foam of the waves'.

‘You can still feel there beneath your feet, he said, far more so than at Finistère itself
³
(and even though hotels are being superimposed upon it now without, however, the power to change the more ancient skeleton of the land), you can still feel the true end of the land of France, of Europe, of the Ancient World. And it's the last encampment of fishermen, precisely like all the fishermen who have ever lived since the beginning of the world, facing the eternal realm of the mists of the sea and shadows of the night.'

One day when, at Combray, I had mentioned this seaside resort of Balbec in the presence of M. Swann in order to find out from him if it was the choicest spot for seeing the most powerful storms, he had answered me: ‘Yes indeed I certainly know Balbec! The church at Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, still half Romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example of our Norman Gothic, and so singular! It's almost Persian in style.' And that region, which until then had seemed to me similar in nature to the immemorial, still contemporaneous great phenomena of geology – and just as completely
outside human history as the Ocean itself or the Great Bear,
⁴
with those wild fishermen for whom, no more than for the whales, there had been no Middle Ages – it had been a great delight for me to see it suddenly take its place in the sequence of the centuries, now that it had experienced the Romanesque period, and to know that the Gothic trefoil had come at the proper time to pattern those wild rocks too, like the frail but hardy plants which, when spring comes, spangle here and there the polar snow. And if the Gothic brought to these places and to these men a definition which they lacked, they too conferred one upon it in return. I tried to picture how these fishermen had lived, the timid and undreamed-of attempt at social relations which they had made there, during the Middle Ages, clustered on a point along the shores of Hell, at the foot of the cliffs of death; and the Gothic seemed to me more alive now that, having separated it from the towns in which until then I had always imagined it, I could see how, in a particular case, on wild rocks, it had germinated and flowered into a delicate steeple. I was taken to see reproductions of the most famous of the statues at Balbec – the fleecy snub-nosed apostles, the Virgin from the porch – and my breathing stopped in my chest for joy when I thought that I could see them modelled in relief against the eternal briny mist. Then, on the sweet stormy evenings of February, the wind – blowing a plan into my heart, which trembled under its gusts no less powerfully than my bedroom chimney, a plan to go to Balbec – mixed in me a desire for Gothic architecture with my desire for a tempest at sea.

I would have liked to leave the very next day on the handsome and generous one-twenty-two train, whose hour of departure I could never read without a palpitating heart, in the railway company's advertisements, in announcements for circular tours: it seemed to me to incise at a precise point in the afternoon a delectable notch, a mysterious mark from which the diverted hours, though they still led to the evening, to the next morning, led to an evening and morning which one would see, not in Paris, but in one of those towns through which the train passes and among which it permitted us 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 Quimperlé, and moved on magnificently overloaded with
proffered names among which I did not know what one I would have preferred, so impossible was it to sacrifice any of them. But without even waiting for it, I could have, by dressing quickly, left that very evening, if my parents had allowed me, and arrived at Balbec when the morning twilight was rising over the furious sea, from whose volleys of foam I would take refuge in the Persian-style church. But at the approach of the Easter holidays, when my parents promised to let me spend them for once in the north of Italy, now, in place of those dreams of tempests by which I had been so entirely occupied, wanting to see only waves running in from all sides, higher and higher, on the wildest coast, near churches as steep and rugged as cliffs, from whose towers the sea birds would shriek, now suddenly erasing them, taking away all their charm, excluding them because they were its opposite, and could only have weakened it, the converse dream now occupied me, of the most dappled spring, not the spring of Combray which still pricked us tartly with all the needles of the frost, but the spring which was already covering the fields of Fiesole with lilies and anemones and dazzling Florence with golden grounds like those of Fra Angelico. From then on, only sunlight, perfumes, colours seemed to me of any value; for this alternation of images had brought about a change of front in my desire, and – as abrupt as those that occur now and then in music – a complete change of tone in my sensibility. Then it came about that a simple variation in the atmosphere was enough to provoke this modulation in me without any need to wait for the return of a season. For often in one season we find a day that has strayed from another and that immediately evokes its particular pleasures, lets us experience them, makes us desire them, and interrupts the dreams we were having by placing, earlier or later than was its turn, this leaf detached from another chapter, in the interpolated calendar of Happiness. But soon, like those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health can derive only an accidental and rather slender benefit until the day when science seizes hold of them, and producing them at will, puts into our hands the possibility of their appearance, withdrawn from the guardianship and exempted from the consent of chance, in the same way the production of those dreams of the Atlantic and of Italy ceased to be subjected solely to the changes of the seasons and
of the weather. I needed only, to make them reappear, to pronounce those names – Balbec, Venice, Florence – in the interior of which had finally accumulated the desire inspired in me by the places they designated. Even in spring, finding the name of Balbec in a book was enough to awaken in me the desire for storms and Norman Gothic; even on a stormy day the name of Florence or Venice gave me a desire for the sun, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Saint-Mary-of-the-Flowers.
⁵

But if these names absorbed for ever the image I had of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subjecting its reappearance in me to their own laws; in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but also more different from what the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could be in reality, and, by increasing the arbitrary joys of my imagination, aggravated the future disappointment of my travels. They exalted the idea I was forming of certain places on the earth, by making them more particular, consequently more real. I did not at the time represent to myself cities, landscapes, monuments as more or less pleasant pictures, cut out here and there from the same material, but each of them as an unknown thing, different in essence from the others, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individuality still did they assume from being designated by names, names that were theirs alone, proper names like the names people have. Words present us with clear and familiar little pictures of things like the pictures hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort. But names present a confused image of people – and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people – an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets. The name of Parma, one of the towns I had most wanted to visit, ever since I had read
La Chartreuse
,
⁶
seeming to me compact, smooth, mauve and soft, if anyone mentioned a certain house in Parma
in which I would be staying, he gave me the pleasure of thinking I would be living in a house that was smooth, compact, mauve and soft, that bore no relation to the houses of any real town in Italy, since I had composed it in my imagination using only that heavy syllable,
Parme
, in which no air circulates, and the Stendhalian softness and tint of violets with which I had permeated it. And when I thought of Florence, I thought of a town miraculously fragrant and like the petals of a flower, because it was known as the city of lilies and its cathedral as Saint-Mary-of-the-Flowers. As for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on a piece of old Norman pottery that retains the colour of the earth from which it was taken, one can still see depicted the representation of some outmoded custom, of some feudal right, of some locality in an earlier condition, of an abandoned habit of pronunciation which had formed its heteroclite syllables and which I did not doubt I would rediscover spoken there even by the innkeeper who would serve me coffee with milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch the furious sea in front of the church and to whom I would ascribe the disputatious, solemn and medieval aspect of a character from a
fabliau.
⁷

If my health improved and my parents allowed me, if not to go to stay in Balbec, at least to take just once, in order to acquaint myself with the architecture and landscapes of Normandy or Brittany, that one-twenty-two train which I had boarded so many times in my imagination, I would have wished by preference to stop in the most beautiful towns; but compare them as I might, how could I choose, any more than between individual people, who are not interchangeable, between Bayeux, so lofty in its noble red-tinged lace, its summit illuminated by the old gold of its last syllable; Vitré, whose acute accent barred its ancient glass with black wood lozenges;
⁸
gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness goes from eggshell yellow to pearl grey; Coutances, a Norman cathedral, which its final, fat, yellowing diphthong crowns with a tower of butter; Lannion with the sound, in its village silence, of the coach followed by the fly;
⁹
Questambert, Pontorson, naïve and ridiculous, white feathers and yellow beaks scattered along the road to those poetic river spots; Benodet, a name scarcely moored, which the river seems to want to carry away among its algae; Pont-Aven, a pink-and-white flight of the wing of a lightly
poised coif reflected trembling in the greeny waters of a canal; Quimperlé, more firmly attached, ever since the Middle Ages, among the streams about which it babbles as they bead it with a pearly grisaille like that which is sketched, through the spiderwebs of a stained-glass window, by rays of sunlight which have turned into blunted points of burnished silver?