• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1443 0

Perhaps Mlle Vinteuil felt that at heart her friend was not altogether bad, nor really sincere when she gave vent to those blasphemous utterances. At any rate, she had the pleasure of receiving and returning those kisses, those smiles, those glances, all feigned, perhaps, but akin in their base and vicious mode of expression to those which would have been evinced not by an ordinarily kind, suffering person but by a cruel and wanton one. She could delude herself for a moment into believing that she was indeed enjoying the pleasures which, with so perverted an accomplice, a girl might enjoy who really did harbour such barbarous feelings towards her father’s memory. Perhaps she would not have thought of evil as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one in which it was so refreshing to sojourn, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the most terrible and lasting form of cruelty.

If the Méséglise way was fairly easy, it was a very different matter when we took the Guermantes way, for that meant a long walk, and we must first make sure of the weather. When we seemed to have entered upon a spell of fine days; when Françoise, in desperation that not a drop was falling on the “poor crops,” gazing up at the sky and seeing there only an occasional white cloud floating upon its calm blue surface, groaned aloud and exclaimed: “They look just like a lot of dogfish swimming about and sticking up their snouts! Ah, they never think of making it rain a little for the poor labourers! And then when the corn is all ripe, down it will come, pitter-patter all over the place, and think no more of where it’s falling than if it was the sea!”; when my father had received the same favourable reply from the gardener and the barometer several times in succession, then someone would say at dinner: “Tomorrow, if the weather holds, we might go the Guermantes way.” And off we would set, immediately after lunch, through the little garden gate into the Rue des Perchamps, narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with clumps of grass among which two or three wasps would spend the day botanising, a street as quaint as its name, from which, I felt, its odd characteristics and cantankerous personality derived, a street for which one might search in vain through the Combray of today, for the village school now occupies its site. But in my dreams of Combray (like those architects, pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying that they can detect, beneath a Renaissance rood-screen and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a Romanesque choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it must have been in the twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern edifice standing, but pierce through it and “restore” the Rue des Perchamps. And for such reconstruction memory furnishes me with more detailed guidance than is generally at the disposal of restorers: the pictures which it has preserved—perhaps the last surviving in the world today, and soon to follow the rest into oblivion—of what Combray looked like in my childhood days; pictures which, because it was the old Combray that traced their outlines upon my mind before it vanished, are as moving—if I may compare a humble landscape with those glorious works, reproductions of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing on me—as those old engravings of the Last Supper or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark’s.

We would pass, in the Rue de l’Oiseau, in front of the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesché, into whose great courtyard, once upon a time, would rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de Montpensier, de Guermantes and de Montmorency, when they had to come down to Combray for some litigation with their tenants, or to receive homage from them. We would come at length to the Mall, among whose tree-tops I could distinguish the steeple of Saint-Hilaire. And I should have liked to be able