In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [242]
it from me, in myself, was not a viable one, could yet be reached circuitously were I to take the plain, terrestrial route. True, when I repeated to myself, giving thus a special value to what I was going to see, that Venice was the “School of Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most complete museum of the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages,” I felt happy. But I was happier still when, out on an errand and walking briskly on account of the weather, which, after several days of a precocious spring, had relapsed into winter (like the weather we invariably found awaiting us at Combray in Holy Week)—seeing on the boulevards that the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked through them like water, were none the less beginning, punctual guests, arrayed already for the party and admitting no discouragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the irrepressible verdure whose steady growth the abortive power of the cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining—I reflected that already the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of hyacinths and anemones, and that the spring sunshine was already tingeing the waters of the Grand Canal with so deep an azure and such noble emeralds that when they washed against the foot of a Titian painting they could vie with it in the richness of their colouring. I could no longer contain myself for joy when my father, in the intervals of tapping the barometer and complaining of the cold, began to look out which were the best trains, and when I understood that by making one’s way after luncheon into the coal-grimed laboratory, the wizard’s cell that undertook to contrive a complete transmutation of its surroundings, one could wake up next morning in the city of marble and gold, “its walls embellished with jasper and its streets paved with emeralds.” So that it and the City of the Lilies were not just artificial scenes which I could set up at will in front of my imagination, but existed a certain distance from Paris which must inevitably be traversed if I wished to see them, at a particular place on the earth’s surface and at no other—in a word, were entirely real. They became even more real to me when my father, by saying, “Well, you can stay in Venice from the 20th to the 29th, and reach Florence on Easter morning,” made them both emerge, no longer only from the abstraction of Space, but from that imaginary Time in which we place not one journey at a time but others simultaneously, without too much agitation since they are only possibilities—that Time which reconstructs itself so effectively that one can spend it again in one town after one has already spent it in another—and assigned to them some of those actual, calendar days which are the certificates of authenticity of the objects on which they are spent, for these unique days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one cannot live them again here when one has lived them there. I felt that it was towards the week that would begin with the Monday on which the laundress was to bring back the white waistcoat I had stained with ink that they were hastening to absorb themselves, on emerging from that ideal Time in which they did not yet exist—those two queens of cities of which I was soon to be able, by the most thrilling kind of geometry, to inscribe the domes and towers on a page of my own life. But I was still only on the way to the supreme pinnacle of happiness; I reached it finally (for not until then did the revelation burst upon me that on the clattering streets, reddened by the light reflected from Giorgione’s frescoes, it was not, as I had continued to imagine despite so many admonitions, men “majestic and terrible as the sea, bearing armour that gleamed with bronze beneath the folds of their blood-red cloaks” who would be walking in Venice next week, on Easter eve, but that I myself might be the minute personage whom, in an enlarged photograph of St Mark’s that had been lent to me, the illustrator had portrayed, in a bowler hat, in front of the portico) when I heard my