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By Root 1417 0

father say: “It must be pretty cold, still, on the Grand Canal; you’d do well, just in case, to pack your winter greatcoat and your thick suit.” At these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy; I felt myself—something I had until then deemed impossible—to be penetrating indeed between those “rocks of amethyst, like a reef in the Indian Ocean”; by a supreme muscular effort, far in excess of my real strength, divesting myself, as of a shell that served no purpose, of the air in my own room which surrounded me, I replaced it by an equal quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere, indescribable and peculiar as the atmosphere of dreams, which my imagination had secreted in the name of Venice; I felt myself undergoing a miraculous disincarnation, which was at once accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels when one has developed a very sore throat; and I had to be put to bed with a fever so persistent that the doctor declared not only that a visit now to Florence and Venice was absolutely out of the question, but that, even when I had completely recovered, I must for at least a year give up all idea of travelling and be kept from anything that was liable to excite me.

And alas, he also imposed a formal ban on my being allowed to go to the theatre to hear Berma. The sublime artist whose genius Bergotte had proclaimed might, by introducing me to something else that was perhaps as important and beautiful, have consoled me for not having been to Florence and Venice, for not going to Balbec. My parents had to be content with sending me every day to the Champs-Elysées, in the custody of a person who would see that I did not tire myself; this person being none other than Françoise, who had entered our service after the death of my aunt Léonie. Going to the Champs-Elysées I found unendurable. If only Bergotte had described the place in one of his books, I should no doubt have longed to get to know it, like so many things else of which a simulacrum had first found its way into my imagination. This breathed life into them, gave them a personality, and I sought then to rediscover them in reality; but in this public garden there was nothing that attached itself to my dreams.

One day, as I was bored with our usual place beside the roundabout, Françoise had taken me for an excursion—across the frontier guarded at regular intervals by the little bastions of the barley-sugar women—into those neighbouring but foreign regions where the faces of the passers-by were strange, where the goat-carriage went past; then she had gone back to collect her things from her chair that stood with its back to a shrubbery of laurels. While I waited for her I was pacing the broad lawn of meagre, close-cropped, sun-baked grass, dominated, at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing battledore and shuttlecock, when from the path another little girl, who was putting on her coat and covering up her racquet, called out sharply: “Good-bye, Gilberte, I’m going home now; don’t forget we’re coming to you this evening, after dinner.” The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the girl whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the proximity of its target—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impressions concerning her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called it out, everything that, as she uttered the words, she recalled, or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let it brush past me without my being able to penetrate it, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry—wafting