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By Root 1282 0

through the air the exquisite emanation which it had distilled, by touching them with the utmost precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle Swann’s life, from the evening to come, just as it would be, after dinner, at her home—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, delicately coloured, resembling one of those clouds that, billowing over a Poussin landscape, reflect minutely, like a cloud in the opera teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods—casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot where it was at one and the same time a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair battledore player (who continued to launch and retrieve her shuttlecock until a governess with a blue feather in her hat had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, the colour of heliotrope, impalpable as a reflection and superimposed like a carpet on which I could not help but drag my lingering, nostalgic and desecrating feet, while Françoise shouted: “Come on, do up your coat and let’s clear off!” and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.

But would she come back to the Champs-Elysées? Next day she was not there; but I saw her on the following days, and spent all my time revolving round the spot where she played with her friends, to such effect that once, when they found that there were not enough of them to make up a prisoner’s base, she sent one of them to ask me if I cared to complete their side, and from that day I played with her whenever she came. But this did not happen every day; there were days when she was prevented from coming by her lessons, by her catechism, by a tea-party, by the whole of that life, separated from my own, which twice only, condensed into the name Gilberte, I had felt pass so painfully close to me, in the hawthorn lane near Combray and on the grass of the Champs-Elysées. On such days she would tell us in advance that we would not be seeing her; if it was because of her lessons, she would say: “It’s too tiresome, I shan’t be able to come tomorrow; you’ll all be enjoying yourselves here without me,” with an air of regret which to some extent consoled me; if, on the other hand, she had been invited to a party, and I, not knowing this, asked her whether she was coming to play with us, she would reply: “I should jolly well hope not! I hope Mamma will let me go to my friend’s.” But on these days I did at least know that I would not see her, whereas on others, without any warning, her mother would take her shopping, and next day she would say: “Oh, yes! I went out with Mamma,” as though it had been the most natural thing in the world, and not the greatest possible misfortune for someone else. There were also the days of bad weather on which her governess, afraid on her own account of the rain, would not bring Gilberte to the Champs-Elysées.

And so, if the sky was overcast, from early morning I would not cease to examine it, observing all the omens. If I saw the lady opposite putting on her hat beside her window, I would say to myself: “That lady is going out; so it must be weather in which one can go out. Why shouldn’t Gilberte do the same as that lady?” But the weather would cloud over. My mother would say that it might clear again, that one burst of sunshine would be enough, but that more probably it would rain; and if it rained, what was the use of going to the Champs-Elysées? And so, from lunch-time onwards, my anxious eyes never left the unsettled, clouded sky. It remained dark. The balcony in front of the window was grey. Suddenly, on its sullen stone, I would not exactly see a less leaden colour, but I would feel as it were a striving towards a less leaden colour, the pulsation of a hesitant ray that struggled to discharge its light. A moment later, the balcony was as pale and luminous as a pool at dawn, and a thousand shadows from the iron-work of its balustrade had alighted on it. A breath of wind would disperse