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By Root 1339 0

by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers. From amid the fresh little green hearts of their foliage they raised inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or mauve blossom, which glowed, even in the shade, with the sunlight in which they had bathed. Some of them, half-concealed by the little tiled house known as the Archers’ Lodge in which Swann’s keeper lived, overtopped its Gothic gable with their pink minaret. The nymphs of spring would have seemed coarse and vulgar in comparison with these young houris, who retained in this French garden the pure and vivid colouring of a Persian miniature. Despite my desire to throw my arms about their pliant forms and to draw down towards me the starry locks that crowned their fragrant heads, we would pass them by without stopping, for my parents had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann’s marriage, and, so as not to appear to be looking into his park, instead of taking the path which skirted his property and then climbed straight up to the open fields, we took another path which led in the same direction, but circuitously, and brought us out beyond it.

One day my grandfather said to my father: “Don’t you remember Swann’s telling us yesterday that his wife and daughter had gone off to Rheims6 and that he was taking the opportunity of spending a day or two in Paris? We might go along by the park, since the ladies are not at home; that will make it a little shorter.”

We stopped for a moment by the fence. Lilac-time was nearly over; some of the trees still thrust aloft, in tall mauve chandeliers, their delicate sprays of blossom, but in many parts of the foliage which only a week before had been drenched in their fragrant foam, there remained only a dry, hollow, scentless froth, shrivelled and discoloured. My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects the appearance of the place was still the same, and how far it had altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann on the day of his wife’s death; and he seized the opportunity to tell us once again the story of that walk.

In front of us a path bordered with nasturtiums ascended in the full glare of the sun towards the house. But to our right the park stretched across level ground. Overshadowed by the tall trees which stood close around it, an ornamental pond had been dug by Swann’s parents; but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work; certain places persist in remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own especial sovereignty, and will flaunt their immemorial insignia in the middle of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position and superimposed on the work of man’s hands. And so it was that, at the foot of the path which led down to the artificial lake, there might be seen, in its two tiers woven of forget-me-nots and periwinkle flowers, a natural, delicate, blue garland encircling the water’s luminous and shadowy brow, while the iris, flourishing its sword-blades in regal profusion, stretched out over agrimony and water-growing crowfoot the tattered fleurs-de-lis, violet and yellow, of its lacustrine sceptre.

The absence of Mlle Swann, which—since it preserved me from the terrible risk of seeing her appear on one of the paths, and of being identified and scorned by this privileged little girl who had Bergotte for a friend and used to go with him to visit cathedrals—made the exploration of Tansonville, now for the first time permissible, a matter of indifference to myself, seemed on the contrary to invest the property, in my grandfather’s and my father’s eyes, with an added attraction, a transient charm, and (like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering) to make the day exceptionally propitious for a walk round it; I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a miracle, Mlle Swann appear with her father, so close to us that we should