In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [167]
We would set off; some time after rounding the railway station, we came into a country road which soon became as familiar to me as the roads round Combray, from the bend where it took off between charming orchards to the turning at which we left it where there were tilled fields on either side. Among these we could see here and there an apple-tree, stripped it was true of its blossom and bearing no more than a fringe of pistils, but sufficient even so to enchant me since I could imagine, seeing those inimitable leaves, how their broad expanse, like the ceremonial carpet spread for a wedding that was now over, had been only recently swept by the white satin train of their blushing flowers.
How often in Paris, during the month of May of the following year, was I to bring home a branch of apple-blossom from the florist and afterwards to spend the night in company with its flowers in which bloomed the same creamy essence that still powdered with its froth the burgeoning leaves and between whose white corollas it seemed almost as though it had been the florist who, from generosity towards me, from a taste for invention too and as an effective contrast, had added on either side the supplement of a becoming pink bud: I sat gazing at them, I grouped them in the light of my lamp—for so long that I was often still there when the dawn brought to their whiteness the same flush with which it must at that moment have been tingeing their sisters on the Balbec road—and I sought to carry them back in my imagination to that roadside, to multiply them, to spread them out within the frame prepared for them, on the canvas already primed, of those fields and orchards whose outline I knew by heart, which I so longed to see, which one day I must see, again, at the moment when, with the exquisite fervour of genius, spring covers their canvas with its colours.
Before getting into the carriage, I had composed the seascape which I was going to look out for, which I hoped to see with Baudelaire’s “radiant sun” upon it, and which at Balbec I could distinguish only in too fragmentary a form, broken by so many vulgar adjuncts that had no place in my dream—bathers, cabins, pleasure yachts. But when, Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage having reached the top of a hill, I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the trees, then no doubt at such a distance those temporal details which had set it apart, as it were, from nature and history disappeared, and I could try to persuade myself as I looked down upon its waters that they were the same which Leconte de Lisle describes for us in his Orestie, where “like a flight of birds of prey, at break of day” the long-haired warriors of heroic Hellas “with oars a hundred thousand sweep the resounding deep.” But on the other hand I was no longer near enough to the sea, which seemed to me not alive but congealed, I no longer felt any power beneath its colours, spread like those of a picture between the leaves, through which it appeared as insubstantial as the sky and only of an intenser blue.
Mme de Villeparisis, seeing that I was fond of churches, promised me that we should visit several of them, and especially the church at Carqueville “quite buried in all its old ivy,” as she said with a gesture of her hand which seemed tastefully to be clothing the absent façade in an invisible and delicate screen of foliage. Mme de Villeparisis would often, with this little descriptive gesture, find just the right word to define the charm and distinctiveness of an historic building, always avoiding technical terms, but incapable of