In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [244]
of a familiar object, an image different from those that we are accustomed to see, unusual and yet true to nature, and for that reason doubly striking because it surprises us, takes us out of our cocoon of habit, and at the same time brings us back to ourselves by recalling to us an earlier impression. For instance, one of these “magnificent” photographs will illustrate a law of perspective, will show us some cathedral which we are accustomed to see in the middle of a town, taken instead from a selected vantage point from which it will appear to be thirty times the height of the houses and to be thrusting out a spur from the bank of the river, from which it is actually at some distance. Now the effort made by Elstir to reproduce things not as he knew them to be but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed, had led him precisely to bring out certain of these laws of perspective, which were thus all the more striking, since art had been the first to disclose them. A river, because of the windings of its course, a bay because of the apparent proximity to one another of the cliffs on either side of it, would seem to have hollowed out in the heart of the plain or of the mountains a lake absolutely landlocked on every side. In a picture of a view from Balbec painted upon a scorching day in summer an inlet of the sea, enclosed between walls of pink granite, appeared not to be the sea, which began further out. The continuity of the ocean was suggested only by the gulls which, wheeling over what seemed to be solid rock, were as a matter of fact sniffing the shifting tide. Other laws emerged vas, as, at the foot of immense cliffs, the moist vapour of from the same can the lilliputian grace of white sails on the blue mirror on whose surface they looked like sleeping butterflies, and certain contrasts between the depth of the shadows and the paleness of the light. This play of light and shade, which photography has also rendered commonplace, had interested Elstir so much that at one time he had delighted in painting what were almost mirages, in which a castle crowned with a tower appeared as a completely circular castle extended by a tower at its summit, and at its foot by an inverted tower, either because the exceptional purity of the atmosphere on a fine day gave the shadow reflected in the water the hardness and brightness of stone, or because the morning mists rendered the stone as vaporous as the shadow. And similarly, beyond the sea, behind a line of woods, another sea began, roseate with the light of the setting sun, which was in fact the sky. The light, fashioning as it were new solids, thrust back the hull of the boat on which it fell behind the other hull that was still in shadow, and arranged as it were the steps of a crystal staircase on what was in reality the flat surface, broken only by the play of light and shade, of the morning sea. A river running beneath the bridges of a town was caught from such an angle that it appeared entirely dislocated, now broadening into a lake, now narrowing into a rivulet, broken elsewhere by the interposition of a hill crowned with trees among which the townsman would repair at evening to breathe the cool air; and even the rhythm of this topsy-turvy town was assured only by the rigid vertical of the steeples which did not rise but rather, in accordance with the plumb-line of the pendulum of gravity beating time as in a triumphal march, seemed to hold suspended beneath them the blurred mass of houses that rose in terraces through the mist along the banks of the crushed, disjointed stream. And (since Elstir’s earliest works belonged to the time in which a painter would embellish his landscape by inserting a human figure), on the cliff’s edge or among the mountains, the path too, that half-human part of nature, underwent, like river or ocean, the eclipses of perspective. And whether a mountain ridge, or the spray of a waterfall, or the sea prevented the eye from following the continuity of the path, visible to the traveller but not to us, the little human