• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1955 0

before the invisible vocation of which this book is the history declared itself. Had the revelation come to me that evening, the carriage in which I sat would have deserved to rank as more memorable for me than Dr Percepied’s, on the box seat of which I had composed that little sketch—which, as it happened, I had recently unearthed, altered and sent in vain to the Figaro—of the steeples of Martinville. Is it because we relive our past years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but in a memory focused upon the coolness or sunshine of some morning or afternoon suffused with the shade of some isolated and enclosed setting, immovable, arrested, lost, remote from all the rest, and thus the changes gradually wrought not only in the world outside but in our dreams and our evolving character (changes which have imperceptibly carried us through life from one time to another, wholly different) are eliminated, that, if we relive another memory taken from a different year, we find between the two, thanks to lacunae, to vast stretches of oblivion, as it were the gulf of a difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two divergent qualities of breathed atmosphere and surrounding coloration? But between the memories that had now come to me in turn of Combray, of Doncières and of Rivebelle, I was conscious at that moment of much more than a distance in time, of the distance that there would be between two separate universes whose substance was not the same. If I had sought to reproduce in a piece of writing the material in which my most insignificant memories of Rivebelle appeared to me to be carved, I should have had to vein with pink, to render at once translucent, compact, cool and resonant, a substance hitherto analogous to the sombre, rugged sandstone of Combray.

But Robert, having finished giving his instructions to the driver, now joined me in the carriage. The ideas that had appeared before me took flight. They are goddesses who deign at times to make themselves visible to a solitary mortal, at a turning in the road, even in his bedroom while he sleeps, when, standing framed in the doorway, they bring him their annunciation. But as soon as a companion joins him they vanish; in the society of his fellows no man has ever beheld them. And I found myself thrown back upon friendship.

Robert on arriving had indeed warned me that there was a good deal of fog outside, but while we were talking it had grown steadily thicker. It was no longer merely the light mist which I had looked forward to seeing rise from the island and envelop Mme de Stermaria and myself. A few feet away from us the street lamps were blotted out and then it was night, as dark as in open fields, in a forest, or rather on a mild Breton island whither I should have liked to go; I felt lost, as on the stark coast of some northern sea where one risks one’s life twenty times over before coming to the solitary inn; ceasing to be a mirage for which one seeks, the fog had become one of those dangers against which one has to fight, so that in finding our way and reaching a safe haven, we experienced the difficulties, the anxiety and finally the joy which safety, so little perceived by one who is not threatened with the loss of it, gives to the perplexed and benighted traveller. One thing only came near to destroying my pleasure during our adventurous ride, owing to the angry astonishment into which it flung me for a moment. “You know,” Saint-Loup suddenly said to me, “I told Bloch that you didn’t like him all that much, that you found him rather vulgar at times. I’m like that, you see, I like clear-cut situations,” he wound up with a self-satisfied air and in an unanswerable tone of voice. I was astounded. Not only had I the most absolute confidence in Saint-Loup, in the loyalty of his friendship, and he had betrayed it by what he had said to Bloch, but it seemed to me that he of all men ought to have been restrained from doing so by his defects as well as by his good qualities, by that astonishing veneer of breeding which was capable of carrying politeness to