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By Root 1736 0

as moving, since, if his face had not been directly produced by hers, the two had nevertheless a common origin. The features of the Duchesse de Guermantes, which were pinned to my vision of Combray, the nose like a falcon’s beak, the piercing eyes, seemed to have served also as a pattern for the cutting out—in another copy analogous and slender, with too delicate a skin—of Robert’s face, which might almost be superimposed upon his aunt’s. I looked longingly at those features of his so characteristic of the Guermantes, of that race which had remained so individual in the midst of a world in which it remained isolated in its divinely ornithological glory, for it seemed to have sprung, in the age of mythology, from the union of a goddess with a bird.

Robert, without being aware of its cause, was touched by my evident affection. This was moreover increased by the sense of well-being inspired in me by the heat of the fire and by the champagne which simultaneously bedewed my forehead with beads of sweat and my eyes with tears; it washed down some young partridges which I ate with the wonderment of a layman, of whatever sort he may be, who finds in a way of life with which he is not familiar what he has supposed it to exclude—the wonderment, for instance, of an atheist who sits down to an exquisitely cooked dinner in a presbytery. And next morning, when I awoke, I went over to Saint-Loup’s window, which being at a great height overlooked the whole countryside, curious to make the acquaintance of my new neighbour, the landscape which I had not been able to see the day before, having arrived too late, at an hour when it was already sleeping beneath the outspread cloak of night. And yet, early as it had awoken, I could see it, when I opened the window and looked out, only as though from the window of a country house overlooking the lake, shrouded still in its soft white morning gown of mist which scarcely allowed me to make out anything at all. But I knew that, before the troopers who were busy with their horses in the square had finished grooming them, it would have cast its gown aside. In the meantime, I could see only a bare hill, raising its lean and rugged flanks, already swept clear of darkness, over the back of the barracks. Through the translucent screen of hoar-frost I could not take my eyes from this stranger who was looking at me too for the first time. But when I had formed the habit of coming to the barracks, my consciousness that the hill was there, more real, consequently, even when I did not see it, than the hotel at Balbec, than our house in Paris, of which I thought as of absent—or dead—friends, that is to say scarcely believing any longer in their existence, caused its reflected form, even without my realising it, to be silhouetted against the slightest impressions that I formed at Doncières, and among them, to begin with this first morning, the pleasing impression of warmth given me by the cup of chocolate, prepared by Saint-Loup’s batman in this comfortable room, which seemed like a sort of optical centre from which to look out at the hill—the idea of doing anything else but just gaze at it, the idea of actually climbing it, being rendered impossible by this same mist. Imbued with the shape of the hill, associated with the taste of hot chocolate and with the whole web of my fancies at that particular time, this mist, without my having given it the least thought, came to infuse all my thoughts of that time, just as a massive and unmelting lump of gold had remained allied to my impressions of Balbec, or as the proximity of the outside steps of sandstone gave a greyish background to my impressions of Combray. It did not, however, persist late into the day; the sun began by hurling at it in vain a few darts which sprinkled it with brilliants, then finally overcame it. The hill might expose its grizzled rump to the sun’s rays, which, an hour later, when I went into the town, gave to the russet tints of the autumn leaves, to the reds and blues of the election posters pasted on the walls, an exaltation which raised