• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1782 0

within by the palely gilded globes of their gas-jets which, already aglow though it was still daylight outside, suited those vast, tall, eighteenth-century windows from which the last gleams of the setting sun had not yet departed, as a head-dress of yellow tortoise-shell might suit a complexion heightened with rouge, and persuaded me to seek out my fireside and the lamp which, alone in the shadowy façade of my hotel, was striving to resist the gathering darkness, and for the sake of which I went indoors before it was quite dark, for pleasure, as to an appetising meal. I retained, in my lodgings, the same fullness of sensation that I had felt outside. It gave such an apparent convexity of surface to things which as a rule seem flat and insipid—to the yellow flame of the fire, the coarse blue paper of the sky on which the setting sun had scribbled corkscrews and whirligigs like a schoolboy with a piece of red chalk, the curiously patterned cloth on the round table on which a ream of essay paper and an inkpot lay in readiness for me together with one of Bergotte’s novels—that ever since then these things have continued to seem to me to abound in a richly particular form of existence which I feel that I should be able to extract from them if it were granted me to set eyes on them again. I thought with joy of the barracks I had just left and of its weather-cock turning with every wind that blew. Like a diver breathing through a pipe which rises above the surface of the water, I felt that I was in some sense linked to a healthy, open-air life through my connexion with those barracks, that towering observatory dominating a countryside furrowed with strips of green enamel, into whose various buildings I esteemed it a priceless privilege, which I hoped would last, to be free to go whenever I chose, always certain of a welcome.

At seven o’clock I dressed and went out again to dine with Saint-Loup at the hotel where he took his meals. I liked to go there on foot. It was by now pitch dark, and after the third day of my visit, as soon as night had fallen an icy wind began blowing which seemed a harbinger of snow. As I walked, I ought not, one might have supposed, to have ceased for a moment to think of Mme de Guermantes; it was only in an attempt to draw nearer to her that I had come to visit Robert’s garrison. But memories and griefs are fleeting things. There are days when they recede so far that we are barely conscious of them, we think that they have gone for ever. Then we pay attention to other things. And the streets of this town had not yet become for me what streets are in the place where one is accustomed to live, simply means of getting from one place to another. The life led by the inhabitants of this unknown world must, it seemed to me, be a thing of wonder, and often the lighted windows of some dwelling kept me standing for a long while motionless in the dark by laying before my eyes the actual and mysterious scenes of an existence into which I might not penetrate. Here the fire-spirit displayed to me in a crimson tableau a chestnut-seller’s booth in which a couple of non-commissioned officers, their belts slung over the backs of chairs, were playing cards, never dreaming that a magician’s wand was conjuring them out of the night like an apparition on the stage and presenting them as they actually were at that very moment to the eyes of a spellbound passer-by whom they could not see. In a little curio shop a half-spent candle, projecting its warm glow over an engraving, reprinted it in sanguine, while, battling against the darkness, the light of a big lamp bronzed a scrap of leather, inlaid a dagger with glittering spangles, spread a film of precious gold like the patina of time or the varnish of an old master on pictures which were only bad copies, made in fact of the whole hovel, in which there was nothing but pinch-beck rubbish, a marvellous composition by Rembrandt. Sometimes I lifted my eyes to gaze at some huge old dwelling-house whose shutters had not been closed and in which amphibious men and women, adapting themselves