In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [88]
It was not with any particular ill-humour against Legrandin that I parted from him. Certain memories are like friends in common, they can bring about reconciliations; set down amid fields of buttercups strewn with the ruins of feudal battlements, the little wooden bridge still joined us, Legrandin and me, as it joined the two banks of the Vivonne.
After coming out of a Paris in which, although spring had begun, the trees on the boulevards had hardly put on their first leaves, it was a marvel to Saint-Loup and myself, when the circle train had set us down at the suburban village in which his mistress was living, to see each little garden decked with the huge festal altars of the fruit-trees in blossom. It was like one of those peculiar, poetic, ephemeral, local festivals which people travel long distances to attend on certain fixed occasions, but this one was given by Nature. The blossom of the cherry-tree is stuck so close to its branches, like a white sheath, that from a distance, among the other trees that showed as yet scarcely a flower or leaf, one might on this day of sunshine that was still so cold have taken it for snow that had remained clinging there, having melted everywhere else. But the tall pear-trees enveloped each house, each modest courtyard, in a more spacious, more uniform, more dazzling whiteness, as if all the dwellings, all the enclosed spaces in the village, were on their way to make their first communion on the same solemn day.
These villages in the environs of Paris still have at their gates parks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which were the “follies” of the stewards and mistresses of the great. A market gardener had utilised one of these, which was situated on low ground beside the road, for his fruit-trees (or had simply, perhaps, preserved the plan of an immense orchard of former days). Laid out in quincunxes, these pear-trees, more spaced-out and less advanced than those that I had seen, formed great quadrilaterals—separated by low walls—of white blossom, on each side of which the light fell differently, so that all these airy roofless chambers seemed to belong to a Palace of the Sun, such as one might find in Crete; and they reminded one also of the different ponds of a reservoir, or of those parts of the sea which man has subdivided for some fishery, or to plant oyster-beds, when one saw, according to their orientation, the light play upon the espaliers as upon springtime waters, and coax into unfolding here and there, gleaming amid the open-work, azure-panelled trellis of the branches, the foaming whiteness of a creamy, sunlit flower.
It had been a country village, and still had its old mairie, sunburned and mellow, in front of which, in the place of maypoles and streamers, three tall pear-trees were elegantly beflagged with white satin as though for some local civic festival.
Never had Robert spoken to me more tenderly of his mistress than he did during this journey. She alone had taken root in his heart; to his future career in the Army, his position in society, his family, he was not, of course, indifferent, but they counted for nothing beside the smallest thing that concerned his mistress. That alone had any importance in his eyes, infinitely more importance than the Guermantes and all the kings of the earth put together. I do not know whether he formulated to himself the notion that she was of a superior essence to the rest of the world, but he was exclusively preoccupied and concerned with what affected her. Through her and for her he was capable of suffering, of being happy, perhaps of killing. There was really nothing that interested, that could excite him except what his mistress wanted, what she was going to do,