In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [162]
Mme du Barry’s. I was far too preoccupied and—even without this revelation as to Mlle Vinteuil’s expected presence—always, in society, far too distracted and agitated to fasten my attention on objects, however beautiful. It could have been arrested only by the appeal of some reality that addressed itself to my imagination, as might have done, this evening, a picture of that Venice of which I had thought so much during the afternoon, or some general element, common to several aspects and truer than they, which, of its own accord, never failed to awake in me an inner spirit, habitually dormant, the ascent of which to the surface of my consciousness filled me with joy. Now, as I emerged from the room known as the concert-room and crossed the other drawing-rooms with Brichot and M. de Charlus, on discovering, transposed among others, certain pieces of furniture which I had seen at La Raspelière and to which I had paid no attention, I perceived, between the arrangement of the town house and that of the country house, a certain family resemblance, a permanent identity, and I understood what Brichot meant when he said to me with a smile: “There, look at this room, it may perhaps give you an idea of what things were like in the Rue Montalivet, twenty-five years ago, grande mortalis aevi spatium.” From his smile, a tribute to the defunct salon which he saw with his mind’s eye, I understood that what Brichot, perhaps without realising it, preferred in the old drawing-room, more than the large windows, more than the gay youth of his hosts and their faithful, was that unreal aspect (which I myself could discern from certain similarities between La Raspelière and the Quai Conti) of which, in a drawing-room as in everything else, the actual, external aspect, verifiable by everyone, is but the prolongation, the aspect which has detached itself from the outer world to take refuge in our soul, to which it gives as it were a surplus-value, in which it is absorbed into its habitual substance, transforming itself—houses that have been pulled down, people long dead, bowls of fruit at suppers which we recall—into that translucent alabaster of our memories of which we are incapable of conveying the colour which we alone can see, so that we can truthfully say to other people, when speaking of these things of the past, that they can have no conception of them, that they are unlike anything they have seen, and that we ourselves cannot inwardly contemplate without a certain emotion, reflecting that it is on the existence of our thoughts that their survival for a little longer depends, the gleam of lamps that have been extinguished and the fragrance of arbours that will never bloom again. And doubtless for this reason, the drawing-room in the Rue Montalivet diminished, for Brichot, the Verdurins’ present home. But on the other hand it added to this home, in the Professor’s eyes, a beauty which it could not have in those of a newcomer. Those pieces of the original furniture that had been transplanted here, and sometimes arranged in the same groups, and which I myself remembered from La Raspelière, introduced into the new drawing-room fragments of the old which recalled it at moments to the point of hallucination and then seemed themselves scarcely real from having evoked in the midst of the surrounding reality fragments of a vanished world which one seemed to see elsewhere. A sofa that had risen up from dreamland between a pair of new and thoroughly substantial armchairs, little chairs upholstered in pink silk, the brocaded covering of a card-table raised to the dignity of a person since, like a person, it had a past, a memory, retaining in the chill and gloom of the Quai Conti the tan of its sun-warming through the windows of the Rue Montalivet (where it could tell the time of day as accurately as Mme Verdurin herself) and through the glass doors at La Raspelière, where they had taken it and where it used to gaze out all day long over the flower-beds of the garden at the valley below, until it was time for Cottard and the violinist to sit down to their