In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [233]
in her room, reading, in her Fortuny dressing-gown. I asked her if she would like to go with me to Versailles. She had the charming quality of being always ready for anything, perhaps because she had been accustomed in the past to spend half her time as the guest of other people, and, just as she had made up her mind to come to Paris in two minutes, she said to me: “I can come as I am if we don’t get out of the car.” She hesitated for a moment between two Fortuny coats beneath which to conceal her dressing-gown—as she might have hesitated between two friends in choosing an escort—chose a beautiful dark-blue one, and stuck a pin into a hat. In a minute, she was ready, before I had put on my overcoat, and we went to Versailles. This very promptitude, this absolute docility left me more reassured, as though, without having any precise reason for anxiety, I had indeed been in need of reassurance. “After all I have nothing to fear. She does everything that I ask, in spite of the noise of her window the other night. The moment I spoke of going out, she flung that blue coat over her gown and out she came. That’s not what a rebel would have done, a person who was no longer on friendly terms with me,” I said to myself as we went to Versailles. We stayed there a long time. The sky consisted entirely of that radiant and slightly pale blue which the wayfarer lying in a field sees at times above his head, but so uniform and so deep that one feels that the pigment of which it is composed has been applied without the least alloy and with such an inexhaustible richness that one might delve more and more deeply into its substance without encountering an atom of anything but the same blue. I thought of my grandmother who—in human art as in nature—loved grandeur, and who used to enjoy gazing at the steeple of Saint-Hilaire soaring into that same blue. Suddenly I felt once again a longing for my lost freedom on hearing a noise which I did not at first recognise and which my grandmother would also have loved. It was like the buzz of a wasp. “Look,” said Albertine, “there’s an aeroplane, high up there, very very high.” I looked all over the sky but could see only, unmarred by any black spot, the unbroken pallor of the unalloyed blue. I continued nevertheless to hear the humming of the wings, which suddenly entered my field of vision. Up there, a pair of tiny wings, dark and flashing, punctured the continuous blue of the unalterable sky. I had at last been able to attach the buzzing to its cause, to that little insect throbbing up there in the sky, probably six thousand feet above me; I could see it hum. Perhaps at a time when distances by land had not yet been habitually shortened by speed as they are today, the whistle of a passing train two thousand yards away was endowed with that beauty which now and for some time to come will stir our emotions in the drone of an aeroplane six thousand feet up, at the thought that the distances traversed in this vertical journey are the same as those on the ground, and that in this other direction, where measurements appear different to us because the reach seemed impossible, an aeroplane at six thousand feet is no further away than a train at two thousand yards, is nearer even, the identical trajectory occurring in a purer medium, with no obstacle between the traveller and his starting point, just as on the sea or across the plains, in calm weather, the wake of a ship that is already far away or the breath of a single zephyr will furrow the ocean of water or of corn.
I wanted something to eat. We stopped at a big pastry-cook’s, situated almost outside the town, which at the time enjoyed a certain vogue. A lady was leaving the place, and asked the proprietress for her things. And after the lady had gone, Albertine cast repeated glances at the proprietress as though she wished to attract her attention while she was putting away cups, plates, cakes, for it was already late. She approached us only if I asked for something. And it happened then that, as the woman, who incidentally was extremely tall, was standing