In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [70]
“Then you’re going out?” she said with a look of mistrust.
She always maintained that she would be delighted if I went out more often, but if anything I said gave her to suppose that I would not be staying indoors, her uneasy air made me think that the joy she would evince on seeing me go out more often was perhaps not altogether sincere.
“I may perhaps go out, perhaps not. You know quite well that I never make plans beforehand. In any case ices are not a thing that’s hawked in the streets, so why do you want one?”
And then she answered me in words which showed me what a fund of intelligence and latent taste had suddenly developed in her since Balbec, in words akin to those which, she maintained, were due entirely to my influence, to living continually in my company, words which, however, I should never have uttered, as though I had been somehow forbidden by an unknown authority ever to decorate my conversation with literary forms. Perhaps the future was not destined to be the same for Albertine as for myself. I had almost a presentiment of this when I saw her eagerness to employ in speech images so “bookish,” which seemed to me to be reserved for another, more sacred use, of which I was still in ignorance. She said to me (and I was, in spite of everything, deeply touched, for I thought to myself: True, I myself wouldn’t speak like that, and yet, all the same, but for me she wouldn’t be speaking like that. She has been profoundly influenced by me, and cannot therefore help but love me, since she is my creation): “What I like about these foodstuffs that the pedlars cry is that a thing heard like a rhapsody changes its nature when it comes to the table and addresses itself to my palate. As for ices (for I hope that you won’t order me one that isn’t cast in one of those old-fashioned moulds which have every architectural shape imaginable), whenever I eat them, temples, churches, obelisks, rocks, a sort of picturesque geography is what I see at first before converting its raspberry or vanilla monuments into coolness in my gullet.”
I thought that this was a little too well expressed, but she felt that I thought that it was well expressed and went on, pausing for a moment when she had brought off a simile to laugh that beautiful laugh of hers which was so painful to me because it was so voluptuous.
“Oh dear, at the Ritz I’m afraid you’ll find Vendôme Columns of ice, chocolate ice or raspberry, and then you’ll need a lot of them so that they may look like votive pillars or pylons erected along an avenue to the glory of Coolness. They make raspberry obelisks too, which will rise up here and there in the burning desert of my thirst, and I shall make their pink granite crumble and melt deep down in my throat which they will refresh better than any oasis” (and here the deep laugh broke out, whether from satisfaction at talking so well, or in self-mockery for using such carefully contrived images, or, alas, from physical pleasure at feeling inside herself something so good, so cool, which was tantamount to a sexual pleasure). “Those mountains of ice at the Ritz sometimes suggest Monte Rosa, and indeed, if it’s a lemon ice, I don’t object to its not having a monumental shape, its being irregular, abrupt, like one of Elstir’s mountains. It mustn’t be too white then, but slightly yellowish, with that look of dull, dirty snow that Elstir’s mountains have. The ice needn’t be at all big, only half an ice if you like, those lemon ices are still mountains, reduced to a tiny scale, but our imagination restores their dimensions, like those Japanese dwarf trees which one feels are still cedars, oaks, manchineels; so much so that if I arranged a few of them beside a little trickle of water in my room I should have a vast forest, stretching down to a river, in which children would lose their way. In the same way, at the foot of my yellowish lemon ice, I can see quite clearly postillions, travellers, post-chaises