In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [74]
But perhaps I am wrong in saying an idiot, such postcards not having always been bought by a person of that sort at random, for their interest as coming from Versailles. For two whole years men of intelligence, artists, used to find Siena, Venice, Granada a “bore,” and would say of the humblest omnibus, of every railway carriage: “There you have true beauty.” Then this fancy passed like the rest. Indeed, I am not sure that people did not revert to the “sacrilege of destroying the noble relics of the past.” At any rate, a first-class railway carriage ceased to be regarded as a priori more beautiful than St Mark’s in Venice. People continued to say: “Here you have real life, the return to the past is artificial,” but without drawing any definite conclusion. At all events, while retaining full confidence in the chauffeur, to ensure that Albertine would be unable to desert him without his daring to stop her for fear of being taken for a spy, I no longer allowed her to go out after this without the reinforcement of Andrée, whereas for a time I had found the chauffeur sufficient. I had even allowed her then (a thing I would never dare do now) to stay away for three whole days by herself with the chauffeur and to go almost as far as Balbec, such a craving did she have for travelling at high speed in an open car. Three days during which my mind had been quite at rest, although the rain of postcards that she had showered upon me did not reach me, owing to the appalling state of the Breton postal system (good in summer, but disorganised, no doubt, in winter), until a week after the return of Albertine and the chauffeur, so hale and hearty that on the very morning of their return they resumed their daily outings as though nothing had happened. I was delighted that Albertine should be going this afternoon to the Trocadéro, to this “special” matinee, but above all reassured by the fact that she would have a companion there in the shape of Andrée.
Dismissing these reflexions, now that Albertine had gone out, I went and stood for a moment at the window. There was at first a silence, amid which the whistle of the tripe vendor and the hooting of the trams reverberated through the air in different octaves, like a blind piano-tuner. Then gradually the interwoven motifs became distinct, and others were combined with them. There was also a new whistle, the call of a vendor the nature of whose wares I never discovered, a whistle that exactly resembled the whistle of the trams, and since it was not carried out of earshot by its own velocity, it gave the impression of a single tram-car, not endowed with motion, or broken down, immobilised, screeching at brief intervals like a dying animal.
And I felt that, should I ever have to leave this aristocratic quarter—unless it were to move to one that was entirely plebeian—the streets and boulevards of central Paris (where the greengrocery, fishmongering and other trades, established in big stores, rendered superfluous the cries of the street hawkers, who in any case would have been unable to make themselves heard) would seem to me very dreary, quite uninhabitable, stripped, drained of all these litanies of the small trades and itinerant victuals, deprived of the orchestra that came every morning to charm me. On the pavement a woman with no pretence to fashion (or else obedient to an ugly fashion) came past, too brightly dressed in a sack overcoat of goatskin; but no, it was not a woman, it was a chauffeur who, enveloped in his goatskin, was proceeding on foot to his garage. Winged messengers of variegated hue, escaped from the big hotels, were speeding towards the stations bent over