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By Root 1677 0

For, whenever we attempt to imitate something that has really existed, we forget that this something was brought about not by the desire to imitate but by an unconscious force which itself is also real; but this unique impression, which all my longing to taste a delicate pleasure by going out with Rachel had failed to give me, I was now experiencing, without having looked for it in the slightest, but for quite other reasons, reasons that were sincere and profound; to take a single instance, for the reason that my jealousy prevented me from losing sight of Albertine, and, the moment I was able to leave the house, from letting her go anywhere without me. I was experiencing it only now because our knowledge is not of the external objects which we want to observe, but of involuntary sensations, because in the past, though a woman might indeed be sitting in the same carriage as myself, she was not really by my side as long as she was not continually re-created there by a need for her such as I felt for Albertine, as long as the constant caress of my gaze did not incessantly restore to her those tints that need to be perpetually refreshed, as long as my senses, appeased perhaps but still freshly remembering, were not aware of the savour and substance beneath those colours, as long as, combined with the senses and with the imagination that exalts them, jealousy was not maintaining that woman in a state of equilibrium at my side by a compensated attraction as powerful as the law of gravity.

Our motor-car sped along the boulevards and the avenues, whose rows of houses, a pink congelation of sunshine and cold, reminded me of my visits to Mme Swann in the soft light of her chrysanthemums, before it was time to ring for the lamps. I had barely time to make out, being separated from them by the glass of the car as effectively as I should have been by that of my bedroom window, a young fruit-seller, or a dairymaid, standing in the doorway of her shop, illuminated by the sunshine like a heroine whom my desire was sufficient to launch upon exquisite adventures, on the threshold of a romance which I should never know. For I could not ask Albertine to let me stop, and already the young women whose features my eyes had barely distinguished, and whose fresh complexions they had barely caressed, were no longer visible in the golden haze in which they were bathed. The emotion that gripped me when I caught sight of a wine-merchant’s girl at her cash-desk or a laundress chatting in the street was the emotion that we feel on recognising a goddess. Now that Olympus no longer exists, its inhabitants dwell upon the earth. And when, in composing a mythological scene, painters have engaged to pose as Venus or Ceres young women of the people following the humblest callings, so far from committing sacrilege they have merely added or restored to them the quality, the divine attributes of which they had been stripped.

“What did you think of the Trocadéro, you little gadabout?”

“I’m jolly glad I came away from it to go out with you. It’s by Davioud, I believe.”

“But how learned my little Albertine is becoming! It is indeed by Davioud, but I’d forgotten.”

“While you’re asleep I read your books, you old lazybones. As a building it’s pretty lousy, isn’t it?”

“I say, little one, you’re changing so fast and becoming so intelligent” (this was true, but even had it not been true I was not sorry that she should have the satisfaction, failing others, of saying to herself that at least the time she spent in my house was not being entirely wasted) “that I don’t mind telling you things which would generally be regarded as false but which correspond to a truth that I’m searching for. You know what is meant by impressionism?”

“Of course!”

“Very well then, this is what I mean: you remember the church at Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse which Elstir disliked because it was new? Isn’t it rather a denial of his own impressionism when he abstracts such buildings from the global impression in which they’re included, brings them out of the light in which they’re dissolved and