In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [97]
Elsewhere, a numerous band were playing ball. All these girls had come out to make the most of the sunshine, for these February days, even when they are as dazzling as this one, do not last long, and the splendour of their light does not postpone the hour of its decline. Before that hour drew near, we had a spell of chiaroscuro, because after we had driven as far as the Seine, where Albertine admired, and by her presence prevented me from admiring, the reflexions of red sails upon the wintry blue of the water, and a tiled house nestling in the distance like a single red poppy against the clear horizon of which Saint-Cloud seemed, further off still, to be the fragmentary, friable, ribbed petrifaction, we left our motor-car and walked a long way. For some moments I even gave her my arm, and it seemed to me that the ring which her arm formed round mine united our two persons in a single self and linked our destinies together.
Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet. It seemed to me already wonderful enough, at home, that Albertine should be living with me, that it should be she who came and lay down on my bed. But it was the transportation of that marvel to the outside world, into the heart of nature, by the shore of the lake in the Bois which I loved so much, beneath the trees, that it should be precisely her shadow, the pure and simplified shadow of her leg, of her bust, that the sun delineated in monochrome by the side of mine upon the gravel of the path. And the fusion of our shadows had a charm for me that was doubtless more insubstantial, but no less intimate, than the contiguity, the fusion of our bodies. Then we returned to the car. And it chose, for our homeward journey, a succession of little winding lanes along which the wintry trees, clothed, like ruins, in ivy and brambles, seemed to be pointing the way to the dwelling of some magician. No sooner had we emerged from their shady cover than we found, leaving the Bois, the daylight still so bright that I thought I should still have time to do everything I wanted to do before dinner, when, only a few moments later, as the car approached the Arc de Triomphe, it was with a sudden start of surprise and dismay that I perceived, over Paris, the moon prematurely full, like the face of a clock that has stopped and makes us think that we are late for an engagement. We had told the driver to take us home. For Albertine, this also meant returning to my home. The presence of women, however dear to us, who are obliged to leave us to return home does not bestow that peace which I found in the presence of Albertine seated in the car by my side, a presence that was conveying us not to the emptiness of the hours when lovers are apart, but to an even more stable and more sheltered reunion in my home, which was also hers, the material symbol of my possession of her. True, in order to possess, one must first have desired. We do not possess a line, a surface, a mass unless it is occupied by our love. But Albertine had not been for me during our drive, as Rachel had once been, a meaningless dust of flesh and clothing. At Balbec, the imagination of my eyes, my lips, my hands had so solidly constructed, so tenderly polished her body that now, in this car, in order to touch that body, to contain it, I had no need to press my own body against Albertine, nor even to see her; it was enough for me to hear her, and, if she was silent, to know that she was by my side; my interwoven senses enveloped her completely and when, on our arrival at the house, she quite naturally alighted,