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By Root 1192 0

a dazzling golden background like those in Fra Angelico’s pictures. From that moment onwards, only sunlight, perfumes, colours, seemed to me of any worth; for this alternation of images had effected a change of front in my desire, and—as abrupt as those that occur sometimes in music—a complete change of key in my sensibility. Then it came about that a simple atmospheric variation was sufficient to provoke in me that modulation, without there being any need for me to await the return of a season. For often in one we find a day that has strayed from another, that makes us live in that other, evokes at once and makes us long for its particular pleasures, and interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf torn from another chapter in the interpolated calendar of Happiness. But soon, in the same way as those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health can derive but an accidental and all too modest benefit until the day when science takes control of them and, producing them at will, places in our hands the power to order their appearance, free from the tutelage and independent of the mandate of chance, so the production of these dreams of the Atlantic and of Italy ceased to depend exclusively upon the changes of the seasons and of the weather. I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring, to come upon the name Balbec in a book sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for Norman Gothic; even on a stormy day the name Florence or Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore.

But if these names thus permanently absorbed the image I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I had formed of certain places on the surface of the globe, making them more special and in consequence more real. I did not then represent to myself cities, landscapes, historical monuments, as more or less attractive pictures, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different in essence from all the rest, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individual still was the character they assumed from being designated by names, names that were for themselves alone, proper names such as people have! Words present to us a little picture of things, clear and familiar, like the pictures hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter’s bench, a bird, an anthill, things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us—of persons, and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons—a confused picture, which draws from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction or by a whim on the designer’s part, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets. The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most longed to visit after reading the Chartreuse, seeming to me compact, smooth, violet-tinted and soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma in which I should be lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking that I