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By Root 1352 0

mysteries of the life which it was his duty to guard and upon which the ground-floor windows appeared conscious of being protectingly closed, with far less resemblance, between the nobly sweeping arches of their muslin curtains, to any other windows in the world than to Gilberte’s glancing eyes. On other days we would go along the boulevards, and I would take up a position at the corner of the Rue Duphot, along which I had heard that Swann was often to be seen passing on his way to his dentist; and my imagination so far differentiated Gilberte’s father from the rest of humanity, his presence in the midst of the real world introduced into it such an element of wonder, that even before we reached the Madeleine I would be trembling with emotion at the thought that I was approaching a street from which that supernatural apparition might at any moment burst upon me unawares.

But most often of all—on days when I was not to see Gilberte—as I had heard that Mme Swann went for a walk or a drive almost every day in the Allée des Acacias, round the big lake, and in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, I would lead Françoise to the Bois de Boulogne. It was to me like one of those zoological gardens in which one sees assembled together a variety of flora and contrasted landscapes, where from a hill one passes to a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a pit, another hill, a marsh, but knows that they are there only to enable the hippopotamus, zebra, crocodile, albino rabbit, bear and heron to disport themselves in a natural or a picturesque setting; it, the Bois, equally complex, uniting a multitude of little worlds, distinct and separate—alternating a plantation of redwood trees and American oaks, like an experimental forest in Virginia, with a fir-wood by the edge of the lake, or a grove from which would suddenly emerge, in her raiment of soft fur, with the large, appealing eyes of a dumb animal, a hastening walker—was the Garden of Woman; and like the myrtle-alley in the Aeneid, planted for their delight with trees of one kind only, the Allée des Acacias was thronged with the famous beauties of the day. As, from a long way off, the sight of the jutting crag from which it dives into the pool thrills with joy the children who know that they are going to see the seal, so, long before I reached the acacias, their fragrance which, radiating all around, made one aware of the approach and the singularity of a vegetable personality at once powerful and soft, then, as I drew near, the glimpsed summit of their lightly tossing foliage, in its easy grace, its coquettish outline, its delicate fabric, on which hundreds of flowers had swooped, like winged and throbbing colonies of precious insects, and finally their name itself, feminine, indolent, dulcet, made my heart beat, but with a social longing, like those waltzes which remind us only of the names of the fair dancers, called aloud as they enter the ballroom. I had been told that I should see in the alley certain women of fashion, who, in spite of their not all having husbands, were habitually mentioned in conjunction with Mme Swann, but most often by their professional names—their new names, when they had any, being but a sort of incognito, a veil which those who wished to speak of them were careful to draw aside in order to make themselves understood. Thinking that Beauty—in the order of feminine elegance—was governed by occult laws into the knowledge of which they had been initiated, and that they had the power to realise it, I accepted in advance like a revelation the appearance of their clothes, of their carriages and horses, of countless details in which I placed my faith as in an inner soul which gave the cohesion of a work of art to that ephemeral and shifting pageant. But it was Mme Swann whom I wished to see, and I waited for her to go past, as thrilled as though she were Gilberte, whose parents, impregnated, like everything that surrounded her, with her own special charm, excited in me as keen a passion as she did herself, indeed a still more painful agitation (since their point of contact