Latest / Swanns Way / 56 - Swanns Way by Marcel Proust
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Part four, Section two of Swan's Way by Marcel Proust,
- 0:05Speaker 1: translated by C. K. Scott Moncrief eighteen eighty nine to
- 0:09Speaker 1: nineteen thirty. The Sleebrivat's recording is in the public domain
- 0:14Speaker 1: recording by expatriate in Bangor, Maine, Part four place names
- 0:20Speaker 1: the name, Section two. These images were false for another reason, also,
- 0:27Speaker 1: namely that they were necessarily much simplified. Doubtless the object
- 0:31Speaker 1: to which my imagination aspired, which my senses took in,
- 0:35Speaker 1: but incompletely and without any immediate pleasure, I had committed
- 0:39Speaker 1: to the safe custody of names, doubtless because I had
- 0:43Speaker 1: accumulated there a store of dreams. Those names now magnetize
- 0:47Speaker 1: my desires. But names themselves are not very comprehensive. The
- 0:52Speaker 1: most that I could do was to include in each
- 0:54Speaker 1: of them two or three of the principal curiosities of
- 0:57Speaker 1: the town, which would lie there side by side without
- 1:00Speaker 1: interval or partition. In the name of Balbeck, as in
- 1:04Speaker 1: the magnifying glasses set in those penholders which one buys
- 1:08Speaker 1: at seaside places, I could distinguish waves surging round a
- 1:12Speaker 1: church built in the Persian manner. Perhaps indeed, the enforced
- 1:16Speaker 1: simplicity of these images was one of the reasons for
- 1:19Speaker 1: the hole that they had over me. When my father
- 1:22Speaker 1: had decided one year that we should go for the
- 1:25Speaker 1: Easter holidays to Florence and Venice. Not finding room to
- 1:29Speaker 1: introduce into the name of Florence the elements that ordinarily
- 1:32Speaker 1: constitute a town, I was obliged to let a supernatural
- 1:36Speaker 1: city emerge from the impregnation by certain vernal scenes of
- 1:41Speaker 1: what I supposed to be in its essentials. The genius
- 1:44Speaker 1: of Joto all the more, and because one cannot make
- 1:47Speaker 1: a name extend much further in time than in space,
- 1:51Speaker 1: Like some of Joto's paintings themselves, which show us at
- 1:54Speaker 1: two separate moments the same person engaged in different actions,
- 1:59Speaker 1: here lying on his bed, there just about to mount
- 2:02Speaker 1: his horse, the name of Florence was divided into two compartments.
- 2:06Speaker 1: In one, beneath an architectural deis, I gazed upon a
- 2:10Speaker 1: fresco over which was partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight,
- 2:15Speaker 1: dusty aslant, and gradually spreading in the other. For since
- 2:20Speaker 1: I thought of names not as an inaccessible ideal, but
- 2:24Speaker 1: as a real and enveloping substance, into which I was
- 2:27Speaker 1: about to plunge, the life not yet lived. The life
- 2:31Speaker 1: intact and pure which I enclosed in them, gave to
- 2:34Speaker 1: the most material pleasures, to the simplest scenes, the same
- 2:38Speaker 1: attraction that they have in the works of the primitives.
- 2:42Speaker 1: I moved swiftly so as to arrive as soon as
- 2:45Speaker 1: might be, at the table that was spread from me
- 2:47Speaker 1: with fruit and a flask of Chianti, across the Ponte Veccio,
- 2:52Speaker 1: heaped with John Quill's Narcissi and anemones. That for all
- 2:56Speaker 1: that I was still in Paris was what I saw,
- 2:59Speaker 1: and not what was actually round about me. Even from
- 3:02Speaker 1: the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries
- 3:06Speaker 1: for which we long occupy at any given moment a
- 3:09Speaker 1: far larger place in our true life than the country
- 3:13Speaker 1: in which we may happen to be. Doubtless, if at
- 3:16Speaker 1: that time I had paid more attention to what was
- 3:18Speaker 1: in my mind when I pronounced the words going to Florence,
- 3:22Speaker 1: to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice, I should have realized
- 3:25Speaker 1: that what I saw was in no sense a town,
- 3:28Speaker 1: but something as different from anything that I knew, something
- 3:31Speaker 1: as delicious as might be for a human race, whose
- 3:35Speaker 1: whole existence had passed in a series of late winter
- 3:38Speaker 1: afternoons that inconceivable marble a morning in spring. These images, unreal, fixed,
- 3:45Speaker 1: always alike, filling all my nights and days, differentiated this
- 3:50Speaker 1: period in my life from those which had gone before it,
- 3:54Speaker 1: and might easily have been confused with it by an
- 3:56Speaker 1: observer who saw things only from without, that is to say,
- 4:00Speaker 1: who saw nothing. As in an opera, a fresh melody
- 4:04Speaker 1: introduces a novel atmosphere which one could never have suspected
- 4:09Speaker 1: if one had done no more than read the libretto,
- 4:12Speaker 1: still less if one had remained outside the theater, counting
- 4:16Speaker 1: only the minutes as they passed. And besides, even from
- 4:19Speaker 1: the point of view of mere quantity, in our life,
- 4:22Speaker 1: the days are not all equal. To reach the end
- 4:25Speaker 1: of a day, Natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was,
- 4:29Speaker 1: make use like motor cars of different speeds. There are mountainous,
- 4:34Speaker 1: uncomfortable days up which one takes an infinite time to pass,
- 4:39Speaker 1: and days downward sloping through which one can go at
- 4:42Speaker 1: full tilt, singing as one goes. During this month in
- 4:46Speaker 1: which I went laboriously over as over a tune, though
- 4:50Speaker 1: never to my satisfaction. These visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa,
- 4:54Speaker 1: from which the desire that they excited in me drew,
- 4:57Speaker 1: and kept something as profoundly person as if it had
- 5:01Speaker 1: been loved love for another person. I never ceased to
- 5:05Speaker 1: believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself,
- 5:10Speaker 1: and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope
- 5:13Speaker 1: as could have been cherished by a Christian in the
- 5:15Speaker 1: primitive age of faith on the eve of his entry
- 5:19Speaker 1: into paradise. Moreover, without my paying any heed to the
- 5:23Speaker 1: contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at
- 5:26Speaker 1: and to touch with my organs of sense, what had
- 5:30Speaker 1: been elaborated by the spell of my dreams, and not
- 5:33Speaker 1: perceived by my senses at all, though all the more
- 5:36Speaker 1: tempting to them, in consequence more different from anything that
- 5:40Speaker 1: they knew. It was that which recalled to me the
- 5:43Speaker 1: reality of these visions, which inflamed my desire, all the
- 5:47Speaker 1: more by seeming to hint a promise that my desire
- 5:50Speaker 1: should be satisfied. And for all that the motive force
- 5:54Speaker 1: of my exaltation was a longing for esthetic enjoyments, the
- 5:58Speaker 1: guide books ministered even more to it than books on esthetics,
- 6:02Speaker 1: and more again than the guide books the railway timetables.
- 6:06Speaker 1: What moved me was the thought that this Florence, which
- 6:09Speaker 1: I could see so near and yet inaccessible in my imagination,
- 6:14Speaker 1: if the tract which separated it from me in myself
- 6:18Speaker 1: was not one that I might cross, could yet be
- 6:20Speaker 1: reached by a circuit, by a digression, were I to
- 6:24Speaker 1: take the plain terrestrial path. When I repeated to myself,
- 6:29Speaker 1: giving thus a special value to what I was going
- 6:32Speaker 1: to see, that Venice was the school of Giorgioni, the
- 6:35Speaker 1: home of Titian, the most complete museum of the domestic
- 6:39Speaker 1: architecture of the Middle Ages, I felt happy, indeed, as
- 6:43Speaker 1: I was even more when on one of my walks,
- 6:46Speaker 1: as I stepped out briskly on account of the weather, which,
- 6:49Speaker 1: after several days of a precocious spring, had relapsed into winter,
- 6:53Speaker 1: like the weather that we had invariably found awaiting us
- 6:57Speaker 1: at Combra in Holy Week, Seeing upon the boulevards that
- 7:00Speaker 1: the chestnut trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that
- 7:04Speaker 1: soaked through them like a stream of water, were nonetheless beginning.
- 7:08Speaker 1: Punctual guests arrayed already for the party and admitting no
- 7:13Speaker 1: discouragement to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps,
- 7:18Speaker 1: the irrepressible verdure, whose steady growth the abortive power of
- 7:22Speaker 1: the cold might hinder, but could not succeed in restraining.
- 7:26Speaker 1: I reflected it already the Ponte Veccio was heaped high
- 7:30Speaker 1: with an abundance of hyacinths and anemones, and that the
- 7:34Speaker 1: spring sunshine was already tinging the waves of the Grand
- 7:37Speaker 1: Canal with so dusky in asure, with emeralds so splendid,
- 7:42Speaker 1: that when they washed and were broken against the foot
- 7:44Speaker 1: of one of Titian's paintings, they could vie with it
- 7:47Speaker 1: in the richness of their coloring. I could no longer
- 7:50Speaker 1: contain my joy when my father, in the intervals of
- 7:54Speaker 1: tapping the barometer and complaining of the cold, began to
- 7:57Speaker 1: look out which were the best trains, And when I
- 8:00Speaker 1: understood that by making one's way after luncheon into the
- 8:04Speaker 1: cold grimed laboratory the wizard's cell, that undertook to contrive
- 8:08Speaker 1: a complete transmutation of its surroundings, one could awaken next
- 8:13Speaker 1: morning in the city of marble and gold, in which
- 8:16Speaker 1: the building of the wall was of Jasper and the
- 8:19Speaker 1: foundation of the wall in emeralds, so that it and
- 8:22Speaker 1: the City of the Lilies was not just artificial scenes
- 8:25Speaker 1: which I could set up at my pleasure in front
- 8:28Speaker 1: of my imagination, but did actually exist at a certain
- 8:31Speaker 1: distance from Paris, which must inevitably be traversed if I
- 8:35Speaker 1: wished to see them at their appointed place on the
- 8:38Speaker 1: Earth's surface, and at no other. In a word, they
- 8:42Speaker 1: were entirely real. They became even more real to me
- 8:45Speaker 1: when my father, by saying, well, you can stay in
- 8:49Speaker 1: Venice from the twentieth to the twenty ninth and reach
- 8:51Speaker 1: Florence on Easter morning, made them both emerge no longer
- 8:55Speaker 1: only from the abstraction of space, but from that imaginary
- 8:59Speaker 1: time in which we place not one merely, but several
- 9:02Speaker 1: of our travels at once, which do not greatly tax us,
- 9:06Speaker 1: since they are but possibilities. That time which reconstructs itself
- 9:10Speaker 1: so effectively that one can spend it again in one
- 9:14Speaker 1: town after one has already spent it in another, and
- 9:17Speaker 1: consecrated to them some of those actual calendar days, which
- 9:21Speaker 1: are certificates of the genuineness of what one does on them,
- 9:25Speaker 1: For those unique days are consumed by being used, they
- 9:28Speaker 1: do not return. One cannot live them again here when
- 9:32Speaker 1: one has lived them elsewhere. I felt that it was
- 9:35Speaker 1: towards the week that would begin with the Monday on
- 9:37Speaker 1: which the laundress was to bring back the white waistcoat
- 9:40Speaker 1: that I had stained with ink, that they were hastening
- 9:43Speaker 1: to busy themselves with the duty of emerging from that
- 9:46Speaker 1: ideal time in which they did not as yet exist,
- 9:49Speaker 1: those two queen cities of which I was soon to
- 9:52Speaker 1: be able, by the most absorbing kind of geometry, to
- 9:56Speaker 1: inscribe the domes and towers on a page of my
- 9:59Speaker 1: own life. But I was still on the way only
- 10:02Speaker 1: to the supreme pinnacle of happiness. I reached it finally,
- 10:06Speaker 1: for not until then did the revelation burst upon me that,
- 10:10Speaker 1: on the clattering streets reddened by the light reflected from
- 10:14Speaker 1: Giorgioni's frescoes, it was not as I had, despite so
- 10:18Speaker 1: many promptings, continued to imagine the men, majestic and terrible
- 10:23Speaker 1: as the sea, bearing armor that gleamed with bronze beneath
- 10:26Speaker 1: the folds of their blood red cloaks, who would be
- 10:29Speaker 1: walking in Venice next week on the Easter vigil, but
- 10:33Speaker 1: that I myself might be the minute personage whom in
- 10:36Speaker 1: an enlarged photograph of Saint Mark's that had been lent
- 10:39Speaker 1: to me, the operator had portrayed in a bowler hat
- 10:42Speaker 1: in front of the portico. When I heard my father say,
- 10:46Speaker 1: it must be pretty cold still on the Grand Canal.
- 10:49Speaker 1: Whatever you do, don't forget to pack your winter greatcoat
- 10:51Speaker 1: and your thick suit. At these words, I was raised
- 10:54Speaker 1: to a sort of ecstasy, a thing that I had
- 10:57Speaker 1: until then deemed impossible. I felt myself to be penetrating,
- 11:01Speaker 1: indeed between those rocks of amethyst, like a reef in
- 11:05Speaker 1: the Indian Ocean, by a supreme muscular effort, a long
- 11:09Speaker 1: way in excess of my real strength, stripping myself as
- 11:13Speaker 1: of a shell that served no purpose. Of the air
- 11:16Speaker 1: in my own room which surrounded me, I replaced it
- 11:19Speaker 1: by an equal quantity of Venetian air. That marine atmosphere
- 11:23Speaker 1: indescribable and peculiar as the atmosphere of the dreams which
- 11:28Speaker 1: my imagination had secreted in the name of Venice. I
- 11:31Speaker 1: could feel at work within me a miraculous disincarnation. It
- 11:36Speaker 1: was at once accompanied by that vague desire to vomit,
- 11:39Speaker 1: which one feels when one has a very sore throat,
- 11:42Speaker 1: and they had to put me to bed with a
- 11:44Speaker 1: fever so persistent that the doctor not only assured my
- 11:47Speaker 1: parents that a visit that spring to Florence and Venice
- 11:51Speaker 1: was absolutely out of the question, but warned them that
- 11:54Speaker 1: even when I should have completely recovered, I must, for
- 11:57Speaker 1: at least a year, give up all idea of traveling
- 12:00Speaker 1: and be kept from anything that was liable to excite me,
- 12:04Speaker 1: and alas he forbade also most categorically my being allowed
- 12:08Speaker 1: to go to the theater to hear Berma, the sublime
- 12:12Speaker 1: artist whose genius Bargault had proclaimed, might, by introducing me
- 12:16Speaker 1: to something else that was perhaps as important and as beautiful,
- 12:20Speaker 1: have consoled me for not having been to Florence and Venice,
- 12:23Speaker 1: for not going to Ballback. My parents had to be
- 12:26Speaker 1: content with sending me every day to the champ Elisee
- 12:30Speaker 1: in the custody of a person who would see that
- 12:32Speaker 1: I did not tire myself. This person was none other
- 12:35Speaker 1: than Francoise, who had entered our service after the death
- 12:39Speaker 1: of my aunt Leonie. Going to the champ Elie I
- 12:42Speaker 1: found unendurable, if only Bargott had described the place in
- 12:46Speaker 1: one of his books. I should no doubt have longed
- 12:48Speaker 1: to see and to know it, like so many things else,
- 12:51Speaker 1: of which a stimulochrum had first found its way into
- 12:55Speaker 1: my imagination, that kept things warm, made them live, gave
- 13:00Speaker 1: them personality. And I sought then to find their counterpart
- 13:04Speaker 1: in reality. But in this public garden there was nothing
- 13:07Speaker 1: that attached itself to my dreams. One day, as I
- 13:11Speaker 1: was weary of our usual place beside the wooden horses,
- 13:15Speaker 1: Francoise had taken me for an excursion across the frontier,
- 13:19Speaker 1: guarded at regular intervals by the little bastions of the
- 13:23Speaker 1: barley sugar women, into those neighboring but foreign regions where
- 13:27Speaker 1: the faces of the passers by were strange, where the
- 13:30Speaker 1: goat carriage went past. Then she had gone away to
- 13:33Speaker 1: lay down her things on a chair that stood with
- 13:35Speaker 1: its back to a shrubbery of laurels. While I waited
- 13:39Speaker 1: for her, I was pacing the broad lawn of meager,
- 13:42Speaker 1: close cropped grass, already faded by the sun, dominated at
- 13:47Speaker 1: its far end by a statue rising from a fountain,
- 13:51Speaker 1: in front of which a little girl with reddish hair
- 13:53Speaker 1: was playing with a shuttlecock, when from the path another
- 13:57Speaker 1: little girl, who was putting on her cloak in covering
- 14:00Speaker 1: up her battle door, called out sharply, goodbye, Gilbert. I'm
- 14:04Speaker 1: going home now. Don't forget we're coming to you this
- 14:07Speaker 1: evening after dinner. The name Gilbert passed close by me,
- 14:11Speaker 1: evoking all the more forcibly her, whom it labeled, in
- 14:15Speaker 1: that it did not merely refer to her as one
- 14:18Speaker 1: speaks of a man in his absence, but was directly
- 14:21Speaker 1: addressed to her. It passed thus close by me in action,
- 14:25Speaker 1: so to speak, with a force that increased with the
- 14:28Speaker 1: curve of its trajectory, and as it drew near to
- 14:31Speaker 1: its target, carrying in its wake, I could feel the
- 14:35Speaker 1: knowledge the impression of her to whom it was addressed,
- 14:38Speaker 1: that belonged not to me, but to the friend who
- 14:40Speaker 1: called to her everything that while she uttered the words,
- 14:43Speaker 1: she more or less vividly reviewed possessed in her memory
- 14:47Speaker 1: of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid
- 14:50Speaker 1: to each other, of that unknown existence which was all
- 14:54Speaker 1: the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me, from
- 14:57Speaker 1: being conversely so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl
- 15:02Speaker 1: who let her message brush past me without my being
- 15:05Speaker 1: able to penetrate its surface, who flung it on the
- 15:08Speaker 1: air with a light hearted cry, letting float in the
- 15:11Speaker 1: atmosphere the delicious atar which that message had distilled by
- 15:16Speaker 1: touching them with precision from certain invisible points in Mademoiselle
- 15:21Speaker 1: Swan's life, from the evening to come, as it would
- 15:24Speaker 1: be after dinner at her home, forming on its celestial
- 15:28Speaker 1: passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids,
- 15:31Speaker 1: a little cloud exquisitely colored like the cloud that curling
- 15:35Speaker 1: over one of Poussin's gardens, reflects minutely like a cloud
- 15:40Speaker 1: in the opera teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition
- 15:44Speaker 1: of the life of the gods, casting finally on that
- 15:48Speaker 1: ragged grass at the spot on which she stood at
- 15:51Speaker 1: once a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in
- 15:54Speaker 1: the afternoon of the fair player, who continued to beat
- 15:57Speaker 1: up and catch her shuttlecock, until a governess with a
- 16:00Speaker 1: blue feather in her hat had called her away. A
- 16:03Speaker 1: marvelous little band of light of the color of heliotrope,
- 16:07Speaker 1: spread over the lawn like a carpet on which I
- 16:09Speaker 1: could not tired of treading to and fro with lingering feet,
- 16:14Speaker 1: nostalgic in profane, while Francoise shouted, come on, button up
- 16:18Speaker 1: your coat, look and let's get away. And I remarked
- 16:22Speaker 1: for the first time how common her speech was, and
- 16:25Speaker 1: that she had alas no blue feather in her hat.
- 16:28Speaker 1: Only would she come again to the Champalisee. Next day
- 16:32Speaker 1: she was not there, but I saw her on the
- 16:34Speaker 1: following days. I spent all my time revolving round the
- 16:37Speaker 1: spot where she was at play with her friends, to
- 16:40Speaker 1: such effect that once, when they found they were not
- 16:42Speaker 1: enough to make up a prisoner's base, she sent one
- 16:45Speaker 1: of them to ask me if I cared to complete
- 16:47Speaker 1: their side. And from that day I played with her
- 16:50Speaker 1: whenever she came. But this did not happen every day.
- 16:53Speaker 1: There were days when she had been prevented from coming,
- 16:56Speaker 1: by her lessons, by her catechism, by a luncheon party,
- 17:00Speaker 1: by the whole of that life separated from my own,
- 17:03Speaker 1: which twice only condensed into the name of Gilbert, I
- 17:07Speaker 1: had felt passed so painfully close to me in the
- 17:10Speaker 1: Hawthorne Lane near Combrae, and on the grass of the
- 17:13Speaker 1: champalise On such days she would have told us beforehand
- 17:17Speaker 1: that we should not see her. If it were because
- 17:19Speaker 1: of her lesson, she would say, it is too tiresome.
- 17:22Speaker 1: I shan't be able to come tomorrow. You will all
- 17:24Speaker 1: be enjoying yourselves here without me, with an air of regret,
- 17:28Speaker 1: which to some extent consoled me. If, on the other hand,
- 17:32Speaker 1: she had been invited to a party, and I, not
- 17:35Speaker 1: knowing this, asked her whether she was coming to play
- 17:37Speaker 1: with us, she would reply, indeed, I hope not. Indeed,
- 17:41Speaker 1: I hope Mama will let me go to my friends.
- 17:43Speaker 1: But on these days I did at least know that
- 17:46Speaker 1: I should not see her, whereas on others, without any warning,
- 17:50Speaker 1: her mother would take her for a drive or some
- 17:52Speaker 1: such thing, and next day she would say, oh, yes,
- 17:55Speaker 1: I went out with Mamma, as though it had been
- 17:57Speaker 1: the most natural thing in the world, and not the
- 18:00Speaker 1: greatst possible misfortune for someone else. There were also the
- 18:04Speaker 1: days of bad weather, on which her governess, afraid on
- 18:07Speaker 1: her own account of the rain, would not bring Jolbert
- 18:10Speaker 1: to the Champalisee, and so if the heavens were doubtful
- 18:14Speaker 1: from early morning, I would not cease to interrogate them
- 18:18Speaker 1: observing all the omens. If I saw the lady opposite,
- 18:22Speaker 1: just inside her window, putting on her hat, I would
- 18:24Speaker 1: say to myself that lady is going out. It must
- 18:28Speaker 1: therefore be weather in which one can go out. Why
- 18:30Speaker 1: should not Jilbert do the same as that lady. But
- 18:33Speaker 1: the day grew dark. My mother said that it might
- 18:36Speaker 1: clear again, that one burst of sunshine would be enough,
- 18:40Speaker 1: but that more probably it would rain. And if it rained,
- 18:43Speaker 1: of what use would it be to go to the champalisee.
- 18:47Speaker 1: And so from breakfast time my anxious eyes never left
- 18:50Speaker 1: the uncertain clouded sky. It remained dark outside the window.
- 18:55Speaker 1: The balcony was gray. Suddenly on its sullen stone. I
- 18:59Speaker 1: did not, indeed i'd see a less negative color, but
- 19:02Speaker 1: I felt as it were an effort towards a less
- 19:04Speaker 1: negative color, the pulsation of a hesitating ray that struggled
- 19:08Speaker 1: to discharge its light. A moment later, the balcony was
- 19:12Speaker 1: as pale and luminous as a standing water at dawn,
- 19:16Speaker 1: and a thousand shadows from the iron work of its
- 19:18Speaker 1: balustrade had come to rest on it. A breath of
- 19:22Speaker 1: wind dispersed them. The stone grew dark again, but like
- 19:26Speaker 1: tamed creatures. They returned, they began imperceptibly to grow lighter,
- 19:31Speaker 1: and by one of those continuous crescendoes, such as in
- 19:35Speaker 1: music at the end of an overture, carry a single
- 19:38Speaker 1: note to the extreme fortissimo, making it pass rapidly through
- 19:42Speaker 1: all the intermediate stages. I saw it attained to that fixed,
- 19:46Speaker 1: unalterable gold of fine days, on which the sharply cut
- 19:50Speaker 1: shadows of the wrought iron of the balustrade were outlined
- 19:54Speaker 1: in black, like a capricious vegetation, with a fineness in
- 19:58Speaker 1: the delineation of their small less details which seem to
- 20:01Speaker 1: indicate a deliberate application and artist's satisfaction, and with so
- 20:07Speaker 1: much relief, so velvety, a bloom in the restfulness of
- 20:10Speaker 1: their somber and happy mass, that in truth, those large
- 20:14Speaker 1: and leafy shadows which lay reflected on that lake of
- 20:18Speaker 1: sunshine seemed aware that they were pledges of happiness and
- 20:21Speaker 1: peace of mind. Brief, fading, ivy, climbing, fugitive flora, the
- 20:27Speaker 1: most colorless, the most depressing to many minds, of all
- 20:31Speaker 1: that creep on walls or decorate windows, to me, the
- 20:34Speaker 1: dearest of them all, From the day when it appeared
- 20:37Speaker 1: upon our balcony like the very shadow of the presence
- 20:40Speaker 1: of Jilbert, who was perhaps already in the champelisee, and
- 20:44Speaker 1: as soon as I arrived there would greet me with,
- 20:46Speaker 1: let's begin at once you were on my side, frail,
- 20:50Speaker 1: swept away by a breath, but at the same time
- 20:53Speaker 1: in harmony, not with the season, with the hour, a
- 20:56Speaker 1: promise of that immediate pleasure which the day will deny
- 20:59Speaker 1: or full fill, and thereby of the one paramount immediate pleasure,
- 21:04Speaker 1: the pleasure of loving and of being loved, more soft,
- 21:08Speaker 1: more warm upon the stone than even moss is alive,
- 21:12Speaker 1: a ray of sunshine, sufficing for its birth and for
- 21:15Speaker 1: the birth of joy, even in the heart of winter,
- 21:18Speaker 1: and on those days when all other vegetation had disappeared,
- 21:22Speaker 1: when the fine jerkins of green leather which covered the
- 21:25Speaker 1: trunks of the old trees were hidden beneath the snow,
- 21:29Speaker 1: after the snow had ceased to fall, but when the
- 21:32Speaker 1: sky was still too much overcast for me to hope
- 21:35Speaker 1: that Jolbert would venture out. Then suddenly inspiring my mother
- 21:39Speaker 1: to say, look, it's quite fine now, I think you
- 21:41Speaker 1: might perhaps try going to the champ elysee. After all,
- 21:45Speaker 1: on the mantle of snow that swathed the balcony, the
- 21:48Speaker 1: sun had appeared, and with stitching steams of gold, with
- 21:52Speaker 1: embroidered patches of dark shadow. That day we found no
- 21:56Speaker 1: one there or else. A solitary girl on the point
- 21:59Speaker 1: of departure, who assured me that Jiolbert was not coming.
- 22:03Speaker 1: The chairs deserted by the imposing but uninspiring company of
- 22:07Speaker 1: governesses stood empty. Only near the grass was sitting a
- 22:11Speaker 1: lady of uncertain age who came in all weathers, dressed
- 22:15Speaker 1: always in an identical style, splendid and somber to make,
- 22:19Speaker 1: whose acquaintance I would have at that period sacrificed, had
- 22:23Speaker 1: it lain in my power, all the greatest opportunities in
- 22:26Speaker 1: my life to come for Gilbert went up every day
- 22:29Speaker 1: to speak to her. She used to ask Gilbert for
- 22:32Speaker 1: news of her dearest mother, and it struck me that
- 22:35Speaker 1: if I had known her, I should have been for Gilbert,
- 22:38Speaker 1: someone wholly different, someone who knew people in her parents world.
- 22:42Speaker 1: While her grandchildren played together at a little distance, she
- 22:45Speaker 1: would sit and read the debates, which she called my
- 22:48Speaker 1: old debates, as with an aristocratic familiarity. She would say,
- 22:52Speaker 1: speaking of the police sergeant or the woman who left
- 22:55Speaker 1: the chairs, my old friend, the police sergeant or the
- 22:58Speaker 1: chair keeper and I who are old friends. End of
- 23:03Speaker 1: Part four, Section two. Recording by expatriate in Bangor, Maine.