The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141956718
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-01-11T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

A visit from Albertine – The prospect of a wealthy marriage for some of Saint-Loup’s friends – Guermantes wit and the Princess of Parma – A curious visit to M. de Charlus – I fail increasingly to understand his character – The Duchesse’s red shoes

Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had just been reborn, life stretched out uninterruptedly before me, for that morning, after a series of mild days, there had been a chilly fog which had not cleared until around midday. And a change in the weather is enough to create the world and ourselves afresh. In the past, when the wind swept down my chimney, I would listen to the blows it struck on the flue-trap with as much emotion as if, like the famous motif on the strings which opens the Fifth Symphony,3 they had been the irresistible calls of a mysterious destiny. Every change in the natural scene offers us a similar transformation by adapting our desires to harmonize with the fresh shape of things. The mist, from the moment I woke up, had turned me, not into the centrifugal being of fine days, but into a man of reclusion, hankering after the fireside corner and the shared bed, an Adam sensitive to cold in quest of a sedentary Eve, in this changed world.

Between the soft grey light of a morning landscape and the taste of a cup of chocolate I instated all that was distinctive about the physical, intellectual and moral life I had taken with me to Doncières about a year earlier and which, blazoned with the oblong shape of a bare hillside – always present even when it was invisible – represented a series of pleasures that were utterly distinct from any others, incommunicable to friends in the sense that the impressions, richly interwoven with one another, which orchestrated them were more typical of them for me, in an unconscious way, than any facts about them I could have related to others. From this point of view the new world into which I had been plunged by the morning mist was a world already known to me (which only made it more real) and forgotten for some time (which restored all its freshness). And I was able to study several of the pictures of misty landscapes acquired by my memory, notably a series of ‘Mornings in Doncières’, including my first morning in the barracks there and another in a nearby country house where I had gone with Saint-Loup to spend the night: from the windows of both, when I had drawn back the curtains at dawn before getting back into bed, in the first a cavalryman, in the second (at the narrow margin of a pond and a wood, all the rest of which was engulfed in the uniform and liquid softness of the mist) a coachman polishing a harness strap, had appeared like those rare figures, scarcely visible to the eye – forced to adapt itself to the mysterious blur of the half-light – which emerge from a worn fresco.

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