The Prisoner by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

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The fine weather took another leap forward that night, as a thermometer rises with the heat. When I woke up on those early rising spring mornings, from my bed I could hear the trams moving through the scents in the air, with which the heat would coalesce more and more until it reached the almost solid density of midday. Fresher were the scents of my bedroom, once the smooth air had finished coating and separating the smells of the washbasin, of the wardrobe, of the sofa; the very clarity with which, standing upright, they formed distinct, juxtaposed layers, in a mother-of-pearl semi-darkness which gave a gentler sheen to the gleam of the curtains and the blue satin armchairs, allowed me to see myself, not by a simple quirk of my imagination but because it was really possible, walking through some newly developed part of the suburbs, like the one Bloch lived in at Balbec, following streets blinded with sunlight, and seeing not the dull butchers’ shops and white freestone, but the dining-room of a country house where I might presently arrive, and the scents which I should find when I arrived there, the smell of the fruit-bowl of cherries and apricots, of cider, of Gruyère cheese, all suspended in the luminous congelation of shadow which they vein delicately like the depths of an agate, while the cut-glass knife-rests flash rainbows or deposit on the oilcloth table-cover peacock’s-feather ocelli.

Like a steadily strengthening wind I heard with joy the sound of a motor-car under my window. I recognized its petrol smell. This smell may seem regrettable to the squeamish (who are always materialists and for whom it spoils the countryside) and to certain thinkers, also materialists in their way, who, believing in the importance of the fact, imagine that man would be happier, capable of a more elevated poetry, if his eyes could see more colors, his nostrils smell more perfumes: a philosophical version of the naïve belief of those who think that life was more beautiful when, instead of dark suits, people wore sumptuous costumes. But for me (just as an aroma, unpleasant in itself, of mothballs and vetiver would have delighted me by restoring to me the pure blue of the sea on the day I arrived at Balbec), this smell of petrol which, with the smoke that was escaping from the machine, had so many times risen into the pale azure sky, on those burning hot days when I went from Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise to Gourville, just as it had followed me on my outings on the afternoons when Albertine was painting, now set to flowering all around me, even though I was in my darkened room, cornflowers, poppies and red clover, it intoxicated me with a scent of the countryside, not circumscribed and precise, like the one which is affixed in front of hawthorns and, held there by its rich, heavy elements, floats without moving much in front of the hedge, but a scent at the appearance of

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