ise. Moreover, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that
there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with my organs of sense
what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by
my senses at all--though all the more tempting to them, in consequence,
more different from anything that they knew--it was that which recalled
to me the reality of these visions, which inflamed my desire all the
more by seeming to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied.
And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for
aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than
books on aesthetics, and, more again than the guide-books, the railway
time-tables. What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I
could see, so near and yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the tract
which separated it from me, in myself, was not one that I might cross,
could yet be reached by a circuit, by a digression, were I to take
the plain, terrestrial path. When I repeated to myself, giving thus a
special value to what I was going to see, that Venice was the "School of
Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most complete museum of the domestic
architecture of the Middle Ages," I felt happy indeed. As I was even
more when, on one of my walks, as I stepped out briskly on account
of the weather, which, after several days of a precocious spring, had
relapsed into winter (like the weather that we had invariably found
awaiting us at Combray, in Holy Week),--seeing upon the boulevards that
the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked
through them like a stream of water, were none the less beginning,
punctual guests, arrayed already for the party, and admitting no
discouragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the
irrepressible verdure whose steady growth the abortive power of the
cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining--I reflected that
already the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of hyacinths
and anemones, and that the spring sunshine was already tinging the waves
of the Grand Canal with so dusky an azure, with emeralds so splendid
that when they washed and were broken against the foot of one of
Titian's paintings they could vie with it in the richness of their
colouring. I could no longer contain my joy when my father, in the
intervals of tapping the barometer and complaining of the cold, began
to look out which we