re the best trains, and when I understood that by
making one's way, after luncheon, into the coal-grimed laboratory, the
wizard's cell that undertook to contrive a complete transmutation of its
surroundings, one could awaken, next morning, in the city of marble
and gold, in which "the building of the wall was of jasper and the
foundation of the wall an emerald." So that it and the City of the
Lilies were not just artificial scenes which I could set up at my
pleasure in front of my imagination, but did actually exist at a certain
distance from Paris which must inevitably be traversed if I wished to
see them, at their appointed place on the earth's surface, and at no
other; in a word they were entirely real. They became even more real
to me when my father, by saying: "Well, you can stay in Venice from the
20th to the 29th, and reach Florence on Easter morning," made them both
emerge, no longer only from the abstraction of Space, but from that
imaginary Time in which we place not one, merely, but several of
our travels at once, which do not greatly tax us since they are but
possibilities,--that Time which reconstructs itself so effectively that
one can spend it again in one town after one has already spent it in
another--and consecrated to them some of those actual, calendar days
which are certificates of the genuineness of what one does on them, for
those unique days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one
cannot live them again here when one has lived them elsewhere; I felt
that it was towards the week that would begin with the Monday on which
the laundress was to bring back the white waistcoat that I had stained
with ink, that they were hastening to busy themselves with the duty
of emerging from that ideal Time in which they did not, as yet, exist,
those two Queen Cities of which I was soon to be able, by the most
absorbing kind of geometry, to inscribe the domes and towers on a
page of my own life. But I was still on the way, only, to the supreme
pinnacle of happiness; I reached it finally (for not until then did the
revelation burst upon me that on the clattering streets, reddened by the
light reflected from Giorgione's frescoes, it was not, as I had, despite
so many promptings, continued to imagine, the men "majestic and terrible
as the sea, bearing armour that gleamed with bronze beneath the folds
of their blood-red cloaks," who would be walking in Venice next week, on
the Easter vigil; but that I myself m