at attached itself to my
dreams.

* * *

One day, as I was weary of our usual place, beside the wooden horses,
Francoise had taken me for an excursion--across the frontier guarded at
regular intervals by the little bastions of the barley-sugar women--into
those neighbouring but foreign regions, where the faces of the
passers-by were strange, where the goat-carriage went past; then she had
gone away to lay down her things on a chair that stood with its back to
a shrubbery of laurels; while I waited for her I was pacing the broad
lawn, of meagre close-cropped grass already faded by the sun, dominated,
at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a
little girl with reddish hair was playing with a shuttlecock; when, from
the path, another little girl, who was putting on her cloak and covering
up her battledore, called out sharply: "Good-bye, Gilberte, I'm going
home now; don't forget, we're coming to you this evening, after dinner."
The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcibly her
whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks
of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed
thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that
increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to
its target;--carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the
impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but
to the friend who called to her, everything that, while she uttered the
words, she more or less vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory, of
their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of
that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more
painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this
happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to
penetrate its surface, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry:
letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attar which that message
had distilled, by touching them with precision, from certain invisible
points in Mlle. Swann's life, from the evening to come, as it would be,
after dinner, at her home,--forming, on its celestial passage through
the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud,
exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one of Poussin's
gardens, reflects minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with
chariots and horses