l steeds of Diomed, which
now, smitten by a desire to sea again what I had once loved, as ardent
as the desire that had driven me, many years before, along the same
paths, I wished to see renewed before my eyes at the moment when Mme.
Swann's enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his
fist, and as infantile as Saint George in the picture, endeavoured to
curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which they
thundered along the ground. Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars
driven each by a moustached mechanic, with a tall footman towering by
his side. I wished to hold before my bodily eyes, that I might know
whether they were indeed as charming as they appeared to the eyes of
memory, little hats, so low-crowned as to seem no more than garlands
about the brows of women. All the hats now were immense; covered with
fruits and flowers and all manner of birds. In place of the lovely gowns
in which Mme. Swann walked like a Queen, appeared Greco-Saxon tunics,
with Tanagra folds, or sometimes, in the Directoire style, 'Liberty
chiffons' sprinkled with flowers like sheets of wallpaper. On the heads
of the gentlemen who might have been eligible to stroll with Mme. Swann
in the Allee de la Reine Marguerite, I found not the grey 'tile' hats
of old, nor any other kind. They walked the Bois bare-headed. And seeing
all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the faith
which, applied to them, would have given them consistency, unity,
life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without
reality, containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have
endeavoured as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in
a picture. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief,
and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes,
there survives it--more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence
of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena--an
idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did
once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the
divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent
cause--the death of the gods.

"Oh, horrible!" I exclaimed to myself: "Does anyone really imagine that
these motor-cars are as smart as the old carriage-and-pair? I dare say.
I am too old now--but I was not intended for a world in which women
shackle themselves in ga