rments that are not even made of cloth. To what
purpose shall I walk among these trees if there is nothing left now of
the assembly that used to meet beneath the delicate tracery of reddening
leaves, if vulgarity and fatuity have supplanted the exquisite thing
that once their branches framed? Oh, horrible! My consolation is to
think of the women whom I have known, in the past, now that there is
no standard left of elegance. But how can the people who watch these
dreadful creatures hobble by, beneath hats on which have been heaped
the spoils of aviary or garden-bed,--how can they imagine the charm that
there was in the sight of Mme. Swann, crowned with a close-fitting lilac
bonnet, or with a tiny hat from which rose stiffly above her head a
single iris?" Could I ever have made them understand the emotion that
I used to feel on winter mornings, when I met Mme. Swann on foot, in an
otter-skin coat, with a woollen cap from which stuck out two blade-like
partridge-feathers, but enveloped also in the deliberate, artificial
warmth of her own house, which was suggested by nothing more than the
bunch of violets crushed into her bosom, whose flowering, vivid and blue
against the grey sky, the freezing air, the naked boughs, had the same
charming effect of using the season and the weather merely as a setting,
and of living actually in a human atmosphere, in the atmosphere of this
woman, as had in the vases and beaupots of her drawing-room, beside the
blazing fire, in front of the silk-covered sofa, the flowers that looked
out through closed windows at the falling snow? But it would not have
sufficed me that the costumes alone should still have been the same as
in those distant years. Because of the solidarity that binds together
the different parts of a general impression, parts that our memory keeps
in a balanced whole, of which we are not permitted to subtract or to
decline any fraction, I should have liked to be able to pass the rest
of the day with one of those women, over a cup of tea, in a little house
with dark-painted walls (as Mme. Swann's were still in the year after
that in which the first part of this story ends) against which would
glow the orange flame, the red combustion, the pink and white flickering
of her chrysanthemums in the twilight of a November evening, in moments
similar to those in which (as we shall see) I had not managed to
discover the pleasures for which I longed. But now, albeit they had led
to nothing,