those moments struck me as having been charming enough in
themselves. I sought to find them again as I remembered them. Alas!
there was nothing now but flats decorated in the Louis XVI style, all
white paint, with hortensias in blue enamel. Moreover, people did not
return to Paris, now, until much later. Mme. Swann would have written to
me, from a country house, that she would not be in town before February,
had I asked her to reconstruct for me the elements of that memory which
I felt to belong to a distant era, to a date in time towards which it
was forbidden me to ascend again the fatal slope, the elements of that
longing which had become, itself, as inaccessible as the pleasure that
it had once vainly pursued. And I should have required also that they
be the same women, those whose costume interested me because, at a time
when I still had faith, my imagination had individualised them and had
provided each of them with a legend. Alas! in the acacia-avenue--the
myrtle-alley--I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now
than grim spectres of what once they had been, wandering to and fro, in
desperate search of heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They
had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths.
The sun's face was hidden. Nature began again to reign over the Bois,
from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian
Garden of Woman; above the gimcrack windmill the real sky was grey; the
wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like
a real lake; large birds passed swiftly over the Bois, as over a real
wood, and with shrill cries perched, one after another, on the great
oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with Dodonaic majesty,
seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest, and
helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the
pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose
the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not
being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer
existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire
and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places
that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which
we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a
thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our
life