h bathed its feet. A young
woman, whose pensive face and fashionable veils did not suggest a local
origin, and who had doubtless come there, in the popular phrase, 'to
bury herself,' to taste the bitter sweetness of feeling that her name,
and still more the name of him whose heart she had once held, but had
been unable to keep, were unknown there, stood framed in a window from
which she had no outlook beyond the boat that was moored beside her
door. She raised her eyes with an air of distraction when she heard,
through the trees that lined the bank, the voices of passers-by of whom,
before they came in sight, she might be certain that never had they
known, nor would they know, the faithless lover, that nothing in their
past lives bore his imprint, which nothing in their future would have
occasion to receive. One felt that in her renunciation of life she had
willingly abandoned those places in which she would at least have been
able to see him whom she loved, for others where he had never trod. And
I watched her, as she returned from some walk along a road where she had
known that he would not appear, drawing from her submissive fingers long
gloves of a precious, useless charm.

Never, in the course of our walks along the 'Guermantes way,' might
we penetrate as far as the source of the Vivonne, of which I had often
thought, which had in my mind so abstract, so ideal an existence, that I
had been as much surprised when some one told me that it was actually
to be found in the same department, and at a given number of miles from
Combray, as I had been on the day when I had learned that there was
another fixed point somewhere on the earth's surface, where, according
to the ancients, opened the jaws of Hell. Nor could we ever reach that
other goal, to which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself. I
knew that it was the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse
de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who did actually
exist, but whenever I thought about them I pictured them to myself
either in tapestry, as was the 'Coronation of Esther' which hung in our
church, or else in changing, rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad in
his window, where he passed from cabbage green, when I was dipping my
fingers in the holy water stoup, to plum blue when I had reached our row
of chairs, or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Genevieve
de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the magic l