weeds; Pont-Aven, the snowy, rosy
flight of the wing of a lightly poised coif, tremulously reflected in
the greenish waters of a canal; Quimperle, more firmly attached, this,
and since the Middle Ages, among the rivulets with which it babbled,
threading their pearls upon a grey background, like the pattern made,
through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into
blunt points of tarnished silver?

These images were false for another reason also; namely, that they
were necessarily much simplified; doubtless the object to which my
imagination aspired, which my senses took in but incompletely and
without any immediate pleasure, I had committed to the safe custody
of names; doubtless because I had accumulated there a store of dreams,
those names now magnetised my desires; but names themselves are not very
comprehensive; the most that I could do was to include in each of them
two or three of the principal curiosities of the town, which would
lie there side by side, without interval or partition; in the name of
Balbec, as in the magnifying glasses set in those penholders which
one buys at sea-side places, I could distinguish waves surging round
a church built in the Persian manner. Perhaps, indeed, the enforced
simplicity of these images was one of the reasons for the hold that they
had over me. When my father had decided, one year, that we should go
for the Easter holidays to Florence and Venice, not finding room
to introduce into the name of Florence the elements that ordinarily
constitute a town, I was obliged to let a supernatural city emerge from
the impregnation by certain vernal scenes of what I supposed to be,
in its essentials, the genius of Giotto. All the more--and because one
cannot make a name extend much further in time than in space--like some
of Giotto's paintings themselves which shew us at two separate moments
the same person engaged in different actions, here lying on his bed,
there just about to mount his horse, the name of Florence was divided
into two compartments. In one, beneath an architectural dais, I gazed
upon a fresco over which was partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight,
dusty, aslant, and gradually spreading; in the other (for, since
I thought of names not as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and
enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge, the life not yet
lived, the life intact and pure which I enclosed in them, gave to the
most material pleasures, to the simple