ked away, carrying with me, then and for ever afterwards,
as the first illustration of a type of happiness rendered inaccessible
to a little boy of my kind by certain laws of nature which it was
impossible to transgress, the picture of a little girl with reddish
hair, and a skin freckled with tiny pink marks, who held a trowel in
her hand, and smiled as she directed towards me a long and subtle and
inexpressive stare. And already the charm with which her name, like a
cloud of incense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn through
which she and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to
conquer, to cover, to embalm, to beautify everything with which it had
any association: her grandparents, whom my own had been so unspeakably
fortunate as to know, the glorious profession of a stockholder, even
the melancholy neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysees, where she lived in
Paris.

"Leonie," said my grandfather on our return, "I wish we had had you with
us this afternoon. You would never have known Tansonville. If I had had
the courage I would have cut you a branch of that pink hawthorn you used
to like so much." And so my grandfather told her the story of our walk,
either just to amuse her, or perhaps because there was still some hope
that she might be stimulated to rise from her bed and to go out of
doors. For in earlier days she had been very fond of Tansonville, and,
moreover, Swann's visits had been the last that she had continued to
receive, at a time when she had already closed her doors to all the
world. And just as, when he called, in these later days, to inquire for
her (and she was still the only person in our household whom he would
ask to see), she would send down to say that she was tired at the moment
and resting, but that she would be happy to see him another time,
so, this evening, she said to my grandfather, "Yes, some day when the
weather is fine I shall go for a drive as far as the gate of the park."
And in saying this she was quite sincere. She would have liked to see
Swann and Tansonville again; but the mere wish to do so sufficed for all
that remained of her strength, which its fulfilment would have more
than exhausted. Sometimes a spell of fine weather made her a little more
energetic, she would rise and put on her clothes; but before she had
reached the outer room she would be 'tired' again, and would insist on
returning to her bed. The process which had begun in her--and in her a
little earl