been
entirely possessed, not wishing to see anything but waves dashing in
from all sides, mounting always higher, upon the wildest of coasts,
beside churches as rugged and precipitous as cliffs, in whose towers
the sea-birds would be wailing; suddenly, effacing them, taking away
all their charm, excluding them because they were its opposite and could
only have weakened its effect, was substituted in me the converse dream
of the most variegated of springs, not the spring of Combray, still
pricking with all the needle-points of the winter's frost, but that
which already covered with lilies and anemones the meadows of Fiesole,
and gave Florence a dazzling golden background, like those in Fra
Angelico's pictures. From that moment, only sunlight, perfumes, colours,
seemed to me to have any value; for this alternation of images had
effected a change of front in my desire, and--as abrupt as those that
occur sometimes in music,--a complete change of tone in my sensibility.
Thus it came about that a mere atmospheric variation would be sufficient
to provoke in me that modulation, without there being any need for me to
await the return of a season. For often we find a day, in one, that has
strayed from another season, and makes us live in that other, summons at
once into our presence and makes us long for its peculiar pleasures, and
interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting,
out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf, torn from another
chapter, in the interpolated calendar of Happiness. But soon it happened
that, like those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health
can derive but an accidental and all too modest benefit, until the day
when science takes control of them, and, producing them at will, places
in our hands the power to order their appearance, withdrawn from
the tutelage and independent of the consent of chance; similarly the
production of these dreams of the Atlantic and of Italy ceased to depend
entirely upon the changes of the seasons and of the weather. I need
only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice,
Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the
longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in
spring, to come in a book upon the name of Balbec sufficed to awaken
in me the desire for storms at sea and for the Norman gothic; even on a
stormy day the name of Florence or of Venice would awaken the desire for
su