Page 111 - swanns-way

to the rest of the audience individually.
Every morning I would hasten to the Moriss column to
see what new plays it announced. Nothing could be more
disinterested or happier than the dreams with which these
announcements filled my mind, dreams which took their
form from the inevitable associations of the words form-
ing the title of the play, and also from the colour of the bills,
still damp and wrinkled with paste, on which those words
stood out. Nothing, unless it were such strange titles as the
Testament de César Girodot, or Oedipe-Roi, inscribed not
on the green bills of the Opéra-Comique, but on the wine-
coloured bills of the Comédie-Française, nothing seemed
to me to differ more profoundly from the sparkling white
plume of the Diamants de la Couronne than the sleek, mys-
terious satin of the Domino Noir; and since my parents had
told me that, for my first visit to the theatre, I should have to
choose between these two pieces, I would study exhaustive-
ly and in turn the title of one and the title of the other (for
those were all that I knew of either), attempting to snatch
from each a foretaste of the pleasure which it offered me,
and to compare this pleasure with that latent in the other
title, until in the end I had shewn myself such vivid, such
compelling pictures of, on the one hand, a play of dazzling
arrogance, and on the other a gentle, velvety play, that I was
as little capable of deciding which play I should prefer to
see as if, at the dinner-table, they had obliged me to choose
between rice à l’Impératrice and the famous cream of choc-
olate.
All my conversations with my playfellows bore upon ac-

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