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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 cov-
er, 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-Elysées, where she lived in Paris.
‘Léonie,’ 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 vis-
its 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

220 Swann’s Way