Page 275 - swanns-way

cannot ever be ours, it is enough, also, sometimes that she
looks on us kindly, as Mme. de Guermantes did then, while
we think of her as almost ours already. Her eyes waxed blue
as a periwinkle flower, wholly beyond my reach, yet dedi-
cated by her to me; and the sun, bursting out again from
behind a threatening cloud and darting the full force of its
rays on to the Square and into the sacristy, shed a geranium
glow over the red carpet laid down for the wedding, along
which Mme. de Guermantes smilingly advanced, and cov-
ered its woollen texture with a nap of rosy velvet, a bloom of
light, giving it that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness
in the pomp of a joyful celebration, which characterises
certain pages of Lohengrin, certain paintings by Carpaccio,
and makes us understand how Baudelaire was able to apply
to the sound of the trumpet the epithet ‘delicious.’
How often, after that day, in the course of my walks
along the ‘Guermantes way,’ and with what an intensified
melancholy did I reflect on my lack of qualification for a
literary career, and that I must abandon all hope of ever
becoming a famous author. The regret that I felt for this,
while I lingered alone to dream for a little by myself, made
me suffer so acutely that, in order not to feel it, my mind
of its own accord, by a sort of inhibition in the instant of
pain, ceased entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction,
of the poetic future on which my want of talent precluded
me from counting. Then, quite apart from all those literary
preoccupations, and without definite attachment to any-
thing, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from
a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to

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