Page 589 - swanns-way

But these words, as they dived down through the waves
of sleep in which Swann was submerged, did not reach his
consciousness without undergoing that refraction which
turns a ray of light, at the bottom of a bowl of water, into
another sun; just as, a moment earlier, the sound of the
door-bell, swelling in the depths of his abyss of sleep into
the clangour of an alarum, had engendered the episode of
the fire. Meanwhile the scenery of his dream-stage scattered
in dust, he opened his eyes, heard for the last time the boom
of a wave in the sea, grown very distant. He touched his
cheek. It was dry. And yet he could feel the sting of the cold
spray, and the taste of salt on his lips. He rose, and dressed
himself. He had made the barber come early because he had
written, the day before, to my grandfather, to say that he
was going, that afternoon, to Combray, having learned that
Mme. de Cambremer—Mlle. Legrandin that had been—was
spending a few days there. The association in his memory of
her young and charming face with a place in the country
which he had not visited for so long, offered him a com-
bined attraction which had made him decide at last to leave
Paris for a while. As the different changes and chances that
bring us into the company of certain other people in this
life do not coincide with the periods in which we are in love
with those people, but, overlapping them, may occur before
love has begun, and may be repeated after love is ended, the
earliest appearances, in our life, of a creature who is des-
tined to afford us pleasure later on, assume retrospectively
in our eyes a certain value as an indication, a warning, a
presage. It was in this fashion that Swann had often car-

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