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benefit. How much more individual still was the character
that they assumed from being designated by names, names
that were only for themselves, proper names such as peo-
ple have. Words present to us little pictures of things, lucid
and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls
of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is
meant by a carpenter’s bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things cho-
sen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names
present to us—of persons and of towns which they accus-
tom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons—a
confused picture, which draws from the names, from the
brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which
it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely
blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations
imposed by the process used in their reproduction, or by
a whim on the designer’s part, are blue or red not only the
sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the people
in the streets. The name of Parma, one of the towns that
I most longed to visit, after reading the Chartreuse, seem-
ing to me compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, if anyone
were to speak of such or such a house in Parma, in which I
should be lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking
that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact and glossy,
violet-tinted, soft, and that bore no relation to the houses in
any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the
aid of that heavy syllable of the name of Parma, in which
no breath of air stirred, and of all that I had made it assume
of Stendhalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets.
And when I thought of Florence, it was of a town mirac-

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