Page 602 - swanns-way

round a church built in the Persian manner. Perhaps, in-
deed, the enforced simplicity of these images was one of the
reasons for the hold that they had over me. When my father
had decided, one year, that we should go for the Easter holi-
days to Florence and Venice, not finding room to introduce
into the name of Florence the elements that ordinarily con-
stitute a town, I was obliged to let a supernatural city emerge
from the impregnation by certain vernal scenes of what I
supposed to be, in its essentials, the genius of Giotto. All the
more—and because one cannot make a name extend much
further in time than in space—like some of Giotto’s paint-
ings themselves which shew us at two separate moments the
same person engaged in different actions, here lying on his
bed, there just about to mount his horse, the name of Flor-
ence was divided into two compartments. In one, beneath
an architectural dais, I gazed upon a fresco over which was
partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight, dusty, aslant,
and gradually spreading; in the other (for, since I thought of
names not as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and envelop-
ing substance into which I was about to plunge, the life not
yet lived, the life intact and pure which I enclosed in them,
gave to the most material pleasures, to the simplest scenes,
the same attraction that they have in the works of the Prim-
itives), I moved swiftly—so as to arrive, as soon as might be,
at the table that was spread for me, with fruit and a flask of
Chianti—across a Ponte Vecchio heaped with jonquils, nar-
cissi and anemones. That (for all that I was still in Paris) was
what I saw, and not what was actually round about me. Even
from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the coun-

602 Swann’s Way