Page 605 - swanns-way

spring, had relapsed into winter (like the weather that we
had invariably found awaiting us at Combray, in Holy
Week),—seeing upon the boulevards that the chestnut-
trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked
through them like a stream of water, were none the less be-
ginning, punctual guests, arrayed already for the party, and
admitting no discouragement, to shape and chisel and
curve in its frozen lumps the irrepressible verdure whose
steady growth the abortive power of the cold might hinder
but could not succeed in restraining—I reflected that al-
ready the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance
of hyacinths and anemones, and that the spring sunshine
was already tinging the waves of the Grand Canal with so
dusky an azure, with emeralds so splendid that when they
washed and were broken against the foot of one of Titian’s
paintings they could vie with it in the richness of their
colouring. I could no longer contain my joy when my father,
in the intervals of tapping the barometer and complaining
of the cold, began to look out which were the best trains,
and when I understood that by making one’s way, after lun-
cheon, into the coal-grimed laboratory, the wizard’s cell
that undertook to contrive a complete transmutation of its
surroundings, one could awaken, next morning, in the city
of marble and gold, in which ‘the building of the wall was of
jasper and the foundation of the wall an emerald.’ So that it
and the City of the Lilies were not just artificial scenes which
I could set up at my pleasure in front of my imagination, but
did actually exist at a certain distance from Paris which
must inevitably be traversed if I wished to see them, at their

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