Page 608 - swanns-way

artist, whose genius Bergotte had proclaimed, might, by
introducing me to something else that was, perhaps, as im-
portant and as beautiful, have consoled me for not having
been to Florence and Venice, for not going to Balbec. My
parents had to be content with sending me, every day, to the
Champs-Elysées, in the custody of a person who would see
that I did not tire myself; this person was none other than
Françoise, who had entered our service after the death of
my aunt Léonie. Going to the Champs-Elysées I found un-
endurable. If only Bergotte had described the place in one of
his books, I should, no doubt, have longed to see and to know
it, like so many things else of which a simulacrum had first
found its way into my imagination. That kept things warm,
made them live, gave them personality, and I sought then to
find their counterpart in reality, but in this public garden
there was nothing that attached itself to my dreams.
*****
One day, as I was weary of our usual place, beside the
wooden horses, Françoise had taken me for an excursion—
across the frontier guarded at regular intervals by the little
bastions of the barley-sugar women—into those neighbour-
ing but foreign regions, where the faces of the passers-by
were strange, where the goat-carriage went past; then she
had gone away to lay down her things on a chair that stood
with its back to a shrubbery of laurels; while I waited for her
I was pacing the broad lawn, of meagre close-cropped grass
already faded by the sun, dominated, at its far end, by a stat-
ue rising from a fountain, in front of which a little girl with
reddish hair was playing with a shuttlecock; when, from the

608 Swann’s Way