Page 609 - swanns-way

path, another little girl, who was putting on her cloak and
covering up her battledore, called out sharply: ‘Good-bye,
Gilberte, I’m going home now; don’t forget, we’re coming
to you this evening, after dinner.’ The name Gilberte passed
close by me, evoking all the more forcibly her whom it la-
belled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks
of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her;
it passed thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a
force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and as
it drew near to its target;—carrying in its wake, I could
feel, the knowledge, the impression of her to whom it was
addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who
called to her, everything that, while she uttered the words,
she more or less vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory,
of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each
other, of that unknown existence which was all the more
inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, con-
versely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let
her message brush past me without my being able to pen-
etrate its surface, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted
cry: letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attar which
that message had distilled, by touching them with preci-
sion, from certain invisible points in Mlle. Swann’s life,
from the evening to come, as it would be, after dinner, at
her home,—forming, on its celestial passage through the
midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud,
exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one
of Poussin’s gardens, reflects minutely, like a cloud in the
opera, teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition

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