Because of the solidarity that binds together the
different parts of a general impression, parts that our memory keeps in a
balanced whole, of which we are not permitted to subtract or to decline
any fraction, I should have liked to be able to pass the rest of the day
with one of those women, over a cup of tea, in a little house with
dark-painted walls (as Mme. Swann's were still in the year after that in
which the first part of this story ends) against which would glow the
orange flame, the red combustion, the pink and white flickering of her
chrysanthemums in the twilight of a November evening, in moments similar
to those in which (as we shall see) I had not managed to discover the
pleasures for which I longed. But now, albeit they had led to nothing,
those moments struck me as having been charming enough in themselves. I
sought to find them again as I remembered them. Alas! there was nothing
now but flats decorated in the Louis XVI style, all white paint, with
hortensias in blue enamel. Moreover, people did not return to Paris, now,
until much later. Mme. Swann would have written to me, from a country
house, that she would not be in town before February, had I asked her to
reconstruct for me the elements of that memory which I felt to belong to a
distant era, to a date in time towards which it was forbidden me to ascend
again the fatal slope, the elements of that longing which had become,
itself, as inaccessible as the pleasure that it had once vainly pursued.
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