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Nonfiction

To sleep, perchance to dream

By Anne F. Garréta
Translated from French by Daniel Levin Becker
In this Oulipian text, Anne F. Garréta offers a rogue reading of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past."

Censorship

We know that the earliest readers of Remembrance of Things Past objected to the length of its incipit narration of its hero’s noddings-off and nocturnal (and diurnal) reveries. A gentleman who spends forty pages explaining how he tosses and turns in bed and rumples his sheets is surely enough likely to rumple the patience of his readers.

If patience is a bedsheet, which virtue is a pillow?

Let us leave this enigma aside and return to the Proustian text whose standing has been polished by that great falsifier, convention. What modern reader does not thrill at the delicately Oedipal considerations of the mother’s kiss at Combray? We clamor for more! And the critics and publishers are, alas, only too obliging!

I have long suspected that the public, exoteric text of Remembrance of Things Past is a fake. A skillful fake, but a fake nonetheless. I suspect it was the object of censorship: censorship in which Marcel himself was, perhaps, complicit . . . in order to see his work published, to win the Goncourt, to make peace . . . and censorship that is enthusiastically perpetuated, to this day, by Proustians and pastry chefs alike.

This censorship will, naturally, have disfigured the text. Some will compare it to the veil punctured by the psychoanalyst who recognizes the unconscious desires beneath the dispersed, mutilated figures of the dream; others will find in it that which analytic interpretation deploys in its Oedipal conquest of the flux of the machine désirante.

I have already proposed, in a novel called The Decomposition, a strategy for reversing the censorship, for opening the potentiality of the Proustian text. (You didn’t know Proust was an Oulipian author? You think that, like a Mormon, I’m posthumously baptizing and dunking into the waters of Potentiality everything that crosses my path?) Now I envision an additional strategy, and I hold that the only accurate reading of the oneiric prelude of Remembrance of Things Past can be obtained by a schizoid oneiric scheme.

Take the sentences of the first volume of Remembrance: Swann’s Way. The first, in C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation, goes thus: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” Now that I have reminded you of it, I will spell it out:

F O R A L O N G T I M E I U S E D T O G O T O B E D E A R L Y

Evidently authentic, this sentence. The proof? Everyone remembers it.

But the second sentence is dubious. Why? Not only because nobody (besides bedding salesmen) remembers it, but also because this second sentence doesn’t begin with an O.

Here let us cite the narrator of Cities of the Plain:

Everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became intelligible, brought itself into evidence, just as a sentence which presents no meaning so long as it remains broken up in letters scattered at random upon a table, expresses, if these letters be rearranged in the proper order, a thought which one can never afterwards forget.

The touchstone of Proustian decryption is its mnemonic power. And an acrostic is a kind of encryption, one that generally responds in silence, along one side of a poem, to the mnemonic operator on the other side: rhyme.

Dispersed, disordered, and buried within the narration and dialogue of the publicly available novel is the decomposed Proustian text. To reconstitute (and decode) it, it will do to vertically inscribe the formula, the sesame of the opening line, whose letter-chain will form an acrostic of the authentic Proustian sequence.

Authentic? Unconscious or potential, as you wish. I leave aside the question—a delicate one, at that—of the difference between Unconscious and Potentiality, for fear of rumpling your patience with further pillow talk. I will only note, in passing, certain elements of contrast:

—The Oulipo is not a couch.
—Jacques Lacan is not a pseudonym of Raymond Queneau
—Oulipo readings are free of charge.

Remembrance of Things Past is a cryptogram with an acrostic solution. Thus we can be certain that if the first sentence is real, the second will start with an O, the third with an R, the fourth with an A, and so on. And that the text recomposed accordingly will give us the primitive version of Combray—the one Proust could not bring himself to write out unambiguously, for evident reasons of security.

So, based on this insomniacal illumination, I have cut up and classified all of the sentences from Swann’s Way in alphabetical order, and refabricated the only intelligible sequence. And here it is.

 

Proust, unambiguously

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bedclothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt.

Rare as they became, those moments did not occur in vain.

And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside?

Later on I discovered that, whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed.

Once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some unknown existence to which that creature’s love for ourselves can win us admission, that is, of all the preliminary conditions which Love exacts, the one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes him generous or indifferent as to the rest.

Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be constantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, toward the discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime.

Going to the Champs-Elysées I found unendurable.

The anesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things.

I longed for nothing more than to behold a storm at sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there were for me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be not artificially composed for my entertainment, but necessary and unalterable—the beauty of landscapes or of great works of art.

Moreover, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with my organs of sense what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all—though all the more tempting to them, in consequence, more different from anything that they knew—it was that which recalled to me the reality of these visions, which inflamed my desire all the more by seeming to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied.

Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process.

I am too old now—but I was not intended for a world in which women shackle themselves in garments that are not even made of cloth.

Upon ourselves they react but indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our actual, primary motives other, secondary motives, less stark and therefore more decent.

Seriously, I’m not annoying you, am I?

Everyone has his own way of looking at things, and what may be horrible to you is, perhaps, just what I like best.

Dear, dear, it’s just as they used to say in my poor mother’s country:

The lady has become a gentleman.

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

Good heavens, I’m making a noise again; they’ll be telling you to have me “chucked out.”

Oh, yes: What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!

To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible.

Obscurely awaited, immanent and concealed, it rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender glance, in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for the kindness of heart of our companion and for her touching predilection of ourselves, which we measure by the benefits, by the happiness that she showers upon us.

Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders.

Even those women who pretend that they judge a man by his exterior only, see in that exterior an emanation from some special way of life.

Don’t make any mistake.

Every kiss provokes another.

As the different changes and chances that bring us into the company of certain other people in this life do not coincide with the periods in which we are in love with those people, but, overlapping them, may occur before love has begun, and may be repeated after love is ended, the earliest appearances, in our life, of a creature who is destined to afford us pleasure later on, assume retrospectively in our eyes a certain value as an indication, a warning, a presage.

Reality must, therefore, be something which bears no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one’s body bears to the gradual movement of the clouds overhead, since those words “two or three times” carved, as it were, a cross upon the living tissues of his heart.

Look here, Doctor, I call you as a witness; did I utter a word?

You know how vain I am!

You may begin cutting your Vintage paperback into small strips. Then go buy new bedsheets.

 

Note

Evidently, the process of uncovering the unambiguous Proust must follow the principle modeled here: the second sentence, in its correct place per the above text, provides the acrostic key to the thirty-second sentence and so on from there—and so on until the text’s alphabetical and acrostic inventory is exhausted.

Certain letters will, of course, run out before others, leaving the acrostic with holes. Yet another indication of the ravages of censorship.

“To sleep, perchance to dream,” published on Oulipo.net. Translation © 2013 by Daniel Levin Becker. All rights reserved.

English French (Original)

Censorship

We know that the earliest readers of Remembrance of Things Past objected to the length of its incipit narration of its hero’s noddings-off and nocturnal (and diurnal) reveries. A gentleman who spends forty pages explaining how he tosses and turns in bed and rumples his sheets is surely enough likely to rumple the patience of his readers.

If patience is a bedsheet, which virtue is a pillow?

Let us leave this enigma aside and return to the Proustian text whose standing has been polished by that great falsifier, convention. What modern reader does not thrill at the delicately Oedipal considerations of the mother’s kiss at Combray? We clamor for more! And the critics and publishers are, alas, only too obliging!

I have long suspected that the public, exoteric text of Remembrance of Things Past is a fake. A skillful fake, but a fake nonetheless. I suspect it was the object of censorship: censorship in which Marcel himself was, perhaps, complicit . . . in order to see his work published, to win the Goncourt, to make peace . . . and censorship that is enthusiastically perpetuated, to this day, by Proustians and pastry chefs alike.

This censorship will, naturally, have disfigured the text. Some will compare it to the veil punctured by the psychoanalyst who recognizes the unconscious desires beneath the dispersed, mutilated figures of the dream; others will find in it that which analytic interpretation deploys in its Oedipal conquest of the flux of the machine désirante.

I have already proposed, in a novel called The Decomposition, a strategy for reversing the censorship, for opening the potentiality of the Proustian text. (You didn’t know Proust was an Oulipian author? You think that, like a Mormon, I’m posthumously baptizing and dunking into the waters of Potentiality everything that crosses my path?) Now I envision an additional strategy, and I hold that the only accurate reading of the oneiric prelude of Remembrance of Things Past can be obtained by a schizoid oneiric scheme.

Take the sentences of the first volume of Remembrance: Swann’s Way. The first, in C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation, goes thus: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.” Now that I have reminded you of it, I will spell it out:

F O R A L O N G T I M E I U S E D T O G O T O B E D E A R L Y

Evidently authentic, this sentence. The proof? Everyone remembers it.

But the second sentence is dubious. Why? Not only because nobody (besides bedding salesmen) remembers it, but also because this second sentence doesn’t begin with an O.

Here let us cite the narrator of Cities of the Plain:

Everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became intelligible, brought itself into evidence, just as a sentence which presents no meaning so long as it remains broken up in letters scattered at random upon a table, expresses, if these letters be rearranged in the proper order, a thought which one can never afterwards forget.

The touchstone of Proustian decryption is its mnemonic power. And an acrostic is a kind of encryption, one that generally responds in silence, along one side of a poem, to the mnemonic operator on the other side: rhyme.

Dispersed, disordered, and buried within the narration and dialogue of the publicly available novel is the decomposed Proustian text. To reconstitute (and decode) it, it will do to vertically inscribe the formula, the sesame of the opening line, whose letter-chain will form an acrostic of the authentic Proustian sequence.

Authentic? Unconscious or potential, as you wish. I leave aside the question—a delicate one, at that—of the difference between Unconscious and Potentiality, for fear of rumpling your patience with further pillow talk. I will only note, in passing, certain elements of contrast:

—The Oulipo is not a couch.
—Jacques Lacan is not a pseudonym of Raymond Queneau
—Oulipo readings are free of charge.

Remembrance of Things Past is a cryptogram with an acrostic solution. Thus we can be certain that if the first sentence is real, the second will start with an O, the third with an R, the fourth with an A, and so on. And that the text recomposed accordingly will give us the primitive version of Combray—the one Proust could not bring himself to write out unambiguously, for evident reasons of security.

So, based on this insomniacal illumination, I have cut up and classified all of the sentences from Swann’s Way in alphabetical order, and refabricated the only intelligible sequence. And here it is.

 

Proust, unambiguously

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bedclothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt.

Rare as they became, those moments did not occur in vain.

And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole, in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside?

Later on I discovered that, whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed.

Once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some unknown existence to which that creature’s love for ourselves can win us admission, that is, of all the preliminary conditions which Love exacts, the one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes him generous or indifferent as to the rest.

Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be constantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, toward the discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime.

Going to the Champs-Elysées I found unendurable.

The anesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things.

I longed for nothing more than to behold a storm at sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there were for me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be not artificially composed for my entertainment, but necessary and unalterable—the beauty of landscapes or of great works of art.

Moreover, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with my organs of sense what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all—though all the more tempting to them, in consequence, more different from anything that they knew—it was that which recalled to me the reality of these visions, which inflamed my desire all the more by seeming to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied.

Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process.

I am too old now—but I was not intended for a world in which women shackle themselves in garments that are not even made of cloth.

Upon ourselves they react but indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our actual, primary motives other, secondary motives, less stark and therefore more decent.

Seriously, I’m not annoying you, am I?

Everyone has his own way of looking at things, and what may be horrible to you is, perhaps, just what I like best.

Dear, dear, it’s just as they used to say in my poor mother’s country:

The lady has become a gentleman.

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

Good heavens, I’m making a noise again; they’ll be telling you to have me “chucked out.”

Oh, yes: What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!

To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible.

Obscurely awaited, immanent and concealed, it rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender glance, in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for the kindness of heart of our companion and for her touching predilection of ourselves, which we measure by the benefits, by the happiness that she showers upon us.

Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders.

Even those women who pretend that they judge a man by his exterior only, see in that exterior an emanation from some special way of life.

Don’t make any mistake.

Every kiss provokes another.

As the different changes and chances that bring us into the company of certain other people in this life do not coincide with the periods in which we are in love with those people, but, overlapping them, may occur before love has begun, and may be repeated after love is ended, the earliest appearances, in our life, of a creature who is destined to afford us pleasure later on, assume retrospectively in our eyes a certain value as an indication, a warning, a presage.

Reality must, therefore, be something which bears no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one’s body bears to the gradual movement of the clouds overhead, since those words “two or three times” carved, as it were, a cross upon the living tissues of his heart.

Look here, Doctor, I call you as a witness; did I utter a word?

You know how vain I am!

You may begin cutting your Vintage paperback into small strips. Then go buy new bedsheets.

 

Note

Evidently, the process of uncovering the unambiguous Proust must follow the principle modeled here: the second sentence, in its correct place per the above text, provides the acrostic key to the thirty-second sentence and so on from there—and so on until the text’s alphabetical and acrostic inventory is exhausted.

Certain letters will, of course, run out before others, leaving the acrostic with holes. Yet another indication of the ravages of censorship.

To sleep, perchance to dream

Censure

On sait que les premiers lecteurs d’ A la Recherche du Temps perdu ont objecté à la longueur de sa narration initiale des endormissements et des rêveries nocturnes (et diurnes) de son héros. Un monsieur qui passe 40 pages à raconter comment il se tourne et retourne dans son lit et use ses draps, use de même la patience de ses lecteurs.

Si la patience est un drap, quelle est la vertu qui fait office d’oreiller?

Laissant de côté cette énigme, revenons au texte proustien dont  l’habitude, cette grande falsificatrice, a changé pour nous la figure. Quel lecteur moderne ne s’extasie pas sur les délicates considérations oedipiennes du baiser de Maman à Combray? On en redemande! Et les critiques et les éditeurs sont obligeants, hélas!

Je soupçonne depuis longtemps le texte public, exotérique d’ A la Recherche du Temps perdu d’être un faux. Un faux habile. Mais un faux tout de même. Je soupçonne qu’il a fait l’objet d’une censure. Censure à laquelle Marcel lui-même peut-être aura prêté la main… Pour permettre la publication de son oeuvre, pour avoir le Goncourt, pour avoir la paix… Censure que poursuivent, enthousiastes, les proustisants et les patissiers.

Cette censure aura défiguré le texte. Certains la compareront à celle que perce à jour le psychanalyste qui reconnaît sous les figures mutilées et dispersées du rêve, le désir inconscient. D’autres aussi bien, y reconnaitront celle que l’interprétation analytique déploie dans sa reterritorialisation oedipienne des flux de la machine désirante.

J’ai proposé déjà, dans un roman ( La Décomposition), une stratégie de levée de la censure, c’est à dire une ouverture de la potentialité du texte proustien.

(Vous ne saviez pas que Proust était un auteur oulipien? Vous croyez qu’à l’instar des mormons, je baptise post-mortem et plonge dans la potentialité tout ce qui me tombe sous la main?)

J’envisage à présent une stratégie supplémentaire, et soutiens que la seule lecture exacte du prélude onirique d’ A la Recherche du temps perdu  peut se régler selon une machination onirique schizoïde.

Prenez les phrases du volume premier d’ A la Recherche: Du côté de chez Swann. La première s’énonce ainsi: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Je vous l’ai rappelée, à présent, je vous l’épelle:

L O N G T E M P S J E M E S U I S C O U C H E D E B O N N E H E U R E

Cette phrase est évidemment authentique. La preuve? C’est que tout le monde s’en souvient.

La seconde est douteuse. Pourquoi? Non seulement personne (hormis les marchands de literie) ne la connait, mais en plus, cette seconde phrase ne commence pas par un O.

Citons ici le narrateur de Sodome et Gomorrhe :

“Tout ce qui avait paru jusque-là incohérent à mon esprit, devenait intelligible, se montrait évident, comme une phrase, n’offrant aucun sens tant qu’elle reste décomposée en lettres disposées au hasard, exprime, si les caractères se trouvent replacés dans l’ordre qu’il faut, une pensée que l’on ne pourra plus oublier.”

La pierre de touche du décryptage proustien, c’est sa puissance mnémonique. Et l’acrostiche est un cryptage, et un cryptage qui répond, usuellement, sur un bord du poème, silencieusement, à cet opérateur mnémonique de l’autre bord, la rime.

Dispersé, désordonné dans le texte public disponible se trouve enfoui le texte proustien décomposé. Pour le recomposer (et le décoder), il suffit d’inscrire verticalement la formule, le sésame de l’incipit, dont la chaîne littérale formera l’acrostiche de la séquence proustienne authentique.

Authentique, c’est à dire inconsciente ou potentielle, comme vous voudrez. Je laisse de côté la question –difficile– de la différence entre l’Inconscient et la Potentialité; j’userais votre patience; nous sommes déjà dans de beaux-draps. J’indique juste au passage quelques éléments de contraste :

– l’Oulipo n’est pas un divan,
– Jacques Lacan n’est pas un pseudonyme de Raymond Queneau,
– les lectures de l’Oulipo sont gratuites.

A la Recherche du temps perdu est un cryptogramme dont la solution est acrostique. Nous savons donc assurément que si la premiere phrase est authentique, la 2eme phrase commencera par un O, la 3eme par un N, la 4eme par un G etc… Et que le texte ainsi recomposé nous offrira la version primitive de Combray. Celle que Proust n’a pu se résoudre à écrire en clair, pour d’évidentes raisons de sécurité.

Sur la base de cette illumination proprement insomniante, j’ai donc découpé et classé toutes les phrases de Du coté de chez Swann par ordre alphabétique, et remachiné la seule succession intelligible. La voici.

 

Proust en clair

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

On avait bien inventé, pour me distraire les soirs où on me trouvait l’air trop malheureux, de me donner une lanterne magique dont, en attendant l’heure du dîner, on coiffait ma lampe; et, à l’instar des premiers architectes et maîtres verriers de l’âge gothique, elle substituait à l’opacité des murs d’impalpables irisations, de surnaturelles apparitions multicolores, où des légendes étaient dépeintes comme dans un vitrail vacillant et momentané.

Ne commencez pas à chuchoter, dit ma grand’tante.

Golo s’arrêtait un instant pour écouter avec tristesse le boniment lu à haute voix par ma grand’tante, et qu’il avait l’air de comprendre parfaitement, conformant son attitude, avec une docilité qui n’excluait pas une certaine majesté, aux indications du texte; puis il s’éloignait du même pas saccadé.

Tâchez de garder toujours un morceau de ciel au-dessus de votre vie, petit garçon, ajoutait-il en se tournant vers moi.

Et rien ne pouvait arrêter sa lente chevauchée.

Mon corps qui sentait dans le sien ma propre chaleur voulait s’y rejoindre, je m’éveillais.

Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: ” je m’endors.”

Si, comme il arrivait quelquefois, elle avait les traits d’une femme que j’avais connue dans la vie, j’allais me donner tout entier à ce but: la retrouver, comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s’imaginent qu’on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe.

Je l’aimais, je regrettais de ne pas avoir eu le temps et l’inspiration de l’offenser, de lui faire mal, et de la forcer à se souvenir de moi.

Et puis, ce n’était pas tout: maman allait sans doute venir!

Maintenant je n’étais plus séparé d’elle; les barrières étaient tombées, un fil délicieux nous réunissait.

Et à tous moments au fond d’elle-même une vierge timide et suppliante implorait et faisait reculer un soudard fruste et vainqueur.

Son coeur scrupuleux et sensible ignorait quelles paroles devaient spontanément venir s’adapter à la scène que ses sens réclamaient.

Un plaisir délicieux m’avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause.

Il était trop tard, mon père était devant nous.

Sans le vouloir, je murmurai ces mots que personne n’entendit: “je suis perdu!”

“ Ce n’est pas comme cela que vous le rendrez robuste et énergique, disait-elle tristement, surtout ce petit qui a tant besoin de prendre des forces et de la volonté.”

“ Oh! ajoutait-il, avec ce sourire doucement ironique et déçu, un peu distrait, qui lui était particulier, certes il y a dans ma maison toutes les choses inutiles.”

“ Un bonheur pour la France! s’écria-t-il malicieusement en levant les bras avec emphase.”

Ce que je voulais maintenant c’était maman, j’étais allé trop loin dans la voie qui menait à la réalisation de ce désir pour pouvoir rebrousser chemin.

Hélas! Il n’y avait plus que des automobiles conduites par des mécaniciens moustachus qu’accompagnaient de grands valets de pied.

Eh bien! dussé-je me jeter par la fenêtre cinq minutes après, j’aimais encore mieux cela.

Devant nous, dans le lointain, terre promise ou maudite, Roussainville, dans les murs de laquelle je n’ai jamais pénétré, Roussainville, tantôt, quand la pluie avait déjà cessé pour nous, continuait à être châtiée comme un village de la Bible par toutes les lances de l’orage qui flagellaient obliquement les demeures de ses habitants, ou bien était déjà pardonnée par Dieu Le Père qui faisait descendre vers elle, inégalement longues, comme les rayons d’un ostensoir d’autel, les tiges d’or effrangées de son soleil reparu.

Elle m’avait proposé aussitôt des voluptés particulières, dont je n’avais jamais eu l’idée avant de l’entendre, dont je sentais que rien autre qu’elle ne pourrait me les faire  connaître, et j’avais éprouvé pour elle comme un amour inconnu.

Bientôt minuit.

On voit un oiseau voler dans le rose, il va en atteindre la fin, il touche presque au noir, puis il y est entré.

Non; de même que ce qu’il me fallait pour que je pusse m’endormir heureux, avec cette paix sans trouble qu’aucune maîtresse n’a pu me donner depuis, puisqu’on doute d’elles encore au moment où on croit en elles et qu’on ne possède jamais leur coeur comme je recevais dans un baiser celui de ma mère, tout entier, sans la réserve d’une arrière-pensée, sans le reliquat d’une intention qui ne fût pas pour moi – c’est que ce fût elle, c’est qu’elle inclinât vers moi ce visage où il y avait au-dessous de l’oeil quelque chose qui était, paraît-il, un défaut, et que j’aimais à l’égal du reste; de même ce que je veux revoir, c’est le côté de Guermantes que j’ai connu, avec la ferme qui est un peu éloignée des deux suivantes serrées l’une contre l’autre, à l’entrée de l’allée des chênes; ce sont ces prairies où, quand le soleil les rend réfléchissantes comme une mare, se dessinent les feuilles des pommiers, c’est ce paysage dont parfois, la nuit dans mes rêves, l’individualité m’étreint avec une puissance presque fantastique et que je ne peux plus retrouver au réveil.

Né brusquement, et sans que j’eusse eu le temps de le rapporter exactement à sa cause, au milieu de pensées très différentes, le plaisir dont il était accompagné ne me semblait qu’un degré supérieur de celui qu’elles me donnaient.

En vain, tenant l’étendue dans le champ de ma vision, je la drainais de mes regards qui eussent voulu en ramener une femme.

Hélas, c’était en vain (aussi) que j’implorais le donjon de Roussainville, que je lui demandais de faire venir auprès de moi quelque enfant de son village, comme au seul confident que j’avais eu de mes premiers désirs, quand au haut de notre maison de Combray, dans le petit cabinet sentant l’iris, je ne voyais que sa tour au milieu du carreau de la fenêtre entr’ouverte, pendant qu’avec les hésitations héroïques du voyageur qui entreprend une exploration ou du désespéré qui se suicide, défaillant, je me frayais en moi-même une route inconnue et que je croyais mortelle, jusqu’au moment où une trace naturelle comme celle d’un colimaçon s’ajoutait aux feuilles de cassis sauvage qui se penchaient jusqu’à moi.

Eh bien! c’est du joli!

Une impression de ce genre, pendant un instant, est pour ainsi dire sine materia .

Rien que les petites frises des bordures, tenez là, la petite vigne sur fond rouge de l’ours et les raisins.

Et, essuyant mes larmes, je leur promettais, quand je serais grand, de ne pas imiter la vie insensée des autres hommes et, même à Paris, les jours de printemps, au lieu d’aller faire des visites et écouter des niaiseries, de partir dans la campagne voir les premières aubépines.

[ . . . ]

 

Note

La mise au clair de Proust doit bien évidemment se poursuivre selon le principe esquissé: la seconde phrase ici remise en son lieu donne la clef de la 36 ème phrase et suivantes… et ainsi de suite, jusqu’à épuisement raisonné (alphabétique et acrostique) du stock.

Certaines lettres initiales viendront bien sûr à s’épuiser avant d’autres et l’acrostiche à présenter des trous: un indice de plus des ravages de la censure.

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