Swanns Way | Page 5

top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner
of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted
for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural
phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a
shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased,
because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have
done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to
which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it,
had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I
became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished
lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design,
issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the
slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards
the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short
by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the
transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through

a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it
stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation,
wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could
tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides made
their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me
an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to
the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed
perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not
devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given
in the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could
arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still
distinguish Golo's horse advancing across the window-curtains,
swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of
Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steed's,
overcame all material obstacles--everything that seemed to bar his
way--by taking each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in
himself: the door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at
once, would float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing
its nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such
a transubstantiation.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which
seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed
around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express
the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a
room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I
thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of
custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very
melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different
to me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it
seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so
unconscious had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an
astral body for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run
down to the dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of
Golo and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of
stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would
fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de

Brabant had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had
driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own
conscience.
But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed
talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little
parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except
my grandmother, who held that "It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in
the country," and used to carry on endless discussions with my father
on the very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room
with a book instead of letting me stay out of doors. "That is not the way
to make him strong and active," she would say sadly, "especially this
little man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get." My
father would shrug his shoulders and