elements the game card codes

play the game here



not really in any order. fiddle around with the mark you use... have fun!

-pauly

4vg 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 50u 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6tv 6tv 6tv 6tv 6tv 6tv 6u0 6u0 6u5 6u5 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u9 6u9 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 8pj

life - scorpion deck

52q 52u 52u 52u 542 542 542 5c6 5c6 5c8 5c8 5c8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5lf 5lf 5lf 5lf 5lf 5lf 5mq 5mq 5mq 5rt 5rt 5rt 5t2 5t2 5t2

aether - phase sheild dragon

61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61u 61v 61v 61v 61v 61v 808 808 808 808 808 808 808 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80e 80e 80f 8pu

phase antimatter

4vc 4vg 4vg 4vl 4vl 4vl 4vl 61u 61v 61v 61v 61v 61v 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6u0 6u0 6u5 6u5 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u7 6u9 6u9 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 808 808 808 808 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80e 80e 80f 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 8pu


dark

5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5uo 5uo 5uo 5uo 5uo 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5ur 5ur 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5v8 606 606 606 606 606 606 7t8 7um 8pt

mindgate aether

61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61u 61u 61u 622 622 622 622 622 622 623 623 623 623 623 623 624 624 624 624 624 624 808 808 808 808 808 808 808 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80e 80e 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 8pu

poison water

52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52o 52o 52o 52o 52o 52o 52p 52p 52r 52r 52r 52r 542 542 542 542 542 542 5i5 5i5 5i5 5i5 5i5 5i5 5ia 5ia 5ia 5ia 5ia 5ia 8pp

aether entropy staller

4vg 4vg 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 61u 61v 61v 61v 61v 61v 63a 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6u0 6u0 6u5 6u5 6u7 6u7 6u9 6u9 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 808 808 808 808 808 808 808 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80e 80e 80f 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 8pj

phase and silence

624 624 624 624 624 624 63a 63a 63a 63a 808 808 808 808 808 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80e 80e 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q

phase

61o 61o 61o 61u 808 808 808 808 808 808 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80e 80e 80f 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q

semiupped antimatter deck PVP 1

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vf 4vg 4vg 4vl 4vl 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 6tv 6tv 6tv 6tv 6tv 6u0 6u5 6u7 6u7 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vf 4vf 4vg 4vg 4vg 4vg 4vg 4vl 4vl 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6tv 6tv 6tv 6tv 6u0 6u5 6u7 6u9 6u9 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve

4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5ur 5ut 5ut 5ut 606 606 606 606 606 61o 61o 61o 622 622 622 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 7um 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d

semiupped antimatter deck PVP 2 and AI

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vf 4vf 4vg 4vg 4vg 4vg 4vg 4vl 4vl 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 50u 6qq 6rm 6rm 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6tv 6tv 6tv 6tv 6u0 6u5 6u7 6u9 6u9 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve

4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6tv 6tv 6tv 6tv 6tv 6u0 6u5 6u7 6u9 6u9 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve


dark sucker (needs work)

5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5uo 5uo 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5ur 5ur 5us 5us 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 606 606 606 606 606 7um


dark water

5i4 5i4 5i8 5i8 5i8 5i8 5i8 5i8 5i9 5i9 5i9 5ia 5ia 5ia 5ia 5ia 5ia 5jm 5jm 5uk 5uk 5uk 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5uo 5uo 5ur 5ur 5ur 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 5us 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 606 606 606 7um 8pp

dragon sky blitz

5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5od 5od 5od 5od 5od 5od 5of 5of 5of 5of 5of 5of 5og 5og 5og 5ol 5ol 5oo 5oo 5op 5op 5op 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 8pr



----------------------upgrading

new three way

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 606 606 606 606 606 6rm 6rm 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 6ts 6ts 6ts 6tv 6u0 6u5 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 7um 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q

aether / entropy tester

4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61u 61u 61v 61v 61v 61v 623 623 6ts 6ts 6ts 6u5 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 808 808 808 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q

new

3color defense

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vg 4vg 4vg 4vg 4vg 4vl 4vl 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5ur 5ur 5ur 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 606 606 606 606 606 61u 61u 61u 6tv 6tv 6tv 6u0 6u5 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 7um 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q

4vc 4vc 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vg 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 50u 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6ts 6tv 6u0 6u5 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 808 808 808 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q


psedo upped phase deck with shards

61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61u 61u 61v 61v 61v 63a 6rm 6rm 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 808 808 808 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q

two color

4vc 4vc 4vg 4vg 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 61u 61u 6qq 6rm 6rm 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 6u5 6ve 808 808 808 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q


two color - entropy mark - pvp

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vg 4vg 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61u 61u 63a 6qq 6ve 808 808 808 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vg 4vg 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 61o 61o 61o 61o 61u 61u 63a 6qq 6u5 6ve 808 808 808 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80c 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 80d 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q 81q


4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vf 4vf 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vl 4vm 4vm 4vm 4vn 4vn 55r 5bt 5bv 5c1 5c1 5c2 5c3 5c5 5l9 5l9 5la 5lb 5lc 5le 5lf 5lf 5ok 5ok 5ok 5um 5um 5un 5uo 5up 5up 5ur


phase deck no ups

61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61s 61s 61s 61s 61s 61s 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61u 61u 61v 61v 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a

phase deck with ups

61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61s 61s 61s 61s 61s 61s 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61u 61u 61v 61v 61v 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 6rm 6rm 6rn 6rn 6rn 81q

Life dragon tamer

4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 5bt 5bt 5bt 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5c7 5c7 5c7 5lf 5lf 5lf 5lf 5mq 5ok 5ok 5ok 5ok 5ok 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu

poison

52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52o 52o 52o 52o 52o 52o 52q 52q 52r 52r 52r 52r 52r 52r 5i5 5i5 5i5 5i5 5i5 5ia

great entropy deck

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vd 4vd 4vd 4vd 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vi 4vi 4vk 4vk 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp

fratal devour / vamp

40-

5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5us 5us 5us 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61v 622 622 622 622 622 622

30)

5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5um 5um 5us 5us 5us 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 61o 61o 61o 61o 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61v 622 622 622 622

phase dragon

61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61v 61v 61v 61v 61v 61v

shrieker graboid rush deck

58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 590 590 590 590 590 590 591 591 591 591 591 591

adrenal forest spirit

5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5c1 5c1 5c1 5c1 5c1 5c3 5c6 5c6 5c6 5c7 5c7 5c7 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5ib 5ib 5ie 5if

death deck

52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52h 52i 52i 52i 52i 52k 52k 52k 52k 52k 52k 52n 52n 52n 52n 52n 52n 52p 52p 52p 52p 52p 52p 52r 52r 52r 52r 52r 52r 6rn

copycat

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61r 61r 61r 61r 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 622 622 622 622 622

time machine dragon (need 5 more dragons)

5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5ri 5ri 5ri 5ri 5ri 5ri 5rj 5rk 5rk 5rk 5rk 5rk 5rk 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rl 5rm 5ro 5ro 5rr 5rr 5rr 5rr 5rr 5rr

earth burrowed deck

58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58p 58p 58q 58r 58s 590 590 590 590 590 590 593 593 593 593 593 593 594 595 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9

entropic dimensions

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 620 620 620 620 620 620 622 622 622 622 622 622

fractal spider

61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 620 620 620 620 620 620 622 622 622 622 622 622

phoenix

5f0 5f0 5f0 5f0 5f0 5f4 5f4 5f5 5f5 5f6 5f6 5f7 5f7 5f8 5f8 5f8 5f9 5f9 5f9 5fc 5fc 5fc 5fc 5fc 5fc 5gi 5gi 5gi 5gi 5gi

lava golumn

5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5aa 5f0 5f0 5f0 5f0 5f0 5f4 5f4 5f4 5f4 5f4 5f4 5f5 5f5 5f6 5f6 5f6 5f6 5f7 5f7 5f8 5f8 5f8 5f8 5fa 5fa 5fa 5fa 5fa 5fa 5fk 5gi 5gi 5gi 5gi

dark poison

52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52h 52h 52h 52h 52o 52o 52o 52o 52o 52o 52p 52q 52r 52s

crazy deck

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vk 4vl 4vn 52n 52o 52p 52q 55r 55v 55v 593 593 5c2 5c3 5c5 5c6 5f3 5f4 5f5 5f6 5f8 5f9 5fa 5li 5li 5og 5oj 5ol 5rk 5rp 5rr 5up 5v8 61q 61r 61t 621 622

panda-spam-iam

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vd 4vd 4vd 4vd 4ve 4vf 4vi 4vi 4vi 4vi 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vo 4vo 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vf 4vi 4vi 4vi 4vi 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vo 4vo 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9

fractal panda-spam-iam

4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vk 4vl 4vl 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 4vp 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9 5l9 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 622 622 622 622 622

firefly hope

5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5c2 5c5 5c6 5c6 5c6 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5li 5li 5li 5lk 5lk 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj

5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5c2 5c6 5c6 5c6 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5l8 5li 5li 5li 5lk 5lk 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj

5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5c6 5c6 5c6 5li 5lk 5lk 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj

5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5bv 5c6 5c6 5c6 5lf 5li 5lk 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj

fractal scarab

5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rj 5rq 5rq 5rq 5rq 5rq 5rq 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61q 621 622 622 622

5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rg 5rj 5rq 5rq 5rq 5rq 5rq 5rq 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61t 61t 61t 622 622

fractal sparky

61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61p 61p 61p 61p 61p 61p 61q 61q 61q 61q 61q 61q 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 622 622 622 622 622

deathrius deck

6rm 710 710 710 710 710 710 710 710 710 710 710 710 710 710 711 711 712 712 712 712 712 712 714 717 717 718 718 718 718 718 718 719 719 719 719 719 719 71a 71b 71b 71b 71b 71b 71b

rainbow death

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vf 52h 55o 58r 5bt 5f2 5of 5rm 5ul 5ul 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5us 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5v8 622 622

devour deck

5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5uk 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut 5ut

quantum starve super staller

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 52p 55v 55v 55v 55v 55v 55v 593 593 593 593 593 593 5c2 5c2 5c6 5c6 5c6 5f5 5ia 5ic 5li 5li 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5uq 5uq 5ut 5ut 61o 61o 622 622 622 622 622 622

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 4vn 55v 55v 55v 55v 55v 593 593 593 593 593 5c2 5c2 5c5 5c6 5c6 5c6 5ic 5ic 5li 5li 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 622 622 622 622 622

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 4vn 52p 55v 55v 55v 55v 593 593 593 593 5c2 5c2 5c6 5c6 5c6 5f5 5ia 5ic 5li 5li 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5uq 5uq 5ut 5ut 622 622 622 622 622

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 4vn 52p 52p 55v 55v 55v 593 593 593 5c2 5c2 5c6 5c6 5c6 5f5 5f8 5ia 5ic 5li 5li 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5uq 5uq 5ut 5ut 622 622 622 622 622

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 4vn 52n 52p 52p 55v 55v 55v 593 593 593 5c2 5c2 5c6 5c6 5c6 5f5 5f8 5ia 5ic 5li 5li 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5uq 5ut 5ut 622 622 622 622 622

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 4vn 52n 52p 52p 55m 55v 55v 55v 593 593 593 5c2 5c2 5c6 5c6 5f5 5f8 5ia 5ic 5li 5li 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5uq 5ut 5ut 622 622 622 622 622

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 52n 52p 52p 55m 55v 55v 55v 593 593 5c2 5c2 5c6 5c6 5f5 5f8 5ia 5ic 5li 5li 5oo 5oo 5oo 5oo 5oo 5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5uq 5ut 5ut 622 622 622 622

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 52n 52p 55m 55v 55v 55v 55v 55v 55v 593 593 5c6 5c6 5f5 5f8 5fk 5ia 5ic 5li 5li 5oo 5oo 5oo 5um 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5up 5uq 5ut 5ut 622 622 622 622 6rn

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 52n 52p 55m 55v 55v 55v 55v 55v 593 593 5c6 5c6 5f5 5f8 5fk 5ia 5ic 5lc 5lc 5lc 5lc 5oo 5oo 5oo 5rl 5rl 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5uq 5ut 5ut 622 622 6rn

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 52n 52p 55m 55v 55v 55v 55v 55v 593 593 5c6 5c6 5f5 5f8 5fk 5ia 5ic 5lc 5lc 5lc 5lc 5oo 5oo 5oo 5rl 5rl 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 5up 5uq 5ut 5ut 622 622 622

4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 4vn 52r 52r 52r 55v 55v 55v 593 593 593 5c3 5c5 5c6 5f6 5f6 5f6 5ia 5ic 5if 5lc 5lc 5lc 5om 5om 5om 5rl 5rl 5rl 5um 5um 5um 5up 5up 5up 622 622 622

dark
4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 52r 52r 55v 55v 5bv 5c1 5c2 5c3 5c5 5c6 5f6 5f8 5fa 5ia 5ic 5if 5lc 5lc 5li 5ok 5ol 5oo 5rk 5rl 5rp 5um 5um 5un 5un 5up 5up 5up 5ut 5ut 61r 61r 622 622

or

life
4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vn 4vn 4vn 52s 52s 52s 55v 55v 55v 593 593 593 5bv 5bv 5c2 5c3 5c5 5c6 5c6 5f9 5f9 5f9 5i5 5i5 5i5 5l9 5l9 5l9 5ok 5ok 5ok 5rq 5rq 5rq 5um 5um 5um 622 622 622

Eating Like a Localvore

Yes, I said "localvore". Don't be surprised if you've not heard the term before, it's a fairly new concept born out of the current trend of environmental friendliness. A greener way of eating.

Even if the word sounds odd, I'm sure you can figure out what it means. A localvore is someone who makes a conscious decision to only eat foods produced locally (usually within a 100 mile radius of where you live). This type of eating habit is also sometimes called the 100-mile diet.

There are several reasons behind the localvore movement, most being environmental or economic.

Support your local food industry. Producing food is hard work and it's not an easy business to be in, especially if you are a small farmer. So keep your money in your community and support the people who work to produce your food.

Create less pollution. This is my personal reason for trying to eat locally. Transporting a load of produce from a South American or European country to Canada or the USA will produce far more carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions than produce transported from 4 miles down the road. I mean really, the amount of pollution created so that we can eat fruit that is out of season is ridiculous and unnecessary.

Less chemicals in the food. Imagine how long it takes to get a bag of fruit from Venezuela to New York. Even when the fruits or vegetables are picked before turning ripe, they need preservatives in order to survive the travel and still be edible. Eating locally means you can eat food that is fresher and that has fewer chemicals.

Better variety. Farmers who don't have to worry about shelf life or transport sturdiness can experiment with all kinds of fruit and vegetable varieties. You'll find all kinds of new tastes if you take the time to browse your local farmer's market instead of relying on the same old stuff at the major supermarket.

Some people choose to become a localvore on their own, but more and more communities are forming groups to help people connect with each other and to improve their own local food resources.

Hopefully after reading this, you might think twice next time you are shopping. If you have the choice between tomatoes grown nearby or 3,000 miles away, make the local choice.

Eat Healthy America: 52 Superfoods

Step into any supermarket and you’ll see thousands of labels shouting good-health claims: Whole grains! No trans fats! Essential vitamins and minerals! But figuring out what really is part of a healthy diet is getting harder and harder in these days of information overload. And it shows in the sobering statistics: 66% of Americans are overweight or obese—which is a big reason more of us are developing diseases such as diabetes, and at younger ages.

That’s why Woman’s Day is launching a yearlong series, Eat Healthy America. Our goal is to make healthy eating a no-brainer. In every issue, you’ll find easy ideas and advice that’ll help you make smart choices, plan balanced (and great-tasting) meals, get a grip on portions, and more. We’ll also prompt you to take small, doable steps that will help you eat better for good.

Start here: Clean out your kitchen, tossing as many unhealthy items as you can. Single-ingredient foods— apples, chicken, cooking oil, etc.—are keepers. Packaged foods with long lists of hard-to-pronounce ingredients go out, especially if they contain more than 7% of calories from saturated fat or more than 10% of calories from sugar. Now, turn the page and find out what you’ve made room for!

52 Superfoods

Fill up on these nutrient packed foods, which can help you fight disease. Feel more energetic and even lose weight.

1. Eggs Each egg has 6 grams of protein but just 72 calories. No wonder researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, found that eating eggs for breakfast (as part of a low-cal diet) helps you slim down.

2. Tomato sauce It’s loaded with lycopene, which makes your skin look younger and keeps your heart healthy. In fact, a Harvard study found that women with the most lycopene in their blood reduced their risk of a heart attack by 34%.

3. Dried plums(prunes) They’re packed with polyphenols, plant chemicals that have been shown to boost bone density by stimulating your bone-building cells.

4. Walnuts Just 14 walnut halves provide more than twice your daily dose of alpha-linolenic acid, an omega-3 fat that’s been shown to improve memory and coordination.

5. Brussels sprouts They have more glucosinolates (compounds that combat cancer and detoxify our bodies) than any other vegetable. For a side dish that will make you wonder why you’ve been avoiding them, slice each one into quarters, then sauté in olive oil with chopped sweet Vidalia onions.

6. Acai juice A glass or two of this anthocyanin-rich berry juice can dramatically boost the amount of antioxidants in your blood, say Texas A&M University researchers.

7. Apples They contain quercetin, an antioxidant that may reduce your risk of lung cancer.

8. Bok choy This calcium-rich veggie can protect your bones and may even ward off PMS symptoms.

9. Steel-cut oats Because they’re less processed than traditional oats, they’re digested more slowly—keeping you full all morning long.

10. Salmon You’ll get all the heart-smart omega-3s you need in a day from just 3 oz.

11. Avocados Their healthy fat keeps you satisfied and helps you absorb other nutrients. For a new u twist, brush a halved avocado (pit removed) with olive oil and grill 1 minute. Serve with red onion, sliced grapefruit and balsamic vinegar.

12. Spinach A half-cup provides more than five times your daily dose of vitamin K, which helps blood clot and builds strong bones.

13. Canned pumpkin It’s filled with natural cancer fighters alpha- and beta-carotene.

14. Cauliflower White foods can be good for you! This one is packed with cancer-fighting glucosinolates.

15. Scallops A 3-oz serving has 14 grams of protein but just 75 calories.

16. Collard greens They’re exploding with nutrients like vitamin A, zeaxanthin and lutein, which keep your eyes healthy.

17. Olives They deliver the same heart-healthy monounsaturated fat you get in olive oil, but for just 7 calories per jumbo olive!

18. Brown rice It’s a top source of magnesium, a mineral your body uses for more than 300 chemical reactions (such as building bones and converting food to energy).

19. Oysters These keep your immune system strong. A 3-oz serving (about 6 oysters) dishes up a quarter of your daily iron, plus nearly twice the zinc and all the selenium you need in a day.

20. Edamame One cup has a whopping 22 grams of plant protein, as well as lots of fiber, folate and cholesterol-lowering phytosterols.

21. Strawberries They’re loaded with ellagitannins, phytochemicals that may halt the growth of cervical and colon cancers.

22. Lentils A great source of meat-free protein, a half-cup of cooked lentils also gives you nearly half your daily folate, a B vitamin that protects a woman’s unborn baby from neural tube defects.

23. Bran flakes Their whole grains keep your heart in tip-top shape by reducing inflammation and melting away belly fat.

24. Kiwi Italian researchers found that it reduces asthma-related wheezing, thanks to its high vitamin C content (one kiwi has 110% of your daily requirement).

25. Black beans They’re loaded with protein, fiber, and flavonoids—antioxidants that help your arteries stay relaxed and pliable.

26. Sunflower seeds A quarter-cup delivers half your day’s vitamin E, which keeps your heart healthy and fights infection.

27. Sardines 3 oz provide more than 100% of your daily vitamin D. Sardines are also a top source of omega-3 fats. Try adding mashed canned sardines to marinara sauce and serving over whole-wheat pasta.

28. Asparagus A half-cup supplies 50% of your daily bone-building vitamin K and a third of your day’s folate, it’s a natural diuretic so it banishes bloating, too.

29. Bananas They’re loaded with several kinds of good-for-you fiber, including resistant starch (which helps you slim down).

30. Broccoli sprouts They have 10 times more of the cancer-preventing compound glucoraphanin than regular broccoli.

31. Fat-free milk With a third of the calcium and half the vitamin D you need in a day, plus 8 grams u of muscle-building protein, it’s the ultimate energy drink.

32. Baked potatoes Each one packs a megadose of blood-pressure–lowering potassium—even more than a banana.

33. Sweet potatoes Half of a large baked sweet potato delivers more than 450% of your daily dose of vitamin A, which protects your vision and your immune system.

34. Flaxseed Not only is flaxseed loaded with plant omega-3s, it also has more lignans (compounds that may prevent endometrial and ovarian cancer) than any other food. Store ground flaxseed in your refrigerator and sprinkle on yogurt, cold cereal or oatmeal.

35. Greek yogurt It has twice the protein of regular yogurt.

36. Dried tart cherries Researchers at Michigan State University found their potent anthocyanins help control blood sugar, reduce insulin and lower cholesterol.

37. Wheat germ A quarter-cup gives you more than 40% of your daily vitamin E and immune-boosting selenium.

38. Whole-wheat english muffins You get 4 ½ grams of fiber for only 134 calories.

39. Tea Both green and black tea prevent hardening of the arteries, according to researchers at the University of Scranton.

40. Peanut butter This smart spread has arginine, an amino acid that helps keep blood vessels healthy.

41. Blackberries The king of the berry family boasts more antioxidants than strawberries, cranberries or blueberries.

42. Mustard greens These “greens” (actually a cruciferous veggie) are a top source of vitamin K. For a tasty pesto, chop them in a food processor with garlic, walnuts, Parmesan and olive oil.

43. Grapes They’re a leading source of resveratrol, the plant chemical responsible for the heart-healthy benefits of red wine.

44. Soy milk A good source of vegetable protein, calcium-enriched soy milk has as much calcium and vitamin D as cow’s milk.

45. Brazil nuts They have more selenium than any other food. One nut delivers your entire day’s worth!

46. Canola oil A Tbsp of this heart-healthy oil has all the alpha-linolenic acid you need in a day, plus two different forms of vitamin E.

47. Blueberries They improve memory by protecting your brain from inflammation and boosting communication between brain cells.

48. Oranges One orange supplies more than 100% of the vitamin C you need in a day. It’s also a good source of calcium and folate.

49. Watercress With just 4 calories per cup, this cruciferous veggie delivers a hefty dose of vitamin K, zeaxanthin, lutein, beta-carotene and cancer-fighting phytochemicals.

50. Turkey breast It has 20 grams of satisfying protein but just 90 calories per 3-oz serving.

51. Barley A top source of beta-glucan, a fiber that lowers cholesterol and helps control blood sugar.

52. Shiitake mushrooms One serving (about ¼ lb) provides as much vitamin D as you’d get from a glass of milk.

Beware of Homeland Security Training for Local Law Enforcement

by: An Insider

article here

I’ve been in law enforcement for the past 18 years. I have attended a variety of training over those years. During the 1990s, most training I attended was community-oriented, sponsored by local agencies or private companies specializing in police training. Themes common to training of the past included topics such as Constitutional rights, community partnerships, youth-oriented programs and problem-oriented policing.

During the past several years, I have witnessed a dramatic shift in the focus of law enforcement training. Law enforcement courses have moved away from a local community focus to a federally dominated model of complete social control. Most training I have attended over the past two years have been sponsored by Department of Homeland Security (DHS), namely the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

No matter what topic the training session concerns, every DHS sponsored course I have attended over the past few years never fails to branch off into warnings about potential domestic terrorists in the community. While this may sound like a valid officer and community safety issue, you may be disturbed to learn how our Federal government describes a typical domestic terrorist.

These federal trainers describe the dangers of “extremists” and “militia groups” roaming the community and hiding in plain sight, ready to attack. Officers are instructed how to recognize these domestic terrorists by their behavior, views and common characteristics. State data bases are kept to track suspected domestic terrorists and officers are instructed on reporting procedures to state and federal agencies. The state I work in, like many others, have what is known as a “fusion center” that compiles a watch list of suspicious people.

So how does a person qualify as a potential domestic terrorist? Based on the training I have attended, here are characteristics that qualify:
Expressions of libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)
Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership, holding a CCW permit)
Survivalist literature (fictional books such as "Patriots" and "One Second After" are mentioned by name)
Self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)
Fear of economic collapse (buying gold and barter items)
Religious views concerning the book of Revelation (apocalypse, anti-Christ)
Expressed fears of Big Brother or big government
Homeschooling
Declarations of Constitutional rights and civil liberties
Belief in a New World Order conspiracy

A recent training session I attended encouraged law enforcement agencies to work with business owners to alert police when customers appear to be stockpiling items. An example was given that a federal agent was monitoring customers at a well known hunting and fishing retail outlet and noting who was purchasing certain items. This is something to remember the next time you purchase a case of ammo at one of these popular outdoor sports retail stores.

Methods of developing evidence of terrorist activity from virtually any search have also been discussed. Various common materials which may be associated with homemade explosives are listed, such as lengths of pipe, gunpowder, matches, flammable liquids and fireworks. Officers are told when these items are found, they can be listed as “bomb making materials”. The training even goes so far as to instruct officers that the items are cleverly disguised as legitimate, such as gasoline stored near a lawn mower, pipes stored in a shop building or gunpowder stored with reloading materials.

One course I attended used the example of a person employed as a plumber being the target of a search warrant. In this example, the officers were told how to use his employment as a plumber as further evidence of terrorism. The suspect’s employment would be described as an elaborate scheme to justify possessing pipes and chemicals so as to have bomb making materials readily available. Based on this example, all plumbers are potential pipe bomb makers. All gun dealers are plotting to provide arms to gangs or terrorists. All pest control companies are preparing mass poisonings. By using this logic, simply having the ability to do something criminal automatically makes the person guilty of plotting the crime. With all the various methods of manufacturing methamphetamine, it would also be easy to claim that a disassembled clandestine drug lab was located during the search. In other words, it is easy to frame anyone for possessing bomb making materials (or other crimes) if the officer knows what items to list in the report and how to link these items to terrorism.

Another common tactic used in DHS sponsored training is the slander of certain ideologies by linking an erroneous characteristic to a particular group. Here are some examples:
These groups hold the anniversaries of certain dates as significant such a Ruby Ridge, Waco and Hitler’s birthday
They oppose abortion, support gun rights and are affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan
They are fearful of big government, espouse support for the Constitution and want to kill police officers
These groups collect firearms, survivalist books and explosives
These extremists read books such as Patriots, One Second After and The Anarchist Cookbook
They are religious zealots, reading the book of Revelation, speak of the second coming of Christ and plan mass murders to summon the end of the world
These people grow their own food, raise livestock and plot attacks on commercial food production facilities

Do you see how this tactic works? List common characteristics of libertarian/conservative minded people, then throw in a slanderous accusation. If A and B apply, then you should automatically presume C applies as well. If they were disturbed by the incidents at Ruby Ridge and Waco, then obviously they must celebrate Hitler’s birthday. Officers are being conditioned to assume criminal and terroristic views when politically-incorrect views are observed. As simple-minded and ridiculous as this line of thinking is, there are some officers who unfortunately buy into this.

Another training session I attended two years ago discussed the dangerous of people who have strong views of the U.S. Constitution. One trainer made the statement that “these people actually believe the Second Amendment gives them the personal right to own a gun.” Of course, the trainer failed to mention that our Founding Fathers, as well as recent Supreme Court rulings, verify this view as being completely accurate. The obvious attempt here was to suggest to officers that the Second Amendment does not apply to individual gun ownership and to be suspicious of anyone who holds such a view. It was also stressed to be cautious of anyone who quotes the Constitution and even worse, actually possesses a copy of this radical document. Incredibly, in the United States of America today belief in our founding legal principles is now grounds for being labeled a domestic terrorism. Imagine how they would respond to some of the known statements of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry or George Mason concerning the issue of individual liberty and limited government. It is true that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

There are several things that we, the patriotic, self-sufficient defenders of liberty can do to counter this effort. First, get involved in local elections. Elect county sheriffs who will not fall for such propaganda nor go along with oppressive federal agendas. Elect city council members who will not tolerate such behavior by their city police department. Elect state representatives who will hold state agencies accountable for participating in such tactics. Bring these issues up during elections, demand a public statement on their position on such propaganda and a promise to stand against these efforts while in office.

Second, get to know your local law enforcement officers. It is much more difficult for DHS to brainwash officers against people they personally know. When you are viewed as a neighbor, friend or fellow Christian, these officers are far less likely to submit your name to a terrorist watch list or view you as a potential terrorist. We want local officers to be personally offended when they hear members of their community slandered in such ways.

Third, always be friendly and courteous when speaking to your local officers. Even if that officer has fallen for this propaganda, be sure not to resemble the negative stereotypes labeled to us. After the fifth, sixth or maybe tenth time he deals with one of us, he or she may come to realize we are of no threat to law enforcement or anyone for that matter. Eventually, the officer may attend one of these training sessions, hear the propaganda and say to himself, “This isn’t true, I’ve dealt with many people like this, they are God-fearing, liberty loving Americans, they are not the enemy!”

I hope you find this information useful. Please remember that there are many people in law enforcement that have not, and will never, fall for DHS propaganda. Some of the most patriotic defenders of liberty and believers in self-sufficiency can be found in law enforcement. Officers like me will continue to do our part to fight tyranny from within while the general public can do its part by electing liberty-minded candidates to office and educating their friends and neighbors about issues important to all of us.

Growing and Storing Your Own Food

by James Wesley, Rawles

Let me begin by saying I am a 64 year old male who grew up in the era of duck and cover. Every school child back then was aware of the threat of falling A bombs form the sky with the Russian hammer and sickle painted on their nose. Many people were prepared for a nuclear exchange with fall out rates and blast distance from ground zero calculated. Food reserves were stocked in the pantry or in a shelter and each family member knew exactly what to do in an emergency. To be prepared then was your civic duty and not being organized was viewed as being, at the least ill-informed and at the worst just plain lazy.

Now fast forward to the present, how the times have changed! Today the threat of nuclear war is not our only worry. We have threats of biological, and chemical attacks, or fear of a global pandemics wiping out one quarter of the earths population. And don’t forget the falling asteroids or comets from the sky repeating the extension event that killed all the dinosaurs, or civil and social collapse due to terror attacks or revolution and riots. Then you throw in the 2012 prophecy, and being prepared is even more important and much harder than ever before.

People think you are a tinfoil hat wearing crazy nut job if you talk about being prepared, you are called a survivalist throwback to the bomb shelter days. The comment that bothers me the most is when a person says that they would prefer to die at the beginning rather than suffer trying to survive. My reply to that is, “can you intentionally watch your grandchildren slowly die because you are lazy and unprepared.” Personally I can’t, and that brings me to the reason for this article.

After 9-11, I began to think about survival, not just for me but for my family and especially my grandchildren. My entire adult life I have tried to provide for my family by making things safe for them. But I never gave much thought about preparing for a prolonged disaster and survival if the unthinkable happens. I started to think about the things I would need to do to be better prepared. My brother and sister have been quietly organizing for years so I knew who to go to for information.

A visit with my older brother out of state opened my eyes to how big a challenge it is to truly be properly equipped. The following is the easy and time tested way to build up our family food stores.

Getting started with the basics:

Every trip to the grocery store I purchased extra of the basic foods.

Beans, dried of all types, and came in large 25 lb bags or as small as 1 lb bag.

Rice, long grain white or brown, pasta, noodles and spaghetti.

Oats rolled old fashioned, corn meal, processed white flower.

Sugar, honey, salt, cooking spices, dried yeast, cooking oil, and powdered milk.

Wheat, if you can find it. Hard Red winter wheat is better for long term storage.

It does not take long to begin to build a food store when you start to purchase just a few of the basics. Always remember to look at the expiration date on any caned foods you purchase. Something I learned is that SPAM, canned salmon and canned tuna have very long shelf lives and can be rotated in your food store for a variety in cooking choices.

The Learning Curve Begins

Then I got out my old and dusty, Nesco American Harvest food dehydrator and jerky maker. After talking with my sister by phone about shelf life I found that you can dehydrate almost all frozen vegetables very easily. So I began learning how to dry all our favorite foods.

I started with frozen corn from the grocery store in one lb. bags. I waited until they went on sale and got 20 bags. My Nesco has a temperature dial and according to instructions you set the temperature at 135 degrees. I moved the dehydrator into the garage when I found that the smell of drying corn fill the house. In the beginning you will check on the unit every hour or so, kind of like watching grass grow. So I decided to fill the dehydrator in the evening and let it run all night while I slept.

The 20 one pound bags were processed five bags at a time for about 14 hours, and the total of that drying will fit into a single quart mason jar. I found that if you use a grocery store brown paper bag you can put the 13-½ inch drying tray inside the bag before dumping the tray. And after all five trays were put into the bag you can fold the corner and use it as a spout while pouring the contents into the quart Mason jars.

Another phone call to my brother and sister who have been preparing for years and I knew how to seal the jars of dehydrated corn. By placing the open jars in my oven with the temperature on its lowest setting which is about 170 degrees. Let the jars sit for two hours to heat up, then put your lids and rings into a pot of boiling water for a couple minutes, take out the jars one at a time and put them on a dish towel, use your caning magnet to pull the lid and ring out of the boiling water, wipe off the moisture and place the lid insert on top of the jar then thread on the ring only finger tight. After a short time you hear the pretty sound of the cans sealing with a loud ping each time the jar seals. Now your can of dehydrated corn is ready for long term storage if you did it all correctly it will last for many many years.

The key to long term food storage is keeping the food, no matter how it is prepared, in a cool dry place. Temperature extremes are bad for food storage even when the food is dehydrated. A hot garage is definitely not the place to store food. So with that in mind I have converted one small bedroom closet into my food locker. The room is air-conditioned so the temperature stays fairly constant.

My home dehydrated food supply now consists of Corn, Green beans, Carrots, Broccoli, Brussels Sprouts, Okra, “sweet peas my favorite,” Spinach, Celery, cucumbers, Apples, and Blueberries. All of this food and more is available from several different sources but I prefer to learn how to process it my self. Learning how to survive is more than opening a can it is learning and teaching for the future generations.

Learning to grow your own food

My brother who lives in Washington State visited me four years ago here in Houston and he complimented me on my well kept yard and flower garden. He added that unless I know how to eat grass and flowers there is nothing in my yard that you can eat and live on. That was my awakening and I began to learn how to raise my own vegetables. Since my back yard is very small I had to teach myself how to grow just a few of my favorite veggies in a limited space. The first two years I purchased starter plants from the nursery and they worked well. But this year I am learning how to grow my own garden from seed packages. It is important to re-learn what our grand parents knew from childhood.

It is a learning process, not enough water, or to much water. Then the quality of soil is a big deal in gardening. I learned that it is important to gain as much knowledge as you can so I purchased a book written by our local extension agent. It is filled with the right kind of information to grow plants in our local area. I am teaching both my granddaughters about gardening and when the radishes or small onions get ready to pick they help and will eat some right out of the ground. I am trying to make gardening generational.

Next is picking the proper fruit trees for my area and of course learned how to keep them producing a good crop. Lack of adequate room is a problem so I picked a single self pollinating apple and plum, and because my neighbor has a peach tree I got one that will use his for pollination. My daughter gave me a dwarf lemon tree that is giving me fits but I think its growing well now. Being retired gives me a lot of time to spend in my home garden and I think it has improved my health some.

It needs to be a family undertaking

Getting the family onboard and thinking survival was the next obstacle. For the last nine years my wife has been agreeable and letting me slowly prepare our food store. My children on the other hand did not understand the importance of being prepared for emergencies. To them an emergency is a couple of days without electricity. So they let me build my family food store and they all know where to come and what to bring in an emergency. Keeping the family involved is important and gives everyone structure.

I have started an event called survival food Sunday held once a month where my family will get together at my home to learn how to prepare and eat dehydrated and survival food. It is a good way for me to learn the best way to prepare certain foods and to rotate my older stocks. My family is starting to understand what I have been saying for years and as a family unit we will have a good shot of growing old together no matter what happens.

There is much much more that I could write about but I wanted to tell you how easy it is to begin to build you family food store. I am not an expert just a regular guy that wants his family to have an advantage in any emergency.

Marcel Proust - Remembrance of Things Past - Swann's Way - Place-Names: The Name

from The University of Adelaide Library

Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during my long nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with the motes of an atmosphere granular, pollenous, edible and instinct with piety, than my room in the Grand Hôtel de la Plage, at Balbec, the walls of which, washed with ripolin, contained, like the polished sides of a basin in which the water glows with a blue, lurking fire, a finer air, pure, azure-tinted, saline. The Bavarian upholsterer who had been entrusted with the furnishing of this hotel had varied his scheme of decoration in different rooms, and in that which I found myself occupying had set against the walls, on three sides of it, a series of low book-cases with glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by a law of nature which he had, perhaps, forgotten to take into account, was reflected this or that section of the ever-changing view of the sea, so that the walls were lined with a frieze of sea-scapes, interrupted only by the polished mahogany of the actual shelves. And so effective was this that the whole room had the appearance of one of those model bedrooms which you see nowadays in Housing Exhibitions, decorated with works of art which are calculated by their designer to refresh the eyes of whoever may ultimately have to sleep in the rooms, the subjects being kept in some degree of harmony with the locality and surroundings of the houses for which the rooms are planned.

And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real Balbec than that other Balbec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy days, when the wind was so strong that Françoise, as she took me to the Champs-Elysées, would warn me not to walk too near the side of the street, or I might have my head knocked off by a falling slate, and would recount to me, with many lamentations, the terrible disasters and shipwrecks that were reported in the newspaper. 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. I was not curious, I did not thirst to know anything save what I believed to be more genuine than myself, what had for me the supreme merit of shewing me a fragment of the mind of a great genius, or of the force or the grace of nature as she appeared when left entirely to herself, without human interference. Just as the lovely sound of her voice, reproduced, all by itself, upon the phonograph, could never console a man for the loss of his mother, so a mechanical imitation of a storm would have left me as cold as did the illuminated fountains at the Exhibition. I required also, if the storm was to be absolutely genuine, that the shore from which I watched it should be a natural shore, not an embankment recently constructed by a municipality. Besides, nature, by all the feelings that she aroused in me, seemed to me the most opposite thing in the world to the mechanical inventions of mankind The less she bore their imprint, the more room she offered for the expansion of my heart. And, as it happened, I had preserved the name of Balbec, which Legrandin had cited to us, as that of a sea-side place in the very midst of “that funereal coast, famed for the number of its wrecks, swathed, for six months in the year, in a shroud of fog and flying foam from the waves.

“You feel, there, below your feet still,” he had told me, “far more even than at Finistère (and even though hotels are now being superimposed upon it, without power, however, to modify that oldest bone in the earth’s skeleton) you feel there that you are actually at the land’s end of France, of Europe, of the Old World. And it is the ultimate encampment of the fishermen, precisely like the fishermen who have lived since the world’s beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of the sea-fogs and shadows of the night.” One day when, at Combray, I had spoken of this coast, this Balbec, before M. Swann, hoping to learn from him whether it was the best point to select for seeing the most violent storms, he had replied: “I should think I did know Balbec! The church at Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still half romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman gothic, and so exceptional that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspiration.” And that region, which, until then, had seemed to me to be nothing else than a part of immemorial nature, that had remained contemporaneous with the great phenomena of geology — and as remote from human history as the Ocean itself, or the Great Bear, with its wild race of fishermen for whom, no more than for their whales, had there been any Middle Ages — it had been a great joy to me to see it suddenly take its place in the order of the centuries, with a stored consciousness of the romanesque epoch, and to know that the gothic trefoil had come to diversify those wild rocks also, at the appointed hour, like those frail but hardy plants which, in the Polar regions, when the spring returns, scatter their stars about the eternal snows. And if gothic art brought to those places and people a classification which, otherwise, they lacked, they too conferred one upon it in return. I tried to form a picture in my mind of how those fishermen had lived, the timid and unsuspected essay towards social intercourse which they had attempted there, clustered upon a promontory of the shores of Hell, at the foot of the cliffs of death; and gothic art seemed to me a more living thing now that, detaching it from the towns in which, until then, I had always imagined it, I could see how, in a particular instance, upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the most famous of the statues at Balbec, — shaggy, blunt-faced Apostles, the Virgin from the porch, — and I could scarcely breathe for joy at the thought that I might myself, one day, see them take a solid form against their eternal background of salt fog. Thereafter, on dear, tempestuous February nights, the wind —— breathing into my heart, which it shook no less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the project of a visit to Balbec — blended in me the desire for gothic architecture with that for a storm upon the sea.

I should have liked to take, the very next day, the good, the generous train at one twenty-two, of which never without a palpitating heart could I read, in the railway company’s bills or in advertisements of circular tours, the hour of departure: it seemed to me to cut, at a precise point in every afternoon, a most fascinating groove, a mysterious mark, from which the diverted hours still led one on, of course, towards evening, towards to-morrow morning, but to an evening and morning which one would behold, not in Paris but in one of those towns through which the train passed and among which it allowed one to choose; for it stopped at Bayeux, at Coutances, at Vitré, at Questambert, at Pontorson, at Balbec, at Lannion, at Lamballe, at Benodet, at Pont-Aven, at Quimperle, and progressed magnificently surcharged with names which it offered me, so that, among them all, I did not know which to choose, so impossible was it to sacrifice any. But even without waiting for the train next day, I could, by rising and dressing myself with all speed, leave Paris that very evening, should my parents permit, and arrive at Balbec as dawn spread westward over the raging sea, from whose driven foam I would seek shelter in that church in the Persian manner. But at the approach of the Easter holidays, when my parents bad promised to let me spend them, for once, in the North of Italy, lo! in place of those dreams of tempests, by which I had been entirely possessed, not wishing to see anything but waves dashing in from all sides, mounting always higher, upon the wildest of coasts, beside churches as rugged and precipitous as cliffs, in whose towers the sea-birds would be wailing; suddenly, effacing them, taking away all their charm, excluding them because they were its opposite and could only have weakened its effect, was substituted in me the converse dream of the most variegated of springs, not the spring of Combray, still pricking with all the needle-points of the winter’s frost, but that which already covered with lilies and anemones the meadows of Fiesole, and gave Florence a dazzling golden background, like those in Fra Angelico’s pictures. From that moment, only sunlight, perfumes, colours, seemed to me to have any value; for this alternation of images had effected a change of front in my desire, and — as abrupt as those that occur sometimes in music, — a complete change of tone in my sensibility. Thus it came about that a mere atmospheric variation would be sufficient to provoke in me that modulation, without there being any need for me to await the return of a season. For often we find a day, in one, that has strayed from another season, and makes us live in that other, summons at once into our presence and makes us long for its peculiar pleasures, and interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting, out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf, torn from another chapter, in the interpolated calendar of Happiness. But soon it happened that, like those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health can derive but an accidental and all too modest benefit, until the day when science takes control of them, and, producing them at will, places in our hands the power to order their appearance, withdrawn from the tutelage and independent of the consent of chance; similarly the production of these dreams of the Atlantic and of Italy ceased to depend entirely upon the changes of the seasons and of the weather. I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring, to come in a book upon the name of Balbec sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for the Norman gothic; even on a stormy day the name of Florence or of Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore.

But if their names thus permanently absorbed the image that I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I formed of certain points on the earth’s surface, making them more special, and in consequence more real. I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, historic buildings, as pictures more or less attractive, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which my soul was athirst, by the knowledge of which it would benefit. How much more individual still was the character that they assumed from being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper names such as people have. Words present to us little pictures of things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter’s bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us — of persons and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons — a confused picture, which draws from the names, from the brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction, or by a whim on the designer’s part, are blue or red not only the sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets. The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most longed to visit, after reading the Chartreuse , seeming to me compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma, in which I should be lodged, he would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, and that bore no relation to the houses in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid of that heavy syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air stirred, and of all that I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets. And when I thought of Florence, it was of a town miraculously embalmed, and flower-like, since it was called the City of the Lilies, and its Cathedral, Our Lady of the Flower. As for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on an old piece of Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which it was fashioned, one sees depicted still the representation of some long-abolished custom, of some feudal right, of the former condition of some place, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language, which had shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables and which I never doubted that I should find spoken there at once, even by the inn-keeper who would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church; to whom I lent the aspect, disputatious, solemn and mediaeval, of some character in one of the old romances.

Had my health definitely improved, had my parents allowed me, if not actually to go down to stay at Balbec, at least to take, just once, so as to become acquainted with the architecture and landscapes of Normandy or of Brittany, that one twenty-two train into which I had so often clambered in imagination, I should have preferred to stop, and to alight from it, at the most beautiful of its towns; but in vain might I compare and contrast them; how was one to choose, any more than between individual people, who are not interchangeable, between Bayeux, so lofty in its noble coronet of rusty lace, whose highest point caught the light of the old gold of its second syllable; Vitré, whose acute accent barred its ancient glass with wooden lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman Cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with a tower of butter; Lannion with the rumble and buzz, in the silence of its village street, of the fly on the wheel of the coach; Questambert, Pontorson, ridiculously silly and simple, white feathers and yellow beaks strewn along the road to those well-watered and poetic spots; Benodet, a name scarcely moored that seemed to be striving to draw the river down into the tangle of its seaweeds; Pont-Aven, the snowy, rosy flight of the wing of a lightly poised coif, tremulously reflected in the greenish waters of a canal; Quimperlé, more firmly attached, this, and since the Middle Ages, among the rivulets with which it babbled, threading their pearls upon a grey background, like the pattern made, through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into blunt points of tarnished silver?

These images were false for another reason also; namely, that they were necessarily much simplified; doubtless the object to which my imagination aspired, which my senses took in but incompletely and without any immediate pleasure, I had committed to the safe custody of names; doubtless because I had accumulated there a store of dreams, those names now magnetised my desires; but names themselves are not very comprehensive; the most that I could do was to include in each of them two or three of the principal curiosities of the town, which would lie there side by side, without interval or partition; in the name of Balbec, as in the magnifying glasses set in those penholders which one buys at sea-side places, I could distinguish waves surging round a church built in the Persian manner. Perhaps, indeed, the enforced simplicity of these images was one of the reasons for the hold that they had over me. When my father had decided, one year, that we should go for the Easter holidays to Florence and Venice, not finding room to introduce into the name of Florence the elements that ordinarily constitute a town, I was obliged to let a supernatural city emerge from the impregnation by certain vernal scenes of what I supposed to be, in its essentials, the genius of Giotto. All the more — and because one cannot make a name extend much further in time than in space — like some of Giotto’s paintings themselves which shew us at two separate moments the same person engaged in different actions, here lying on his bed, there just about to mount his horse, the name of Florence was divided into two compartments. In one, beneath an architectural dais, I gazed upon a fresco over which was partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight, dusty, aslant, and gradually spreading; in the other (for, since I thought of names not as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge, the life not yet lived, the life intact and pure which I enclosed in them, gave to the most material pleasures, to the simplest scenes, the same attraction that they have in the works of the Primitives), I moved swiftly — so as to arrive, as soon as might be, at the table that was spread for me, with fruit and a flask of Chianti — across a Ponte Vecchio heaped with jonquils, narcissi and anemones. That (for all that I was still in Paris) was what I saw, and not what was actually round about me. Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries for which we long occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our true life than the country in which we may happen to be. Doubtless, if, at that time, I had paid more attention to what was in my mind when I pronounced the words “going to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice,” I should have realised that what I saw was in no sense a town, but something as different from anything that I knew, something as delicious as might be for a human race whose whole existence had passed in a series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel, a morning in spring. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all my nights and days, differentiated this period in my life from those which had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it by an observer who saw things only from without, that is to say, who saw nothing), as in an opera a fresh melody introduces a novel atmosphere which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre, counting only the minutes as they passed. And besides, even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not all equal. To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different ‘speeds.’ There are mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt, singing as one goes. During this month — in which I went laboriously over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for another person — I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve of his entry into Paradise. 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. And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again than the guide-books, the railway time-tables. What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I could see, so near and yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the tract which separated it from me, in myself, was not one that I might cross, could yet be reached by a circuit, by a digression, were I to take the plain, terrestrial path. When I repeated to myself, giving thus a special value to what I was going to see, that Venice was the “School of Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most complete museum of the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages,” I felt happy indeed. As I was even more when, on one of my walks, as I stepped out briskly on account of the weather, which, after several days of a precocious spring, had relapsed into winter (like the weather that we had invariably found awaiting us at Combray, in Holy Week), — seeing upon the boulevards that the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked through them like a stream of water, were none the less beginning, punctual guests, arrayed already for the party, and admitting no discouragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the irrepressible verdure whose steady growth the abortive power of the cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining — I reflected that already the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of hyacinths and anemones, and that the spring sunshine was already tinging the waves of the Grand Canal with so dusky an azure, with emeralds so splendid that when they washed and were broken against the foot of one of Titian’s paintings they could vie with it in the richness of their colouring. I could no longer contain my joy when my father, in the intervals of tapping the barometer and complaining of the cold, began to look out which were the best trains, and when I understood that by making one’s way, after luncheon, into the coal-grimed laboratory, the wizard’s cell that undertook to contrive a complete transmutation of its surroundings, one could awaken, next morning, in the city of marble and gold, in which “the building of the wall was of jasper and the foundation of the wall an emerald.” So that it and the City of the Lilies were not just artificial scenes which I could set up at my pleasure in front of my imagination, but did actually exist at a certain distance from Paris which must inevitably be traversed if I wished to see them, at their appointed place on the earth’s surface, and at no other; in a word they were entirely real. They became even more real to me when my father, by saying: “Well, you can stay in Venice from the 20th to the 29th, and reach Florence on Easter morning,” made them both emerge, no longer only from the abstraction of Space, but from that imaginary Time in which we place not one, merely, but several of our travels at once, which do not greatly tax us since they are but possibilities, — that Time which reconstructs itself so effectively that one can spend it again in one town after one has already spent it in another — and consecrated to them some of those actual, calendar days which are certificates of the genuineness of what one does on them, for those unique days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one cannot live them again here when one has lived them elsewhere; I felt that it was towards the week that would begin with the Monday on which the laundress was to bring back the white waistcoat that I had stained with ink, that they were hastening to busy themselves with the duty of emerging from that ideal Time in which they did not, as yet, exist, those two Queen Cities of which I was soon to be able, by the most absorbing kind of geometry, to inscribe the domes and towers on a page of my own life. But I was still on the way, only, to the supreme pinnacle of happiness; I reached it finally (for not until then did the revelation burst upon me that on the clattering streets, reddened by the light reflected from Giorgione’s frescoes, it was not, as I had, despite so many promptings, continued to imagine, the men “majestic and terrible as the sea, bearing armour that gleamed with bronze beneath the folds of their blood-red cloaks,” who would be walking in Venice next week, on the Easter vigil; but that I myself might be the minute personage whom, in an enlarged photograph of St. Mark’s that had been lent to me, the operator had portrayed, in a bowler hat, in front of the portico), when I heard my father say: “It must be pretty cold, still, on the Grand Canal; whatever you do, don’t forget to pack your winter greatcoat and your thick suit.” At these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy; a thing that I had until then deemed impossible, I felt myself to be penetrating indeed between those “rocks of amethyst, like a reef in the Indian Ocean”; by a supreme muscular effort, a long way in excess of my real strength, stripping myself, as of a shell that served no purpose, of the air in my own room which surrounded me, I replaced it by an equal quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere, indescribable and peculiar as the atmosphere of the dreams which my imagination had secreted in the name of Venice; I could feel at work within me a miraculous disincarnation; it was at once accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels when one has a very sore throat; and they had to put me to bed with a fever so persistent that the doctor not only assured my parents that a visit, that spring, to Florence and Venice was absolutely out of the question, but warned their that, even when I should have completely recovered, I must, for at least a year, give up all idea of travelling, and be kept from anything that wa; liable to excite me.

And, alas, he forbade also, most categorically, my being allowed to go to the theatre, to hear Berma; the sublime artist, whose genius Bergotte had proclaimed, might, by introducing me to something else that was, perhaps, as important 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 unendurable. 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 neighbouring 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 statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing with a shuttlecock; when, from the 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 labelled 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, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to penetrate 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 precision, 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 of the life of the gods; casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot on which she stood (at once a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair player, who continued to beat up and catch her shuttlecock until a governess, with a blue feather in her hat, had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, of the colour of heliotrope, spread over the lawn like a carpet on which I could not tire of treading to and fro with lingering feet, nostalgic and profane, while Françoise shouted: “Come on, button up your coat, look, and let’s get away!” and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.

Only, would she come again to the Champs-Elysées? Next day she was not there; but I saw her on the following days; I spent all my time revolving round the spot where she was at play with her friends, to such effect that once, when, they found, they were not enough to make up a prisoner’s base, she sent one of them to ask me if I cared to complete their side, and from that day I played with her whenever she came. But this did not happen every day; there were days when she had been prevented from coming by her lessons, by her catechism, by a luncheon-party, by the whole of that life, separated from my own, which twice only, condensed into the name of Gilberte, I had felt pass so painfully close to me, in the hawthorn lane near Combray and on the grass of the Champs-Elysées. On such days she would have told us beforehand that we should not see her; if it were because of her lessons, she would say: “It is too tiresome, I sha’n’t be able to come to-morrow; you will all be enjoying yourselves here without me,” with an air of regret which to some extent consoled me; if, on the other hand, she had been invited to a party, and I, not knowing this, asked her whether she was coming to play with us, she would reply: “Indeed I hope not! Indeed I hope Mamma will let me go to my friend’s.” But on these days I did at least know that I should not see her, whereas on others, without any warning, her mother would take her for a drive, or some such thing, and next day she would say: “Oh, yes! I went out with Mamma,” as though it had been the most natural thing in the world, and not the greatest possible misfortune for some one else. There were also the days of bad weather on which her governess, afraid, on her own account, of the rain, would not bring Gilberte to the Champs-Elysées.

And so, if the heavens were doubtful, from early morning I would not cease to interrogate them, observing all the omens. If I saw the lady opposite, just inside her window, putting on her hat, I would say to myself: “That lady is going out; it must, therefore, be weather in which one can go out. Why should not Gilberte do the same as that lady?” But the day grew dark. My mother said that it might clear again, that one burst of sunshine would be enough, but that more probably it would rain; and if it rained, of what use would it be to go to the Champs-Elysées? And so, from breakfast-time, my anxious eyes never left the uncertain, clouded sky. It remained dark: Outside the window, the balcony was grey. Suddenly, on its sullen stone, I did not indeed see a less negative colour, but I felt as it were an effort towards a less negative colour, the pulsation of a hesitating ray that struggled to discharge its light. A moment later the balcony was as pale and luminous as a standing water at dawn, and a thousand shadows from the iron-work of its balustrade had come to rest on it. A breath of wind dispersed them; the stone grew dark again, but, like tamed creatures, they returned; they began, imperceptibly, to grow lighter, and by one of those continuous crescendos, such as, in music, at the end of an overture, carry a single note to the extreme fortissimo, making it pass rapidly through all the intermediate stages, I saw it attain to that fixed, unalterable gold of fine days, on which the sharply cut shadows of the wrought iron of the balustrade were outlined in black like a capricious vegetation, with a fineness in the delineation of their smallest details which seemed to indicate a deliberate application, an artist’s satisfaction, and with so much relief, so velvety a bloom in the restfulness of their sombre and happy mass that in truth those large and leafy shadows which lay reflected on that lake of sunshine seemed aware that they were pledges of happiness and peace of mind.

Brief, fading ivy, climbing, fugitive flora, the most colourless, the most depressing, to many minds, of all that creep on walls or decorate windows; to me the dearest of them all, from the day when it appeared upon our balcony, like the very shadow of the presence of Gilberte, who was perhaps already in the Champs-Elysées, and as soon as I arrived there would greet me with: “Let’s begin at once. You are on my side.” Frail, swept away by a breath, but at the same time in harmony, not with the season, with the hour; a promise of that immediate pleasure which the day will deny or fulfil, and thereby of the one paramount immediate pleasure, the pleasure of loving and of being loved; more soft, more warm upon tie stone than even moss is; alive, a ray of sunshine sufficing for its birth, and for the birth of joy, even in the heart of winter.

And on those days when all other vegetation had disappeared, when the fine jerkins of green leather which covered the trunks of the old trees were hidden beneath the snow; after the snow had ceased to fall, but when the sky was still too much overcast for me to hope that Gilberte would venture out, then suddenly — inspiring my mother to say: “Look, it’s quite fine now; I think you might perhaps try going to the Champs-Elysées after all.” — On the mantle of snow that swathed the balcony, the sun had appeared and was stitching seams of gold, with embroidered patches of dark shadow. That day we found no one there, or else a solitary girl, on the point of departure, who assured me that Gilberte was not coming. The chairs, deserted by the imposing but uninspiring company of governesses, stood empty. Only, near the grass, was sitting a lady of uncertain age who came in all weathers, dressed always in an identical style, splendid and sombre, to make whose acquaintance I would have, at that period, sacrificed, had it lain in my power, all the greatest opportunities in my life to come. For Gilberte went up every day to speak to her; she used to ask Gilberte for news of her “dearest mother” and it struck me that, if I had known her, I should have been for Gilberte some one wholly different, some one who knew people in her parents’ world. While her grandchildren played together at a little distance, she would sit and read the Débats, which she called “My old Débats !” as, with an aristocratic familiarity, she would say, speaking of the police-sergeant or the woman who let the chairs, “My old friend the police-sergeant,” or “The chair-keeper and I, who are old friends.”

Françoise found it too cold to stand about, so we walked to the Pont de la Concorde to see the Seine frozen over, on to which everyone, even children, walked fearlessly, as though upon an enormous whale, stranded, defenceless, and about to be cut up. We returned to the Champs-Elysées; I was growing sick with misery between the motionless wooden horses and the white lawn, caught in a net of black paths from which the snow had been cleared, while the statue that surmounted it held in its hand a long pendent icicle which seemed to explain its gesture. The old lady herself, having folded up her Débats , asked a passing nursemaid the time, thanking her with “How very good of you!” then begged the road-sweeper to tell her grandchildren to come, as she felt cold, adding “A thousand thanks. I am sorry to give you so much trouble!” Suddenly the sky was rent in two: between the punch-and-judy and the horses, against the opening horizon, I had just seen, like a miraculous sign, Mademoiselle’s blue feather. And now Gilberte was running at full speed towards me, sparkling and rosy beneath a cap trimmed with fur, enlivened by the cold, by being late, by her anxiety for a game; shortly before she reached me, she slipped on a piece of ice and, either to regain her balance, or because it appeared to her graceful, or else pretending that she was on skates, it was with outstretched arms that she smilingly advanced, as though to embrace me. “Bravo! bravo! that’s splendid; ‘topping,’ I should say, like you — ‘sporting,’ I suppose I ought to say, only I’m a hundred-and-one, a woman of the old school,” exclaimed the lady, uttering, on behalf of the voiceless Champs-Elysées, their thanks to Gilberte for having come, without letting herself be frightened away by the weather. “You are like me, faithful at all costs to our old Champs-Elysées; we are two brave souls! You wouldn’t believe me, I dare say, if I told you that I love them, even like this. This snow (I know, you’ll laugh at me), it makes me think of ermine!” And the old lady began to laugh herself.

The first of these days — to which the snow, a symbol of the powers that were able to deprive me of the sight of Gilberte, imparted the sadness of a day of separation, almost the aspect of a day of departure, because it changed the outward form and almost forbade the use of the customary scene of our only encounters, now altered, covered, as it were, in dust-sheets — that day, none the less, marked a stage in the progress of my love, for it was, in a sense, the first sorrow that she was to share with me. There were only our two selves of our little company, and to be thus alone with her was not merely like a beginning of intimacy, but also on her part — as though she had come there solely to please me, and in such weather — it seemed to me as touching as if, on one of those days on which she had been invited to a party, she had given it up in order to come to me in the Champs-Elysées; I acquired more confidence in the vitality, in the future of a friendship which could remain so much alive amid the torpor, the solitude, the decay of our surroundings; and while she dropped pellets of snow down my neck, I smiled lovingly at what seemed to me at once a predilection that she shewed for me in thus tolerating me as her travelling companion in this new, this wintry land, and a sort of loyalty to me which she preserved through evil times. Presently, one after another, like shyly bopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow. We got ready to play and, since this day which had begun so sadly was destined to end in joy, as I went up, before the game started, to the friend with the sharp voice whom I had heard, that first day, calling Gilberte by name, she said to me: “No, no, I’m sure you’d much rather be in Gilberte’s camp; besides, look, she’s signalling to you.” She was in fact summoning me to cross the snowy lawn to her camp, to ‘take the field,’ which the sun, by casting over it a rosy gleam, the metallic lustre of old and worn brocades, had turned into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.

This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.

For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything save not to let a single day pass without seeing Gilberte (so much so that once, when my grandmother had not come home by dinner-time, I could not resist the instinctive reflection that, if she had been run over in the street and killed, I should not for some time be allowed to play in the Champs-Elysées; when one is in love one has no love left for anyone), yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited with so much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the world, were by no means happy moments; well did I know it, for they were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous, undistracted attention, and yet I could not discover in them one atom of pleasure. All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her, I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my love corresponded. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me. Far from it, she had often boasted that she knew other little boys whom she preferred to myself, that I was a good companion, with whom she was always willing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive enough to the game. Moreover, she had often shewn signs of apparent coldness towards me, which might have shaken my faith that I was for her a creature different from the rest, had that faith been founded upon a love that Gilberte had felt for me, and not, as was the case, upon the love that I felt for her, which strengthened its resistance to the assaults of doubt by making it depend entirely upon the manner in which I was obliged, by an internal compulsion, to think of Gilberte. But my feelings with regard to her I had never yet ventured to express to her in words. Of course, on every page of my exercise-books, I wrote out, in endless repetition, her name and address, but at the sight of those vague lines which I might trace, without her having to think, on that account, of me, I felt discouraged, because they spoke to me, not of Gilberte, who would never so much as see them, but of my own desire, which they seemed to shew me in its true colours, as something purely personal, unreal, tedious and ineffective. The most important thing was that we should see each other, Gilberte and I, and should have an opportunity of making a mutual confession of our love which, until then, would not officially (so to speak) have begun. Doubtless the various reasons which made me so impatient to see her would have appeared less urgent to a grown man. As life goes on, we acquire such adroitness in the culture of our pleasures, that we content ourselves with that which we derive from thinking of a woman, as I was thinking of Gilberte, without troubling ourselves to ascertain whether the image corresponds to the reality, — and with the pleasure of loving her, without needing to be sure, also, that she loves us; or again that we renounce the pleasure of confessing our passion for her, so as to preserve and enhance the passion that she has for us, like those Japanese gardeners who, to obtain one perfect blossom, will sacrifice the rest. But at the period when I was in love with Gilberte, I still believed that Love did really exist, apart from ourselves; that, allowing us, at the most, to surmount the obstacles in our way, it offered us its blessings in an order in which we were not free to make the least alteration; it seemed to me that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of a confession a pretence of indifference, I should not only have been depriving myself of one of the joys of which I had most often dreamed, I should have been fabricating, of my own free will, a love that was artificial and without value, that bore no relation to the truth, whose mysterious and foreordained ways I should thus have been declining to follow.

But when I arrived at the Champs-Elysées, — and, as at first sight it appeared, was in a position to confront my love, so as to make it undergo the necessary modifications, with its living and independent cause — as soon as I was in the presence of that Gilberte Swann on the sight of whom I had counted to revive the images that my tired memory had lost and could not find again, of that Gilberte Swann with whom I had been playing the day before, and whom I had just been prompted to greet, and then to recognise, by a blind instinct like that which, when we are walking, sets one foot before the other, without giving us time to think what we are doing, then at once it became as though she and the little girl who had inspired my dreams had been two different people. If, for instance, I had retained in my memory overnight two fiery eyes above plump and rosy cheeks, Gilberte’s face would now offer me (and with emphasis) something that I distinctly had not remembered, a certain sharpening and prolongation of the nose which, instantaneously associating itself with certain others of her features, assumed the importance of those characteristics which, in natural history, are used to define a species, and transformed her into a little girl of the kind that have sharpened profiles. While I was making myself ready to take advantage of this long expected moment, and to surrender myself to the impression of Gilberte which I had prepared beforehand but could no longer find in my head, to an extent which would enable me, during the long hours which I must spend alone, to be certain that it was indeed herself whom I had in mind, that it was indeed my love for her that I was gradually making grow, as a book grows when one is writing it, she threw me a ball; and, like the idealist philosopher whose body takes account of the external world in the reality of which his intellect declines to believe, the same self which had made me salute her before I had identified her now urged me to catch the ball that she tossed to me (as though she had been a companion, with whom I had come to play, and not a sister-soul with whom my soul had come to be limited), made me, out of politeness, until the time came when she had to I go, address a thousand polite and trivial remarks to her, and so prevented me both from keeping a silence in which I might at last have laid my hand upon the indispensable, escaped idea, and from uttering the words which might have made that definite progress in the course of our love on which I was always obliged to count only for the following afternoon. There was, however, an occasional development. One day, we had gone with Gilberte to the stall of our own special vendor, who was always particularly nice to us, since it was to her that M. Swann used to send for his gingerbread, of which, for reasons of health (he suffered from a racial eczema, and from the constipation of the prophets), he consumed a great quantity, — Gilberte pointed out to me with a laugh two little boys who were like the little artist and the little naturalist in the children’s storybooks. For one of them would not have a red stick of rock because he preferred the purple, while the other, with tears in his eyes, refused a plum which his nurse was buying for him, because, as he finally explained in passionate tones: “I want the other plum; it’s got a worm in it!” I purchased two ha’penny marbles. With admiring eyes I saw, luminous and imprisoned in a bowl by themselves, the agate marbles which seemed precious to me because they were as fair and smiling as little girls, and because they cost five-pence each. Gilberte, who was given a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked me which I thought the prettiest. They were as transparent, as liquid-seeming as life itself. I would not have had her sacrifice a single one of them. I should have liked her to be able to buy them, to liberate them all. Still, I pointed out one that had the same colour as her eyes. Gilberte took it, turned it about until it shone with a ray of gold, fondled it, paid its ransom, but at once handed me her captive, saying: “Take it; it is for you, I give it to you, keep it to remind yourself of me.”

Another time, being still obsessed by the desire to hear Berma in classic drama, I had asked her whether she had not a copy of a pamphlet in which Bergotte spoke of Racine, and which was now out of print. She had told me to let her know the exact title of it, and that evening I had sent her a little telegram, writing on its envelope the name, Gilberte Swann, which I had so often, traced in my exercise-books. Next day she brought me in a parcel tied with pink bows and sealed with white wax, the pamphlet, a copy of which she had managed to find. “You see, it is what you asked me for,” she said, taking from her muff the telegram that I had sent her. But in the address on the pneumatic message — which, only yesterday, was nothing, was merely a ‘little blue’ that I had written, and, after a messenger had delivered it to Gilberte’s porter and a servant had taken it to her in her room, had become a thing without value or distinction, one of the ‘little blues’ that she had received in the course of the day — I had difficulty in recognising the futile, straggling lines of my own handwriting beneath the circles stamped on it at the post-office, the inscriptions added in pencil by a postman, signs of effectual realisation, seals of the external world, violet bands symbolical of life itself, which for the first time came to espouse, to maintain, to raise, to rejoice my dream.

And there was another day on which she said to me: “You know, you may call me ‘Gilberte’; in any case, I’m going to call you by your first name. It’s too silly not to.” Yet she continued for a while to address me by the more formal ‘vous ,’ and, when I drew her attention to this, smiled, and composing, constructing a phrase like those that are put into the grammar-books of foreign languages with no other object than to teach us to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name. And when I recalled, later, what I had felt at the time, I could distinguish the impression of having been held, for a moment, in her mouth, myself, naked, without, any longer, any of the social qualifications which belonged equally to her other companions and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips — by the effort that she made, a little after her father’s manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special value — had the air of stripping, of divesting me, as one peels the skin from a fruit of which one is going to put only the pulp into one’s mouth, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly, not without testifying to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt, accompanying itself with a smile.

But at that actual moment, I was not able to appreciate the worth of these new pleasures. They were given, not by the little girl whom I loved, to me who loved her, but by the other, her with whom I used to play, to my other self, who possessed neither the memory of the true Gilberte, nor the fixed heart which alone could have known the value of a happiness for which it alone had longed. Even after I had returned home I did not taste them, since, every day, the necessity which made me hope that on the morrow I should arrive at the clear, calm, happy contemplation of Gilberte, that she would at last confess her love for me, explaining to me the reasons by which she had been obliged, hitherto, to conceal it, that same necessity forced me to regard the past as of no account, to look ahead of me only, to consider the little advantages that she had given me not in themselves and as if they were self-sufficient, but like fresh rungs of the ladder on which I might set my feet, which were going to allow me to advance a step further and finally to attain the happiness which I had not yet encountered.

If, at times, she shewed me these marks of her affection, she troubled me also by seeming not to be pleased to see me, and this happened often on the very days on which I had most counted for the realisation of my hopes. I was sure that Gilberte was coming to the Champs-Elysées, and I felt an elation which seemed merely the anticipation of a great happiness when — going into the drawing-room in the morning to kiss Mamma, who was already dressed to go out, the coils of her black hair elaborately built up, and her beautiful hands, plump and white, fragrant still with soap — I had been apprised, by seeing a column of dust standing by itself in the air above the piano, and by hearing a barrel-organ playing, beneath the window, En revenant de la revue , that the winter had received, until nightfall, an unexpected, radiant visit from a day of spring. While we sat at luncheon, by opening her window, the lady opposite had sent packing, in the twinkling of an eye, from beside my chair — to sweep in a single stride over the whole width of our dining-room — a sunbeam which had lain down there for its midday rest and returned to continue it there a moment later. At school, during the one o’clock lesson, the sun made me sick with impatience and boredom as it let fall a golden stream that crept to the edge of my desk, like an invitation to the feast at which I could not myself arrive before three o’clock, until the moment when Françoise came to fetch me at the school-gate, and we made our way towards the Champs-Elysées through streets decorated with sunlight, dense with people, over which the balconies, detached by the sun and made vaporous, seemed to float in front of the houses like clouds of gold. Alas! in the Champs-Elysées I found no Gilberte; she had not yet arrived. Motionless, on the lawn nurtured by the invisible sun which, here and there, kindled to a flame the point of a blade of grass, while the pigeons that had alighted upon it had the appearance of ancient sculptures which the gardener’s pick had heaved to the surface of a hallowed soil, I stood with my eyes fixed on the horizon, expecting at every moment to see appear the form of Gilberte following that of her governess, behind the statue that seemed to be holding out the child, which it had in its arms, and which glistened in the stream of light, to receive benediction from the sun. The old lady who read the Débats was sitting on her chair, in her invariable place, and had just accosted a park-keeper, with a friendly wave of her hands towards him as she exclaimed “What a lovely day!” And when the chair-woman came up to collect her penny, with an infinity of smirks and affectations she folded the ticket away inside her glove, as though it had been a posy of flowers, for which she had sought, in gratitude to the donor, the most becoming place upon her person. When she had found it, she performed a circular movement with her neck, straightened her boa, and fastened upon the collector, as she shewed her the end of yellow paper that stuck out over her bare wrist, the bewitching smile with which a woman says to a young man, pointing to her bosom: “You see, I’m wearing your roses!”

I dragged Françoise, on the way towards Gilberte, as far as the Arc de Triomphe; we did not meet her, and I was returning towards the lawn convinced, now, that she was not coming, when, in front of the wooden horses, the little girl with the sharp voice flung herself upon me: “Quick, quick, Gilberte’s been here a quarter of an hour. She’s just going. We’ve been waiting for you, to make up a prisoner’s base.”

While I had been going up the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Gilberte had arrived by the Rue Boissy-d’Anglas, Mademoiselle having taken advantage of the fine weather to go on some errand of her own; and M. Swann was coming to fetch his daughter. And so it was my fault; I ought not to have strayed from the lawn; for one never knew for certain from what direction Gilberte would appear, whether she would be early or late, and this perpetual tension succeeded in making more impressive not only the Champs-Elysées in their entirety, and the whole span of the afternoon, like a vast expanse of space and time, on every point and at every moment of which it was possible that the form of Gilberte might appear, but also that form itself, since behind its appearance I felt that there lay concealed the reason for which it had shot its arrow into my heart at four o’clock instead of at half-past two; crowned with a smart hat, for paying calls, instead of the plain cap, for games; in front of the Ambassadeurs and not between the two puppet-shows; I divined one of those occupations in which I might not follow Gilberte, occupations that forced her to go out or to stay at home, I was in contact with the mystery of her unknown life. It was this mystery, too, which troubled me when, running at the sharp-voiced girl’s bidding, so as to begin our game without more delay, I saw Gilberte, so quick and informal with us, make a ceremonious bow to the old lady with the Débats (who acknowledged it with “What a lovely sun! You’d think there was a fire burning.”) speaking to her with a shy smile, with an air of constraint which called to my mind the other little girl that Gilberte must be when at home with her parents, or with friends of her parents, paying visits, in all the rest, that escaped me, of her existence. But of that existence no one gave me so strong an impression as did M. Swann, who came a little later to fetch his daughter. That was because he and Mme. Swann — inasmuch as their daughter lived with them, as her lessons, her games, her friendships depended upon them — contained for me, like Gilberte, perhaps even more than Gilberte, as befitted subjects that had an all-powerful control over her in whom it must have had its source, an undefined, an inaccessible quality of melancholy charm. Everything that concerned them was on my part the object of so constant a preoccupation that the days on which, as on this day, M. Swann (whom I had seen so often, long ago, without his having aroused my curiosity, when he was still on good terms with my parents) came for Gilberte to the Champs-Elysées, once the pulsations to which my heart had been excited by the appearance of his grey hat and hooded cape had subsided, the sight of him still impressed me as might that of an historic personage, upon whom one had just been studying a series of books, and the smallest details of whose life one learned with enthusiasm. His relations with the Comte de Paris, which, when I heard them discussed at Combray, seemed to me unimportant, became now in my eyes something marvellous, as if no one else had ever known the House of Orleans; they set him in vivid detachment against the vulgar background of pedestrians of different classes, who encumbered that particular path in the Champs-Elysées, in the midst of whom I admired his condescending to figure without claiming any special deference, which as it happened none of them dreamed of paying him, so profound was the incognito in which he was wrapped.

He responded politely to the salutations of Gilberte’s companions, even to mine, for all that he was no longer on good terms with my family, but without appearing to know who I was. (This reminded me that he had constantly seen me in the country; a memory which I had retained, but kept out of sight, because, since I had seen Gilberte again, Swann had become to me pre-eminently her father, and no longer the Combray Swann; as the ideas which, nowadays, I made his name connote were different from the ideas in the system of which it was formerly comprised, which I utilised not at all now when I had occasion to think of him, he had become a new, another person; still I attached him by an artificial thread, secondary and transversal, to our former guest; and as nothing had any longer any value for me save in the extent to which my love might profit by it, it was with a spasm of shame and of regret at not being able to erase them from my memory that I recaptured the years in which, in the eyes of this same Swann who was at this moment before me in the Champs-Elysées, and to whom, fortunately, Gilberte had perhaps not mentioned my name, I had so often, in the evenings, made myself ridiculous by sending to ask Mamma to come upstairs to my room to say good-night to me, while she was drinking coffee with him and my father and my grandparents at the table in the garden.) He told Gilberte that she might play one game; he could wait for a quarter of an hour; and, sitting down, just like anyone else, on an iron chair, paid for his ticket with that hand which Philippe VII had so often held in his own, while we began our game upon the lawn, scattering the pigeons, whose beautiful, iridescent bodies (shaped like hearts and, surely, the lilacs of the feathered kingdom) took refuge as in so many sanctuaries, one on the great basin of stone, on which its beak, as it disappeared below the rim, conferred the part, assigned the purpose of offering to the bird in abundance the fruit or grain at which it appeared to be pecking, another on the head of the statue, which it seemed to crown with one of those enamelled objects whose polychrome varies in certain classical works the monotony of the stone, and with an attribute which, when the goddess bears it, entitles her to a particular epithet and makes of her, as a different Christian name makes of a mortal, a fresh divinity.

On one of these sunny days which had not realised my hopes, I had not the courage to conceal my disappointment from Gilberte.

“I had ever so many things to ask you,” I said to her; “I thought that to-day was going to mean so much in our friendship. And no sooner have you come than you go away! Try to come early to-morrow, so that I can talk to you.”

Her face lighted up and she jumped for joy as she answered: “Tomorrow, you may make up your mind, my dear friend, I sha’n’t come!

“First of all I’ve a big luncheon-party; then in the afternoon I am going to a friend’s house to see King Theodosius arrive from her windows; won’t that be splendid? — and then, next day, I’m going to Michel Strogoff , and after that it will soon be Christmas, and the New Year holidays! Perhaps they’ll take me south, to the Riviera; won’t that be nice? Though I should miss the Christmas-tree here; anyhow, if I do stay in Paris, I sha’n’t be coming here, because I shall be out paying calls with Mamma. Good-bye — there’s Papa calling me.”

I returned home with Françoise through streets that were still gay with sunshine, as on the evening of a holiday when the merriment is over. I could scarcely drag my legs along.

“I’m not surprised;” said Françoise, “it’s not the right weather for the time of year; it’s much too warm. Oh dear, oh dear, to think of all the poor sick people there must be everywhere; you would think that up there, too, everything’s got out of order.”

I repeated to myself, stifling my sobs, the words in which Gilberte had given utterance to her joy at the prospect of not coming back, for a long time, to the Champs-Elysées. But already the charm with which, by the mere act of thinking, my mind was filled as soon as it thought of her, the privileged position, unique even if it were painful, in which I was inevitably placed in relation to Gilberte by the contraction of a scar in my mind, had begun to add to that very mark of her indifference something romantic, and in the midst of my tears my lips would shape themselves in a smile which was indeed the timid outline of a kiss. And when the time came for the postman I said to myself, that evening as on every other: “I am going to have a letter from Gilberte, she is going to tell me, at last, that she has never ceased to love me, and to explain to me the mysterious reason by which she has been forced to conceal her love from me until now, to put on the appearance of being able to be happy without seeing me; the reason for which she has assumed the form of the other Gilberte, who is simply a companion.”

Every evening I would beguile myself into imagining this letter, believing that I was actually reading it, reciting each of its sentences in turn. Suddenly I would stop, in alarm. I had realised that, if I was to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could not, in any case, be this letter, since it was I myself who had just composed it. And from that moment I would strive to keep my thoughts clear of the words which I should have liked her to write to me, from fear lest, by first selecting them myself, I should be excluding just those identical words, — the dearest, the most desired — from the field of possible events. Even if, by an almost impossible coincidence, it had been precisely the letter of my invention that Gilberte had addressed to me of her own accord, recognising my own work in it I should not have had the impression that I was receiving something that had not originated in myself, something real, something new, a happiness external to my mind, independent of my will, a gift indeed from love.

While I waited I read over again a page which, although it had not been written to me by Gilberte, came to me, none the less, from her, that page by Bergotte upon the beauty of the old myths from which Racine drew his inspiration, which (with the agate marble) I always kept within reach. I was touched by my friend’s kindness in having procured the book for me; and as everyone is obliged to find some reason for his passion, so much so that he is glad to find in the creature whom he loves qualities which (he has learned by reading or in conversation) are worthy to excite a man’s love, that he assimilates them by imitation and makes out of them fresh reasons for his love, even although these qualities be diametrically opposed to those for which his love would have sought, so long as it was spontaneous — as Swann, before my day, had sought to establish the aesthetic basis of Odette’s beauty — I, who had at first loved Gilberte, in Combray days, on account of all the unknown element in her life into which I would fain have plunged headlong, have undergone reincarnation, discarding my own separate existence as a thing that no longer mattered, I thought now, as of an inestimable advantage, that of this, my own, my too familiar, my contemptible existence Gilberte might one day become the humble servant, the kindly, the comforting collaborator, who in the evenings, helping me in my work, would collate for me the texts of rare pamphlets. As for Bergotte, that infinitely wise, almost divine old man, because of whom I had first, before I had even seen her, loved Gilberte, now it was for Gilberte’s sake, chiefly, that I loved him. With as much pleasure as the pages that he had written about Racine, I studied the wrapper, folded under great seals of white wax and tied with billows of pink ribbon, in which she had brought those pages to me. I kissed the agate marble, which was the better part of my love’s heart, the part that was not frivolous but faithful, and, for all that it was adorned with the mysterious charm of Gilberte’s life, dwelt close beside me, inhabited my chamber, shared my bed. But the beauty of that stone, and the beauty also of those pages of Bergotte which I was glad to associate with the idea of my love for Gilberte, as if, in the moments when my love seemed no longer to have any existence, they gave it a kind of consistency, were, I perceived, anterior to that love, which they in no way resembled; their elements had been determined by the writer’s talent, or by geological laws, before ever Gilberte had known me, nothing in book or stone would have been different if Gilberte had not loved me, and there was nothing, consequently, that authorised me to read in them a message of happiness. And while my love, incessantly waiting for the morrow to bring a confession of Gilberte’s love for me, destroyed, unravelled every evening, the ill-done work of the day, in some shadowed part of my being was an unknown weaver who would not leave where they lay the severed threads, but collected and rearranged them, without any thought of pleasing me, or of toiling for my advantage, in the different order which she gave to all her handiwork. Without any special interest in my love, not beginning by deciding that I was loved, she placed, side by side, those of Gilberte’s actions that had seemed to me inexplicable and her faults which I had excused. Then, one with another, they took on a meaning. It seemed to tell me, this new arrangement, that when I saw Gilberte, instead of coming to me in the Champs-Elysées, going to a party, or on errands with her governess, when I saw her prepared for an absence that would extend over the New Year holidays, I was wrong in thinking, in saying: “It is because she is frivolous,” or “easily lead.” For she would have ceased to be either if she had loved me, and if she had been forced to obey it would have been with the same despair in her heart that I felt on the days when I did not see her. It shewed me further, this new arrangement, that I ought, after all, to know what it was to love, since I loved Gilberte; it drew my attention to the constant anxiety that I had to ‘shew off’ before her, by reason of which I tried to persuade my mother to get for Françoise a waterproof coat and a hat with a blue feather, or, better still, to stop sending with me to the Champs-Elysées an attendant with whom I blushed to be seen (to all of which my mother replied that I was not fair to Françoise, that she was an excellent woman and devoted to us all) and also that sole, exclusive need to see Gilberte, the result of which was that, months in advance, I could think of nothing but how to find out at what date she would be leaving Paris and where she was going, feeling that the most attractive country in the world would be but a place of exile if she were not to be there, and asking only to be allowed to stay for ever in Paris, so long as I might see her in the Champs-Elysées; and it had little difficulty in making me see that neither my anxiety nor my need could be justified by anything in Gilberte’s conduct. She, on the contrary, was genuinely fond of her governess, without troubling herself over what I might choose to think about it. It seemed quite natural to her not to come to the Champs-Elysées if she had to go shopping with Mademoiselle, delightful if she had to go out somewhere with her mother. And even supposing that she would ever have allowed me to spend my holidays in the same place as herself, when it came to choosing that place she considered her parents’ wishes, a thousand different amusements of which she had been told, and not at all that it should be the place to which my family were proposing to send me. When she assured me (as sometimes happened) that she liked me less than some other of her friends, less than she had liked me the day before, because by my clumsiness I had made her side lose a game, I would beg her pardon, I would beg her to tell me what I must do in order that she should begin again to like me as much as, or more than the rest; I hoped to hear her say that that was already my position; I besought her; as though she had been able to modify her affection for me as she or I chose, to give me pleasure, merely by the words that she would utter, as my good or bad conduct should deserve. Was I, then, not yet aware that what I felt, myself, for her, depended neither upon her actions nor upon my desires?

It shewed me finally, the new arrangement planned by my unseen weaver, that, if we find ourselves hoping that the actions of a person who has hitherto caused us anxiety may prove not to have been sincere, they shed in their wake a light which our hopes are powerless to extinguish, a light to which, rather than to our hopes, we must put the question, what will be that person’s actions on the morrow.

These new counsels, my love listened and heard them; they persuaded it that the morrow would not be different from all the days that had gone before; that Gilberte’s feeling for me, too long established now to be capable of alteration, was indifference; that hi my friendship with Gilberte, it was I alone who loved. “That is true,” my love responded, “there is nothing more to be made of that friendship. It will not alter now.” And so the very next day (unless I were to wait for a public holiday, if there was one approaching, some anniversary, the New Year, perhaps, one of those days which are not like other days, on which time starts afresh, casting aside the heritage of the past, declining its legacy of sorrows) I would appeal to Gilberte to terminate our old and to join me in laying the foundations of a new friendship.

* * *

I had always, within reach, a plan of Paris, which, because I could see drawn on it the street in which M. and Mme. Swann lived, seemed to me to contain a secret treasure. And to please myself, as well as by a sort of chivalrous loyalty, in any connection or with no relevance at all, I would repeat the name of that street until my father, not being, like my mother and grandmother, in the secret of my love, would ask: “But why are you always talking about that street? There’s nothing wonderful about it. It is an admirable street to live in because it’s only a few minutes’ walk from the Bois, but there are a dozen other streets just the same.”

I made every effort to introduce the name of Swann into my conversation with my parents; in my own mind, of course, I never ceased to murmur it; but I needed also to hear its exquisite sound, and to make myself play that chord, the voiceless rendering of which did not suffice me. Moreover, that name of Swann, with which I had for so long been familiar, was to me now (as happens at times to people suffering from aphasia, in the case of the most ordinary words) the name of something new. It was for ever present in my mind, which could not, however, grow accustomed to it. I analysed it, I spelt it; its orthography came to me as a surprise. And with its familiarity it had simultaneously lost its innocence. The pleasure that I derived from the sound of it I felt to be so guilty, that it seemed to me as though the others must read my thoughts, and would change the conversation if I endeavoured to guide it in that direction. I fell back upon subjects which still brought me into touch with Gilberte, I eternally repeated the same words, and it was no use my knowing that they were but words — words uttered in her absence, which she could not hear, words without virtue in themselves, repeating what were, indeed, facts, but powerless to modify them — for still it seemed to me that by dint of handling, of stirring in this way everything that had reference to Gilberte, I might perhaps make emerge from it something that would bring me happiness. I told my parents again that Gilberte was very fond of her governess, as if the statement, when repeated for the hundredth time, would at last have the effect of making Gilberte suddenly burst into the room, come to live with us for ever. I had already sung the praises of the old lady who read the Débats (I had hinted to my parents that she must at least be an Ambassador’s widow, if not actually a Highness) and I continued to descant on her beauty, her splendour, her nobility, until the day on which I mentioned that, by what I had heard Gilberte call her, she appeared to be a Mme. Blatin.

“Oh, now I know whom you mean,” cried my mother, while I felt myself grow red all over with shame. “On guard! on guard! — as your grandfather says. And so it’s she that you think so wonderful? Why, she’s perfectly horrible, and always has been. She’s the widow of a bailiff. You can’t remember, when you were little, all the trouble I used to have to avoid her at your gymnastic lessons, where she was always trying to get hold of me — I didn’t know the woman, of course — to tell me that you were ‘much too nice-looking for a boy.’ She has always had an insane desire to get to know people, and she must be quite insane, as I have always thought, if she really does know Mme. Swann. For even if she does come of very common people, I have never heard anything said against her character. But she must always be forcing herself upon strangers. She is, really, a horrible woman, frightfully vulgar, and besides, she is always creating awkward situations.”

As for Swann, in my attempts to resemble him, I spent the whole time, when I was at table, in drawing my finger along my nose and in rubbing my eyes. My father would exclaim: “The child’s a perfect idiot, he’s becoming quite impossible.” More than all else I should have liked to be as bald as Swann. He appeared to me to be a creature so extraordinary that I found it impossible to believe that people whom I knew and often saw knew him also, and that in the course of the day anyone might run against him. And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she had done that afternoon, merely by the words: “By the way, guess whom I saw at the Trois Quartiers — at the umbrella counter — Swann!” caused to burst open in the midst of her narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom. What a melancholy satisfaction to learn that, that very afternoon, threading through the crowd his supernatural form, Swann had gone to buy an umbrella. Among the events of the day, great and small, but all equally unimportant, that one alone aroused in me those peculiar vibrations by which my love for Gilberte was invariably stirred. My father complained that I took no interest in anything, because I did not listen while he was speaking of the political developments that might follow the visit of King Theo-dosius, at that moment in France as the nation’s guest and (it was hinted) ally. And yet how intensely interested I was to know whether Swann had been wearing his hooded cape!

“Did you speak to him?” I asked.

“Why, of course I did,” answered my mother, who always seemed afraid lest, were she to admit that we were not on the warmest of terms with Swann, people would seek to reconcile us more than she cared for, in view of the existence of Mme. Swann, whom she did not wish to know. “It was he who came up and spoke to me. I hadn’t seen him.”

“Then you haven’t quarrelled?”

“Quarrelled? What on earth made you think that we had quarrelled?” she briskly parried, as though I had cast doubt on the fiction of her friendly relations with Swann, and was planning an attempt to ‘bring them together.’

“He might be cross with you for never asking him here.”

“One isn’t obliged to ask everyone to one’s house, you know; has he ever asked me to his? I don’t know his wife.”

“But he used often to come, at Combray.”

“I should think he did! He used to come at Combray, and now, in Paris, he has something better to do, and so have I. But I can promise you, we didn’t look in the least like people who had quarrelled. We were kept waiting there for some time, while they brought him his parcel. He asked after you; he told me you had been playing with his daughter — ” my mother went on, amazing me with the portentous revelation of my own existence in Swann’s mind; far more than that, of my existence in so complete, so material a form that when I stood before him, trembling with love, in the Champs-Elysées, he had known my name, and who my mother was, and had been able to blend with my quality as his daughter’s playmate certain facts with regard to my grandparents and their connections, the place in which we lived, certain details of our past life, all of which I myself perhaps did not know. But my mother did not seem to have noticed anything particularly attractive in that counter at the Trois Quartiers where she had represented to Swann, at the moment in which he caught sight of her, a definite person with whom he had sufficient memories in common to impel him to come up to her and to speak.

Nor did either she or my father seem to find any occasion now to mention Swann’s family, the grandparents of Gilberte, nor to use the title of stockbroker, topics than which nothing else gave me so keen a pleasure. My imagination had isolated and consecrated in the social Paris a certain family, just as it had set apart in the structural Paris a certain house, on whose porch it had fashioned sculptures and made its windows precious. But these ornaments I alone had eyes to see. Just as my father and mother looked upon the house in which Swann lived as one that closely resembled the other houses built at the same period in the neighbourhood of the Bois, so Swann’s family seemed to them to be in the same category as many other families of stockbrokers. Their judgment was more or less favourable according to the extent to which the family in question shared in merits that were common to the rest of the universe, and there was about it nothing that they could call unique. What, on the other hand, they did appreciate in the Swanns they found in equal, if not in greater measure elsewhere. And so, after admitting that the house was in a good position, they would go on to speak of some other house that was in a better, but had nothing to do with Gilberte, or of financiers on a larger scale than her grandfather had been; and if they had appeared, for a moment, to be of my opinion, that was a mistake which was very soon corrected. For in order to distinguish in all Gilberte’s surroundings an indefinable quality analogous, in the scale of emotions, to what in the scale of colours is called infra-red, a supplementary sense of perception was required, with which love, for the time being, had endowed me; and this my parents lacked.

On the days when Gilberte had warned me that she would not be coming to the Champs-Elysées, I would try to arrange my walks so that I should be brought into some kind of contact with her. Sometimes I would lead Françoise on a pilgrimage to the house in which the Swanns lived, making her repeat to me unendingly all that she had learned from the governess with regard to Mme. Swann. “It seems, she puts great faith in medals. She would never think of starting on a journey if she had heard an owl hoot, or the death-watch in the wall, or if she had seen a cat at midnight, or if the furniture had creaked. Oh yes! she’s a most religious lady, she is!” I was so madly in love with Gilberte that if, on our way, I caught sight of their old butler taking the dog out, my emotion would bring me to a standstill, I would fasten on his white whiskers eyes that melted with passion. And Françoise would rouse me with: “What’s wrong with you now, child?” and we would continue on our way until we reached their gate, where a porter, different from every other porter in the world, and saturated, even to the braid on his livery, with the same melancholy charm that I had felt to be latent in the name of Gilberte, looked at me as though he knew that I was one of those whose natural unworthiness would for ever prevent them from penetrating into the mysteries of the life inside, which it was his duty to guard, and over which the ground-floor windows appeared conscious of being protectingly closed, with far less resemblance, between the nobly sweeping arches of their muslin curtains, to any other windows in the world than to Gilberte’s glancing eyes. On other days we would go along the boulevards, and I would post myself at the corner of the Rue Duphot; I had heard that Swann was often to be seen passing there, on his way to the dentist’s; and my imagination so far differentiated Gilberte’s father from the rest of humanity, his presence in the midst of a crowd of real people introduced among them so miraculous an element, that even before we reached the Madeleine I would be trembling with emotion at the thought that I was approaching a street from which that supernatural apparition might at any moment burst upon me unawares.

But most often of all, on days when I was not to see Gilberte, as I had heard that Mme. Swann walked almost every day along the Allée des Acacias, round the big lake, and in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, I would guide Françoise in thé direction of the Bois de Boulogne. It was to me like one of those zoological gardens in which one sees assembled together a variety of flora, and contrasted effects in landscape; where from a hill one passes to a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a trench, another hill, a marsh, but knows that they are there only to enable the hippopotamus, zebra, crocodile, rabbit, bear and heron to disport themselves in a natural or a picturesque setting; this, the Bois, equally complex, uniting a multitude of little worlds, distinct and separate — placing a stage set with red trees, American oaks, like an experimental forest in Virginia, next to a fir-wood by the edge of the lake, or to a forest grove from which would suddenly emerge, in her lissom covering of furs, with the large, appealing eyes of a dumb animal, a hastening walker — was the Garden of Woman; and like the myrtle-alley in the Aeneid, planted for their delight with trees of one kind only, the Allée des Acacias was thronged by the famous Beauties of the day. As, from a long way off, the sight of the jutting crag from which it dives into the pool thrills with joy the children who know that they are going to behold the seal, long before I reached the acacia-alley, their fragrance, scattered abroad, would make me feel that I was approaching the incomparable presence of a vegetable personality, strong and tender; then, as I drew near, the sight of their topmost branches, their lightly tossing foliage, in its easy grace, its coquettish outline, its delicate fabric, over which hundreds of flowers were laid, like winged and throbbing colonies of precious insects; and finally their name itself, feminine, indolent and seductive, made my heart beat, but with a social longing, like those waltzes which remind us only of the names of the fair dancers, called aloud as they entered the ball-room. I had been told that I should see in the alley certain women of fashion, who, in spite of their not all having husbands, were constantly mentioned in conjunction with Mme. Swann, but most often by their professional names; — their new names, when they had any, being but a sort of incognito, a veil which those who would speak of them were careful to draw aside, so as to make themselves understood. Thinking that Beauty — in the order of feminine elegance — was governed by occult laws into the knowledge of which they had been initiated, and that they had the power to realise it, I accepted before seeing them, like the truth of a coming revelation, the appearance of their clothes, of their carriages and horses, of a thousand details among which I placed my faith as in an inner soul which gave the cohesion of a work of art to that ephemeral and changing pageant. But it was Mme. Swann whom I wished to see, and I waited for her to go past, as deeply moved as though she were Gilberte, whose parents, saturated, like everything in her environment, with her own special charm, excited in me as keen a passion as she did herself, indeed a still more painful disturbance (since their point of contact with her was that intimate, that internal part of her life which was hidden from me), and furthermore, for I very soon learned, as we shall see in due course, that they did not like my playing with her, that feeling of veneration which we always have for those who hold, and exercise without restraint, the power to do us an injury.

I assigned the first place, in the order of aesthetic merit and of social grandeur, to simplicity, when I saw Mme. Swann on foot, in a ‘polonaise’ of plain cloth, a little toque on her head trimmed with a pheasant’s wing, a bunch of violets in her bosom, hastening along the Allée des Acacias as if it had been merely the shortest way back to her own house, and acknowledging with a rapid glance the courtesy of the gentlemen in carriages, who, recognising her figure at a distance, were raising their hats to her and saying to one another that there was never anyone so well turned out as she. But instead of simplicity it was to ostentation that I must assign the first place if, after I had compelled Françoise, who could hold out no longer, and complained that her legs were ‘giving’ beneath her, to stroll up and down with me for another hour, I saw at length, emerging from the Porte Dauphine, figuring for me a royal dignity, the passage of a sovereign, an impression such as no real Queen has ever since been able to give me, because my notion of their power has been less vague, and more founded upon experience — borne along by the flight of a pair of fiery horses, slender and shapely as one sees them in the drawings of Constantin Guys, carrying on its box an enormous coachman, furred like a cossack, and by his side a diminutive groom, like Toby, “the late Beaudenord’s tiger,” I saw — or rather I felt its outlines engraved upon my heart by a clean and killing stab — a matchless victoria, built rather high, and hinting, through the extreme modernity of its appointments, at the forms of an earlier day, deep down in which lay negligently back Mme. Swann, her hair, now quite pale with one grey lock, girt with a narrow band of flowers, usually violets, from which floated down long veils, a lilac parasol in her hand, on her lips an ambiguous smile in which I read only the benign condescension of Majesty, though it was pre-eminently the enticing smile of the courtesan, which she graciously bestowed upon the men who bowed to her. That smile was, in reality, saying to one: “Oh yes, I do remember, quite well; it was wonderful!” to another: “How I should have loved to! We were unfortunate!”, to a third: “Yes, if you like! I must just keep in the line for a minute, then as soon as I can I will break away.” When strangers passed she still allowed to linger about her lips a lazy smile, as though she expected or remembered some friend, which made them say: “What a lovely woman!”. And for certain men only she had a sour, strained, shy, cold smile which meant: “Yes, you old goat, I know that you’ve got a tongue like a viper, that you can’t keep quiet for a moment. But do you suppose that I care what you say?” Coquelin passed, talking, in a group of listening friends, and with a sweeping wave of his hand bade a theatrical good day to the people in the carriages. But I thought only of Mme. Swann, and pretended to have not yet seen her, for I knew that, when she reached the pigeon-shooting ground, she would tell her coachman to ‘break away’ and to stop the carriage, so that she might come back on foot. And on days when I felt that I had the courage to pass close by her I would drag Françoise off in that direction; until the moment came when I saw Mme. Swann, letting trail behind her the long train of her lilac skirt, dressed, as the populace imagine queens to be dressed, in rich attire such as no other woman might wear, lowering her eyes now and then to study the handle of her parasol, paying scant attention to the passers-by, as though the important thing for her, her one object in being there, was to take exercise, without thinking that she was seen, and that every head was turned towards her. Sometimes, however, when she had looked back to call her dog to her, she would cast, almost imperceptibly, a sweeping glance round about.

Those even who did not know her were warned by something exceptional, something beyond the normal in her — or perhaps by a telepathic suggestion such as would move an ignorant audience to a frenzy of applause when Berma was ‘sublime’ — that she must be some one well-known. They would ask one another, “Who is she?”, or sometimes would interrogate a passing stranger, or would make a mental note of how she was dressed so as to fix her identity, later, in the mind of a friend better informed than themselves, who would at once enlighten them. Another pair, half-stopping in their walk, would exchange:

“You know who that is? Mme. Swann! That conveys nothing to you? Odette de Crécy, then?”

“Odette de Crécy! Why, I thought as much. Those great, sad eyes... But I say, you know, she can’t be as young as she was once, eh? I remember, I had her on the day that MacMahon went.”

“I shouldn’t remind her of it, if I were you. She is now Mme. Swann, the wife of a gentleman in the Jockey Club, a friend of the Prince of Wales. Apart from that, though, she is wonderful still.”

“Oh, but you ought to have known her then; Gad, she was lovely! She lived in a very odd little house with a lot of Chinese stuff. I remember, we were bothered all the time by the newsboys, shouting outside; in the end she made me get up and go.”

Without listening to these memories, I could feel all about her the indistinct murmur of fame. My heart leaped with impatience when I thought that a few seconds must still elapse before all these people, among whom I was dismayed not to find a certain mulatto banker who (or so I felt) had a contempt for me, were to see the unknown youth, to whom they had not, so far, been paying the slightest attention, salute (without knowing her, it was true, but I thought that I had sufficient authority since my parents knew her husband and I was her daughter’s playmate) this woman whose reputation for beauty, for misconduct, and for elegance was universal. But I was now close to Mme. Swann; I pulled off my hat with so lavish, so prolonged a gesture that she could not repress a smile. People laughed. As for her, she had never seen me with Gilberte, she did not know my name, but I was for her — like one of the keepers in the Bois, like the boatman, or the ducks on the lake, to which she threw scraps of bread — one of the minor personages, familiar, nameless, as devoid of individual character as a stage-hand in a theatre, of her daily walks abroad.

On certain days when I had missed her in the Allée des Acacias I would be so fortunate as to meet her in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, where women went who wished to be alone, or to appear to be wishing to be alone; she would not be alone for long, being soon overtaken by some man or other, often in a grey ‘tile’ hat, whom I did not know, and who would talk to her for some time, while their two carriages crawled behind.

* * *

That sense of the complexity of the Bois de Boulogne which made it an artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of the word, a Garden, I captured again, this year, as I crossed it on my way to Trianon, on one of those mornings, early in November, when in Paris, if we stay indoors, being so near and yet prevented from witnessing the transformation scene of autumn, which is drawing so rapidly to a close without our assistance, we feel a regret for the fallen leaves that becomes a fever, and may even keep us awake at night. Into my closed room they had been drifting already for a month, summoned there by my desire to see them, slipping between my thoughts and the object, whatever it might be, upon which I was trying to concentrate them, whirling in front of me like those brown spots that sometimes, whatever we may be looking at, will seem to be dancing or swimming before our eyes. And on that morning, not hearing the splash of the rain as on the previous days, seeing the smile of fine weather at the corners of my drawn curtains, as from the corners of closed lips may escape the secret of their happiness, I had felt that I could actually see those yellow leaves, with the light shining through them, in their supreme beauty; and being no more able to restrain myself from going to look at the trees than, in my childhood’s days, when the wind howled in the chimney, I had been able to resist the longing to visit the sea, I had risen and left the house to go to Trianon, passing through the Bois de Boulogne. It was the hour and the season in which the Bois seems, perhaps, most multiform, not only because it is then most divided, but because it is divided in a different way. Even in the unwooded parts, where the horizon is large, here and there against the background of a dark and distant mass of trees, now leafless or still keeping their summer foliage unchanged, a double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed, as in a picture just begun, to be the only thing painted, so far, by an artist who had not yet laid any colour on the rest, and to be offering their cloister, in full daylight, for the casual exercise of the human figures that would be added to the picture later on.

Farther off, at a place where the trees were still all green, one alone, small, stunted, lopped, but stubborn in its resistance, was tossing in the breeze an ugly mane of red. Elsewhere, again, might be seen the first awakening of this Maytime of the leaves, and those of an ampelopsis, a smiling miracle, like a red hawthorn flowering in winter, had that very morning all ‘come out,’ so to speak, in blossom. And the Bois had the temporary, unfinished, artificial look of a nursery garden or a park in which, either for some botanic purpose or in preparation for a festival, there have been embedded among the trees of commoner growth, which have not yet been uprooted and transplanted elsewhere, a few rare specimens, with fantastic foliage, which seem to be clearing all round themselves an empty space, making room, giving air, diffusing light. Thus it was the time of year at which the Bois de Boulogne displays more separate characteristics, assembles more distinct elements in a composite whole than at any other. It was also the time of day. In places where the trees still kept their leaves, they seemed to have undergone an alteration of their substance from the point at which they were touched by the sun’s light, still, at this hour in the morning, almost horizontal, as it would be again, a few hours later, at the moment when, just as dusk began, it would flame up like a lamp, project afar over the leaves a warm and artificial glow, and set ablaze the few topmost boughs of a tree that would itself remain unchanged, a sombre incombustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest. At one spot the light grew solid as a brick wall, and like a piece of yellow Persian masonry, patterned in blue, daubed coarsely upon the sky the leaves of the chestnuts; at another, it cut them off from the sky towards which they stretched out their curling, golden fingers. Half-way up the trunk of a tree draped with wild vine, the light had grafted and brought to blossom, too dazzling to be clearly distinguished, an enormous posy, of red flowers apparently, perhaps of a new variety of carnation. The diffèrent parts of the Bois, so easily confounded in summer in the density and monotony of their universal green, were now clearly divided. A patch of brightness indicated the approach to almost every one of them, or else a splendid mass of foliage stood out before it like an oriflamme. I could make out, as on a coloured map, Armenonville, the Pré Catalan, Madrid, the Race Course and the shore of the lake. Here and there would appear some meaningless erection, a sham grotto, a mill, for which the trees made room by drawing away from it, or which was borne upon the soft green platform of a grassy lawn. I could feel that the Bois was not really a wood, that it existed for a purpose alien to the life of its trees; my sense of exaltation was due not only to admiration of the autumn tints but to a bodily desire. Ample source of a joy which the heart feels at first without being conscious of its cause, without understanding that it results from no external impulse! Thus I gazed at the trees with an unsatisfied longing which went beyond them and, without my knowledge, directed itself towards that masterpiece of beautiful strolling women which the trees enframed for a few hours every day. I walked towards the Allée des Acacias. I passed through forest groves in which the morning light, breaking them into new sections, lopped and trimmed the trees, united different trunks in marriage, made nosegays of their branches. It would skilfully draw towards it a pair of trees; making deft use of the sharp chisel of light and shade, it would cut away from each of them half of its trunk and branches, and, weaving together the two halves that remained, would make of them either a single pillar of shade, defined by the surrounding light, or a single luminous phantom whose artificial, quivering contour was encompassed in a network of inky shadows. When a ray of sunshine gilded the highest branches, they seemed, soaked and still dripping with a sparkling moisture, to have emerged alone from the liquid, emerald-green atmosphere in which the whole grove was plunged as though beneath the sea. For the trees continued to live by their own vitality, and when they had no longer any leaves, that vitality gleamed more brightly still from the nap of green velvet that carpeted their trunks, or in the white enamel of the globes of mistletoe that were scattered all the way up to the topmost branches of the poplars, rounded as are the sun and moon in Michelangelo’s ‘Creation.’ But, forced for so many years now, by a sort of grafting process, to share the life of feminine humanity, they called to my mind the figure of the dryad, the fair worldling, swiftly walk-ing, brightly coloured, whom they sheltered with their branches as she passed beneath them, and obliged to acknowledge, as they themselves acknowledged, the power of the season; they recalled to me the happy days when I was young and had faith, when I would hasten eagerly to the spots where masterpieces of female elegance would be incarnate for a few moments beneath the unconscious, accommodating boughs. But the beauty for which the firs and acacias of the Bois de Boulogne made me long, more disquieting in that respect than the chestnuts and lilacs of Trianon which I was going to see, was not fixed somewhere outside myself in the relics of an historical period, in works of art, in a little temple of love at whose door was piled an oblation of autumn leaves ribbed with gold. I reached the shore of the lake; I walked on as far as the pigeon-shooting ground. The idea of perfection which I had within me I had bestowed, in that other time, upon the height of a victoria, upon the raking thinness of those horses, frenzied and light as wasps upon the wing, with bloodshot eyes like the cruel steeds of Diomed, which now, smitten by a desire to sea again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me, many years before, along the same paths, I wished to see renewed before my eyes at the moment when Mme. Swann’s enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist, and as infantile as Saint George in the picture, endeavoured to curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered along the ground. Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars driven each by a moustached mechanic, with a tall footman towering by his side. I wished to hold before my bodily eyes, that I might know whether they were indeed as charming as they appeared to the eyes of memory, little hats, so low-crowned as to seem no more than garlands about the brows of women. All the hats now were immense; covered with fruits and flowers and all manner of birds. In place of the lovely gowns in which Mme. Swann walked like a Queen, appeared Greco-Saxon tunics, with Tanagra folds, or sometimes, in the Directoire style, ‘Liberty chiffons’ sprinkled with flowers like sheets of wallpaper. On the heads of the gentlemen who might have been eligible to stroll with Mme. Swann in the Allée de la Reine Marguerite, I found not the grey ‘tile’ hats of old, nor any other kind. They walked the Bois bare-headed. And seeing all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the faith which, applied to them, would have given them consistency, unity, life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without reality, containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have endeavoured as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in a picture. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes, there survives it — more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena — an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if il was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause — the death of the gods.

“Oh, horrible!” I exclaimed to myself: “Does anyone really imagine that these motor-cars are as smart as the old carriage-and-pair? I dare say. 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. To what purpose shall I walk among these trees if there is nothing left now of the assembly that used to meet beneath the delicate tracery of reddening leaves, if vulgarity and fatuity have supplanted the exquisite thing that once their branches framed? Oh, horrible! My consolation is to think of the women whom I have known, in the past, now that there is no standard left of elegance. But how can the people who watch these dreadful creatures hobble by, beneath hats on which have been heaped the spoils of aviary or garden-bed, — how can they imagine the charm that there was in the sight of Mme. Swann, crowned with a close-fitting lilac bonnet, or with a tiny hat from which rose stiffly above her head a single iris?” Could I ever have made them understand the emotion that I used to feel on winter mornings, when I met Mme. Swann on foot, in an otter-skin coat, with a woollen cap from which stuck out two blade-like partridge-feathers, but enveloped also in the deliberate, artificial warmth of her own house, which was suggested by nothing more than the bunch of violets crushed into her bosom, whose flowering, vivid and blue against the grey sky, the freezing air, the naked boughs, had the same charming effect of using the season and the weather merely as a setting, and of living actually in a human atmosphere, in the atmosphere of this woman, as had in the vases and beaupots of her drawing-room, beside the blazing fire, in front of the silk-covered sofa, the flowers that looked out through closed windows at the falling snow? But it would not have sufficed me that the costumes alone should still have been the same as in those distant years. 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. And I should have required also that they be the same women, those whose costume interested me because, at a time when I still had faith, my imagination had individualised them and had provided each of them with a legend. Alas! in the acacia-avenue — the myrtle-alley — I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what once they had been, wandering to and fro, in desperate search of heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun’s face was hidden. Nature began again to reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman; above the gimcrack windmill the real sky was grey; the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds passed swiftly over the Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries perched, one after another, on the great oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with Dodonaic majesty, seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.