Swann's Way-- the End

Somehow I thought Swann's Way ended with Swann out of love, but it ends with the narrator contemplating the Bois de Boulogne, irretrievably changed as is Marcel. They take a huge leap forward in time.

"The reality that I had known no longer existed." Must be the shortest sentence in Proust.

Two wonderful bird images in the last pages. ". . . 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 sone, 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 of those works the monotony of the stone. . ."

In an earlier passage he remarks, "Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow."

Shyly hopping sparrows. Two great bird images.

Now onto Within A Budding Grove.

A Demain.

Odette