Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

All the time I was recollecting Saint-Loup’s visit, I had been walking and had come far out of my way; I was almost at the Pont des Invalides. The lamps, of which there were only a few (because of the Gothas),[42] had been lighted, slightly too early because the “time change”[43] had been made slightly too early, when the night still came fairly quickly, but had been fixed then for the whole of the summer (just as heating-stoves are lit or turned off from a certain date) and, above the nocturnally illuminated city, in a whole section of the sky—the sky which was unaware of summertime and wintertime, and which did not deign to know that half past eight had become half past nine—in a whole section of the bluish sky the day still lingered. Across all that part of the city dominated by the towers of the Trocadéro, the sky looked like a vast turquoise-colored sea on the ebb, disclosing a whole slender line of black rocks, which might even perhaps have been a row of simple fishing nets, but which were really small clouds. Sea for that moment colored turquoise, and carrying all mankind, unawares, away with it, swept up by the immense revolution of the earth, that earth on which they are mad enough to continue their own revolutions, and their pointless wars, like the one that was at that moment steeping France in blood. Then as I continued to gaze at the lazy and impossibly beautiful sky, which regarded it as beneath its dignity to change its time-table and above the illuminated c...