Sometimes, when the weather had broken, the narrator and his family were obliged to go home. “Here and there, in the distance, in a landscape which, what with the failing light and saturated atmosphere, resembled a seascape rather, a few solitary houses clinging to the lower slopes of a hill whose heights were buried in cloudy darkness shone out like little boats which had folded their sails and would ride at anchor all night, upon the sea,” writes Marcel Proust, in Swann’s Way, 1913 translated by CK Scott Moncrieff.
“But what mattered rain or storm? In summer, bad weather is no more than a passing fit of superficial ill-temper expressed by the permanent, underlying fine weather; a very different thing from the fluid and unstable ‘fine weather’ of winter, its very opposite in fact; for has it not (firmly established in the soil, on which it has taken solid form in dense masses of foliage over which the rain may pour in torrents without weakening the resistance offered by their real and lasting happiness) hoisted, to keep them flying throughout the season, in the village streets, on the walls of the houses and in their gardens its silken banners, violet and white.”
His remembrance of things past extended even to the sound of rainwater “dripping from our chestnut-trees, but I would know that the shower would only glaze and brighten the greenness of their thick, crumpled leaves, and that they themselves had undertaken to remain there, like pledges of summer, all through the rainy night.”
