Swann's Way

it announced. Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than the
dreams with which these announcements filled my mind, dreams which took
their form from the inevitable associations of the words forming the
title of the play, and also from the colour of the bills, still damp and
wrinkled with paste, on which those words stood out. Nothing, unless
it were such strange titles as the _Testament de César Girodot, or
Oedipe-Roi_, inscribed not on the green bills of the Opéra-Comique, but
on the wine-coloured bills of the Comédie-Française, nothing seemed
to me to differ more profoundly from the sparkling white plume of
the _Diamants de la Couronne_ than the sleek, mysterious satin of the
_Domino Noir_; and since my parents had told me that, for my first visit
to the theatre, I should have to choose between these two pieces, I
would study exhaustively and in turn the title of one and the title
of the other (for those were all that I knew of either), attempting to
snatch from each a foretaste of the pleasure which it offered me, and to
compare this pleasure with that latent in the other title, until in the
end I had shewn myself such vivid, such compelling pictures of, on