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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Swann’s Way
+       Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One
+
+Author: Marcel Proust
+
+Release Date: March 22, 2003 [eBook #7178]
+[Most recently updated: May 1, 2023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Produced by: Eric Eldred and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SWANN’S WAY ***
+
+
+
+
+SWANN'S WAY
+
+Remembrance Of Things Past, Volume One
+
+
+By Marcel Proust
+
+
+Translated From The French By C. K. Scott Moncrieff
+
+NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1922
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+OVERTURE
+
+COMBRAY
+
+SWANN IN LOVE
+
+PLACE-NAMES: THE NAME
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+OVERTURE
+
+For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out
+my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to
+say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was
+time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book
+which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I
+had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just
+been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own,
+until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book:
+a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This
+impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not
+disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them
+from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then
+it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former
+existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would
+separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form
+part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I
+would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and
+restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to
+which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark
+indeed.
+
+I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling
+of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the
+distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective
+the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying
+towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for
+ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange
+place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to
+farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his
+ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of
+being once again at home.
+
+I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my
+pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood. Or I would
+strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an
+invalid, who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a
+strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief
+a streak of daylight shewing under his bedroom door. Oh, joy of joys!
+it is morning. The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring,
+and some one will come to look after him. The thought of being made
+comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain. He is certain he
+heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light
+beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; some one has turned
+out the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night
+in agony with no one to bring him any help.
+
+I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches
+only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or
+to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness,
+to savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay
+heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I
+formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very
+soon return to share. Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had returned
+without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life, now for ever
+outgrown; and had come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors,
+such as that old terror of my great-uncle's pulling my curls, which was
+effectually dispelled on the day--the dawn of a new era to me--on which
+they were finally cropped from my head. I had forgotten that event
+during my sleep; I remembered it again immediately I had succeeded in
+making myself wake up to escape my great-uncle's fingers; still, as a
+measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in the pillow
+before returning to the world of dreams.
+
+Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman
+would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some
+strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was
+on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that
+gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating
+hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest
+of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose
+company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her
+kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes
+happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking
+hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like
+people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city
+that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste
+in reality what has charmed their fancy. And then, gradually, the memory
+of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my
+dream.
+
+When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the
+hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.
+Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant
+reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time
+that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt
+to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning,
+after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading,
+in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to
+sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back
+in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the
+time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he
+gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair,
+say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit,
+the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space,
+and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep
+months earlier and in some far distant country. But for me it was enough
+if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my
+consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had
+gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was,
+I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary
+sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an
+animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the
+cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I
+was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very
+possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up
+out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped
+by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of
+civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps,
+followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by
+degrees the component parts of my ego.
+
+Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon
+them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else,
+and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened
+that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful
+attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me
+through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy
+with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its
+tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce
+from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together
+and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory,
+the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it
+a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept;
+while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape
+of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the
+darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when
+things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected
+sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body,
+would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where
+the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a
+passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had
+found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would,
+for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying,
+face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to
+myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came
+to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who
+died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally
+preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have
+forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the
+night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung
+by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my
+bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days
+which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly
+penned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly
+awake.
+
+Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid away in
+another direction; I was in my room in Mme. de Saint-Loup's house in the
+country; good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will have finished
+dinner! I must have overslept myself, in the little nap which I always
+take when I come in from my walk with Mme. de Saint-Loup, before
+dressing for the evening. For many years have now elapsed since the
+Combray days, when, coming in from the longest and latest walks, I would
+still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the
+panes of my bedroom window. It is a very different kind of existence
+at Tansonville now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of
+pleasure that I now derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from
+visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in
+the sunshine; while the bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep
+instead of dressing for dinner, from afar off I can see it, as we return
+from our walk, with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary
+beacon in the night.
+
+These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than
+a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to
+where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that
+uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running,
+we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon
+a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in
+which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them
+all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on
+going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the
+most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets,
+a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper,
+all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of
+birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in
+a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the
+outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark
+tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire
+keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great
+cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which
+would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a
+cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat
+whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature
+as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from
+the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the
+fireplace which had therefore remained cold--or rooms in summer, where
+I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the
+moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the
+foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it
+might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised
+in the focus of a sunbeam--or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful
+that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it:
+that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling
+would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and
+to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high
+ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys,
+and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind
+was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of
+the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of
+a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not
+there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which
+stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not
+looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of
+vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end
+to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the
+exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous
+funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched
+out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils
+sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the
+colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression
+of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even
+completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly
+reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but
+unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end
+with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is
+fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never
+contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
+
+Certainly I was now well awake; my body had turned about for the last
+time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding
+objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom,
+and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain
+light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my fireplace, the window
+overlooking the street, and both the doors. But it was no good my
+knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid
+moment of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still
+believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; as
+a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend
+the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at
+Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the
+rest; remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what
+I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.
+
+At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should
+have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my
+mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my
+melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy
+idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally
+wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while
+we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders
+and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness
+of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many
+colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory
+window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of
+lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary
+impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself,
+but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite
+endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as
+though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place
+where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.
+
+Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design,
+issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the
+slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the
+castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by
+a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the
+transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through
+a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front
+of it stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation,
+wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could
+tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides
+made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given
+me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to
+the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly
+to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid
+of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the
+text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest
+his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish
+Golo's horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with
+their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself,
+being of the same supernatural substance as his steed's, overcame all
+material obstacles--everything that seemed to bar his way--by taking
+each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the
+door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would
+float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its
+nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such a
+transubstantiation.
+
+And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which
+seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed
+around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express
+the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into
+a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until
+I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect
+of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very
+melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to
+me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to
+open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious
+had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body
+for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the
+dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard
+but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the
+same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of
+my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the
+dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than
+ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.
+
+But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed
+talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little
+parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my
+grandmother, who held that "It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the
+country," and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the
+very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room with a book
+instead of letting me stay out of doors. "That is not the way to make
+him strong and active," she would say sadly, "especially this little
+man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get." My
+father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an
+interest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not
+to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard,
+not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind. But my
+grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in
+torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker
+armchairs, so that they should not get soaked--you would see my
+grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing
+back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to
+imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, "At
+last one can breathe!" and would run up and down the soaking paths--too
+straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any
+feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking
+all morning if the weather were going to improve--with her keen, jerky
+little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by
+the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of
+my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for
+that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the
+spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which
+always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh
+despair.
+
+When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner there was
+one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: that was if
+(at one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her,
+moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs
+were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to her:
+"Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" For,
+simply to tease her (she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my
+father's family that everyone made a joke of it), my great-aunt used to
+make my grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops.
+My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to
+taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops
+all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still
+smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards
+others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own
+troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those
+seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save
+for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes,
+which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow
+upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by my
+great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of her in
+her weakness conquered before she began, but still making the futile
+endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass--all these
+were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well
+accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a.
+happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not,
+really, tormenting; but in those days they filled me with such horror
+that I longed to strike my great-aunt. And yet, as soon as I heard her
+"Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" in my
+cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when
+face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them;
+I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room
+beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root,
+and was scented also by a wild currant-bush which had climbed up between
+the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through
+the half-opened window. Intended for a more special and a baser use,
+this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of
+Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless
+because it was the only room whose door Ï was allowed to lock, whenever
+my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude; reading or
+dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire. Alas! I little knew
+that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent
+uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmother's
+mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband, during those
+endless perambulations, afternoon and evening, in which we used to see
+passing up and down, obliquely raised towards the heavens, her handsome
+face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with age had acquired
+almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn, covered, if she were
+walking abroad, by a half-lifted veil, while upon them either the
+cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying traces of an
+involuntary tear.
+
+My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma
+would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted
+for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in
+which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her
+garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited
+straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment
+of the keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached
+the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as
+to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have
+appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I
+longed to call her back, to say to her "Kiss me just once again," but
+I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession
+which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with
+this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies
+absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the
+need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different
+thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional
+kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look
+displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a
+moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held
+it out to me like a Host, for an act of Communion in which my lips might
+drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to
+sleep. But those evenings on which Mamma stayed so short a time in
+my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests
+to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all. Our 'guests'
+were practically limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few passing
+strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at
+Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner (but less frequently since
+his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive his wife)
+and sometimes after dinner, uninvited. On those evenings when, as we sat
+in front of the house beneath the big chestnut-tree and round the iron
+table, we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the large and
+noisy rattle which heralded and deafened as he approached with its
+ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who
+had put it out of action by coming in 'without ringing,' but the double
+peal--timid, oval, gilded--of the visitors' bell, everyone would at once
+exclaim "A visitor! Who in the world can it be?" but they knew quite
+well that it could only be M. Swann. My great-aunt, speaking in a loud
+voice, to set an example, in a tone which she endeavoured to make sound
+natural, would tell the others not to whisper so; that nothing could be
+more unpleasant for a stranger coming in, who would be led to think that
+people were saying things about him which he was not meant to hear; and
+then my grandmother would be sent out as a scout, always happy to find
+an excuse for an additional turn in the garden, which she would utilise
+to remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or
+two, so as to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother
+might run her hand through her boy's hair, after the barber had smoothed
+it down, to make it stick out properly round his head.
+
+And there we would all stay, hanging on the words which would fall from
+my grandmother's lips when she brought us back her report of the
+enemy, as though there had been some uncertainty among a vast number of
+possible invaders, and then, soon after, my grandfather would say: "I
+can hear Swann's voice." And, indeed, one could tell him only by his
+voice, for it was difficult to make out his face with its arched nose
+and green eyes, under a high forehead fringed with fair, almost red
+hair, dressed in the Bressant style, because in the garden we used as
+little light as possible, so as not to attract mosquitoes: and I would
+slip away as though not going for anything in particular, to tell them
+to bring out the syrups; for my grandmother made a great point, thinking
+it 'nicer' of their not being allowed to seem anything out of the
+ordinary, which we kept for visitors only. Although a far younger man,
+M. Swann was very much attached to my grandfather, who had been an
+intimate friend, in his time, of Swann's father, an excellent but an
+eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often
+check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.
+Several times in the course of a year I would hear my grandfather tell
+at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of M. Swann the
+elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched
+day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time,
+hastened to join him at the Swanns' family property on the outskirts of
+Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out
+of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was
+laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was
+a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather by the arm
+and cried, "Oh, my dear old friend, how fortunate we are to be walking
+here together on such a charming day! Don't you see how pretty they are,
+all these trees--my hawthorns, and my new pond, on which you have never
+congratulated me? You look as glum as a night-cap. Don't you feel this
+little breeze? Ah! whatever you may say, it's good to be alive all the
+same, my dear Amédée!" And then, abruptly, the memory of his dead wife
+returned to him, and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire
+into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried
+away by an impulse of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which
+he habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came into his
+mind: that is, he passed his hand across his forehead, dried his eyes,
+and wiped his glasses. And he could never be consoled for the loss of
+his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years for
+which he survived her, "It's a funny thing, now; I very often think
+of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her very much at any one time."
+"Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann," became one of my
+grandfather's favourite phrases, which he would apply to all kinds of
+things. And I should have assumed that this father of Swann's had been
+a monster if my grandfather, whom I regarded as a better judge than
+myself, and whose word was my law and often led me in the long run to
+pardon offences which I should have been inclined to condemn, had not
+gone on to exclaim, "But, after all, he had a heart of gold."
+
+For many years, albeit--and especially before his marriage--M. Swann
+the younger came often to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and
+grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the
+kind of society which his family had frequented, or that, under the
+sort of incognito which the name of Swann gave him among us, they were
+harbouring--with the complete innocence of a family of honest innkeepers
+who have in their midst some distinguished highwayman and never know
+it--one of the smartest members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend
+of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one of the
+men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg
+Saint-Germain.
+
+Our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which Swann was playing in
+the world of fashion was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and
+discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people in those days
+took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist
+of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself
+called to that station in life which his parents already occupied,
+and nothing, except the chance of a brilliant career or of a 'good'
+marriage, could extract you from that station or admit you to a superior
+caste. M. Swann, the father, had been a stockbroker; and so 'young
+Swann' found himself immured for life in a caste where one's fortune, as
+in a list of taxpayers, varied between such and such limits of income.
+We knew the people with whom his father had associated, and so we knew
+his own associates, the people with whom he was 'in a position to mix.'
+If he knew other people besides, those were youthful acquaintances on
+whom the old friends of the family, like my relatives, shut their eyes
+all the more good-naturedly that Swann himself, after he was left an
+orphan, still came most faithfully to see us; but we would have been
+ready to wager that the people outside our acquaintance whom Swann knew
+were of the sort to whom he would not have dared to raise his hat, had
+he met them while he was walking with ourselves. Had there been such a
+thing as a determination to apply to Swann a social coefficient peculiar
+to himself, as distinct from all the other sons of other stockbrokers in
+his father's position, his coefficient would have been rather lower than
+theirs, because, leading a very simple life, and having always had
+a craze for 'antiques' and pictures, he now lived and piled up his
+collections in an old house which my grandmother longed to visit,
+but which stood on the Quai d'Orléans, a neighbourhood in which my
+great-aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered. "Are you really
+a connoisseur, now?" she would say to him; "I ask for your own sake, as
+you are likely to have 'fakes' palmed off on you by the dealers," for
+she did not, in fact, endow him with any critical faculty, and had no
+great opinion of the intelligence of a man who, in conversation, would
+avoid serious topics and shewed a very dull preciseness, not only when
+he gave us kitchen recipes, going into the most minute details, but
+even when my grandmother's sisters were talking to him about art. When
+challenged by them to give an opinion, or to express his admiration for
+some picture, he would remain almost impolitely silent, and would then
+make amends by furnishing (if he could) some fact or other about the
+gallery in which the picture was hung, or the date at which it had been
+painted. But as a rule he would content himself with trying to amuse
+us by telling us the story of his latest adventure--and he would have
+a fresh story for us on every occasion--with some one whom we ourselves
+knew, such as the Combray chemist, or our cook, or our coachman. These
+stories certainly used to make my great-aunt laugh, but she could
+never tell whether that was on account of the absurd parts which Swann
+invariably made himself play in the adventures, or of the wit that he
+shewed in telling us of them. "It is easy to see that you are a regular
+'character,' M. Swann!"
+
+As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a
+trifle 'common,' she would always take care to remark to strangers, when
+Swann was mentioned, that he could easily, if he had wished to, have
+lived in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l'Opéra, and that
+he was the son of old M. Swann who must have left four or five million
+francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which, moreover, she thought
+was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M. Swann
+called on New Year's Day bringing her a little packet of _marrons
+glacés_, she never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say
+to him: "Well, M. Swann, and do you still live next door to the Bonded
+Vaults, so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to
+Lyons?" and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her
+glasses, at the other visitors.
+
+But if anyone had suggested to my aunt that this Swann, who, in his
+capacity as the son of old M. Swann, was 'fully qualified' to be
+received by any of the 'upper middle class,' the most respected
+barristers and solicitors of Paris (though he was perhaps a trifle
+inclined to let this hereditary privilege go into abeyance), had another
+almost secret existence of a wholly different kind: that when he left
+our house in Paris, saying that he must go home to bed, he would no
+sooner have turned the corner than he would stop, retrace his steps, and
+be off to some drawing-room on whose like no stockbroker or associate
+of stockbrokers had ever set eyes--that would have seemed to my aunt
+as extraordinary as, to a woman of wider reading, the thought of being
+herself on terms of intimacy with Aristaeus, of knowing that he would,
+when he had finished his conversation with her, plunge deep into the
+realms of Thetis, into an empire veiled from mortal eyes, in which
+Virgil depicts him as being received with open arms; or--to be content
+with an image more likely to have occurred to her, for she had seen it
+painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray--as the thought
+of having had to dinner Ali Baba, who, as soon as he found himself alone
+and unobserved, would make his way into the cave, resplendent with its
+unsuspected treasures.
+
+One day when he had come to see us after dinner in Paris, and had begged
+pardon for being in evening clothes, Françoise, when he had gone, told
+us that she had got it from his coachman that he had been dining "with a
+princess." "A pretty sort of princess," drawled my aunt; "I know
+them," and she shrugged her shoulders without raising her eyes from her
+knitting, serenely ironical.
+
+Altogether, my aunt used to treat him with scant ceremony. Since she was
+of the opinion that he ought to feel flattered by our invitations, she
+thought it only right and proper that he should never come to see us in
+summer without a basket of peaches or raspberries from his garden,
+and that from each of his visits to Italy he should bring back some
+photographs of old masters for me.
+
+It seemed quite natural, therefore, to send to him whenever we wanted
+a recipe for some special sauce or for a pineapple salad for one of
+our big dinner-parties, to which he himself would not be invited, not
+seeming of sufficient importance to be served up to new friends who
+might be in our house for the first time. If the conversation turned
+upon the Princes of the House of France, "Gentlemen, you and I will
+never know, will we, and don't want to, do we?" my great-aunt would
+say tartly to Swann, who had, perhaps, a letter from Twickenham in his
+pocket; she would make him play accompaniments and turn over music on
+evenings when my grandmother's sister sang; manipulating this creature,
+so rare and refined at other times and in other places, with the rough
+simplicity of a child who will play with some curio from the cabinet no
+more carefully than if it were a penny toy. Certainly the Swann who was
+a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from,
+the Swann created in my great-aunt's mind when, of an evening, in our
+little garden at Combray, after the two shy peals had sounded from the
+gate, she would vitalise, by injecting into it everything she had ever
+heard about the Swann family, the vague and unrecognisable shape which
+began to appear, with my grandmother in its wake, against a background
+of shadows, and could at last be identified by the sound of its voice.
+But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none
+of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for
+everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or
+the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts
+of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some
+one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the
+physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have
+already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we
+compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In
+the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to
+follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in
+the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent
+envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our
+own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen. And so, no
+doubt, from the Swann they had built up for their own purposes my family
+had left out, in their ignorance, a whole crowd of the details of his
+daily life in the world of fashion, details by means of which other
+people, when they met him, saw all the Graces enthroned in his face and
+stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a natural frontier; but
+they contrived also to put into a face from which its distinction had
+been evicted, a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, to plant
+in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not
+unpleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, of idle hours spent together
+after our weekly dinners, round the card-table or in the garden, during
+our companionable country life. Our friend's bodily frame had been so
+well lined with this sense, and with various earlier memories of his
+family, that their own special Swann had become to my people a complete
+and living creature; so that even now I have the feeling of leaving
+some one I know for another quite different person when, going back in
+memory, I pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately
+to this early Swann--this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the
+charming mistakes of my childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like
+his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as
+though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits
+of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak)
+tonality--this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent
+of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of
+tarragon.
+
+And yet one day, when my grandmother had gone to ask some favour of a
+lady whom she had known at the Sacré Coeur (and with whom, because of
+our caste theory, she had not cared to keep up any degree of intimacy in
+spite of several common interests), the Marquise de Villeparisis, of the
+famous house of Bouillon, this lady had said to her:
+
+"I think you know M. Swann very well; he is a great friend of my
+nephews, the des Laumes."
+
+My grandmother had returned from the call full of praise for the house,
+which overlooked some gardens, and in which Mme. de Villeparisis had
+advised her to rent a flat; and also for a repairing tailor and his
+daughter, who kept a little shop in the courtyard, into which she had
+gone to ask them to put a stitch in her skirt, which she had torn on the
+staircase. My grandmother had found these people perfectly charming: the
+girl, she said, was a jewel, and the tailor a most distinguished man,
+the finest she had ever seen. For in her eyes distinction was a thing
+wholly independent of social position. She was in ecstasies over some
+answer the tailor had made, saying to Mamma:
+
+"Sévigné would not have said it better!" and, by way of contrast, of a
+nephew of Mme. de Villeparisis whom she had met at the house:
+
+"My dear, he is so common!"
+
+Now, the effect of that remark about Swann had been, not to raise him
+in my great-aunt's estimation, but to lower Mme. de Villeparisis. It
+appeared that the deference which, on my grandmother's authority, we
+owed to Mme. de Villeparisis imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to
+do nothing that would render her less worthy of our regard, and that
+she had failed in her duty in becoming aware of Swann's existence and
+in allowing members of her family to associate with him. "How should
+she know Swann? A lady who, you always made out, was related to Marshal
+MacMahon!" This view of Swann's social atmosphere which prevailed in my
+family seemed to be confirmed later on by his marriage with a woman of
+the worst class, you might almost say a 'fast' woman, whom, to do him
+justice, he never attempted to introduce to us, for he continued to come
+to us alone, though he came more and more seldom; but from whom they
+thought they could establish, on the assumption that he had found her
+there, the circle, unknown to them, in which he ordinarily moved.
+
+But on one occasion my grandfather read in a newspaper that M. Swann was
+one of the most faithful attendants at the Sunday luncheons given by the
+Duc de X----, whose father and uncle had been among our most prominent
+statesmen in the reign of Louis Philippe. Now my grandfather was curious
+to learn all the little details which might help him to take a mental
+share in the private lives of men like Mole, the Duc Pasquier, or the
+Duc de Broglie. He was delighted to find that Swann associated with
+people who had known them. My great-aunt, however, interpreted this
+piece of news in a sense discreditable to Swann; for anyone who chose
+his associates outside the caste in which he had been born and bred,
+outside his 'proper station,' was condemned to utter degradation in her
+eyes. It seemed to her that such a one abdicated all claim to enjoy the
+fruits of those friendly relations with people of good position which
+prudent parents cultivate and store up for their children's benefit, for
+my great-aunt had actually ceased to 'see' the son of a lawyer we
+had known because he had married a 'Highness' and had thereby stepped
+down--in her eyes--from the respectable position of a lawyer's son to
+that of those adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly,
+to whom we read that queens have sometimes shewn their favours. She
+objected, therefore, to my grandfather's plan of questioning Swann, when
+next he came to dine with us, about these people whose friendship with
+him we had discovered. On the other hand, my grandmother's two sisters,
+elderly spinsters who shared her nobility of character but lacked her
+intelligence, declared that they could not conceive what pleasure their
+brother-in-law could find in talking about such trifles. They were
+ladies of lofty ambition, who for that reason were incapable of taking
+the least interest in what might be called the 'pinchbeck' things of
+life, even when they had an historic value, or, generally speaking, in
+anything that was not directly associated with some object aesthetically
+precious. So complete was their negation of interest in anything which
+seemed directly or indirectly a part of our everyday life that their
+sense of hearing--which had gradually come to understand its own
+futility when the tone of the conversation, at the dinner-table, became
+frivolous or merely mundane, without the two old ladies' being able to
+guide it back to the topic dear to themselves--would leave its receptive
+channels unemployed, so effectively that they were actually becoming
+atrophied. So that if my grandfather wished to attract the attention of
+the two sisters, he would have to make use of some such alarm signals
+as mad-doctors adopt in dealing with their distracted patients; as by
+beating several times on a glass with the blade of a knife, fixing them
+at the same time with a sharp word and a compelling glance, violent
+methods which the said doctors are apt to bring with them into their
+everyday life among the sane, either from force of professional habit or
+because they think the whole world a trifle mad.
+
+Their interest grew, however, when, the day before Swann was to dine
+with us, and when he had made them a special present of a case of Asti,
+my great-aunt, who had in her hand a copy of the _Figaro_ in which to
+the name of a picture then on view in a Corot exhibition were added the
+words, "from the collection of M. Charles Swann," asked: "Did you see
+that Swann is 'mentioned' in the _Figaro_?"
+
+"But I have always told you," said my grandmother, "that he had plenty
+of taste."
+
+"You would, of course," retorted my great-aunt, "say anything just to
+seem different from _us_." For, knowing that my grandmother never agreed
+with her, and not being quite confident that it was her own opinion
+which the rest of us invariably endorsed, she wished to extort from us
+a wholesale condemnation of my grandmother's views, against which she
+hoped to force us into solidarity with her own.
+
+But we sat silent. My grandmother's sisters having expressed a desire
+to mention to Swann this reference to him in the _Figaro_, my great-aunt
+dissuaded them. Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however
+trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it
+was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to
+have to envy them.
+
+"I don't think that would please him at all; I know very well, I should
+hate to see my name printed like that, as large as life, in the paper,
+and I shouldn't feel at all flattered if anyone spoke to me about it."
+
+She did not, however, put any very great pressure upon my grandmother's
+sisters, for they, in their horror of vulgarity, had brought to such a
+fine art the concealment of a personal allusion in a wealth of ingenious
+circumlocution, that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person
+to whom it was addressed. As for my mother, her only thought was of
+managing to induce my father to consent to speak to Swann, not of his
+wife, but of his daughter, whom he worshipped, and for whose sake it was
+understood that he had ultimately made his unfortunate marriage.
+
+"You need only say a word; just ask him how she is. It must be so very
+hard for him."
+
+My father, however, was annoyed: "No, no; you have the most absurd
+ideas. It would be utterly ridiculous."
+
+But the only one of us in whom the prospect of Swann's arrival gave
+rise to an unhappy foreboding was myself. And that was because on the
+evenings when there were visitors, or just M. Swann in the house, Mamma
+did not come up to my room. I did not, at that time, have dinner with
+the family: I came out to the garden after dinner, and at nine I said
+good night and went to bed. But on these evenings I used to dine earlier
+than the others, and to come in afterwards and sit at table until eight
+o'clock, when it was understood that I must go upstairs; that frail and
+precious kiss which Mamma used always to leave upon my lips when I
+was in bed and just going to sleep I had to take with me from the
+dining-room to my own, and to keep inviolate all the time that it
+took me to undress, without letting its sweet charm be broken, without
+letting its volatile essence diffuse itself and evaporate; and just on
+those very evenings when I must needs take most pains to receive it with
+due formality, I had to snatch it, to seize it instantly and in public,
+without even having the time or being properly free to apply to what I
+was doing the punctiliousness which madmen use who compel themselves to
+exclude all other thoughts from their minds while they are shutting a
+door, so that when the sickness of uncertainty sweeps over them again
+they can triumphantly face and overcome it with the recollection of the
+precise moment in which the door was shut.
+
+We were all in the garden when the double peal of the gate-bell sounded
+shyly. Everyone knew that it must be Swann, and yet they looked at one
+another inquiringly and sent my grandmother scouting.
+
+"See that you thank him intelligibly for the wine," my grandfather
+warned his two sisters-in-law; "you know how good it is, and it is a
+huge case."
+
+"Now, don't start whispering!" said my great-aunt. "How would you like
+to come into a house and find everyone muttering to themselves?"
+
+"Ah! There's M. Swann," cried my father. "Let's ask him if he thinks it
+will be fine to-morrow."
+
+My mother fancied that a word from her would wipe out all the
+unpleasantness which my family had contrived to make Swann feel since
+his marriage. She found an opportunity to draw him aside for a moment.
+But I followed her: I could not bring myself to let her go out of reach
+of me while I felt that in a few minutes I should have to leave her in
+the dining-room and go up to my bed without the consoling thought, as on
+ordinary evenings, that she would come up, later, to kiss me.
+
+"Now, M. Swann," she said, "do tell me about your daughter; I am sure
+she shews a taste already for nice things, like her papa."
+
+"Come along and sit down here with us all on the verandah," said my
+grandfather, coming up to him. My mother had to abandon the quest, but
+managed to extract from the restriction itself a further refinement of
+thought, as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into
+the discovery of their finest lines.
+
+"We can talk about her again when we are by ourselves," she said, or
+rather whispered to Swann. "It is only a mother who can understand. I am
+sure that hers would agree with me."
+
+And so we all sat down round the iron table. I should have liked not
+to think of the hours of anguish which I should have to spend, that
+evening, alone in my room, without the possibility of going to sleep: I
+tried to convince myself that they were of no importance, really,
+since I should have forgotten them next morning, and to fix my mind on
+thoughts of the future which would carry me, as on a bridge, across the
+terrifying abyss that yawned at my feet. But my mind, strained by this
+foreboding, distended like the look which I shot at my mother, would not
+allow any other impression to enter. Thoughts did, indeed, enter it,
+but only on the condition that they left behind them every element of
+beauty, or even of quaintness, by which I might have been distracted or
+beguiled. As a surgical patient, by means of a local anaesthetic, can
+look on with a clear consciousness while an operation is being performed
+upon him and yet feel nothing, I could repeat to myself some favourite
+lines, or watch my grandfather attempting to talk to Swann about the Duc
+d'Audriffet-Pasquier, without being able to kindle any emotion from one
+or amusement from the other. Hardly had my grandfather begun to question
+Swann about that orator when one of my grandmother's sisters, in whose
+ears the question echoed like a solemn but untimely silence which her
+natural politeness bade her interrupt, addressed the other with:
+
+"Just fancy, Flora, I met a young Swedish governess to-day who told
+me some most interesting things about the co-operative movement in
+Scandinavia. We really must have her to dine here one evening."
+
+"To be sure!" said her sister Flora, "but I haven't wasted my time
+either. I met such a clever old gentleman at M. Vinteuil's who knows
+Maubant quite well, and Maubant has told him every little thing about
+how he gets up his parts. It is the most interesting thing I ever heard.
+He is a neighbour of M. Vinteuil's, and I never knew; and he is so nice
+besides."
+
+"M. Vinteuil is not the only one who has nice neighbours," cried my aunt
+Céline in a voice which seemed loud because she was so timid, and seemed
+forced because she had been planning the little speech for so long;
+darting, as she spoke, what she called a 'significant glance' at Swann.
+And my aunt Flora, who realised that this veiled utterance was Céline's
+way of thanking Swann intelligibly for the Asti, looked at him with a
+blend of congratulation and irony, either just, because she wished to
+underline her sister's little epigram, or because she envied Swann
+his having inspired it, or merely because she imagined that he was
+embarrassed, and could not help having a little fun at his expense.
+
+"I think it would be worth while," Flora went on, "to have this old
+gentleman to dinner. When you get him upon Maubant or Mme. Materna he
+will talk for hours on end."
+
+"That must be delightful," sighed my grandfather, in whose mind nature
+had unfortunately forgotten to include any capacity whatsoever for
+becoming passionately interested in the co-operative movement among the
+ladies of Sweden or in the methods employed by Maubant to get up his
+parts, just as it had forgotten to endow my grandmother's two sisters
+with a grain of that precious salt which one has oneself to 'add to
+taste' in order to extract any savour from a narrative of the private
+life of Mole or of the Comte de Paris.
+
+"I say!" exclaimed Swann to my grandfather, "what I was going to tell
+you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me
+just now, for in some respects there has been very little change. I came
+across a passage in Saint-Simon this morning which would have amused
+you. It is in the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one
+of the best, little more in fact than a journal, but at least it is a
+journal wonderfully well written, which fairly distinguishes it from
+the devastating journalism that we feel bound to read in these days,
+morning, noon and night."
+
+"I do not agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the
+papers very pleasant indeed!" my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that
+she had read the note about his Corot in the _Figaro_.
+
+"Yes," aunt Céline went one better. "When they write about things or
+people in whom we are interested."
+
+"I don't deny it," answered Swann in some bewilderment. "The fault I
+find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in
+some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four
+books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose
+that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered
+hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside
+it--oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's _Pensées_?" He articulated
+the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And
+then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years,"
+he went on, shewing that contempt for the things of this world which
+some men of the world like to affect, "we should read that the Queen of
+the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had
+given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at the right
+proportion between 'information' and 'publicity.'" But at once
+regretting that he had allowed himself to speak, even in jest, of
+serious matters, he added ironically: "We are having a most entertaining
+conversation; I cannot think why we climb to these lofty summits," and
+then, turning to my grandfather: "Well, Saint-Simon tells how Maulevrier
+had had the audacity to offer his hand to his sons. You remember how he
+says of Maulevrier, 'Never did I find in that coarse bottle anything but
+ill-humour, boorishness, and folly.'"
+
+"Coarse or not, I know bottles in which there is something very
+different!" said Flora briskly, feeling bound to thank Swann as well as
+her sister, since the present of Asti had been addressed to them both.
+Céline began to laugh.
+
+Swann was puzzled, but went on: "'I cannot say whether it was his
+ignorance or a trap,' writes Saint-Simon; 'he wished to give his hand to
+my children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.'"
+
+My grandfather was already in ecstasies over "ignorance or a trap,"
+but Miss Céline--the name of Saint-Simon, a 'man of letters,' having
+arrested the complete paralysis of her sense of hearing--had grown
+angry.
+
+"What! You admire that, do you? Well, it is clever enough! But what is
+the point of it? Does he mean that one man isn't as good as another?
+What difference can it make whether he is a duke or a groom so long
+as he is intelligent and good? He had a fine way of bringing up his
+children, your Saint-Simon, if he didn't teach them to shake hands with
+all honest men. Really and truly, it's abominable. And you dare to quote
+it!"
+
+And my grandfather, utterly depressed, realising how futile it would be
+for him, against this opposition, to attempt to get Swann to tell him
+the stories which would have amused him, murmured to my mother: "Just
+tell me again that line of yours which always comforts me so much on
+these occasions. Oh, yes:
+
+
+  What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!
+
+Good, that is, very good."
+
+I never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at table
+I should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time,
+and that Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to
+give her in public the series of kisses that she would have had in my
+room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room, as they began
+to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand
+into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and stealthy in
+execution, everything that my own efforts could put into it: would
+look out very carefully first the exact spot on her cheek where I would
+imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts that I might be able,
+thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the
+minute Mamma would allow me to the sensation of her cheek against my
+lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only
+prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes
+does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's
+absence. But to-night, before the dinner-bell had sounded, my
+grandfather said with unconscious cruelty: "The little man looks tired;
+he'd better go up to bed. Besides, we are dining late to-night."
+
+And my father, who was less scrupulous than my grandmother or mother in
+observing the letter of a treaty, went on: "Yes, run along; to bed with
+you."
+
+I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the
+dinner-bell rang.
+
+"No, no, leave your mother alone. You've said good night quite enough.
+These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs."
+
+And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the
+staircase 'against my heart,' as the saying is, climbing in opposition
+to my heart's desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had
+not, by her kiss, given my heart leave to accompany me forth. That
+hateful staircase, up which I always passed with such dismay, gave out
+a smell of varnish which had to some extent absorbed, made definite and
+fixed the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made
+it perhaps even more cruel to my sensibility because, when it assumed
+this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we
+have gone to sleep with a maddening toothache and are conscious of it
+only as a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out
+of the water, or as a line of Molière which we repeat incessantly to
+ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence
+can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of
+heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the precise converse of this relief
+which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my
+consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid, instantaneous almost,
+a manner at once insidious and brutal as I breathed in--a far more
+poisonous thing than any moral penetration--the peculiar smell of the
+varnish upon that staircase.
+
+Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to
+dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the
+shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which
+had been placed there because, on summer nights, I was too hot among the
+red curtains of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and attempted
+the desperate stratagem of a condemned prisoner. I wrote to my mother
+begging her to come upstairs for an important reason which I could not
+put in writing. My fear was that Françoise, my aunt's cook who used to
+be put in charge of me when I was at Combray, might refuse to take my
+note. I had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a message to
+my mother when there was a stranger in the room would appear flatly
+inconceivable, just as it would be for the door-keeper of a theatre
+to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage. For things which might
+or might not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant,
+subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or
+irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which
+combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast
+with prohibitions, of exaggerated refinement, against "seething the kid
+in his mother's milk," or "eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow
+of the thigh." This code, if one could judge it by the sudden obstinacy
+which she would put into her refusal to carry out certain of our
+instructions, seemed to have foreseen such social complications and
+refinements of fashion as nothing in Françoise's surroundings or in her
+career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head;
+and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past
+existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood,
+just as there is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still
+testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among
+delicately sculptured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or the Quatre
+Fils Aymon.
+
+In this particular instance, the article of her code which made it
+highly improbable that--barring an outbreak of fire--Françoise would
+go down and disturb Mamma when M. Swann was there for so unimportant a
+person as myself was one embodying the respect she shewed not only for
+the family (as for the dead, for the clergy, or for royalty), but also
+for the stranger within our gates; a respect which I should perhaps have
+found touching in a book, but which never failed to irritate me on her
+lips, because of the solemn and gentle tones in which she would utter
+it, and which irritated me more than usual this evening when the sacred
+character in which she invested the dinner-party might have the effect
+of making her decline to disturb its ceremonial. But to give myself one
+chance of success I lied without hesitation, telling her that it was not
+in the least myself who had wanted to write to Mamma, but Mamma who,
+on saying good night to me, had begged me not to forget to send her
+an answer about something she had asked me to find, and that she would
+certainly be very angry if this note were not taken to her. I think that
+Françoise disbelieved me, for, like those primitive men whose senses
+were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, by signs
+imperceptible by the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything that
+we might wish to conceal from her. She studied the envelope for five
+minutes as though an examination of the paper itself and the look of
+my handwriting could enlighten her as to the nature of the contents,
+or tell her to which article of her code she ought to refer the matter.
+Then she went out with an air of resignation which seemed to imply:
+"What a dreadful thing for parents to have a child like this!"
+
+A moment later she returned to say that they were still at the ice stage
+and that it was impossible for the butler to deliver the note at once,
+in front of everybody; but that when the finger-bowls were put round he
+would find a way of slipping it into Mamma's hand. At once my anxiety
+subsided; it was now no longer (as it had been a moment ago) until
+to-morrow that I had lost my mother, for my little line was going--to
+annoy her, no doubt, and doubly so because this contrivance would make
+me ridiculous in Swann's eyes--but was going all the same to admit me,
+invisibly and by stealth, into the same room as herself, was going
+to whisper from me into her ear; for that forbidden and unfriendly
+dining-room, where but a moment ago the ice itself--with burned nuts in
+it--and the finger-bowls seemed to me to be concealing pleasures that
+were mischievous and of a mortal sadness because Mamma was tasting of
+them and I was far away, had opened its doors to me and, like a ripe
+fruit which bursts through its skin, was going to pour out into my
+intoxicated heart the gushing sweetness of Mamma's attention while she
+was reading what I had written. Now I was no longer separated from her;
+the barriers were down; an exquisite thread was binding us. Besides,
+that was not all, for surely Mamma would come.
+
+As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann
+would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had
+guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due
+course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years,
+and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so
+well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies in knowing that the
+creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not
+and cannot follow--to him that anguish came through Love, to which it
+is in a sense predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted; but
+when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one's soul before
+Love has yet entered into one's life, then it must drift, awaiting
+Love's coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the
+disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety
+or affection for a comrade. And the joy with which I first bound myself
+apprentice, when Françoise returned to tell me that my letter would be
+delivered; Swann, too, had known well that false joy which a friend can
+give us, or some relative of the woman we love, when on his arrival at
+the house or theatre where she is to be found, for some ball or party or
+'first-night' at which he is to meet her, he sees us wandering outside,
+desperately awaiting some opportunity of communicating with her. He
+recognises us, greets us familiarly, and asks what we are doing there.
+And when we invent a story of having some urgent message to give to his
+relative or friend, he assures us that nothing could be more simple,
+takes us in at the door, and promises to send her down to us in five
+minutes. How much we love him--as at that moment I loved Françoise--the
+good-natured intermediary who by a single word has made supportable,
+human, almost propitious the inconceivable, infernal scene of gaiety in
+the thick of which we had been imagining swarms of enemies, perverse and
+seductive, beguiling away from us, even making laugh at us, the woman
+whom we love. If we are to judge of them by him, this relative who has
+accosted us and who is himself an initiate in those cruel mysteries,
+then the other guests cannot be so very demoniacal. Those inaccessible
+and torturing hours into which she had gone to taste of unknown
+pleasures--behold, a breach in the wall, and we are through it. Behold,
+one of the moments whose series will go to make up their sum, a moment
+as genuine as the rest, if not actually more important to ourself
+because our mistress is more intensely a part of it; we picture it to
+ourselves, we possess it, we intervene upon it, almost we have created
+it: namely, the moment in which he goes to tell her that we are waiting
+there below. And very probably the other moments of the party will not
+be essentially different, will contain nothing else so exquisite or so
+well able to make us suffer, since this kind friend has assured us that
+"Of course, she will be delighted to come down! It will be far more
+amusing for her to talk to you than to be bored up there." Alas! Swann
+had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are
+powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even
+into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind
+friend comes down again alone.
+
+My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my
+self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she
+had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something
+or other) made Françoise tell me, in so many words "There is no
+answer"--words I have so often, since then, heard the hall-porters in
+'mansions' and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to
+some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: "What! he's said nothing?
+It's not possible. You did give him my letter, didn't you? Very well,
+I shall wait a little longer." And just as she invariably protests that
+she does not need the extra gas which the porter offers to light for
+her, and sits on there, hearing nothing further, except an occasional
+remark on the weather which the porter exchanges with a messenger
+whom he will send off suddenly, when he notices the time, to put some
+customer's wine on the ice; so, having declined Françoise's offer to
+make me some tea or to stay beside me, I let her go off again to the
+servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the
+voices of my family who were drinking their coffee in the garden.
+
+But after a few seconds I realised that, by writing that line to Mamma,
+by approaching--at the risk of making her angry--so near to her that I
+felt I could reach out and grasp the moment in which I should see her
+again, I had cut myself off from the possibility of going to sleep
+until I actually had seen her, and my heart began to beat more and more
+painfully as I increased my agitation by ordering myself to keep calm
+and to acquiesce in my ill-fortune. Then, suddenly, my anxiety subsided,
+a feeling of intense happiness coursed through me, as when a strong
+medicine begins to take effect and one's pain vanishes: I had formed a
+resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma,
+and had decided to kiss her at all costs, even with the certainty of
+being in disgrace with her for long afterwards, when she herself came
+up to bed. The tranquillity which followed my anguish made me extremely
+alert, no less than my sense of expectation, my thirst for and my fear
+of danger.
+
+Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed;
+hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things
+outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the
+moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the
+extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its
+substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer,
+like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.
+What had to move--a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for instance--moved. But
+its minute shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with
+utmost delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene,
+and yet was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined. Exposed upon
+this surface of silence, which absorbed nothing from them, the most
+distant sounds, those which must have come from gardens at the far end
+of the town, could be distinguished with such exact 'finish' that the
+impression they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their
+'pianissimo' execution, like those movements on muted strings so well
+performed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire that, although one does
+not lose a single note, one thinks all the same that they are being
+played somewhere outside, a long way from the concert hall, so that all
+the old subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann had
+given them his seats, used to strain their ears as if they had caught
+the distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded
+the corner of the Rue de Trévise.
+
+I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which
+none could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my
+parents' hands; consequences far graver, indeed, than a stranger would
+have imagined, and such as (he would have thought) could follow only
+some really shameful fault. But in the system of education which they
+had given me faults were not classified in the same order as in that of
+other children, and I had been taught to place at the head of the list
+(doubtless because there was no other class of faults from which
+I needed to be more carefully protected) those in which I can now
+distinguish the common feature that one succumbs to them by yielding to
+a nervous impulse. But such words as these last had never been uttered
+in my hearing; no one had yet accounted for my temptations in a way
+which might have led me to believe that there was some excuse for my
+giving in to them, or that I was actually incapable of holding out
+against them. Yet I could easily recognise this class of transgressions
+by the anguish of mind which preceded, as well as by the rigour of the
+punishment which followed them; and I knew that what I had just done was
+in the same category as certain other sins for which I had been severely
+chastised, though infinitely more serious than they. When I went out to
+meet my mother as she herself came up to bed, and when she saw that I
+had remained up so as to say good night to her again in the passage,
+I should not be allowed to stay in the house a day longer, I should be
+packed off to school next morning; so much was certain. Very good: had
+I been obliged, the next moment, to hurl myself out of the window,
+I should still have preferred such a fate. For what I wanted now was
+Mamma, and to say good night to her. I had gone too far along the road
+which led to the realisation of this desire to be able to retrace my
+steps.
+
+I could hear my parents' footsteps as they went with Swann; and, when
+the rattle of the gate assured me that he had really gone, I crept to
+the window. Mamma was asking my father if he had thought the lobster
+good, and whether M. Swann had had some of the coffee-and-pistachio ice.
+"I thought it rather so-so," she was saying; "next time we shall have to
+try another flavour."
+
+"I can't tell you," said my great-aunt, "what a change I find in Swann.
+He is quite antiquated!" She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann
+always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to
+find him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him.
+And the others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal,
+excessive, scandalous senescence, meet only in a celibate, in one of
+that class for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow
+must be longer than for other men, since for such a one it is void of
+promise, and from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any
+subsequent partition among his offspring.
+
+"I fancy he has a lot of trouble with that wretched wife of his, who
+'lives' with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all Combray knows. It's
+the talk of the town."
+
+My mother observed that, in spite of this, he had looked much less
+unhappy of late. "And he doesn't nearly so often do that trick of his,
+so like his father, of wiping his eyes and passing his hand across his
+forehead. I think myself that in his heart of hearts he doesn't love his
+wife any more."
+
+"Why, of course he doesn't," answered my grandfather. "He wrote me a
+letter about it, ages ago, to which I took care to pay no attention, but
+it left no doubt as to his feelings, let alone his love for his wife.
+Hullo! you two; you never thanked him for the Asti!" he went on, turning
+to his sisters-in-law.
+
+"What! we never thanked him? I think, between you and me, that I put it
+to him quite neatly," replied my aunt Flora.
+
+"Yes, you managed it very well; I admired you for it," said my aunt
+Céline.
+
+"But you did it very prettily, too."
+
+"Yes; I liked my expression about 'nice neighbours.'"
+
+"What! Do you call that thanking him?" shouted my grandfather. "I heard
+that all right, but devil take me if I guessed it was meant for Swann.
+You may be quite sure he never noticed it."
+
+"Come, come; Swann is not a fool. I am positive he appreciated the
+compliment. You didn't expect me to tell him the number of bottles, or
+to guess what he paid for them."
+
+My father and mother were left alone and sat down for a moment; then my
+father said: "Well, shall we go up to bed?"
+
+"As you wish, dear, though I don't feel in the least like sleeping. I
+don't know why; it can't be the coffee-ice--it wasn't strong enough to
+keep me awake like this. But I see a light in the servants' hall: poor
+Françoise has been sitting up for me, so I will get her to unhook me
+while you go and undress."
+
+My mother opened the latticed door which led from the hall to the
+staircase. Presently I heard her coming upstairs to close her window. I
+went quietly into the passage; my heart was beating so violently that I
+could hardly move, but at least it was throbbing no longer with anxiety,
+but with terror and with joy. I saw in the well of the stair a light
+coming upwards, from Mamma's candle. Then I saw Mamma herself: I threw
+myself upon her. For an instant she looked at me in astonishment, not
+realising what could have happened. Then her face assumed an expression
+of anger. She said not a single word to me; and, for that matter, I used
+to go for days on end without being spoken to, for far less offences
+than this. A single word from Mamma would have been an admission that
+further intercourse with me was within the bounds of possibility,
+and that might perhaps have appeared to me more terrible still, as
+indicating that, with such a punishment as was in store for me, mere
+silence, and even anger, were relatively puerile.
+
+A word from her then would have implied the false calm in which one
+converses with a servant to whom one has just decided to give notice;
+the kiss one bestows on a son who is being packed off to enlist, which
+would have been denied him if it had merely been a matter of being
+angry with him for a few days. But she heard my father coming from the
+dressing-room, where he had gone to take off his clothes, and, to avoid
+the 'scene' which he would make if he saw me, she said, in a voice
+half-stifled by her anger: "Run away at once. Don't let your father see
+you standing there like a crazy jane!"
+
+But I begged her again to "Come and say good night to me!" terrified as
+I saw the light from my father's candle already creeping up the wall,
+but also making use of his approach as a means of blackmail, in the hope
+that my mother, not wishing him to find me there, as find me he must
+if she continued to hold out, would give in to me, and say: "Go back to
+your room. I will come."
+
+Too late: my father was upon us. Instinctively I murmured, though no one
+heard me, "I am done for!"
+
+I was not, however. My father used constantly to refuse to let me do
+things which were quite clearly allowed by the more liberal charters
+granted me by my mother and grandmother, because he paid no heed to
+'Principles,' and because in his sight there were no such things as
+'Rights of Man.' For some quite irrelevant reason, or for no reason at
+all, he would at the last moment prevent me from taking some particular
+walk, one so regular and so consecrated to my use that to deprive me of
+it was a clear breach of faith; or again, as he had done this evening,
+long before the appointed hour he would snap out: "Run along up to
+bed now; no excuses!" But then again, simply because he was devoid
+of principles (in my grandmother's sense), so he could not, properly
+speaking, be called inexorable. He looked at me for a moment with an air
+of annoyance and surprise, and then when Mamma had told him, not without
+some embarrassment, what had happened, said to her: "Go along with him,
+then; you said just now that you didn't feel like sleep, so stay in his
+room for a little. I don't need anything."
+
+"But dear," my mother answered timidly, "whether or not I feel like
+sleep is not the point; we must not make the child accustomed..."
+
+"There's no question of making him accustomed," said my father, with
+a shrug of the shoulders; "you can see quite well that the child is
+unhappy. After all, we aren't gaolers. You'll end by making him ill,
+and a lot of good that will do. There are two beds in his room; tell
+Françoise to make up the big one for you, and stay beside him for the
+rest of the night. I'm off to bed, anyhow; I'm not nervous like you.
+Good night."
+
+It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my
+sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring
+to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white
+nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere
+in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up
+his head, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli
+which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself
+away from Isaac. Many years have passed since that night. The wall of
+the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually
+climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have
+perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have
+arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days
+I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of
+comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able
+to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be
+possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if
+I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to
+control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found
+myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is
+only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that
+I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively
+drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would
+suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again
+through the silent evening air.
+
+Mamma spent that night in my room: when I had just committed a sin so
+deadly that I was waiting to be banished from the household, my parents
+gave me a far greater concession than I should ever have won as the
+reward of a good action. Even at the moment when it manifested itself in
+this crowning mercy, my father's conduct towards me was still somewhat
+arbitrary, and regardless of my deserts, as was characteristic of him
+and due to the fact that his actions were generally dictated by chance
+expediencies rather than based on any formal plan. And perhaps even what
+I called his strictness, when he sent me off to bed, deserved that
+title less, really, than my mother's or grandmother's attitude, for his
+nature, which in some respects differed more than theirs from my own,
+had probably prevented him from guessing, until then, how wretched I was
+every evening, a thing which my mother and grandmother knew well; but
+they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering,
+which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous
+sensibility and to strengthen my will. As for my father, whose affection
+for me was of another kind, I doubt if he would have shewn so much
+courage, for as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he
+had said to my mother: "Go and comfort him." Mamma stayed all night in
+my room, and it seemed that she did not wish to mar by recrimination
+those hours, so different from anything that I had had a right to
+expect; for when Françoise (who guessed that something extraordinary
+must have happened when she saw Mamma sitting by my side, holding my
+hand and letting me cry unchecked) said to her: "But, Madame, what is
+little Master crying for?" she replied: "Why, Françoise, he doesn't know
+himself: it is his nerves. Make up the big bed for me quickly and then
+go off to your own." And thus for the first time my unhappiness was
+regarded no longer as a fault for which I must be punished, but as
+an involuntary evil which had been officially recognised a nervous
+condition for which I was in no way responsible: I had the consolation
+that I need no longer mingle apprehensive scruples with the bitterness
+of my tears; I could weep henceforward without sin. I felt no small
+degree of pride, either, in Françoise's presence at this return to humane
+conditions which, not an hour after Mamma had refused to come up to my
+room and had sent the snubbing message that I was to go to sleep, raised
+me to the dignity of a grown-up person, brought me of a sudden to a sort
+of puberty of sorrow, to emancipation from tears. I ought then to have
+been happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first
+concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step
+down from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the first time
+she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten. It struck
+me that if I had just scored a victory it was over her; that I had
+succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in
+relaxing her will, in altering her judgment; that this evening opened
+a new era, must remain a black date in the calendar. And if I had dared
+now, I should have said to Mamma: "No, I don't want you; you mustn't
+sleep here." But I was conscious of the practical wisdom, of what
+would be called nowadays the realism with which she tempered the ardent
+idealism of my grandmother's nature, and I knew that now the mischief
+was done she would prefer to let me enjoy the soothing pleasure of
+her company, and not to disturb my father again. Certainly my mother's
+beautiful features seemed to shine again with youth that evening, as she
+sat gently holding my hands and trying to check my tears; but, just for
+that reason, it seemed to me that this should not have happened; her
+anger would have been less difficult to endure than this new kindness
+which my childhood had not known; I felt that I had with an impious and
+secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and made the first
+white hair shew upon her head. This thought redoubled my sobs, and then
+I saw that Mamma, who had never allowed herself to go to any length
+of tenderness with me, was suddenly overcome by my tears and had to
+struggle to keep back her own. Then, as she saw that I had noticed
+this, she said to me, with a smile: "Why, my little buttercup, my little
+canary-boy, he's going to make Mamma as silly as himself if this goes
+on. Look, since you can't sleep, and Mamma can't either, we mustn't
+go on in this stupid way; we must do something; I'll get one of your
+books." But I had none there. "Would you like me to get out the books
+now that your grandmother is going to give you for your birthday? Just
+think it over first, and don't be disappointed if there is nothing new
+for you then."
+
+I was only too delighted, and Mamma went to find a parcel of books
+in which I could not distinguish, through the paper in which it was
+wrapped, any more than its squareness and size, but which, even at this
+first glimpse, brief and obscure as it was, bade fair to eclipse already
+the paint-box of last New Year's Day and the silkworms of the year
+before. It contained _La Mare au Diable_, _François le Champi_, _La
+Petite Fadette_, and _Les Maîtres Sonneurs_. My grandmother, as I
+learned afterwards, had at first chosen Mussel's poems, a volume of
+Rousseau, and _Indiana_; for while she considered light reading as
+unwholesome as sweets and cakes, she did not reflect that the strong
+breath of genius must have upon the very soul of a child an influence
+at once more dangerous and less quickening than those of fresh air and
+country breezes upon his body. But when my father had seemed almost to
+regard her as insane on learning the names of the books she proposed
+to give me, she had journeyed back by herself to Jouy-le-Vicomte to
+the bookseller's, so that there should be no fear of my not having my
+present in time (it was a burning hot day, and she had come home so
+unwell that the doctor had warned my mother not to allow her again
+to tire herself in that way), and had there fallen back upon the four
+pastoral novels of George Sand.
+
+"My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not allow myself to give the
+child anything that was not well written."
+
+The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything
+from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all,
+that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our
+pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.
+Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called
+'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or
+a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long
+desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted
+them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than
+to serve the common requirements of our own. She would have liked me to
+have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places.
+But at the moment of buying them, and for all that the subject of the
+picture had an aesthetic value of its own, she would find that vulgarity
+and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical
+nature of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a
+subterfuge, if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality,
+at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was
+art still, to introduce, as it might be, several 'thicknesses' of
+art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains
+of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some
+great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me
+photographs of 'Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of
+Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner, which
+were a stage higher in the scale of art. But although the photographer
+had been prevented from reproducing directly the masterpieces or the
+beauties of nature, and had there been replaced by a great artist, he
+resumed his odious position when it came to reproducing the artist's
+interpretation. Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity,
+my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still
+further. She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved,
+preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of
+association apart from themselves, such, for example, as shew us a
+masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day, as
+Morghen's print of the 'Cenacolo' of Leonardo before it was spoiled
+by restoration. It must be admitted that the results of this method of
+interpreting the art of making presents were not always happy. The idea
+which I formed of Venice, from a drawing by Titian which is supposed to
+have the lagoon in the background, was certainly far less accurate than
+what I have since derived from ordinary photographs. We could no
+longer keep count in the family (when my great-aunt tried to frame an
+indictment of my grandmother) of all the armchairs she had presented
+to married couples, young and old, which on a first attempt to sit down
+upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipient.
+But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too
+closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still
+be discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past. And
+even what in such pieces supplied a material need, since it did so in a
+manner to which we are no longer accustomed, was as charming to her as
+one of those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a
+metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our
+modern tongue. In precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George
+Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms
+of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use
+and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.
+And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as
+she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or
+some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on
+the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys
+through the realms of time.
+
+Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen _François le Champi_, whose
+reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it a distinct personality
+in my eyes and a mysterious attraction. I had not then read any real
+novels. I had heard it said that George Sand was a typical novelist.
+That prepared me in advance to imagine that _François le Champi_
+contained something inexpressibly delicious. The course of the
+narrative, where it tended to arouse curiosity or melt to pity, certain
+modes of expression which disturb or sadden the reader, and which, with
+a little experience, he may recognise as 'common form' in novels, seemed
+to me then distinctive--for to me a new book was not one of a number of
+similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no
+cause of existence beyond himself--an intoxicating whiff of the peculiar
+essence of _François le Champi_. Beneath the everyday incidents, the
+commonplace thoughts and hackneyed words, I could hear, or overhear, an
+intonation, a rhythmic utterance fine and strange. The 'action' began:
+to me it seemed all the more obscure because in those days, when I read
+to myself, I used often, while I turned the pages, to dream of something
+quite different. And to the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge
+of the story more were added by the fact that when it was Mamma who was
+reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out. And so all the odd
+changes which take place in the relations between the miller's wife and
+the boy, changes which only the birth and growth of love can explain,
+seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery, the key to which (as I
+could readily believe) lay in that strange and pleasant-sounding name of
+_Champi_, which draped the boy who bore it, I knew not why, in its own
+bright colour, purpurate and charming. If my mother was not a faithful
+reader, she was, none the less, admirable when reading a work in which
+she found the note of true feeling by the respectful simplicity of her
+interpretation and by the sound of her sweet and gentle voice. It was
+the same in her daily life, when it was not works of art but men and
+women whom she was moved to pity or admire: it was touching to observe
+with what deference she would banish from her voice, her gestures, from
+her whole conversation, now the note of joy which might have distressed
+some mother who had long ago lost a child, now the recollection of an
+event or anniversary which might have reminded some old gentleman of the
+burden of his years, now the household topic which might have bored some
+young man of letters. And so, when she read aloud the prose of George
+Sand, prose which is everywhere redolent of that generosity and moral
+distinction which Mamma had learned from my grandmother to place above
+all other qualities in life, and which I was not to teach her until
+much later to refrain from placing, in the same way, above all other
+qualities in literature; taking pains to banish from her voice any
+weakness or affectation which might have blocked its channel for that
+powerful stream of language, she supplied all the natural tenderness,
+all the lavish sweetness which they demanded to phrases which seemed
+to have been composed for her voice, and which were all, so to speak,
+within her compass. She came to them with the tone that they required,
+with the cordial accent which existed before they were, which dictated
+them, but which is not to be found in the words themselves, and by these
+means she smoothed away, as she read on, any harshness there might be
+or discordance in the tenses of verbs, endowing the imperfect and the
+preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the
+melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing
+to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now
+slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their
+difference of quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this
+quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.
+
+My agony was soothed; I let myself be borne upon the current of this
+gentle night on which I had my mother by my side. I knew that such a
+night could not be repeated; that the strongest desire I had in the
+world, namely, to keep my mother in my room through the sad hours of
+darkness, ran too much counter to general requirements and to the wishes
+of others for such a concession as had been granted me this evening to
+be anything but a rare and casual exception. To-morrow night I should
+again be the victim of anguish and Mamma would not stay by my side. But
+when these storms of anguish grew calm I could no longer realise
+their existence; besides, tomorrow evening was still a long way off;
+I reminded myself that I should still have time to think about things,
+albeit that remission of time could bring me no access of power, albeit
+the coming event was in no way dependent upon the exercise of my will,
+and seemed not quite inevitable only because it was still separated from
+me by this short interval.
+
+* * *
+
+And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at
+night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than
+this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy
+background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign
+will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other
+parts of which remain plunged in darkness: broad enough at its base, the
+little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows of the path along
+which would come M. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the
+hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase,
+so hard to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the tapering
+'elevation' of an irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom,
+with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter;
+in a word, seen always at the same evening hour, isolated from all
+its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy
+background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting
+one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in
+the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had
+consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though
+there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night. I must own
+that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other
+scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts
+which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an
+exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures
+which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of
+the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this
+residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.
+
+Permanently dead? Very possibly.
+
+There is a large element of hazard in these matters, and a second
+hazard, that of our own death, often prevents us from awaiting for any
+length of time the favours of the first.
+
+I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the
+souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior
+being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so
+effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we
+happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which
+forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our
+name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken.
+We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our
+life.
+
+And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to
+recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.
+The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of
+intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material
+object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object,
+it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves
+must die.
+
+Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was
+comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had
+any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my
+mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did
+not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular
+reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump
+little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they
+had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon,
+mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing
+morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked
+a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with
+it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I
+stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.
+An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached,
+with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life
+had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity
+illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has
+of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not
+in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental,
+mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was
+conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that
+it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the
+same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How
+could I seize upon and define it?
+
+I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the
+first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time
+to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object
+of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has
+called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat
+indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which
+I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon
+the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact and at my
+disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my
+own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss
+of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed
+beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region
+through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it
+nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something
+which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and
+substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
+
+And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this
+unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its
+existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a
+real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and
+vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts
+to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again
+the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make
+one further effort, to follow and recapture once again the fleeting
+sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out
+every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all
+attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling
+that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report,
+I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just
+denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before
+the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty
+space in front of it. I place in position before my mind's eye the still
+recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within
+me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise,
+something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I
+do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can
+measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
+
+Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must
+be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has
+tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too
+far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless
+reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of
+radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as
+the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its
+contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea;
+cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of
+what period in my past life.
+
+Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this
+memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment
+has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the
+very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has
+stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who
+can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task,
+must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which
+deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has
+urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely
+of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let
+themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind.
+
+And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb
+of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those
+mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good
+day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it
+first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the
+little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it;
+perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without
+tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image
+had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among
+others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned
+and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the
+forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry,
+so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either
+obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of
+expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my
+consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after
+the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still,
+alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more
+persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a
+long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their
+moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the
+tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of
+recollection.
+
+And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in
+her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I
+did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory
+made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where
+her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to
+the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out
+behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had
+been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to
+night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon,
+the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took
+when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling
+a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper
+which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they
+become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive
+shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable,
+so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park,
+and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and
+their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray
+and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid,
+sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+COMBRAY
+
+Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it
+from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no
+more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it
+and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about
+its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as
+a shepherd gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking
+houses, which a fragment of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and
+there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town
+in a primitive painting. To live in, Combray was a trifle depressing,
+like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackened stone of the
+country, fronted with outside steps, capped with gables which projected
+long shadows downwards, were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun
+began to go down, to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows;
+streets with the solemn names of Saints, not a few of whom figured
+in the history of the early lords of Combray, such as the Rue
+Saint-Hilaire, the Rue Saint-Jacques, in which my aunt's house stood,
+the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, which ran past her railings, and the Rue
+du Saint-Esprit, on to which the little garden gate opened; and these
+Combray streets exist in so remote a quarter of my memory, painted in
+colours so different from those in which the world is decked for me
+to-day, that in fact one and all of them, and the church which towered
+above them in the Square, seem to me now more unsubstantial than the
+projections of my magic-lantern; while at times I feel that to be able
+to cross the Rue Saint-Hilaire again, to engage a room in the Rue de
+l'Oiseau, in the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesché, from whose windows
+in the pavement used to rise a smell of cooking which rises still in
+my mind, now and then, in the same warm gusts of comfort, would be to
+secure a contact with the unseen world more marvellously supernatural
+than it would be to make Golo's acquaintance and to chat with Geneviève
+de Brabant.
+
+My grandfather's cousin--by courtesy my great-aunt--with whom we used
+to stay, was the mother of that aunt Léonie who, since her husband's (my
+uncle Octave's) death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray,
+then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed;
+and who now never 'came down,' but lay perpetually in an indefinite
+condition of grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions,
+and religious observances. Her own room looked out over the Rue
+Saint-Jacques, which ran a long way further to end in the Grand-Pré (as
+distinct from the Petit-Pré, a green space in the centre of the town
+where three streets met) and which, monotonous and grey, with the three
+high steps of stone before almost every one of its doors, seemed like a
+deep furrow cut by some sculptor of gothic images in the very block of
+stone out of which he had fashioned a Calvary or a Crib. My aunt's life
+was now practically confined to two adjoining rooms, in one of which she
+would rest in the afternoon while they aired the other. They were rooms
+of that country order which (just as in certain climes whole tracts of
+air or ocean are illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which
+we cannot see) fascinate our sense of smell with the countless odours
+springing from their own special virtues, wisdom, habits, a whole secret
+system of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which
+their atmosphere holds in solution; smells natural enough indeed, and
+coloured by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside,
+but already humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful,
+limpid jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left
+the orchard for the store-room, smells changing with the year, but
+plenishing, domestic smells, which compensate for the sharpness of hoar
+frost with the sweet savour of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as
+a village clock, roving smells, pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which
+brings only an increase of anxiety, and in a prosiness which serves as
+a deep source of poetry to the stranger who passes through their midst
+without having lived amongst them. The air of those rooms was saturated
+with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I
+could not enter them without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on
+those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could
+taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray: before
+I went in to wish my aunt good day I would be kept waiting a little time
+in the outer room, where the sun, a wintry sun still, had crept in to
+warm itself before the fire, lighted already between its two brick sides
+and plastering all the room and everything in it with a smell of soot,
+making the room like one of those great open hearths which one finds in
+the country, or one of the canopied mantelpieces in old castles under
+which one sits hoping that in the world outside it is raining or
+snowing, hoping almost for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of
+shelter and security to the comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to
+and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs, each
+one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking
+like a pie the appetising smells with which the air of the room was
+thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had
+already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed them and glazed them and
+fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable
+country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour
+the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells
+of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper
+I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the
+nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the
+flowered quilt.
+
+In the next room I could hear my aunt talking quietly to herself. She
+never spoke save in low tones, because she believed that there was
+something broken in her head and floating loose there, which she might
+displace by talking too loud; but she never remained for long, even when
+alone, without saying something, because she believed that it was good
+for her throat, and that by keeping the blood there in circulation it
+would make less frequent the chokings and other pains to which she
+was liable; besides, in the life of complete inertia which she led she
+attached to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance,
+endowed them with a Protean ubiquity which made it difficult for her to
+keep them secret, and, failing a confidant to whom she might communicate
+them, she used to promulgate them to herself in an unceasing monologue
+which was her sole form of activity. Unfortunately, having formed the
+habit of thinking aloud, she did not always take care to see that there
+was no one in the adjoining room, and I would often hear her saying
+to herself: "I must not forget that I never slept a wink"--for "never
+sleeping a wink" was her great claim to distinction, and one admitted
+and respected in our household vocabulary; in the morning Françoise
+would not 'call' her, but would simply 'come to' her; during the day,
+when my aunt wished to take a nap, we used to say just that she wished
+to 'be quiet' or to 'rest'; and when in conversation she so far forgot
+herself as to say "what made me wake up," or "I dreamed that," she would
+flush and at once correct herself.
+
+After waiting a minute, I would go in and kiss her; Françoise would
+be making her tea; or, if my aunt were feeling 'upset,' she would ask
+instead for her 'tisane,' and it would be my duty to shake out of
+the chemist's little package on to a plate the amount of lime-blossom
+required for infusion in boiling water. The drying of the stems had
+twisted them into a fantastic trellis, in whose intervals the pale
+flowers opened, as though a painter had arranged them there, grouping
+them in the most decorative poses. The leaves, which had lost or altered
+their own appearance, assumed those instead of the most incongruous
+things imaginable, as though the transparent wings of flies or the blank
+sides of labels or the petals of roses had been collected and pounded,
+or interwoven as birds weave the material for their nests. A
+thousand trifling little details--the charming prodigality of the
+chemist--details which would have been eliminated from an artificial
+preparation, gave me, like a book in which one is astonished to read the
+name of a person whom one knows, the pleasure of finding that these were
+indeed real lime-blossoms, like those I had seen, when coming from the
+train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered, but only because they were not
+imitations but the very same blossoms, which had grown old. And as each
+new character is merely a metamorphosis from something older, in these
+little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but
+beyond all else the rosy, moony, tender glow which lit up the blossoms
+among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden
+roses--marking, as the radiance upon an old wall still marks the place
+of a vanished fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree
+which had and those which had not been 'in bloom'--shewed me that these
+were petals which, before their flowering-time, the chemist's package
+had embalmed on warm evenings of spring. That rosy candlelight was still
+their colour, but half-extinguished and deadened in the diminished life
+which was now theirs, and which may be called the twilight of a flower.
+Presently my aunt was able to dip in the boiling infusion, in which she
+would relish the savour of dead or faded blossom, a little madeleine, of
+which she would hold out a piece to me when it was sufficiently soft.
+
+At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest-of-drawers of
+lemon-wood, and a table which served at once as pharmacy and as
+high altar, on which, beneath a statue of Our Lady and a bottle of
+Vichy-Célestins, might be found her service-books and her medical
+prescriptions, everything that she needed for the performance, in bed,
+of her duties to soul and body, to keep the proper times for pepsin and
+for vespers. On the other side her bed was bounded by the window: she
+had the street beneath her eyes, and would read in it from morning to
+night to divert the tedium of her life, like a Persian prince, the daily
+but immemorial chronicles of Combray, which she would discuss in detail
+afterwards with Françoise.
+
+I would not have been five minutes with my aunt before she would send me
+away in case I made her tired. She would hold out for me to kiss her sad
+brow, pale and lifeless, on which at this early hour she would not yet
+have arranged the false hair and through which the bones shone like the
+points of a crown of thorns--or the beads of a rosary, and she would say
+to me: "Now, my poor child, you must go away; go and get ready for
+mass; and if you see Françoise downstairs, tell her not to stay too
+long amusing herself with you; she must come up soon to see if I want
+anything."
+
+Françoise, who had been for many years in my aunt's service and did not
+at that time suspect that she would one day be transferred entirely to
+ours, was a little inclined to desert my aunt during the months which we
+spent in her house. There had been in my infancy, before we first went
+to Combray, and when my aunt Léonie used still to spend the winter in
+Paris with her mother, a time when I knew Françoise so little that on
+New Year's Day, before going into my great-aunt's house, my mother put
+a five-franc piece in my hand and said: "Now, be careful. Don't make
+any mistake. Wait until you hear me say 'Good morning, Françoise,' and
+I touch your arm before you give it to her." No sooner had we arrived
+in my aunt's dark hall than we saw in the gloom, beneath the frills of a
+snowy cap as stiff and fragile as if it had been made of spun sugar, the
+concentric waves of a smile of anticipatory gratitude. It was Françoise,
+motionless and erect, framed in the small doorway of the corridor like
+the statue of a saint in its niche. When we had grown more accustomed to
+this religious darkness we could discern in her features a disinterested
+love of all humanity, blended with a tender respect for the 'upper
+classes' which raised to the most honourable quarter of her heart the
+hope of receiving her due reward. Mamma pinched my arm sharply and said
+in a loud voice: "Good morning, Françoise." At this signal my fingers
+parted and I let fall the coin, which found a receptacle in a confused
+but outstretched hand. But since we had begun to go to Combray there was
+no one I knew better than Françoise. We were her favourites, and in the
+first years at least, while she shewed the same consideration for us
+as for my aunt, she enjoyed us with a keener relish, because we had, in
+addition to our dignity as part of 'the family' (for she had for those
+invisible bonds by which community of blood unites the members of a
+family as much respect as any Greek tragedian), the fresh charm of not
+being her customary employers. And so with what joy would she welcome
+us, with what sorrow complain that the weather was still so bad for us,
+on the day of our arrival, just before Easter, when there was often an
+icy wind; while Mamma inquired after her daughter and her nephews, and
+if her grandson was good-looking, and what they were going to make of
+him, and whether he took after his granny.
+
+Later, when no one else was in the room, Mamma, who knew that Françoise
+was still mourning for her parents, who had been dead for years, would
+speak of them kindly, asking her endless little questions about them and
+their lives.
+
+She had guessed that Françoise was not over-fond of her son-in-law, and
+that he spoiled the pleasure she found in visiting her daughter, as the
+two could not talk so freely when he was there. And so one day, when
+Françoise was going to their house, some miles from Combray, Mamma said
+to her, with a smile: "Tell me, Françoise, if Julien has had to go away,
+and you have Marguerite to yourself all day, you will be very sorry, but
+will make the best of it, won't you?"
+
+And Françoise answered, laughing: "Madame knows everything; Madame
+is worse than the X-rays" (she pronounced 'x' with an affectation
+of difficulty and with a smile in deprecation of her, an unlettered
+woman's, daring to employ a scientific term) "they brought here for Mme.
+Octave, which see what is in your heart"--and she went off, disturbed
+that anyone should be caring about her, perhaps anxious that we should
+not see her in tears: Mamma was the first person who had given her the
+pleasure of feeling that her peasant existence, with its simple joys
+and sorrows, might offer some interest, might be a source of grief or
+pleasure to some one other than herself.
+
+My aunt resigned herself to doing without Françoise to some extent
+during our visits, knowing how much my mother appreciated the services
+of so active and intelligent a maid, one who looked as smart at five
+o'clock in the morning in her kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and
+dazzling frills seemed to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for
+churchgoing; who did everything in the right way, who toiled like a
+horse, whether she was well or ill, but without noise, without the
+appearance of doing anything; the only one of my aunt's maids who when
+Mamma asked for hot water or black coffee would bring them actually
+boiling; she was one of those servants who in a household seem least
+satisfactory, at first, to a stranger, doubtless because they take
+no pains to make a conquest of him and shew him no special attention,
+knowing very well that they have no real need of him, that he will cease
+to be invited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it;
+who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and
+mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not
+look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability,
+which may impress a stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter
+barrenness of spirit in which no amount of training can produce the
+least trace of individuality.
+
+When Françoise, having seen that my parents had everything they
+required, first went upstairs again to give my aunt her pepsin and to
+find out from her what she would take for luncheon, very few mornings
+pased but she was called upon to give an opinion, or to furnish an
+explanation, in regard to some important event.
+
+"Just fancy, Françoise, Mme. Goupil went by more than a quarter of an
+hour late to fetch her sister: if she loses any more time on the way I
+should not be at all surprised if she got in after the Elevation."
+
+"Well, there'd be nothing wonderful in that," would be the answer. Or:
+
+"Françoise, if you had come in five minutes ago, you would have seen
+Mme. Imbert go past with some asparagus twice the size of what mother
+Callot has: do try to find out from her cook where she got them. You
+know you've been putting asparagus in all your sauces this spring; you
+might be able to get some like these for our visitors."
+
+"I shouldn't be surprised if they came from the Curé's," Françoise would
+say, and:
+
+"I'm sure you wouldn't, my poor Françoise," my aunt would reply, raising
+her shoulders. "From the Curé's, indeed! You know quite well that he
+can never grow anything but wretched little twigs of asparagus, not
+asparagus at all. I tell you these ones were as thick as my arm. Not
+your arm, of course, but my poor arm, which has grown so much thinner
+again this year." Or:
+
+"Françoise, didn't you hear that bell just now! It split my head."
+
+"No, Mme. Octave."
+
+"Ah, poor girl, your skull must be very thick; you may thank God for
+that. It was Maguelone come to fetch Dr. Piperaud. He came out with her
+at once and they went off along the Rue de l'Oiseau. There must be some
+child ill."
+
+"Oh dear, dear; the poor little creature!" would come with a sigh from
+Françoise, who could not hear of any calamity befalling a person unknown
+to her, even in some distant part of the world, without beginning to
+lament. Or:
+
+"Françoise, for whom did they toll the passing-bell just now? Oh dear,
+of course, it would be for Mme. Rousseau. And to think that I had
+forgotten that she passed away the other night. Indeed, it is time the
+Lord called me home too; I don't know what has become of my head since I
+lost my poor Octave. But I am wasting your time, my good girl."
+
+"Indeed no, Mme. Octave, my time is not so precious; whoever made our
+time didn't sell it to us. I am just going to see that my fire hasn't
+gone out."
+
+In this way Françoise and my aunt made a critical valuation between
+them, in the course of these morning sessions, of the earliest
+happenings of the day. But sometimes these happenings assumed so
+mysterious or so alarming an air that my aunt felt she could not wait
+until it was time for Françoise to come upstairs, and then a formidable
+and quadruple peal would resound through the house.
+
+"But, Mme. Octave, it is not time for your pepsin," Françoise would
+begin. "Are you feeling faint?"
+
+"No, thank you, Françoise," my aunt would reply, "that is to say, yes;
+for you know well that there is very seldom a time when I don't feel
+faint; one day I shall pass away like Mme. Rousseau, before I know where
+I am; but that is not why I rang. Would you believe that I have just
+seen, as plainly as I see you, Mme. Goupil with a little girl I didn't
+know at all. Run and get a pennyworth of salt from Camus. It's not often
+that Théodore can't tell you who a person is."
+
+"But that must be M. Pupin's daughter," Françoise would say, preferring
+to stick to an immediate explanation, since she had been perhaps twice
+already into Camus's shop that morning.
+
+"M. Pupin's daughter! Oh, that's a likely story, my poor Françoise. Do
+you think I should not have recognised M. Pupin's daughter!"
+
+"But I don't mean the big one, Mme. Octave; I mean the little girl, he
+one who goes to school at Jouy. I seem to have seen her once already this
+morning."
+
+"Oh, if that's what it is!" my aunt would say, "she must have come over
+for the holidays. Yes, that is it. No need to ask, she will have come
+over for the holidays. But then we shall soon see Mme. Sazerat come
+along and ring her sister's door-bell, for her luncheon. That will be
+it! I saw the boy from Galopin's go by with a tart. You will see that
+the tart was for Mme. Goupil."
+
+"Once Mme. Goupil has anyone in the house, Mme. Octave, you won't be
+long in seeing all her folk going in to their luncheon there, for it's
+not so early as it was," would be the answer, for Françoise, who was
+anxious to retire downstairs to look after our own meal, was not sorry
+to leave my aunt with the prospect of such a distraction.
+
+"Oh! not before midday!" my aunt would reply in a tone of resignation,
+darting an uneasy glance at the clock, but stealthily, so as not to let
+it be seen that she, who had renounced all earthly joys, yet found a
+keen satisfaction in learning that Mme. Goupil was expecting company to
+luncheon, though, alas, she must wait a little more than an hour still
+before enjoying the spectacle. "And it will come in the middle of
+my luncheon!" she would murmur to herself. Her luncheon was such a
+distraction in itself that she did not like any other to come at the
+same time. "At least, you will not forget to give me my creamed eggs on
+one of the flat plates?" These were the only plates which had pictures
+on them and my aunt used to amuse herself at every meal by reading the
+description on whichever might have been sent up to her. She would
+put on her spectacles and spell out: "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,"
+"Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp," and smile, and say "Very good indeed."
+
+"I may as well go across to Camus..." Françoise would hazard, seeing
+that my aunt had no longer any intention of sending her there.
+
+"No, no; it's not worth while now; it's certain to be the Pupin girl. My
+poor Françoise, I am sorry to have made you come upstairs for nothing."
+
+But it was not for nothing, as my aunt well knew, that she had rung for
+Françoise, since at Combray a person whom one 'didn't know at all' was
+as incredible a being as any mythological deity, and it was apt to be
+forgotten that after each occasion on which there had appeared in the
+Rue du Saint-Esprit or in the Square one of these bewildering phenomena,
+careful and exhaustive researches had invariably reduced the fabulous
+monster to the proportions of a person whom one 'did know,' either
+personally or in the abstract, in his or her civil status as being more
+or less closely related to some family in Combray. It would turn out to
+be Mme. Sauton's son discharged from the army, or the Abbé Perdreau's
+niece come home from her convent, or the Curé's brother, a tax-collector
+at Châteaudun, who had just retired on a pension or had come over to
+Combray for the holidays. On first noticing them you have been impressed
+by the thought that there might be in Combray people whom you 'didn't
+know at all,' simply because you had failed to recognise or identify
+them at once. And yet long beforehand Mme. Sauton and the Curé had given
+warning that they expected their 'strangers.' In the evening, when I
+came in and went upstairs to tell my aunt the incidents of our walk, if
+I was rash enough to say to her that we had passed, near the Pont-Vieux,
+a man whom my grandfather didn't know:
+
+"A man grandfather didn't know at all!" she would exclaim. "That's a
+likely story." None the less, she would be a little disturbed by
+the news, she would wish to have the details correctly, and so my
+grandfather would be summoned. "Who can it have been that you passed
+near the Pont-Vieux, uncle? A man you didn't know at all?"
+
+"Why, of course I did," my grandfather would answer; "it was Prosper,
+Mme. Bouilleboeuf's gardener's brother."
+
+"Ah, well!" my aunt would say, calm again but slightly flushed still;
+"and the boy told me that you had passed a man you didn't know at all!"
+After which I would be warned to be more careful of what I said, and not
+to upset my aunt so by thoughtless remarks. Everyone was so well known
+in Combray, animals as well as people, that if my aunt had happened to
+see a dog go by which she 'didn't know at all' she would think about it
+incessantly, devoting to the solution of the incomprehensible problem
+all her inductive talent and her leisure hours.
+
+"That will be Mme. Sazerat's dog," Françoise would suggest, without any
+real conviction, but in the hope of peace, and so that my aunt should
+not 'split her head.'
+
+"As if I didn't know Mme. Sazerat's dog!"--for my aunt's critical mind
+would not so easily admit any fresh fact.
+
+"Ah, but that will be the new dog M. Galopin has brought her from
+Lisieux."
+
+"Oh, if that's what it is!"
+
+"It seems, it's a most engaging animal," Françoise would go on, having
+got the story from Théodore, "as clever as a Christian, always in a good
+temper, always friendly, always everything that's nice. It's not often
+you see an animal so well-behaved at that age. Mme. Octave, it's high
+time I left you; I can't afford to stay here amusing myself; look, it's
+nearly ten o'clock and my fire not lighted yet, and I've still to dress
+the asparagus."
+
+"What, Françoise, more asparagus! It's a regular disease of asparagus
+you have got this year: you will make our Parisians sick of it."
+
+"No, no, Madame Octave, they like it well enough. They'll be coming back
+from church soon as hungry as hunters, and they won't eat it out of the
+back of their spoons, you'll see."
+
+"Church! why, they must be there now; you'd better not lose any time. Go
+and look after your luncheon."
+
+While my aunt gossiped on in this way with Françoise I would have
+accompanied my parents to mass. How I loved it: how clearly I can see it
+still, our church at Combray! The old porch by which we went in, black,
+and full of holes as a cullender, was worn out of shape and deeply
+furrowed at the sides (as also was the holy water stoup to which it led
+us) just as if the gentle grazing touch of the cloaks of peasant-women
+going into the church, and of their fingers dipping into the water, had
+managed by agelong repetition to acquire a destructive force, to impress
+itself on the stone, to carve ruts in it like those made by cart-wheels
+upon stone gate-posts against which they are driven every day. Its
+memorial stones, beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray,
+who were buried there, furnished the choir with a sort of spiritual
+pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time
+had softened and sweetened them, and had made them melt like honey
+and flow beyond their proper margins, either surging out in a milky,
+frothing wave, washing from its place a florid gothic capital, drowning
+the white violets of the marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their
+limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription,
+bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed
+characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest
+were disproportionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant
+as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside
+you might be certain of fine weather in church. One of them was
+filled from top to bottom by a solitary figure, like the king on a
+playing-card, who lived up there beneath his canopy of stone, between
+earth and heaven; and in the blue light of its slanting shadow, on
+weekdays sometimes, at noon, when there was no service (at one of those
+rare moments when the airy, empty church, more human somehow and more
+luxurious with the sun shewing off all its rich furnishings, seemed to
+have almost a habitable air, like the hall--all sculptured stone and
+painted glass--of some mediaeval mansion), you might see Mme. Sazerat
+kneel for an instant, laying down on the chair beside her own a neatly
+corded parcel of little cakes which she had just bought at the baker's
+and was taking home for her luncheon. In another, a mountain of rosy
+snow, at whose foot a battle was being fought, seemed to have frozen the
+window also, which it swelled and distorted with its cloudy sleet, like
+a pane to which snowflakes have drifted and clung, but flakes illumined
+by a sunrise--the same, doubtless, which purpled the reredos of the
+altar with tints so fresh that they seemed rather to be thrown on it for
+a moment by a light shining from outside and shortly to be extinguished
+than painted and permanently fastened on the stone. And all of them
+were so old that you could see, here and there, their silvery antiquity
+sparkling with the dust of centuries and shewing in its threadbare
+brilliance the very cords of their lovely tapestry of glass. There
+was one among them which was a tall panel composed of a hundred little
+rectangular windows, of blue principally, like a great game of patience
+of the kind planned to beguile King Charles VI; but, either because a
+ray of sunlight had gleamed through it or because my own shifting vision
+had drawn across the window, whose colours died away and were rekindled
+by turns, a rare and transient fire--the next instant it had taken on
+all the iridescence of a peacock's tail, then shook and wavered in a
+flaming and fantastic shower, distilled and dropping from the groin of
+the dark and rocky vault down the moist walls, as though it were
+along the bed of some rainbow grotto of sinuous stalactites that I was
+following my parents, who marched before me, their prayer-books clasped
+in their hands; a moment later the little lozenge windows had put on the
+deep transparence, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on
+some enormous breastplate; but beyond which could be distinguished,
+dearer than all such treasures, a fleeting smile from the sun, which
+could be seen and felt as well here, in the blue and gentle flood in
+which it washed the masonry, as on the pavement of the Square or the
+straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when we came
+down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness
+of the earth outside by making burst into blossom, as in some springtime
+in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded
+carpet of forget-me-nots in glass.
+
+Two tapestries of high warp represented the coronation of Esther (in
+which tradition would have it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the
+features of one of the kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of
+Guermantes whose lover he had been); their colours had melted into one
+another, so as to add expression, relief, light to the pictures. A touch
+of red over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the
+yellow on her dress was spread with such unctuous plumpness as to have
+acquired a kind of solidity, and stood boldly out from the receding
+atmosphere; while the green of the trees, which was still bright in silk
+and wool among the lower parts of the panel, but had quite 'gone' at the
+top, separated in a paler scheme, above the dark trunks, the yellowing
+upper branches, tanned and half-obliterated by the sharp though sidelong
+rays of an invisible sun. All these things and, still more than these,
+the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me
+were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was
+said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons
+of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of
+which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way
+to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with
+amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little
+people's supernatural passage--all these things made of the church for
+me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building
+which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space--the name of the
+fourth being Time--which had sailed the centuries with that old nave,
+where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across
+and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each
+successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant,
+hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness
+of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches,
+long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where,
+near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the
+tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful
+gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up
+sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves
+smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger
+brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked
+down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting
+down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through
+which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault,
+ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Théodore or his
+sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little
+daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been
+bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when
+the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the
+golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and
+with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried
+itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way."
+
+And then the apse of Combray: what am I to say of that? It was so
+coarse, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of the religious spirit. From
+outside, since the street crossing which it commanded was on a lower
+level, its great wall was thrust upwards from a basement of unfaced
+ashlar, jagged with flints, in all of which there was nothing
+particularly ecclesiastical; the windows seemed to have been pierced at
+an abnormal height, and its whole appearance was that of a prison wall
+rather than of a church. And certainly in later years, were I to recall
+all the glorious apses that I had seen, it would never enter my mind to
+compare with any one of them the apse of Combray. Only, one day,
+turning out of a little street in some country town, I came upon three
+alley-ways that converged, and facing them an old wall, rubbed, worn,
+crumbling, and unusually high; with windows pierced in it far overhead
+and the same asymmetrical appearance as the apse of Combray. And at that
+moment I did not say to myself, as at Chartres I might have done or at
+Rheims, with what strength the religious feeling had been expressed in
+its construction, but instinctively I exclaimed "The Church!"
+
+The church! A dear, familiar friend; close pressed in the Rue
+Saint-Hilaire, upon which its north door opened, by its two neighbours,
+Mme. Loiseau's house and the pharmacy of M. Rapin, against which its
+walls rested without interspace; a simple citizen of Combray, who might
+have had her number in the street had the streets of Combray borne
+numbers, and at whose door one felt that the postman ought to stop on
+his morning rounds, before going into Mme. Loiseau's and after leaving
+M. Rapin's, there existed, for all that, between the church and
+everything in Combray that was not the church a clear line of
+demarcation which I have never succeeded in eliminating from my mind.
+In vain might Mme. Loiseau deck her window-sills with fuchsias, which
+developed the bad habit of letting their branches trail at all times
+and in all directions, head downwards, and whose flowers had no more
+important business, when they were big enough to taste the joys of life,
+than to go and cool their purple, congested cheeks against the dark
+front of the church; to me such conduct sanctified the fuchsias not at
+all; between the flowers and the blackened stones towards which they
+leaned, if my eyes could discern no interval, my mind preserved the
+impression of an abyss.
+
+From a long way off one could distinguish and identify the steeple of
+Saint-Hilaire inscribing its unforgettable form upon a horizon beneath
+which Combray had not yet appeared; when from the train which brought
+us down from Paris at Easter-time my father caught sight of it, as it
+slipped into every fold of the sky in turn, its little iron cock veering
+continually in all directions, he would say: "Come, get your wraps
+together, we are there." And on one of the longest walks we ever took
+from Combray there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly
+on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by strips of forest over
+which rose and stood alone the fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple,
+but so sharpened and so pink that it seemed to be no more than sketched
+on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a
+landscape, to so pure a piece of 'nature,' this little sign of art, this
+single indication of human existence. As one drew near it and could make
+out the remains of the square tower, half in ruins, which still stood by
+its side, though without rivalling it in height, one was struck, first
+of all, by the tone, reddish and sombre, of its stones; and on a misty
+morning in autumn one would have called it, to see it rising above the
+violet thunder-cloud of the vineyards, a ruin of purple, almost the
+colour of the wild vine.
+
+Often in the Square, as we came home, my grandmother would make me stop
+to look up at it. From the tower windows, placed two and two, one pair
+above another, with that right and original proportion in their spacing
+to which not only human faces owe their beauty and dignity, it released,
+it let fall at regular intervals flights of jackdaws which for a little
+while would wheel and caw, as though the ancient stones which allowed
+them to sport thus and never seemed to see them, becoming of a sudden
+uninhabitable and discharging some infinitely disturbing element, had
+struck them and driven them forth. Then after patterning everywhere the
+violet velvet of the evening air, abruptly soothed, they would return
+and be absorbed in the tower, deadly no longer but benignant, some
+perching here and there (not seeming to move, but snapping, perhaps, and
+swallowing some passing insect) on the points of turrets, as a seagull
+perches, with an angler's immobility, on the crest of a wave. Without
+quite knowing why, my grandmother found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire
+that absence of vulgarity, pretension, and meanness which made her
+love--and deem rich in beneficent influences--nature itself, when the
+hand of man had not, as did my great-aunt's gardener, trimmed it, and
+the works of genius. And certainly every part one saw of the church
+served to distinguish the whole from any other building by a kind of
+general feeling which pervaded it, but it was in the steeple that
+the church seemed to display a consciousness of itself, to affirm its
+individual and responsible existence. It was the steeple which spoke for
+the church. I think, too, that in a confused way my grandmother found in
+the steeple of Combray what she prized above anything else in the
+world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinction. Ignorant of
+architecture, she would say:
+
+"My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful,
+but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it
+could play the piano, I am sure it would really _play_." And when she
+gazed on it, when her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent
+inclination of its stony slopes which drew together as they rose, like
+hands joined in prayer, she would absorb herself so utterly in the
+outpouring of the spire that her gaze seemed to leap upwards with it;
+her lips at the same time curving in a friendly smile for the worn old
+stones of which the setting sun now illumined no more than the topmost
+pinnacles, which, at the point where they entered that zone of sunlight
+and were softened and sweetened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly
+far higher, to have become truly remote, like a song whose singer breaks
+into falsetto, an octave above the accompanying air.
+
+It was the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which shaped and crowned and
+consecrated every occupation, every hour of the day, every point of view
+in the town. From my bedroom window I could discern no more than its
+base, which had been freshly covered with slates; but when on Sundays I
+saw these, in the hot light of a summer morning, blaze like a black sun
+I would say to myself: "Good heavens! nine o'clock! I must get ready for
+mass at once if I am to have time to go in and kiss aunt Léonie first,"
+and I would know exactly what was the colour of the sunlight upon the
+Square, I could feel the heat and dust of the market, the shade behind
+the blinds of the shop into which Mamma would perhaps go on her way
+to mass, penetrating its odour of unbleached calico, to purchase a
+handkerchief or something, of which the draper himself would let her see
+what he had, bowing from the waist: who, having made everything ready
+for shutting up, had just gone into the back shop to put on his Sunday
+coat and to wash his hands, which it was his habit, every few minutes
+and even on the saddest occasions, to rub one against the other with an
+air of enterprise, cunning, and success.
+
+And again, after mass, when we looked in to tell Théodore to bring a
+larger loaf than usual because our cousins had taken advantage of the
+fine weather to come over from Thiberzy for luncheon, we had in front of
+us the steeple, which, baked and brown itself like a larger loaf still
+of 'holy bread,' with flakes and sticky drops on it of sunlight, pricked
+its sharp point into the blue sky. And in the evening, as I came in from
+my walk and thought of the approaching moment when I must say good night
+to my mother and see her no more, the steeple was by contrast so kindly,
+there at the close of day, that I would imagine it as being laid, like a
+brown velvet cushion, against--as being thrust into the pallid sky which
+had yielded beneath its pressure, had sunk slightly so as to make room
+for it, and had correspondingly risen on either side; while the cries of
+the birds wheeling to and fro about it seemed to intensify its silence,
+to elongate its spire still further, and to invest it with some quality
+beyond the power of words.
+
+Even when our errands lay in places behind the church, from which it
+could not be seen, the view seemed always to have been composed with
+reference to the steeple, which would stand up, now here, now there,
+among the houses, and was perhaps even more affecting when it appeared
+thus without the church. And, indeed, there are many others which
+look best when seen in this way, and I can call to mind vignettes of
+housetops with surmounting steeples in quite another category of art
+than those formed by the dreary streets of Combray. I shall never
+forget, in a quaint Norman town not far from Balbec, two charming
+eighteenth-century houses, dear to me and venerable for many reasons,
+between which, when one looks up at them from a fine garden which
+descends in terraces to the river, the gothic spire of a church (itself
+hidden by the houses) soars into the sky with the effect of crowning and
+completing their fronts, but in a material so different, so precious, so
+beringed, so rosy, so polished, that it is at once seen to be no more
+a part of them than would be a part of two pretty pebbles lying side
+by side, between which it had been washed on the beach, the purple,
+crinkled spire of some sea-shell spun out into a turret and gay with
+glossy colour. Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the town, I
+know a window from which one can see across a first, a second, and even
+a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street, a violet bell,
+sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest 'prints' which the
+atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black; which is, in fact,
+nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this
+view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome. But
+since into none of these little etchings, whatever the taste my
+memory may have been able to bring to their execution, was it able to
+contribute an element I have long lost, the feeling which makes us not
+merely regard a thing as a spectacle, but believe in it as in a creature
+without parallel, so none of them keeps in dependence on it a whole
+section of my inmost life as does the memory of those aspects of the
+steeple of Combray from the streets behind the church. Whether one saw
+it at five o'clock when going to call for letters at the post-office,
+some doors away from one, on the left, raising abruptly with its
+isolated peak the ridge of housetops; or again, when one had to go in
+and ask for news of Mme. Sazerat, one's eyes followed the line where it
+ran low again beyond the farther, descending slope, and one knew that it
+would be the second turning after the steeple; or yet again, if pressing
+further afield one went to the station, one saw it obliquely, shewing in
+profile fresh angles and surfaces, like a solid body surprised at some
+unknown point in its revolution; or, from the banks of the Vivonne, the
+apse, drawn muscularly together and heightened in perspective, seemed
+to spring upwards with the effort which the steeple made to hurl its
+spire-point into the heart of heaven: it was always to the steeple that
+one must return, always it which dominated everything else, summing up
+the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger
+of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of
+human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with
+them. And so even to-day in any large provincial town, or in a quarter
+of Paris which I do not know well, if a passer-by who is 'putting me on
+the right road' shews me from afar, as a point to aim at, some belfry of
+a hospital, or a convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical
+cap at the corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need only
+find in it some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and
+the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone
+astray, would see me, to his astonishment, oblivious of the walk that I
+had planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call, standing
+still on the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless,
+trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed
+from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it
+again; and then no doubt, and then more uneasily than when, just now,
+I asked him for a direction, I will seek my way again, I will turn a
+corner... but... the goal is in my heart...
+
+On our way home from mass we would often meet M. Legrandin, who,
+detained in Paris by his professional duties as an engineer, could
+only (except in the regular holiday seasons) visit his home at Combray
+between Saturday evenings and Monday mornings. He was one of that class
+of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have
+proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different
+kind of culture, literary or artistic, of which they make no use in the
+specialised work of their profession, but by which their conversation
+profits. More 'literary' than many 'men of letters' (we were not aware
+at this period that M. Legrandin had a distinct reputation as a writer,
+and so were greatly astonished to find that a well-known composer
+had set some verses of his to music), endowed with a greater ease
+in execution than many painters, they imagine that the life they are
+obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they
+bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or
+a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.
+Tall, with a good figure, a fine, thoughtful face, drooping fair
+moustaches, a look of disillusionment in his blue eyes, an almost
+exaggerated refinement of courtesy; a talker such as we had never heard;
+he was in the sight of my family, who never ceased to quote him as an
+example, the very pattern of a gentleman, who took life in the noblest
+and most delicate manner. My grandmother alone found fault with him for
+speaking a little too well, a little too much like a book, for not using
+a vocabulary as natural as his loosely knotted Lavallière neckties, his
+short, straight, almost schoolboyish coat. She was astonished, too, at
+the furious invective which he was always launching at the aristocracy,
+at fashionable life, and 'snobbishness'--"undoubtedly," he would say,
+"the sin of which Saint Paul is thinking when he speaks of the sin for
+which there is no forgiveness."
+
+Worldly ambition was a thing which my grandmother was so little capable
+of feeling, or indeed of understanding, that it seemed to her futile to
+apply so much heat to its condemnation. Besides, she thought it in not
+very good taste that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country
+gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver himself of such
+violent attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the Revolution
+for not having guillotined them all.
+
+"Well met, my friends!" he would say as he came towards us. "You are
+lucky to spend so much time here; to-morrow I have to go back to Paris,
+to squeeze back into my niche.
+
+"Oh, I admit," he went on, with his own peculiar smile, gently ironical,
+disillusioned and vague, "I have every useless thing in the world in
+my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great
+patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above
+your life, little boy," he added, turning to me. "You have a soul in
+you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of
+what it needs."
+
+When, on our reaching the house, my aunt would send to ask us whether
+Mme. Goupil had indeed arrived late for mass, not one of us could inform
+her. Instead, we increased her anxiety by telling her that there was
+a painter at work in the church copying the window of Gilbert the
+Bad. Françoise was at once dispatched to the grocer's, but returned
+empty-handed owing to the absence of Théodore, whose dual profession of
+choirman, with a part in the maintenance of the fabric, and of grocer's
+assistant gave him not only relations with all sections of society, but
+an encyclopaedic knowledge of their affairs.
+
+"Ah!" my aunt would sigh, "I wish it were time for Eulalie to come. She
+is really the only person who will be able to tell me."
+
+Eulalie was a limping, energetic, deaf spinster who had 'retired' after
+the death of Mme. de la Bretonnerie, with whom she had been in service
+from her childhood, and had then taken a room beside the church, from
+which she would incessantly emerge, either to attend some service,
+or, when there was no service, to say a prayer by herself or to give
+Théodore a hand; the rest of her time she spent in visiting sick persons
+like my aunt Léonie, to whom she would relate everything that had
+occurred at mass or vespers. She was not above adding occasional
+pocket-money to the little income which was found for her by the family
+of her old employers by going from time to time to look after the Curé's
+linen, or that of some other person of note in the clerical world of
+Combray. Above a mantle of black cloth she wore a little white coif that
+seemed almost to attach her to some Order, and an infirmity of the
+skin had stained part of her cheeks and her crooked nose the bright red
+colour of balsam. Her visits were the one great distraction in the life
+of my aunt Léonie, who now saw hardly anyone else, except the reverend
+Curé. My aunt had by degrees erased every other visitor's name from
+her list, because they all committed the fatal error, in her eyes,
+of falling into one or other of the two categories of people she most
+detested. One group, the worse of the two, and the one of which she rid
+herself first, consisted of those who advised her not to take so much
+care of herself, and preached (even if only negatively and with no
+outward signs beyond an occasional disapproving silence or doubting
+smile) the subversive doctrine that a sharp walk in the sun and a good
+red beefsteak would do her more good (her, who had had two dreadful sips
+of Vichy water on her stomach for fourteen hours!) than all her medicine
+bottles and her bed. The other category was composed of people who
+appeared to believe that she was more seriously ill than she thought,
+in fact that she was as seriously ill as she said. And so none of those
+whom she had allowed upstairs to her room, after considerable hesitation
+and at Françoise's urgent request, and who in the course of their visit
+had shewn how unworthy they were of the honour which had been done them
+by venturing a timid: "Don't you think that if you were just to stir out
+a little on really fine days...?" or who, on the other hand, when she
+said to them: "I am very low, very low; nearing the end, dear friends!"
+had replied: "Ah, yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you may
+last a while yet"; each party alike might be certain that her doors
+would never open to them again. And if Françoise was amused by the look
+of consternation on my aunt's face whenever she saw, from her bed, any
+of these people in the Rue du Saint-Esprit, who looked as if they were
+coming to see her, or heard her own door-bell ring, she would laugh far
+more heartily, as at a clever trick, at my aunt's devices (which never
+failed) for having them sent away, and at their look of discomfiture
+when they had to turn back without having seen her; and would be filled
+with secret admiration for her mistress, whom she felt to be superior
+to all these other people, inasmuch as she could and did contrive not to
+see them. In short, my aunt stipulated, at one and the same time, that
+whoever came to see her must approve of her way of life, commiserate
+with her in her sufferings, and assure her of an ultimate recovery.
+
+In all this Eulalie excelled. My aunt might say to her twenty times in
+a minute: "The end is come at last, my poor Eulalie!", twenty times
+Eulalie would retort with: "Knowing your illness as you do, Mme.
+Octave, you will live to be a hundred, as Mme. Sazerin said to me only
+yesterday." For one of Eulalie's most rooted beliefs, and one that the
+formidable list of corrections which her experience must have compiled
+was powerless to eradicate, was that Mme. Sazerat's name was really Mme.
+Sazerin.
+
+"I do not ask to live to a hundred," my aunt would say, for she
+preferred to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.
+
+And since, besides this, Eulalie knew, as no one else knew, how to
+distract my aunt without tiring her, her visits, which took place
+regularly every Sunday, unless something unforeseen occurred to prevent
+them, were for my aunt a pleasure the prospect of which kept her on
+those days in a state of expectation, appetising enough to begin with,
+but at once changing to the agony of a hunger too long unsatisfied if
+Eulalie were a minute late in coming. For, if unduly prolonged, the
+rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture, and my aunt would never
+cease from looking at the time, and yawning, and complaining of each of
+her symptoms in turn. Eulalie's ring, if it sounded from the front door
+at the very end of the day, when she was no longer expecting it, would
+almost make her ill. For the fact was that on Sundays she thought of
+nothing else than this visit, and the moment that our luncheon was ended
+Françoise would become impatient for us to leave the dining-room so that
+she might go upstairs to 'occupy' my aunt. But--and this more than ever
+from the day on which fine weather definitely set in at Combray--the
+proud hour of noon, descending from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which
+it blazoned for a moment with the twelve points of its sonorous crown,
+would long have echoed about our table, beside the 'holy bread,' which
+too had come in, after church, in its familiar way; and we would still
+be found seated in front of our Arabian Nights plates, weighed down
+by the heat of the day, and even more by our heavy meal. For upon
+the permanent foundation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, preserves, and
+biscuits, whose appearance on the table she no longer announced to us,
+Françoise would add--as the labour of fields and orchards, the harvest
+of the tides, the luck of the markets, the kindness of neighbours, and
+her own genius might provide; and so effectively that our bill of fare,
+like the quatrefoils that were carved on the porches of cathedrals
+in the thirteenth century, reflected to some extent the march of the
+seasons and the incidents of human life--a brill, because the fish-woman
+had guaranteed its freshness; a turkey, because she had seen a beauty
+in the market at Roussainville-le-Pin; cardoons with marrow, because she
+had never done them for us in that way before; a roast leg of mutton,
+because the fresh air made one hungry and there would be plenty of time
+for it to 'settle down' in the seven hours before dinner; spinach,
+by way of a change; apricots, because they were still hard to get;
+gooseberries, because in another fortnight there would be none left;
+raspberries, which M. Swann had brought specially; cherries, the first
+to come from the cherry-tree, which had yielded none for the last two
+years; a cream cheese, of which in those days I was extremely fond; an
+almond cake, because she had ordered one the evening before; a fancy
+loaf, because it was our turn to 'offer' the holy bread. And when all
+these had been eaten, a work composed expressly for ourselves, but
+dedicated more particularly to my father, who had a fondness for such
+things, a cream of chocolate, inspired in the mind, created by the
+hand of Françoise, would be laid before us, light and fleeting as an
+'occasional piece' of music, into which she had poured the whole of her
+talent. Anyone who refused to partake of it, saying: "No, thank you, I
+have finished; I am not hungry," would at once have been lowered to the
+level of the Philistines who, when an artist makes them a present of one
+of his works, examine its weight and material, whereas what is of value
+is the creator's intention and his signature. To have left even the
+tiniest morsel in the dish would have shewn as much discourtesy as to
+rise and leave a concert hall while the 'piece' was still being played,
+and under the composer's very eyes.
+
+At length my mother would say to me: "Now, don't stay here all day;
+you can go up to your room if you are too hot outside, but get a little
+fresh air first; don't start reading immediately after your food."
+
+And I would go and sit down beside the pump and its trough, ornamented
+here and there, like a gothic font, with a salamander, which modelled
+upon a background of crumbling stone the quick relief of its slender,
+allegorical body; on the bench without a back, in the shade of a
+lilac-tree, in that little corner of the garden which communicated, by
+a service door, with the Rue du Saint-Esprit, and from whose neglected
+soil rose, in two stages, an outcrop from the house itself and
+apparently a separate building, my aunt's back-kitchen. One could see
+its red-tiled floor gleaming like porphyry. It seemed not so much the
+cave of Françoise as a little temple of Venus. It would be overflowing
+with the offerings of the milkman, the fruiterer, the greengrocer, come
+sometimes from distant villages to dedicate here the first-fruits of
+their fields. And its roof was always surmounted by the cooing of a
+dove.
+
+In earlier days I would not have lingered in the sacred grove which
+surrounded this temple, for, before going upstairs to read, I would
+steal into the little sitting-room which my uncle Adolphe, a brother of
+my grandfather and an old soldier who had retired from the service as a
+major, used to occupy on the ground floor, a room which, even when its
+opened windows let in the heat, if not actually the rays of the sun
+which seldom penetrated so far, would never fail to emit that vague and
+yet fresh odour, suggesting at once an open-air and an old-fashioned
+kind of existence, which sets and keeps the nostrils dreaming when one
+goes into a disused gun-room. But for some years now I had not gone into
+my uncle Adolphe's room, since he no longer came to Combray on account
+of a quarrel which had arisen between him and my family, by my fault,
+and in the following circumstances: Once or twice every month, in Paris,
+I used to be sent to pay him a. visit, as he was finishing his luncheon,
+wearing a plain alpaca coat, and waited upon by his servant in a
+working-jacket of striped linen, purple and white. He would complain
+that I had not been to see him for a long time; that he was being
+neglected; he would offer me a marchpane or a tangerine, and we would
+cross a room in which no one ever sat, whose fire was never lighted,
+whose walls were picked out with gilded mouldings, its ceiling painted
+blue in imitation of the sky, and its furniture upholstered in satin, as
+at my grandparents', only yellow; then we would enter what he called his
+'study,' a room whose walls were hung with prints which shewed, against
+a dark background, a plump and rosy goddess driving a car, or standing
+upon a globe, or wearing a star on her brow; pictures which were popular
+under the Second Empire because there was thought to be something about
+them that suggested Pompeii, which were then generally despised, and
+which now people are beginning to collect again for one single and
+consistent reason (despite any others which they may advance), namely,
+that they suggest the Second Empire. And there I would stay with my
+uncle until his man came, with a message from the coachman, to ask him
+at what time he would like the carriage. My uncle would then be lost
+in meditation, while his astonished servant stood there, not daring to
+disturb him by the least movement, wondering and waiting for his
+answer, which never varied. For in the end, after a supreme crisis of
+hesitation, my uncle would utter, infallibly, the words: "A quarter past
+two," which the servant would echo with amazement, but without disputing
+them: "A quarter past two! Very good, sir... I will go and tell him...."
+
+At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, of
+necessity, since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and
+so incorrect was the picture I drew for myself of the pleasures to be
+enjoyed there that I almost believed that each of the spectators looked,
+as into a stereoscope, upon a stage and scenery which existed for
+himself alone, though closely resembling the thousand other spectacles
+presented to the rest of the audience individually.
+
+Every morning I would hasten to the Moriss column to see what new plays
+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
+the one hand, a play of dazzling arrogance, and on the other a gentle,
+velvety play, that I was as little capable of deciding which play I
+should prefer to see as if, at the dinner-table, they had obliged me to
+choose between _rice à l'Impératrice_ and the famous cream of chocolate.
+
+All my conversations with my playfellows bore upon actors, whose art,
+although as yet I had no experience of it, was the first of all its
+numberless forms in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its
+enjoyment. Between one actor's tricks of intonation and inflection and
+another's, the most trifling differences would strike me as being of an
+incalculable importance. And from what I had been told of them I would
+arrange them in the order of their talent in lists which I used to
+murmur to myself all day long: lists which in the end became petrified
+in my brain and were a source of annoyance to it, being irremovable.
+
+And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in class, when the
+master's head was turned, to communicate with some new friend, I would
+always begin by asking him whether he had begun yet to go to theatres,
+and if he agreed that our greatest actor was undoubtedly Got, our second
+Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his judgment, Febvre came below Thiron,
+or Delaunay below Coquelin, the sudden volatility which the name of
+Coquelin, forsaking its stony rigidity, would engender in my mind, in
+which it moved upwards to the second place, the rich vitality with which
+the name of Delaunay would suddenly be furnished, to enable it to slip
+down to fourth, would stimulate and fertilise my brain with a sense of
+budding and blossoming life.
+
+But if the thought of actors weighed so upon me, if the sight of
+Maubant, coming out one afternoon from the Théâtre-Français, had plunged
+me in the throes and sufferings of hopeless love, how much more did the
+name of a 'star,' blazing outside the doors of a theatre, how much more,
+seen through the window of a brougham which passed me in the street, the
+hair over her forehead abloom with roses, did the face of a woman who,
+I would think, was perhaps an actress, leave with me a lasting
+disturbance, a futile and painful effort to form a picture of her
+private life.
+
+I classified, in order of talent, the most distinguished: Sarah
+Bernhardt, Berma, Bartet, Madeleine Brohan, Jeanne Samary; but I was
+interested in them all. Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and
+also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses
+in my mind. He used to entertain them at his house. And if we went to
+see him on certain days only, that was because on the other days ladies
+might come whom his family could not very well have met. So we at least
+thought; as for my uncle, his fatal readiness to pay pretty widows (who
+had perhaps never been married) and countesses (whose high-sounding
+titles were probably no more than _noms de guerre_) the compliment of
+presenting them to my grandmother or even of presenting to them some
+of our family jewels, had already embroiled him more than once with
+my grandfather. Often, if the name of some actress were mentioned in
+conversation, I would hear my father say, with a smile, to my mother:
+"One of your uncle's friends," and I would think of the weary novitiate
+through which, perhaps for years on end, a grown man, even a man of real
+importance, might have to pass, waiting on the doorstep of some such
+lady, while she refused to answer his letters and made her hall-porter
+drive him away; and imagine that my uncle was able to dispense a little
+jackanapes like myself from all these sufferings by introducing me in
+his own home to the actress, unapproachable by all the world, but for
+him an intimate friend.
+
+And so--on the pretext that some lesson, the hour of which had been
+altered, now came at such an awkward time that it had already more than
+once prevented me, and would continue to prevent me, from seeing my
+uncle--one day, not one of the days which he set apart for our visits, I
+took advantage of the fact that my parents had had luncheon earlier
+than usual; I slipped out and, instead of going to read the playbills on
+their column, for which purpose I was allowed to go out unaccompanied,
+I ran all the way to his house. I noticed before his door a carriage and
+pair, with red carnations on the horses' blinkers and in the coachman's
+buttonhole. As I climbed the staircase I could hear laughter and a
+woman's voice, and, as soon as I had rung, silence and the sound of
+shutting doors. The man-servant who let me in appeared embarrassed, and
+said that my uncle was extremely busy and probably could not see me; he
+went in, however, to announce my arrival, and the same voice I had heard
+before said: "Oh, yes! Do let him come in; just for a moment; it will be
+so amusing. Is that his photograph there, on your desk? And his mother
+(your niece, isn't she?) beside it? The image of her, isn't he? I should
+so like to see the little chap, just for a second."
+
+I could hear my uncle grumbling and growing angry; finally the
+manservant told me to come in.
+
+On the table was the same plate of marchpanes that was always there; my
+uncle wore the same alpaca coat as on other days; but opposite to him,
+in a pink silk dress with a great necklace of pearls about her throat,
+sat a young woman who was just finishing a tangerine. My uncertainty
+whether I ought to address her as Madame or Mademoiselle made me blush,
+and not daring to look too much in her direction, in case I should be
+obliged to speak to her, I hurried across to kiss my uncle. She looked
+at me and smiled; my uncle said "My nephew!" without telling her my name
+or telling me hers, doubtless because, since his difficulties with
+my grandfather, he had endeavoured as far as possible to avoid any
+association of his family with this other class of acquaintance.
+
+"How like his mother he is," said the lady.
+
+"But you have never seen my niece, except in photographs," my uncle
+broke in quickly, with a note of anger.
+
+"I beg your pardon, dear friend, I passed her on the staircase last year
+when you were so ill. It is true I only saw her for a moment, and your
+staircase is rather dark; but I saw well enough to see how lovely she
+was. This young gentleman has her beautiful eyes, and also this," she
+went on, tracing a line with one finger across the lower part of her
+forehead. "Tell me," she asked my uncle, "is your niece Mme.----; is her
+name the same as yours?"
+
+"He takes most after his father," muttered my uncle, who was no more
+anxious to effect an introduction by proxy, in repeating Mamma's name
+aloud, than to bring the two together in the flesh. "He's his father all
+over, and also like my poor mother."
+
+"I have not met his father, dear," said the lady in pink, bowing her
+head slightly, "and I never saw your poor mother. You will remember it
+was just after your great sorrow that we got to know one another."
+
+I felt somewhat disillusioned, for this young lady was in no way
+different from other pretty women whom I had seen from time to time at
+home, especially the daughter of one of our cousins, to whose house I
+went every New Year's Day. Only better dressed; otherwise my uncle's
+friend had the same quick and kindly glance, the same frank and friendly
+manner. I could find no trace in her of the theatrical appearance
+which I admired in photographs of actresses, nothing of the diabolical
+expression which would have been in keeping with the life she must lead.
+I had difficulty in believing that this was one of 'those women,' and
+certainly I should never have believed her one of the 'smart ones' had I
+not seen the carriage and pair, the pink dress, the pearly necklace, had
+I not been aware, too, that my uncle knew only the very best of them.
+But I asked myself how the millionaire who gave her her carriage and her
+flat and her jewels could find any pleasure in flinging his money away
+upon a woman who had so simple and respectable an appearance. And yet,
+when I thought of what her life must be like, its immorality disturbed
+me more, perhaps, than if it had stood before me in some concrete and
+recognisable form, by its secrecy and invisibility, like the plot of a
+novel, the hidden truth of a scandal which had driven out of the home
+of her middle-class parents and dedicated to the service of all mankind
+which had brought to the flowering-point of her beauty, had raised
+to fame or notoriety this woman, the play of whose features, the
+intonations of whose voice, like so many others I already knew, made me
+regard her, in spite of myself, as a young lady of good family, her who
+was no longer of a family at all.
+
+We had gone by this time into the 'study,' and my uncle, who seemed a
+trifle embarrassed by my presence, offered her a cigarette.
+
+"No, thank you, dear friend," she said. "You know I only smoke the ones
+the Grand Duke sends me. I tell him that they make you jealous." And
+she drew from a case cigarettes covered with inscriptions in gold, in
+a foreign language. "Why, yes," she began again suddenly. "Of course I
+have met this young man's father with you. Isn't he your nephew? How on
+earth could I have forgotten? He was so nice, so charming to me," she
+went on, modestly and with feeling. But when I thought to myself what
+must actually have been the rude greeting (which, she made out, had been
+so charming), I, who knew my father's coldness and reserve, was shocked,
+as though at some indelicacy on his part, at the contrast between the
+excessive recognition bestowed on it and his never adequate geniality.
+It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part
+played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote
+all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of
+sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realise
+the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame
+of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the
+fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched
+and ill-polished lives of men. And just as this one filled the
+smoking-room, where my uncle was entertaining her in his alpaca coat,
+with her charming person, her dress of pink silk, her pearls, and the
+refinement suggested by intimacy with a Grand Duke, so, in the same
+way, she had taken some casual remark by my father, had worked it up
+delicately, given it a 'turn,' a precious title, set in it the gem of a
+glance from her own eyes, a gem of the first water, blended of humility
+and gratitude; and so had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work
+of art, into something altogether charming.
+
+"Look here, my boy, it is time you went away," said my uncle.
+
+I rose; I could scarcely resist a desire to kiss the hand of the lady
+in pink, but I felt that to do so would require as much audacity as a
+forcible abduction of her. My heart beat loud while I counted out to
+myself "Shall I do it, shall I not?" and then I ceased to ask myself
+what I ought to do so as at least to do something. Blindly, hotly,
+madly, flinging aside all the reasons I had just found to support such
+action, I seized and raised to my lips the hand she held out to me.
+
+"Isn't he delicious! Quite a ladies' man already; he takes after his
+uncle. He'll be a perfect 'gentleman,'" she went on, setting her teeth
+so as to give the word a kind of English accentuation. "Couldn't he come
+to me some day for 'a cup of tea,' as our friends across the channel
+say; he need only send me a 'blue' in the morning?"
+
+I had not the least idea of what a 'blue' might be. I did not understand
+half the words which the lady used, but my fear lest there should be
+concealed in them some question which it would be impolite in me not to
+answer kept me from withdrawing my close attention from them, and I was
+beginning to feel extremely tired.
+
+"No, no; it is impossible," said my uncle, shrugging his shoulders. "He
+is kept busy at home all day; he has plenty of work to do. He brings
+back all the prizes from his school," he added in a lower tone, so that
+I should not hear this falsehood and interrupt with a contradiction.
+"You can't tell; he may turn out a little Victor Hugo, a kind of
+Vaulabelle, don't you know."
+
+"Oh, I love artistic people," replied the lady in pink; "there is no
+one like them for understanding women. Them, and really nice men like
+yourself. But please forgive my ignorance. Who, what is Vaulabelle? Is
+it those gilt books in the little glass case in your drawing-room? You
+know you promised to lend them to me; I will take great care of them."
+
+My uncle, who hated lending people books, said nothing, and ushered me
+out into the hall. Madly in love with the lady in pink, I covered my
+old uncle's tobacco-stained cheeks with passionate kisses, and while he,
+awkwardly enough, gave me to understand (without actually saying) that
+he would rather I did not tell my parents about this visit, I assured
+him, with tears in my eyes, that his kindness had made so strong an
+impression upon me that some day I would most certainly find a way of
+expressing my gratitude. So strong an impression had it made upon me
+that two hours later, after a string of mysterious utterances which did
+not strike me as giving my parents a sufficiently clear idea of the new
+importance with which I had been invested, I found it simpler to let
+them have a full account, omitting no detail, of the visit I had paid
+that afternoon. In doing this I had no thought of causing my uncle any
+unpleasantness. How could I have thought such a thing, since I did not
+wish it? And I could not suppose that my parents would see any harm in
+a visit in which I myself saw none. Every day of our lives does not
+some friend or other ask us to make his apologies, without fail, to some
+woman to whom he has been prevented from writing; and do not we forget
+to do so, feeling that this woman cannot attach much importance to a
+silence which has none for ourselves? I imagined, like everyone else,
+that the brains of other people were lifeless and submissive receptacles
+with no power of specific reaction to any stimulus which might be
+applied to them; and I had not the least doubt that when I deposited in
+the minds of my parents the news of the acquaintance I had made at my
+uncle's I should at the same time transmit to them the kindly judgment
+I myself had based on the introduction. Unfortunately my parents had
+recourse to principles entirely different from those which I suggested
+they should adopt when they came to form their estimate of my uncle's
+conduct. My father and grandfather had 'words' with him of a violent
+order; as I learned indirectly. A few days later, passing my uncle in
+the street as he drove by in an open carriage, Î felt at once all the
+grief, the gratitude, the remorse which I should have liked to convey to
+him. Beside the immensity of these emotions I considered that merely to
+raise my hat to him would be incongruous and petty, and might make
+him think that I regarded myself as bound to shew him no more than the
+commonest form of courtesy. I decided to abstain from so inadequate a
+gesture, and turned my head away. My uncle thought that, in doing so I
+was obeying my parents' orders; he never forgave them; and though he
+did not die until many years later, not one of us ever set eyes on him
+again.
+
+And so I no longer used to go into the little sitting-room (now kept
+shut) of my uncle Adolphe; instead, after hanging about on the outskirts
+of the back-kitchen until Françoise appeared on its threshold and
+announced: "I am going to let the kitchen-maid serve the coffee and take
+up the hot water; it is time I went off to Mme. Octave," I would then
+decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read.
+The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution
+to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and
+continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human
+shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the
+same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such
+quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to dress
+them was a poor sickly creature, some way 'gone' in pregnancy when
+we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that
+Françoise allowed her to run so many errands in the town and to do so
+much work in the house, for she was beginning to find a difficulty in
+bearing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger every day,
+whose splendid outline could be detected through the folds of her ample
+smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of
+the allegorical figures in his paintings, of which M. Swann had given
+me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he
+inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: "Well, how goes it with
+Giotto's Charity?" And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled
+and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical,
+squared outlines of her cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins,
+so strong and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are
+personified in the Arena Chapel. And I can see now that those Virtues
+and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just as
+the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which
+she carried in her body, without appearing to understand what it meant,
+without any rendering in her facial expression of all its beauty and
+spiritual significance, but carried as if it were an ordinary and rather
+heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is
+about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena
+beneath the label 'Caritas,' and a reproduction of whose portrait hung
+upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, incarnates that virtue, for
+it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever have found
+expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the
+painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at
+her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to
+extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on a heap of
+sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart
+to God, or shall we say 'handing' it to Him, exactly as a cook might
+hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen to
+some one who had called down to ask her for it from the ground-level
+above. The 'Invidia,' again, should have had some look on her face of
+envy. But in this fresco, too, the symbol occupies so large a place and
+is represented with such realism; the serpent hissing between the lips
+of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that
+the muscles of her face are strained and contorted, like a child's who
+is filling a balloon with his breath, and that Envy, and we ourselves
+for that matter, when we look at her, since all her attention and ours
+are concentrated on the action of her lips, have no time, almost, to
+spare for envious thoughts.
+
+Despite all the admiration that M. Swann might profess for these figures
+of Giotto, it was a long time before I could find any pleasure in seeing
+in our schoolroom (where the copies he had brought me were hung) that
+Charity devoid of charity, that Envy who looked like nothing so much
+as a plate in some medical book, illustrating the compression of the
+glottis or uvula by a tumour in the tongue, or by the introduction of
+the operator's instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular
+features were the very same as those which adorned the faces of certain
+good and pious and slightly withered ladies of Combray whom I used to
+see at mass, many of whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces
+of Injustice. But in later years I understood that the arresting
+strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes lay in the great part
+played in each of them by its symbols, while the fact that these
+were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought symbolised was nowhere
+expressed), but as real things, actually felt or materially handled,
+added something more precise and more literal to their meaning,
+something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they imparted.
+And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our attention
+incessantly drawn to her belly by the load which filled it; and in the
+same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of
+death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal,
+intestinal aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it
+happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them
+to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a
+difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to
+which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?
+
+There must have been a strong element of reality in those Virtues and
+Vices of Padua, since they appeared to me to be as much alive as
+the pregnant servant-girl, while she herself appeared scarcely less
+allegorical than they. And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack)
+of participation by a person's soul in the significant marks of its own
+special virtue has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which,
+if not strictly psychological, may at least be called physiognomical.
+Later on, when, in the course of my life, I have had occasion to meet
+with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical
+charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and
+slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern
+no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and
+no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the
+sublime face of true goodness.
+
+Then while the kitchen-maid--who, all unawares, made the superior
+qualities of Françoise shine with added lustre, just as Error, by
+force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth--took in coffee which
+(according to Mamma) was nothing more than hot water, and then carried
+up to our rooms hot water which was barely tepid, I would be lying
+stretched out on my bed, a book in my hand, in my room which trembled
+with the effort to defend its frail, transparent coolness against the
+afternoon sun, behind its almost closed shutters through which, however,
+a reflection of the sunlight had contrived to slip in on its golden
+wings, remaining motionless, between glass and woodwork, in a corner,
+like a butterfly poised upon a flower. It was hardly light enough for
+me to read, and my feeling of the day's brightness and splendour was
+derived solely from the blows struck down below, in the Rue de la Cure,
+by Camus (whom Françoise had assured that my aunt was not 'resting' and
+that he might therefore make a noise), upon some old packing-cases from
+which nothing would really be sent flying but the dust, though the din
+of them, in the resonant atmosphere that accompanies hot weather, seemed
+to scatter broadcast a rain of blood-red stars; and from the flies who
+performed for my benefit, in their small concert, as it might be the
+chamber music of summer; evoking heat and light quite differently from
+an air of human music which, if you happen to have heard it during a
+fine summer, will always bring that summer back to your mind, the flies'
+music is bound to the season by a closer, a more vital tie--born of
+sunny days, and not to be reborn but with them, containing something
+of their essential nature, it not merely calls up their image in our
+memory, but gives us a guarantee that they do really exist, that they
+are close around us, immediately accessible.
+
+This dim freshness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street
+what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say, equally luminous,
+and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which
+my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed in
+fragments only; and so was quite in harmony with my state of repose,
+which (thanks to the adventures related in my books, which had just
+excited it) bore, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running
+water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity and life.
+
+But my grandmother, even if the weather, after growing too hot, had
+broken, and a storm, or just a shower, had burst over us, would come up
+and beg me to go outside. And as I did not wish to leave off my book, I
+would go on with it in the garden, under the chestnut-tree, in a little
+sentry-box of canvas and matting, in the farthest recesses of which I
+used to sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who might
+be coming to call upon the family.
+
+And then my thoughts, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole,
+in the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain
+invisible even when I was looking at what went on outside? When I saw
+any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain
+between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which
+prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material
+form; for it would volatilise itself in some way before I could touch
+it, just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet
+never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by
+a zone of evaporation. Upon the sort of screen, patterned with different
+states and impressions, which my consciousness would quietly unfold
+while I was reading, and which ranged from the most deeply hidden
+aspirations of my heart to the wholly external view of the horizon
+spread out before my eyes at the foot of the garden, what was from the
+first the most permanent and the most intimate part of me, the lever
+whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my belief in the
+philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire
+to appropriate these to myself, whatever the book might be. For even if
+I had purchased it at Combray, having seen it outside Borange's, whose
+grocery lay too far from our house for Françoise to be able to deal
+there, as she did with Camus, but who enjoyed better custom as a
+stationer and bookseller; even if I had seen it, tied with string to
+keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly parts and pamphlets which
+adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more
+teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, I should have noticed
+and bought it there simply because I had recognised it as a book which
+had been well spoken of, in my hearing, by the school-master or the
+school-friend who, at that particular time, seemed to me to be
+entrusted with the secret of Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me,
+half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which was the vague but
+permanent object of my thoughts.
+
+Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be
+constantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the
+discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in
+which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with
+more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole
+lifetime. These were the events which took place in the book I was
+reading. It is true that the people concerned in them were not what
+Françoise would have called 'real people.' But none of the feelings
+which the joys or misfortunes of a 'real' person awaken in us can be
+awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes;
+and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding
+that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated
+structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted
+in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided
+improvement. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him,
+is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to
+say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities
+have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is
+only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that
+we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small
+section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of
+feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think
+of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human
+spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which
+the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the
+actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in
+the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in
+ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall,
+while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened
+breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that
+state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is
+multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might
+a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than
+those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour
+he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of
+which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting
+to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have
+been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops
+our perception of them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and
+that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by
+imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural
+phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish,
+successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the
+actual sensation of change.
+
+Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than this human
+element, would come the view, more or less projected before my eyes,
+of the country in which the action of the story was taking place, which
+made a far stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual
+landscape which would meet my eyes when I raised them from my book. In
+this way, for two consecutive summers I used to sit in the heat of our
+Combray garden, sick with a longing inspired by the book I was then
+reading for a land of mountains and rivers, where I could see an endless
+vista of sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments of
+wood lay mouldering in beds of watercress; and nearby, rambling and
+clustering along low walls, purple flowers and red. And since there was
+always lurking in my mind the dream of a woman who would enrich me with
+her love, that dream in those two summers used to be quickened with the
+freshness and coolness of running water; and whoever she might be, the
+woman whose image I called to mind, purple flowers and red would at once
+spring up on either side of her like complementary colours.
+
+This was not only because an image of which we dream remains for ever
+distinguished, is adorned and enriched by the association of colours not
+its own which may happen to surround it in our mental picture; for the
+scenes in the books I read were to me not merely scenery more vividly
+portrayed by my imagination than any which Combray could spread before
+my eyes but otherwise of the same kind. Because of the selection that
+the author had made of them, because of the spirit of faith in which
+my mind would exceed and anticipate his printed word, as it might
+be interpreting a revelation, these scenes used to give me the
+impression--one which I hardly ever derived from any place in which
+I might happen to be, and never from our garden, that undistinguished
+product of the strictly conventional fantasy of the gardener whom my
+grandmother so despised--of their being actually part of Nature herself,
+and worthy to be studied and explored.
+
+Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the
+country it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous
+advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have
+the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul,
+still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem
+to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it,
+to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear
+endlessly, all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from
+without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to
+discover in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual
+glamour which we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned,
+and learn that they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm
+which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas;
+sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so
+as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very well
+know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them. And
+so, if I always imagined the woman I loved as in a setting of whatever
+places I most longed, at the time, to visit; if in my secret longings
+it was she who attracted me to them, who opened to me the gate of an
+unknown world, that was not by the mere hazard of a simple association
+of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were
+only moments--which I isolate artificially to-day as though I
+were cutting sections, at different heights, in a jet of water,
+rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or motion--were only drops
+in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all the forces of my
+life.
+
+And then, as I continue to trace the outward course of these impressions
+from their close-packed intimate source in my consciousness, and
+before I come to the horizon of reality which envelops them, I discover
+pleasures of another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of tasting
+the good scent on the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor; and,
+when an hour chimed from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of watching what
+was already spent of the afternoon fall drop by drop until I heard the
+last stroke which enabled me to add up the total sum, after which the
+silence that followed seemed to herald the beginning, in the blue sky
+above me, of that long part of the day still allowed me for reading,
+until the good dinner which Françoise was even now preparing should come
+to strengthen and refresh me after the strenuous pursuit of its hero
+through the pages of my book. And, as each hour struck, it would seem to
+me that a few seconds only had passed since the hour before; the latest
+would inscribe itself, close to its predecessor, on the sky's surface,
+and I would be unable to believe that sixty minutes could be squeezed
+into the tiny arc of blue which was comprised between their two golden
+figures. Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would
+sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour
+which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not
+taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the
+deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated
+the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping
+silence. Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in our
+Combray garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace
+incident of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange
+adventures and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still
+recall those adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you,
+and you embody and preserve them by virtue of having little by little
+drawn round and enclosed them (while I went on with my book and the heat
+of the day declined) in the gradual crystallisation, slowly altering
+in form and dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent,
+sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.
+
+Sometimes I would be torn from my book, in the middle of the afternoon,
+by the gardener's daughter, who came running like a mad thing,
+overturning an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a
+tooth, and screaming out "They're coming, they're coming!" so that
+Françoise and I should run too and not miss anything of the show. That
+was on days when the cavalry stationed in Combray went out for some
+military exercise, going as a rule by the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde. While
+our servants, sitting in a row on their chairs outside the garden
+railings, stared at the people of Combray taking their Sunday walks and
+were stared at in return, the gardener's daughter, through the gap which
+there was between two houses far away in the Avenue de la Gare, would
+have spied the glitter of helmets. The servants then hurried in
+with their chairs, for when the troopers filed through the Rue
+Sainte-Hildegarde they filled it from side to side, and their jostling
+horses scraped against the walls of the houses, covering and drowning
+the pavements like banks which present too narrow a channel to a river
+in flood.
+
+"Poor children," Françoise would exclaim, in tears almost before she
+had reached the railings; "poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a
+meadow. It's just shocking to think of," she would go on, laying a hand
+over her heart, where presumably she had felt the shock.
+
+"A fine sight, isn't it, Mme. Françoise, all these young fellows not
+caring two straws for their lives?" the gardener would ask, just to
+'draw' her. And he would not have spoken in vain.
+
+"Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world is there that
+we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never
+offers us a second time? Oh dear, oh dear; you're right all the same;
+it's quite true, they don't care! I can remember them in '70; in those
+wretched wars they've no fear of death left in them; they're nothing
+more nor less than madmen; and then they aren't worth the price of a
+rope to hang them with; they're not men any more, they're lions." For
+by her way of thinking, to compare a man with a lion, which she used to
+pronounce 'lie-on,' was not at all complimentary to the man.
+
+The Rue Sainte-Hildegarde turned too sharply for us to be able to see
+people approaching at any distance, and it was only through the gap
+between those two houses in the Avenue de la Gare that we could still
+make out fresh helmets racing along towards us, and flashing in the
+sunlight. The gardener wanted to know whether there were still many to
+come, and he was thirsty besides, with the sun beating down upon his
+head. So then, suddenly, his daughter would leap out, as though from
+a beleaguered city, would make a sortie, turn the street corner, and,
+having risked her life a hundred times over, reappear and bring us,
+with a jug of liquorice-water, the news that there were still at least
+a thousand of them, pouring along without a break from the direction
+of Thiberzy and Méséglise. Françoise and the gardener, having 'made up'
+their difference, would discuss the line to be followed in case of war.
+
+"Don't you see, Françoise," he would say. "Revolution would be better,
+because then no one would need to join in unless he liked."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can see that, certainly; it's more straightforward."
+
+The gardener believed that, as soon as war was declared, they would stop
+all the railways.
+
+"Yes, to be sure; so that we sha'n't get away," said Françoise.
+
+And the gardener would assent, with "Ay, they're the cunning ones," for
+he would not allow that war was anything but a kind of trick which the
+state attempted to play on the people, or that there was a man in the
+world who would not run away from it if he had the chance to do so.
+
+But Françoise would hasten back to my aunt, and I would return to my
+book, and the servants would take their places again outside the gate to
+watch the dust settle on the pavement, and the excitement caused by the
+passage of the soldiers subside. Long after order had been restored,
+an abnormal tide of humanity would continue to darken the streets of
+Combray. And in front of every house, even of those where it was not,
+as a rule, 'done,' the servants, and sometimes even the masters would
+sit and stare, festooning their doorsteps with a dark, irregular fringe,
+like the border of shells and sea-weed which a stronger tide than usual
+leaves on the beach, as though trimming it with embroidered crape, when
+the sea itself has retreated.
+
+Except on such days as these, however, I would as a rule be left to read
+in peace. But the interruption which a visit from Swann once made, and
+the commentary which he then supplied to the course of my reading,
+which had brought me to the work of an author quite new to me, called
+Bergotte, had this definite result that for a long time afterwards
+it was not against a wall gay with spikes of purple blossom, but on a
+wholly different background, the porch of a gothic cathedral, that I
+would see outlined the figure of one of the women of whom I dreamed.
+
+I had heard Bergotte spoken of, for the first time, by a friend older
+than myself, for whom I had a strong admiration, a precious youth of the
+name of Bloch. Hearing me confess my love of the _Nuit d'Octobre_, he
+had burst out in a bray of laughter, like a bugle-call, and told me,
+by way of warning: "You must conquer your vile taste for A. de Musset,
+Esquire. He is a bad egg, one of the very worst, a pretty detestable
+specimen. I am bound to admit, natheless," he added graciously, "that
+he, and even the man Racine, did, each of them, once in his life,
+compose a line which is not only fairly rhythmical, but has also what is
+in my eyes the supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing. One is
+
+
+  _La blanche Oloossone et la blanche Camire_,
+
+and the other
+
+
+  _La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë_."
+
+They were submitted to my judgment, as evidence for the defence of the
+two runagates, in an article by my very dear master Father Lecomte, who
+is found pleasing in the sight of the immortal gods. By which token,
+here is a book which I have not the time, just now, to read, a book
+recommended, it would seem, by that colossal fellow. He regards, or so
+they tell me, its author, one Bergotte, Esquire, as a subtle scribe,
+more subtle, indeed, than any beast of the field; and, albeit he
+exhibits on occasion a critical pacifism, a tenderness in suffering
+fools, for which it is impossible to account, and hard to make
+allowance, still his word has weight with me as it were the Delphic
+Oracle. Read you then this lyrical prose, and, if the Titanic
+master-builder of rhythm who composed _Bhagavat_ and the _Lévrier de
+Magnus_ speaks not falsely, then, by Apollo, you may taste, even you, my
+master, the ambrosial joys of Olympus." It was in an ostensible vein of
+sarcasm that he had asked me to call him, and that he himself called me,
+"my master." But, as a matter of fact, we each derived a certain amount
+of satisfaction from the mannerism, being still at the age in which one
+believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name.
+
+Unfortunately I was not able to set at rest, by further talks with
+Bloch, in which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts
+he had engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from
+which I, if you please, expected nothing less than the revelation of
+truth itself) were all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For,
+as it happened, Bloch was not invited to the house again. At first, he
+had been well received there. It is true that my grandfather made out
+that, whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and
+brought him home with me, that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he
+would not have objected on principle--indeed his own friend Swann was
+of Jewish extraction--had he not found that the Jews whom I chose as
+friends were not usually of the best type. And so I was hardly ever able
+to bring a new friend home without my grandfather's humming the "O,
+God of our fathers" from _La Juive_, or else "Israel, break thy chain,"
+singing the tune alone, of course, to an "um-ti-tum-ti-tum, tra-la"; but
+I used to be afraid of my friend's recognising the sound, and so being
+able to reconstruct the words.
+
+Before seeing them, merely on hearing their names, about which, as often
+as not, there was nothing particularly Hebraic, he would divine not only
+the Jewish origin of such of my friends as might indeed be of the chosen
+people, but even some dark secret which was hidden in their family.
+
+"And what do they call your friend who is coming this evening?"
+
+"Dumont, grandpapa."
+
+"Dumont! Oh, I'm frightened of Dumont."
+
+And he would sing:
+
+
+  Archers, be on your guard!
+  Watch without rest, without sound,
+
+and then, after a few adroit questions on points of detail, he would
+call out "On guard! on guard," or, if it were the victim himself who
+had already arrived, and had been obliged, unconsciously, by my
+grandfather's subtle examination, to admit his origin, then my
+grandfather, to shew us that he had no longer any doubts, would merely
+look at us, humming almost inaudibly the air of
+
+
+  What! do you hither guide the feet
+  Of this timid Israelite?
+
+or of
+
+
+  Sweet vale of Hebron, dear paternal fields,
+
+or, perhaps, of
+
+
+  Yes, I am of the chosen race.
+
+These little eccentricities on my grandfather's part implied no ill-will
+whatsoever towards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for
+other reasons. He had begun by annoying my father, who, seeing him come
+in with wet clothes, had asked him with keen interest:
+
+"Why, M. Bloch, is there a change in the weather; has it been raining? I
+can't understand it; the barometer has been 'set fair.'"
+
+Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am
+absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so
+resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer
+trouble to inform me of them."
+
+"My poor boy," said my father after Bloch had gone, "your friend is out
+of his mind. Why, he couldn't even tell me what the weather was like. As
+if there could be anything more interesting! He is an imbecile."
+
+Next, Bloch had displeased my grandmother because, after luncheon, when
+she complained of not feeling very well, he had stifled a sob and wiped
+the tears from his eyes.
+
+"You cannot imagine that he is sincere," she observed to me. "Why he
+doesn't know me. Unless he's mad, of course."
+
+And finally he had upset the whole household when he arrived an hour
+and a half late for luncheon and covered with mud from head to foot, and
+made not the least apology, saying merely: "I never allow myself to be
+influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or
+by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time. I would willingly
+reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the Malayan kriss, but
+I am wholly and entirely without instruction in those infinitely more
+pernicious (besides being quite bleakly bourgeois) implements, the
+umbrella and the watch."
+
+In spite of all this he would still have been received at Combray. He
+was, of course, hardly the friend my parents would have chosen for
+me; they had, in the end, decided that the tears which he had shed on
+hearing of my grandmother's illness were genuine enough; but they
+knew, either instinctively or from their own experience, that our early
+impulsive emotions have but little influence over our later actions and
+the conduct of our lives; and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty
+to our friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule
+of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly
+followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile. They
+would have preferred to Bloch, as companions for myself, boys who would
+have given me no more than it is proper, by all the laws of middle-class
+morality, for boys to give one another, who would not unexpectedly
+send me a basket of fruit because they happened, that morning, to have
+thought of me with affection, but who, since they were incapable of
+inclining in my favour, by any single impulse of their imagination and
+emotions, the exact balance of the duties and claims of friendship, were
+as incapable of loading the scales to my prejudice. Even the injuries
+we do them will not easily divert from the path of their duty towards us
+those conventional natures of which my great-aunt furnished a type: who,
+after quarrelling for years with a niece, to whom she never spoke again,
+yet made no change in the will in which she had left that niece the
+whole of her fortune, because she was her next-of-kin, and it was the
+'proper thing' to do.
+
+But I was fond of Bloch; my parents wished me to be happy; and the
+insoluble problems which I set myself on such texts as the 'absolutely
+meaningless' beauty of _La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë_ tired me more
+and made me more unwell than I should have been after further talks with
+him, unwholesome as those talks might seem to my mother's mind. And he
+would still have been received at Combray but for one thing. That same
+night, after dinner, having informed me (a piece of news which had a
+great influence on my later life, making it happier at one time and then
+more unhappy) that no woman ever thought of anything but love, and that
+there was not one of them whose resistance a man could not overcome,
+he had gone on to assure me that he had heard it said on unimpeachable
+authority that my great-aunt herself had led a 'gay' life in her younger
+days, and had been notoriously 'kept.' I could not refrain from passing
+on so important a piece of information to my parents; the next time
+Bloch called he was not admitted, and afterwards, when I met him in the
+street, he greeted me with extreme coldness.
+
+But in the matter of Bergotte he had spoken truly.
+
+For the first few days, like a tune which will be running in one's head
+and maddening one soon enough, but of which one has not for the moment
+'got hold,' the things I was to love so passionately in Bergotte's style
+had not yet caught my eye. I could not, it is true, lay down the novel
+of his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the
+story alone, as in the first dawn of love, when we go every day to meet
+a woman at some party or entertainment by the charm of which we imagine
+it is that we are attracted. Then I observed the rare, almost archaic
+phrases which he liked to employ at certain points, where a hidden flow
+of harmony, a prelude contained and concealed in the work itself would
+animate and elevate his style; and it was at such points as these,
+too, that he would begin to speak of the "vain dream of life," of the
+"inexhaustible torrent of fair forms," of the "sterile, splendid torture
+of understanding and loving," of the "moving effigies which ennoble for
+all time the charming and venerable fronts of our cathedrals"; that he
+would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by the use of
+marvellous imagery, to the inspiration of which I would naturally have
+ascribed that sound of harping which began to chime and echo in my ears,
+an accompaniment to which that imagery added something ethereal and
+sublime. One of these passages of Bergotte, the third or fourth which I
+had detached from the rest, filled me with a joy to which the meagre joy
+I had tasted in the first passage bore no comparison, a joy which I felt
+myself to have experienced in some innermost chamber of my soul, deep,
+undivided, vast, from which all obstructions and partitions seemed to
+have been swept away. For what had happened was that, while I recognised
+in this passage the same taste for uncommon phrases, the same bursts
+of music, the same idealist philosophy which had been present in the
+earlier passages without my having taken them into account as the source
+of my pleasure, I now no longer had the impression of being confronted
+by a particular passage in one of Bergotte's works, which traced a
+purely bi-dimensional figure in outline upon the surface of my mind, but
+rather of the 'ideal passage' of Bergotte, common to every one of his
+books, and to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming
+merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own
+understanding seemed to be enlarged.
+
+I was by no means Bergotte's sole admirer; he was the favourite writer
+also of a friend of my mother's, a highly literary lady; while Dr. du
+Boulbon had kept all his patients waiting until he finished Bergotte's
+latest volume; and it was from his consulting room, and from a house in
+a park near Combray that some of the first seeds were scattered of that
+taste for Bergotte, a rare-growth in those days, but now so universally
+acclimatised that one finds it flowering everywhere throughout Europe
+and America, and even in the tiniest villages, rare still in its
+refinement, but in that alone. What my mother's friend, and, it would
+seem, what Dr. du Boulbon liked above all in the writings of Bergotte
+was just what I liked, the same flow of melody, the same old-fashioned
+phrases, and certain others, quite simple and familiar, but so placed by
+him, in such prominence, as to hint at a particular quality of taste on
+his part; and also, in the sad parts of his books, a sort of roughness,
+a tone that was almost harsh. And he himself, no doubt, realised that
+these were his principal attractions. For in his later books, if he had
+hit upon some great truth, or upon the name of an historic cathedral,
+he would break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a
+lengthy prayer, would give a free outlet to that effluence which, in
+the earlier volumes, remained buried beneath the form of his prose,
+discernible only in a rippling of its surface, and perhaps even more
+delightful, more harmonious when it was thus veiled from the eye, when
+the reader could give no precise indication of where the murmur of the
+current began, or of where it died away. These passages in which he
+delighted were our favourites also. For my own part I knew all of them
+by heart. I felt even disappointed when he resumed the thread of his
+narrative. Whenever he spoke of something whose beauty had until
+then remained hidden from me, of pine-forests or of hailstorms, of
+_Notre-Dame de Paris_, of _Athalie_, or of _Phèdre_, by some piece
+of imagery he would make their beauty explode and drench me with its
+essence. And so, dimly realising that the universe contained innumerable
+elements which my feeble senses would be powerless to discern, did he
+not bring them within my reach, I wished that I might have his opinion,
+some metaphor of his, upon everything in the world, and especially upon
+such things as I might have an opportunity, some day, of seeing for
+myself; and among such things, more particularly still upon some of the
+historic buildings of France, upon certain views of the sea, because the
+emphasis with which, in his books, he referred to these shewed that he
+regarded them as rich in significance and beauty. But, alas, upon almost
+everything in the world his opinion was unknown to me. I had no doubt
+that it would differ entirely from my own, since his came down from an
+unknown sphere towards which I was striving to raise myself; convinced
+that my thoughts would have seemed pure foolishness to that perfected
+spirit, I had so completely obliterated them all that, if I happened to
+find in one of his books something which had already occurred to my own
+mind, my heart would swell with gratitude and pride as though some deity
+had, in his infinite bounty, restored it to me, had pronounced it to be
+beautiful and right. It happened now and then that a page of Bergotte
+would express precisely those ideas which I used often at night, when
+I was unable to sleep, to write to my grandmother and mother, and so
+concisely and well that his page had the appearance of a collection of
+mottoes for me to set at the head of my letters. And so too, in later
+years, when I began to compose a book of my own, and the quality of some
+of my sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to
+go on with the undertaking, I would find the equivalent of my sentences
+in Bergotte's. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages,
+that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in
+my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I seemed to have
+detected in my mind, and in my fear of their not turning out 'true to
+life,' I had no time to ask myself whether what I was writing would be
+pleasant to read! But indeed there was no kind of language, no kind of
+ideas which I really liked, except these. My feverish and unsatisfactory
+attempts were themselves a token of my love, a love which brought me no
+pleasure, but was, for all that, intense and deep. And so, when I came
+suddenly upon similar phrases in the writings of another, that is to say
+stripped of their familiar accompaniment of scruples and repressions and
+self-tormentings, I was free to indulge to the full my own appetite
+for such things, just as a cook who, once in a while, has no dinner to
+prepare for other people, can then find time to gormandise himself. And
+so, when I had found, one day, in a book by Bergotte, some joke about
+an old family servant, to which his solemn and magnificent style added a
+great deal of irony, but which was in principle what I had often said to
+my grandmother about Françoise, and when, another time, I had discovered
+that he thought not unworthy of reflection in one of those mirrors of
+absolute Truth which were his writings, a remark similar to one which I
+had had occasion to make on our friend M. Legrandin (and, moreover, my
+remarks on Françoise and M. Legrandin were among those which I would
+most resolutely have sacrificed for Bergotte's sake, in the belief
+that he would find them quite without interest); then it was suddenly
+revealed to me that my own humble existence and the Realms of Truth were
+less widely separated than I had supposed, that at certain points they
+were actually in contact; and in my new-found confidence and joy I wept
+upon his printed page, as in the arms of a long-lost father.
+
+From his books I had formed an impression of Bergotte as a frail and
+disappointed old man, who had lost his children, and had never found
+any consolation. And so I would read, or rather sing his sentences in
+my brain, with rather more _dolce_, rather more _lento_ than he himself
+had, perhaps, intended, and his simplest phrase would strike my ears
+with something peculiarly gentle and loving in its intonation. More than
+anything else in the world I cherished his philosophy, and had pledged
+myself to it in lifelong devotion. It made me impatient to reach the
+age when I should be eligible to attend the class at school called
+'Philosophy.' I did not wish to learn or do anything else there, but
+simply to exist and be guided entirely by the mind of Bergotte, and,
+if I had been told then that the metaphysicians whom I was actually to
+follow there resembled him in nothing, I should have been struck down by
+the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when
+a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to
+come.
+
+One Sunday, while I was reading in the garden, I was interrupted by
+Swann, who had come to call upon my parents.
+
+"What are you reading? May I look? Why, it's Bergotte! Who has been
+telling you about him?"
+
+I replied that Bloch was responsible.
+
+"Oh, yes, that boy I saw here once, who looks so like the Bellini
+portrait of Mahomet II. It's an astonishing likeness; he has the same
+arched eyebrows and hooked nose and prominent cheekbones. When his beard
+comes he'll be Mahomet himself. Anyhow he has good taste, for Bergotte
+is a charming creature." And seeing how much I seemed to admire
+Bergotte, Swann, who never spoke at all about the people he knew, made
+an exception in my favour and said: "I know him well; if you would like
+him to write a few words on the title-page of your book I could ask him
+for you."
+
+I dared not accept such an offer, but bombarded Swann with questions
+about his friend. "Can you tell me, please, who is his favourite actor?"
+
+"Actor? No, I can't say. But I do know this: there's not a man on the
+stage whom he thinks equal to Berma; he puts her above everyone. Have
+you seen her?"
+
+"No, sir, my parents do not allow me to go to the theatre."
+
+"That is a pity. You should insist. Berma in _Phèdre_, in the _Cid_;
+well, she's only an actress, if you like, but you know that I don't
+believe very much in the 'hierarchy' of the arts." As he spoke I
+noticed, what had often struck me before in his conversations with
+my grandmother's sisters, that whenever he spoke of serious matters,
+whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a definite opinion
+upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise
+it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he
+had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious
+to disclaim any personal responsibility for it; as who should say "the
+'hierarchy,' don't you know, as silly people call it." But then, if it
+was so absurd, why did he say the 'hierarchy'? A moment later he went
+on: "Her acting will give you as noble an inspiration as any masterpiece
+of art in the world, as--oh, I don't know--" and he began to laugh,
+"shall we say the Queens of Chartres?" Until then I had supposed that
+his horror of having to give a serious opinion was something Parisian
+and refined, in contrast to the provincial dogmatism of my grandmother's
+sisters; and I had imagined also that it was characteristic of the
+mental attitude towards life of the circle in which Swann moved,
+where, by a natural reaction from the 'lyrical' enthusiasms of earlier
+generations, an excessive importance was given to small and precise
+facts, formerly regarded as vulgar, and anything in the nature of
+'phrase-making' was banned. But now I found myself slightly shocked
+by this attitude which Swann invariably adopted when face to face with
+generalities. He appeared unwilling to risk even having an opinion, and
+to be at his ease only when he could furnish, with meticulous accuracy,
+some precise but unimportant detail. But in so doing he did not take
+into account that even here he was giving an opinion, holding a brief
+(as they say) for something, that the accuracy of his details had an
+importance of its own. I thought again of the dinner that night, when I
+had been so unhappy because Mamma would not be coming up to my room, and
+when he had dismissed the balls given by the Princesse de Léon as being
+of no importance. And yet it was to just that sort of amusement that he
+was devoting his life. For what other kind of existence did he reserve
+the duties of saying in all seriousness what he thought about things,
+of formulating judgments which he would not put between inverted commas;
+and when would he cease to give himself up to occupations of which at
+the same time he made out that they were absurd? I noticed, too, in the
+manner in which Swann spoke to me of Bergotte, something which, to do
+him justice, was not peculiar to himself, but was shared by all that
+writer's admirers at that time, at least by my mother's friend and
+by Dr. du Boulbon. Like Swann, they would say of Bergotte: "He has a
+charming mind, so individual, he has a way of his own of saying things,
+which is a little far-fetched, but so pleasant. You never need to look
+for his name on the title-page, you can tell his work at once." But
+none of them had yet gone so far as to say "He is a great writer, he has
+great talent." They did not even credit him with talent at all. They
+did not speak, because they were not aware of it. We are very slow in
+recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which
+is labelled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Simply
+because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no
+resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather
+originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we add up the
+sum of these, and find that it amounts simply to talent.
+
+"Are there any books in which Bergotte has written about Berma?" I asked
+M. Swann.
+
+"I think he has, in that little essay on Racine, but it must be out of
+print. Still, there has perhaps been a second impression. I will find
+out. Anyhow, I can ask Bergotte himself all that you want to know next
+time he comes to dine with us. He never misses a week, from one year's
+end to another. He is my daughter's greatest friend. They go about
+together, and look at old towns and cathedrals and castles."
+
+As I was still completely ignorant of the different grades in the social
+hierarchy, the fact that my father found it impossible for us to see
+anything of Swann's wife and daughter had, for a long time, had the
+contrary effect of making me imagine them as separated from us by an
+enormous gulf, which greatly enhanced their dignity and importance in
+my eyes. I was sorry that my mother did not dye her hair and redden her
+lips, as I had heard our neighbour, Mme. Sazerat, say that Mme. Swann
+did, to gratify not her husband but M. de Charlus; and I felt that, to
+her, we must be an object of scorn, which distressed me particularly on
+account of the daughter, such a pretty little girl, as I had heard, and
+one of whom I used often to dream, always imagining her with the same
+features and appearance, which I bestowed upon her quite arbitrarily,
+but with a charming effect. But from this afternoon, when I had learned
+that Mlle. Swann was a creature living in such rare and fortunate
+circumstances, bathed, as in her natural element, in such a sea of
+privilege that, if she should ask her parents whether anyone were coming
+to dinner, she would be answered in those two syllables, radiant with
+celestial light, would hear the name of that golden guest who was to
+her no more than an old friend of her family, Bergotte; that for her the
+intimate conversation at table, corresponding to what my great-aunt's
+conversation was for me, would be the words of Bergotte upon all those
+subjects which he had not been able to take up in his writings, and on
+which I would fain have heard him utter oracles; and that, above all,
+when she went to visit other towns, he would be walking by her side,
+unrecognised and glorious, like the gods who came down, of old, from
+heaven to dwell among mortal men: then I realised both the rare worth
+of a creature such as Mlle. Swann, and, at the same time, how coarse and
+ignorant I should appear to her; and I felt so keenly how pleasant and
+yet how impossible it would be for me to become her friend that I was
+filled at once with longing and with despair. And usually, from this
+time forth, when I thought of her, I would see her standing before the
+porch of a cathedral, explaining to me what each of the statues meant,
+and, with a smile which was my highest commendation, presenting me, as
+her friend, to Bergotte. And invariably the charm of all the fancies
+which the thought of cathedrals used to inspire in me, the charm of the
+hills and valleys of the Ile-de-France and of the plains of Normandy,
+would radiate brightness and beauty over the picture I had formed in my
+mind of Mlle. Swann; nothing more remained but to know and to love
+her. Once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some unknown
+existence to which that creature's love for ourselves can win us
+admission, that is, of all the preliminary conditions which Love exacts,
+the one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes him
+generous or indifferent as to the rest. Even those women who pretend
+that they judge a man by his exterior only, see in that exterior an
+emanation from some special way of life. And that is why they fall
+in love with a soldier or a fireman, whose uniform makes them less
+particular about his face; they kiss and believe that beneath the
+crushing breastplate there beats a heart different from the rest, more
+gallant, more adventurous, more tender; and so it is that a young king
+or a crown prince may travel in foreign countries and make the most
+gratifying conquests, and yet lack entirely that regular and classic
+profile which would be indispensable, I dare say, in an outside-broker.
+
+While I was reading in the garden, a thing my great-aunt would never
+have understood my doing save on a Sunday, that being the day on which
+it was unlawful to indulge in any serious occupation, and on which she
+herself would lay aside her sewing (on a week-day she would have said,
+"How you can go on amusing yourself with a book; it isn't Sunday, you
+know!" putting into the word 'amusing' an implication of childishness
+and waste of time), my aunt Léonie would be gossiping with Françoise
+until it was time for Eulalie to arrive. She would tell her that she had
+just seen Mme. Goupil go by "without an umbrella, in the silk dress
+she had made for her the other day at Châteaudun. If she has far to go
+before vespers, she may get it properly soaked."
+
+"Very likely" (which meant also "very likely not") was the answer,
+for Françoise did not wish definitely to exclude the possibility of a
+happier alternative.
+
+"There, now," went on my aunt, beating her brow, "that reminds me that
+I never heard if she got to church this morning before the Elevation. I
+must remember to ask Eulalie... Françoise, just look at that black cloud
+behind the steeple, and how poor the light is on the slates, you may be
+certain it will rain before the day is out. It couldn't possibly keep on
+like this, it's been too hot. And the sooner the better, for until the
+storm breaks my Vichy water won't 'go down,'" she concluded, since, in
+her mind, the desire to accelerate the digestion of her Vichy water was
+of infinitely greater importance than her fear of seeing Mme. Goupil's
+new dress ruined.
+
+"Very likely."
+
+"And you know that when it rains in the Square there's none too much
+shelter." Suddenly my aunt turned pale. "What, three o'clock!" she
+exclaimed. "But vespers will have begun already, and I've forgotten my
+pepsin! Now I know why that Vichy water has been lying on my stomach."
+And falling precipitately upon a prayer-book bound in purple velvet,
+with gilt clasps, out of which in her haste she let fall a shower of
+the little pictures, each in a lace fringe of yellowish paper, which she
+used to mark the places of the greater feasts of the church, my aunt,
+while she swallowed her drops, began at full speed to mutter the words
+of the sacred text, its meaning being slightly clouded in her brain by
+the uncertainty whether the pepsin, when taken so long after the
+Vichy, would still be able to overtake it and to 'send it down.' "Three
+o'clock! It's unbelievable how time flies."
+
+A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it,
+followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower
+of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall
+spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming,
+musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.
+
+"There, Françoise, what did I tell you? How it's coming down! But I
+think I heard the bell at the garden gate: go along and see who can be
+outside in this weather."
+
+Françoise went and returned. "It's Mme. Amédée" (my grandmother). "She
+said she was going for a walk. It's raining hard, all the same."
+
+"I'm not at all surprised," said my aunt, looking up towards the sky.
+"I've always said that she was not in the least like other people. Well,
+I'm glad it's she and not myself who's outside in all this."
+
+"Mme. Amédée is always the exact opposite of the rest," said Françoise,
+not unkindly, refraining until she should be alone with the other
+servants from stating her belief that my grandmother was 'a bit off her
+head.'
+
+"There's Benediction over! Eulalie will never come now," sighed my aunt.
+"It will be the weather that's frightened her away."
+
+"But it's not five o'clock yet, Mme. Octave, it's only half-past four."
+
+"Only half-past four! And here am I, obliged to draw back the small
+curtains, just to get a tiny streak of daylight. At half-past four! Only
+a week before the Rogation-days. Ah, my poor Françoise, the dear Lord
+must be sorely vexed with us. The world is going too far in these days.
+As my poor Octave used to say, we have forgotten God too often, and He
+is taking vengeance upon us."
+
+A bright flush animated my aunt's cheeks; it was Eulalie. As ill luck
+would have it, scarcely had she been admitted to the presence when
+Françoise reappeared and, with a smile which was meant to indicate her
+full participation in the pleasure which, she had no doubt, her tidings
+would give my aunt, articulating each syllable so as to shew that, in
+spite of her having to translate them into indirect speech, she was
+repeating, as a good servant should, the very words which the new
+visitor had condescended to use, said: "His reverence the Curé would be
+delighted, enchanted, if Mme. Octave is not resting just now, and
+could see him. His reverence does not wish to disturb Mme. Octave. His
+reverence is downstairs; I told him to go into the parlour."
+
+Had the truth been known, the Curé's visits gave my aunt no such
+ecstatic pleasure as Françoise supposed, and the air of jubilation with
+which she felt bound to illuminate her face whenever she had to announce
+his arrival, did not altogether correspond to what was felt by her
+invalid. The Curé (an excellent man, with whom I am sorry now that I did
+not converse more often, for, even if he cared nothing for the arts,
+he knew a great many etymologies), being in the habit of shewing
+distinguished visitors over his church (he had even planned to compile
+a history of the Parish of Combray), used to weary her with his endless
+explanations, which, incidentally, never varied in the least degree.
+But when his visit synchronized exactly with Eulalie's it became frankly
+distasteful to my aunt. She would have preferred to make the most of
+Eulalie, and not to have had the whole of her circle about her at one
+time. But she dared not send the Curé away, and had to content herself
+with making a sign to Eulalie not to leave when he did, so that she
+might have her to herself for a little after he had gone.
+
+"What is this I have been hearing, Father, that a painter has set up his
+easel in your church, and is copying one of the windows? Old as I am,
+I can safely say that I have never even heard of such a thing in all my
+life! What is the world coming to next, I wonder! And the ugliest thing
+in the whole church, too."
+
+"I will not go so far as to say that it is quite the ugliest, for,
+although there are certain things in Saint-Hilaire which are well worth
+a visit, there are others that are very old now, in my poor basilica,
+the only one in all the diocese that has never even been restored.
+The Lord knows, our porch is dirty and out of date; still, it is of a
+majestic character; take, for instance, the Esther tapestries, though
+personally I would not give a brass farthing for the pair of them, but
+experts put them next after the ones at Sens. I can quite see, too, that
+apart from certain details which are--well, a trifle realistic, they
+shew features which testify to a genuine power of observation. But don't
+talk to me about the windows. Is it common sense, I ask you, to leave
+up windows which shut out all the daylight, and even confuse the eyes by
+throwing patches of colour, to which I should be hard put to it to give
+a name, on a floor in which there are not two slabs on the same level?
+And yet they refuse to renew the floor for me because, if you please,
+those are the tombstones of the Abbots of Combray and the Lords of
+Guermantes, the old Counts, you know, of Brabant, direct ancestors of
+the present Duc de Guermantes, and of his Duchesse also, since she was a
+lady of the Guermantes family, and married her cousin." (My grandmother,
+whose steady refusal to take any interest in 'persons' had ended in
+her confusing all their names and titles, whenever anyone mentioned the
+Duchesse de Guermantes used to make out that she must be related to Mme.
+de Villeparisis. The whole family would then burst out laughing; and she
+would attempt to justify herself by harking back to some invitation to
+a christening or funeral: "I feel sure that there was a Guermantes in it
+somewhere." And for once I would side with the others, and against
+her, refusing to admit that there could be any connection between her
+school-friend and the descendant of Geneviève de Brabant.)
+
+"Look at Roussainville," the Curé went on. "It is nothing more nowadays
+than a parish of farmers, though in olden times the place must have had
+a considerable importance from its trade in felt hats and clocks. (I
+am not certain, by the way, of the etymology of Roussainville. I
+should dearly like to think that the name was originally Rouville, from
+_Radulfi villa_, analogous, don't you see, to Châteauroux, _Castrum
+Radulfi_, but we will talk about that some other time.) Very well; the
+church there has superb windows, almost all quite modern, including that
+most imposing 'Entry of Louis-Philippe into Combray' which would be more
+in keeping, surely, at Combray itself, and which is every bit as good, I
+understand, as the famous windows at Chartres. Only yesterday I met Dr.
+Percepied's brother, who goes in for these things, and he told me that
+he looked upon it as a most beautiful piece of work. But, as I said to
+this artist, who, by the way, seems to be a most civil fellow, and is a
+regular virtuoso, it appears, with his brush; what on earth, I said to
+him, do you find so extraordinary in this window, which is, if anything,
+a little dingier than the rest?"
+
+"I am sure that if you were to ask his Lordship," said my aunt in
+a resigned tone, for she had begun to feel that she was going to be
+'tired,' "he would never refuse you a new window."
+
+"You may depend upon it, Mme. Octave," replied the Curé. "Why, it was
+just his Lordship himself who started the outcry about the window, by
+proving that it represented Gilbert the Bad, a Lord of Guermantes and
+a direct descendant of Geneviève de Brabant, who was a daughter of the
+House of Guermantes, receiving absolution from Saint Hilaire."
+
+"But I don't see where Saint Hilaire comes in."
+
+"Why yes, have you never noticed, in the corner of the window, a lady in
+a yellow robe? Very well, that is Saint Hilaire, who is also known, you
+will remember, in certain parts of the country as Saint Illiers, Saint
+Hèlier, and even, in the Jura, Saint Ylie. But these various corruptions
+of _Sanctus Hilarius_ are by no means the most curious that have
+occurred in the names of the blessed Saints. Take, for example, my good
+Eulalie, the case of your own patron, _Sancta Eulalia_; do you know what
+she has become in Burgundy? Saint Eloi, nothing more nor less! The lady
+has become a gentleman. Do you hear that, Eulalie, after you are dead
+they will make a man of you!"
+
+"Father will always have his joke."
+
+"Gilbert's brother, Charles the Stammerer, was a pious prince, but,
+having early in life lost his father, Pepin the Mad, who died as a
+result of his mental infirmity, he wielded the supreme power with all
+the arrogance of a man who has not been subjected to discipline in his
+youth, so much so that, whenever he saw a man in a town whose face
+he did not remember, he would massacre the whole place, to the last
+inhabitant. Gilbert, wishing to be avenged on Charles, caused the church
+at Combray to be burned down, the original church, that was, which
+Théodebert, when he and his court left the country residence he had near
+here, at Thiberzy (which is, of course, _Theodeberiacus_), to go out
+and fight the Burgundians, had promised to build over the tomb of Saint
+Hilaire if the Saint brought him victory. Nothing remains of it now
+but the crypt, into which Théodore has probably taken you, for Gilbert
+burned all the rest. Finally, he defeated the unlucky Charles with the
+aid of William" which the Curé pronounced "Will'am" "the Conqueror,
+which is why so many English still come to visit the place. But he
+does not appear to have managed to win the affection of the people of
+Combray, for they fell upon him as he was coming out from mass, and cut
+off his head. Théodore has a little book, that he lends people, which
+tells you the whole story.
+
+"But what is unquestionably the most remarkable thing about our church
+is the view from the belfry, which is full of grandeur. Certainly in
+your case, since you are not very strong, I should never recommend you
+to climb our seven and ninety steps, just half the number they have in
+the famous cathedral at Milan. It is quite tiring enough for the most
+active person, especially as you have to go on your hands and knees, if
+you don't wish to crack your skull, and you collect all the cobwebs off
+the staircase upon your clothes. In any case you should be well wrapped
+up," he went on, without noticing my aunt's fury at the mere suggestion
+that she could ever, possibly, be capable of climbing into his belfry,
+"for there's a strong breeze there, once you get to the top. Some people
+even assure me that they have felt the chill of death up there. No
+matter, on Sundays there are always clubs and societies, who come,
+some of them, long distances to admire our beautiful panorama, and they
+always go home charmed. Wait now, next Sunday, if the weather holds, you
+will be sure to find a lot of people there, for Rogation-tide. You must
+admit, certainly, that the view from up there is like a fairy-tale, with
+what you might call vistas along the plain, which have quite a special
+charm of their own. On a clear day you can see as far as Verneuil. And
+then another thing; you can see at the same time places which you are in
+the habit of seeing one without the other, as, for instance, the course
+of the Vivonne and the ditches at Saint-Assise-lès-Combray, which
+are separated, really, by a screen of tall trees; or, to take another
+example, there are all the canals at Jouy-le-Vicomte, which is
+_Gaudiacus vicecomitis_, as of course you know. Each time that I have
+been to Jouy I have seen a bit of a canal in one place, and then I have
+turned a corner and seen another, but when I saw the second I could no
+longer see the first. I tried in vain to imagine how they lay by one
+another; it was no good. But, from the top of Saint-Hilaire, it's quite
+another matter; the whole countryside is spread out before you like a
+map. Only, you cannot make out the water; you would say that there were
+great rifts in the town, slicing it up so neatly that it looks like a
+loaf of bread which still holds together after it has been cut up. To
+get it all quite perfect you would have to be in both places at once; up
+here on the top of Saint-Hilaire and down there at Jouy-le-Vicomte."
+
+The Curé had so much exhausted my aunt that no sooner had he gone than
+she was obliged to send away Eulalie also.
+
+"Here, my poor Eulalie," she said in a feeble voice, drawing a coin from
+a small purse which lay ready to her hand. "This is just something so
+that you shall not forget me in your prayers."
+
+"Oh, but, Mme. Octave, I don't think I ought to; you know very well
+that I don't come here for that!" So Eulalie would answer, with the
+same hesitation and the same embarrassment, every Sunday, as though
+each temptation were the first, and with a look of displeasure which
+enlivened my aunt and never offended her, for if it so happened that
+Eulalie, when she took the money, looked a little less sulky than usual,
+my aunt would remark afterwards, "I cannot think what has come over
+Eulalie; I gave her just the trifle I always give, and she did not look
+at all pleased."
+
+"I don't think she has very much to complain of, all the same,"
+Françoise would sigh grimly, for she had a tendency to regard as petty
+cash all that my aunt might give her for herself or her children, and as
+treasure riotously squandered on a pampered and ungrateful darling the
+little coins slipped, Sunday by Sunday, into Eulalie's hand, but so
+discreetly passed that Françoise never managed to see them. It was
+not that she wanted to have for herself the money my aunt bestowed
+on Eulalie. She already enjoyed a sufficiency of all that my
+aunt possessed, in the knowledge that the wealth of the mistress
+automatically ennobled and glorified the maid in the eyes of the world;
+and that she herself was conspicuous and worthy to be praised throughout
+Combray, Jouy-le-Vicomte, and other cities of men, on account of my
+aunt's many farms, her frequent and prolonged visits from the Curé, and
+the astonishing number of bottles of Vichy water which she consumed.
+Françoise was avaricious only for my aunt; had she had control over
+my aunt's fortune (which would have more than satisfied her highest
+ambition) she would have guarded it from the assaults of strangers with
+a maternal ferocity. She would, however, have seen no great harm in what
+my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give
+away, had she given only to those who were already rich. Perhaps
+she felt that such persons, not being actually in need of my aunt's
+presents, could not be suspected of simulating affection for her on
+that account. Besides, presents offered to persons of great wealth and
+position, such as Mme. Sazerat, M. Swann, M. Legrandin and Mme. Goupil,
+to persons of the 'same class' as my aunt, and who would naturally
+'mix with her,' seemed to Françoise to be included among the ornamental
+customs of that strange and brilliant life led by rich people, who
+hunted and shot, gave balls and paid visits, a life which she would
+contemplate with an admiring smile. But it was by no means the same
+thing if, for this princely exchange of courtesies, my aunt substituted
+mere charity, if her beneficiaries were of the class which Françoise
+would label "people like myself," or "people no better than myself,"
+people whom she despised even more if they did not address her always
+as "Mme. Françoise," just to shew that they considered themselves to be
+'not as good.' And when she saw that, despite all her warnings, my aunt
+continued to do exactly as she pleased, and to fling money away with
+both hands (or so, at least, Françoise believed) on undeserving objects,
+she began to find that the presents she herself received from my aunt
+were very tiny compared to the imaginary riches squandered upon
+Eulalie, There was not, in the neighbourhood of Combray, a farm of such
+prosperity and importance that Françoise doubted Eulalie's ability to
+buy it, without thinking twice, out of the capital which her visits to
+my aunt had 'brought in.' It must be added that Eulalie had formed an
+exactly similar estimate of the vast and secret hoards of Françoise.
+So, every Sunday, after Eulalie had gone, Françoise would mercilessly
+prophesy her coming downfall. She hated Eulalie, but was at the same
+time afraid of her, and so felt bound, when Eulalie was there, to 'look
+pleasant.' But she would make up for that after the other's departure;
+never, it is true, alluding to her by name, but hinting at her in
+Sibylline oracles, or in utterances of a comprehensive character, like
+those of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, but so worded that their special
+application could not escape my aunt. After peering out at the side of
+the curtain to see whether Eulalie had shut the front-door behind her;
+"Flatterers know how to make themselves welcome, and to gather up the
+crumbs; but have patience, have patience; our God is a jealous God, and
+one fine day He will be avenged upon them!" she would declaim, with the
+sidelong, insinuating glance of Joash, thinking of Athaliah alone when
+he says that the
+
+            ....prosperity
+  Of wicked men runs like a torrent past,
+  And soon is spent.
+
+But on this memorable afternoon, when the Curé had come as well, and
+by his interminable visit had drained my aunt's strength, Françoise
+followed Eulalie from the room, saying: "Mme. Octave, I will leave you
+to rest; you look utterly tired out."
+
+And my aunt answered her not a word, breathing a sigh so faint that
+it seemed it must prove her last, and lying there with closed eyes, as
+though already dead. But hardly had Françoise arrived downstairs, when
+four peals of a bell, pulled with the utmost violence, reverberated
+through the house, and my aunt, sitting erect upon her bed, called out:
+"Has Eulalie gone yet? Would you believe it; I forgot to ask her whether
+Mme. Goupil arrived in church before the Elevation. Run after her,
+quick!"
+
+But Françoise returned alone, having failed to overtake Eulalie. "It
+is most provoking," said my aunt, shaking her head. "The one important
+thing that I had to ask her."
+
+In this way life went by for my aunt Léonie, always the same, in the
+gentle uniformity of what she called, with a pretence of deprecation
+but with a deep tenderness, her 'little jog-trot.' Respected by all
+and sundry, not merely in her own house, where every one of us, having
+learned the futility of recommending any healthier mode of life, had
+become gradually resigned to its observance, but in the village as well,
+where, three streets away, a tradesman who had to hammer nails into a
+packing-case would send first to Françoise to make sure that my aunt
+was not 'resting'--her 'little jog-trot' was, none the less, brutally
+disturbed on one occasion in this same year. Like a fruit hidden among
+its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved by man, until it
+falls of its own accord, there came upon us one night the kitchen-maid's
+confinement. Her pains were unbearable, and, as there was no midwife
+in Combray, Françoise had to set off before dawn to fetch one from
+Thiberzy. My aunt was unable to 'rest,' owing to the cries of the girl,
+and as Françoise, though the distance was nothing, was very late in
+returning, her services were greatly missed. And so, in the course of
+the morning, my mother said to me: "Run upstairs, and see if your aunt
+wants anything."
+
+I went into the first of her two rooms, and through the open door of the
+other saw my aunt lying on her side, asleep. I could hear her breathing,
+in what was almost distinguishable as a snore. I was just going to slip
+away when something, probably the sound of my entry, interrupted her
+sleep, and made it 'change speed,' as they say of motorcars nowadays,
+for the music of her snore broke off for a second and began again on a
+lower note; then she awoke, and half turned her face, which I could see
+for the first time; a kind of horror was imprinted on it; plainly she
+had just escaped from some terrifying dream. She could not see me from
+where she was lying, and I stood there not knowing whether I ought to go
+forward or to retire; but all at once she seemed to return to a sense
+of reality, and to grasp the falsehood of the visions that had terrified
+her; a smile of joy, a pious act of thanksgiving to God, Who is pleased
+to grant that life shall be less cruel than our dreams, feebly illumined
+her face, and, with the habit she had formed of speaking to herself,
+half-aloud, when she thought herself alone, she murmured: "The Lord be
+praised! We have nothing to disturb us here but the kitchen-maid's baby.
+And I've been dreaming that my poor Octave had come back to life, and
+was trying to make me take a walk every day!" She stretched out a hand
+towards her rosary, which was lying on the small table, but sleep was
+once again getting the mastery, and did not leave her the strength to
+reach it; she fell asleep, calm and contented, and I crept out of the
+room on tiptoe, without either her or anyone's else ever knowing, from
+that day to this, what I had seen and heard.
+
+When I say that, apart from such rare happenings as this confinement, my
+aunt's 'little jog-trot' never underwent any variation, I do not include
+those variations which, repeated at regular intervals and in identical
+form, did no more, really, than print a sort of uniform pattern upon
+the greater uniformity of her life. So, for instance, every Saturday, as
+Françoise had to go in the afternoon to market at Roussainville-le-Pin,
+the whole household would have to have luncheon an hour earlier. And my
+aunt had so thoroughly acquired the habit of this weekly exception to
+her general habits, that she clung to it as much as to the rest. She
+was so well 'routined' to it, as Françoise would say, that if, on a
+Saturday, she had had to wait for her luncheon until the regular hour,
+it would have 'upset' her as much as if she had had, on an ordinary
+day, to put her luncheon forward to its Saturday time. Incidentally this
+acceleration of luncheon gave Saturday, for all of us, an individual
+character, kindly and rather attractive. At the moment when, ordinarily,
+there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded,
+we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives
+make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an
+omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday
+was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost
+civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a
+kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation,
+for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator
+pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary
+cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind. At daybreak, before we were
+dressed, without rhyme or reason, save for the pleasure of proving the
+strength of our solidarity, we would call to one another good-humoredly,
+cordially, patriotically, "Hurry up; there's no time to be lost; don't
+forget, it's Saturday!" while my aunt, gossiping with Françoise, and
+reflecting that the day would be even longer than usual, would say, "You
+might cook them a nice bit of veal, seeing that it's Saturday." If, at
+half-past ten, some one absent-mindedly pulled out a watch and said, "I
+say, an hour-and-a-half still before luncheon," everyone else would
+be in ecstasies over being able to retort at once: "Why, what are you
+thinking about? Have you for-gotten that it's Saturday?" And a quarter
+of an hour later we would still be laughing, and reminding ourselves to
+go up and tell aunt Léonie about this absurd mistake, to amuse her. The
+very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change. After luncheon the
+sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the
+zenith, and when some one, thinking that we were late in starting for
+our walk, said, "What, only two o'clock!" feeling the heavy throb go by
+him of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire (which as
+a rule passed no one at that hour upon the highways, deserted for the
+midday meal or for the nap which follows it, or on the banks of the
+bright and ever-flowing stream, which even the angler had abandoned, and
+so slipped unaccompanied into the vacant sky, where only a few loitering
+clouds remained to greet them) the whole family would respond in chorus:
+"Why, you're forgetting; we had luncheon an hour earlier; you know very
+well it's Saturday."
+
+The surprise of a 'barbarian' (for so we termed everyone who was not
+acquainted with Saturday's special customs) who had called at eleven
+o'clock to speak to my father, and had found us at table, was an event
+which used to cause Françoise as much merriment as, perhaps, anything
+that had ever happened in her life. And if she found it amusing that the
+nonplussed visitor should not have known, beforehand, that we had our
+luncheon an hour earlier on Saturday, it was still more irresistibly
+funny that my father himself (fully as she sympathised, from the bottom
+of her heart, with the rigid chauvinism which prompted him) should never
+have dreamed that the barbarian could fail to be aware of so simple a
+matter, and so had replied, with no further enlightenment of the
+other's surprise at seeing us already in the dining-room: "You see, it's
+Saturday." On reaching this point in the story, Françoise would pause to
+wipe the tears of merriment from her eyes, and then, to add to her own
+enjoyment, would prolong the dialogue, inventing a further reply for
+the visitor to whom the word 'Saturday' had conveyed nothing. And so far
+from our objecting to these interpolations, we would feel that the story
+was not yet long enough, and would rally her with: "Oh, but surely he
+said something else as well. There was more than that, the first time
+you told it."
+
+My great-aunt herself would lay aside her work, and raise her head and
+look on at us over her glasses.
+
+The day had yet another characteristic feature, namely, that during May
+we used to go out on Saturday evenings after dinner to the 'Month of
+Mary' devotions.
+
+As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil, who held very strict
+views on "the deplorable untidiness of young people, which seems to
+be encouraged in these days," my mother would first see that there was
+nothing out of order in my appearance, and then we would set out for
+the church. It was in these 'Month of Mary' services that I can remember
+having first fallen in love with hawthorn-blossom. The hawthorn was not
+merely in the church, for there, holy ground as it was, we had all of us
+a right of entry; but, arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from
+the mysteries in whose celebration it was playing a part, it thrust in
+among the tapers and the sacred vessels its rows of branches, tied to
+one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration; and
+they were made more lovely still by the scalloped outline of the dark
+leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train,
+little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look
+at them save through my fingers, I could feel that the formal scheme
+was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by
+trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament
+of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at
+once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar,
+a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so
+unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of
+stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a
+white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate,
+somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it
+as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance
+from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and
+alive.
+
+M. Vinteuil had come in with his daughter and had sat down beside us.
+He belonged to a good family, and had once been music-master to
+my grandmother's sisters; so that when, after losing his wife and
+inheriting some property, he had retired to the neighbourhood of
+Combray, we used often to invite him to our house. But with his intense
+prudishness he had given up coming, so as not to be obliged to meet
+Swann, who had made what he called "a most unsuitable marriage, as
+seems to be the fashion in these days." My mother, on hearing that he
+'composed,' told him by way of a compliment that, when she came to see
+him, he must play her something of his own. M. Vinteuil would have liked
+nothing better, but he carried politeness and consideration for others
+to so fine a point, always putting himself in their place, that he was
+afraid of boring them, or of appearing egotistical, if he carried out,
+or even allowed them to suspect what were his own desires. On the day
+when my parents had gone to pay him a visit, I had accompanied them,
+but they had allowed me to remain outside, and as M. Vinteuil's house,
+Montjouvain, stood on a site actually hollowed out from a steep hill
+covered with shrubs, among which I took cover, I had found myself on a
+level with his drawing-room, upstairs, and only a few feet away from its
+window. When a servant came in to tell him that my parents had arrived,
+I had seen M. Vinteuil run to the piano and lay out a sheet of music
+so as to catch the eye. But as soon as they entered the room he had
+snatched it away and hidden it in a corner. He was afraid, no doubt, of
+letting them suppose that he was glad to see them only because it gave
+him a chance of playing them some of his compositions. And every time
+that my mother, in the course of her visit, had returned to the subject
+of his playing, he had hurriedly protested: "I cannot think who put that
+on the piano; it is not the proper place for it at all," and had turned
+the conversation aside to other topics, simply because those were of
+less interest to himself.
+
+His one and only passion was for his daughter, and she, with her
+somewhat boyish appearance, looked so robust that it was hard to
+restrain a smile when one saw the precautions her father used to take
+for her health, with spare shawls always in readiness to wrap around
+her shoulders. My grandmother had drawn our attention to the gentle,
+delicate, almost timid expression which might often be caught flitting
+across the face, dusted all over with freckles, of this otherwise stolid
+child. When she had spoken, she would at once take her own words in the
+sense in which her audience must have heard them, she would be alarmed
+at the possibility of a misunderstanding, and one would see, in clear
+outline, as though in a transparency, beneath the mannish face of the
+'good sort' that she was, the finer features of a young woman in tears.
+
+When, before turning to leave the church, I made a genuflection before
+the altar, I felt suddenly, as I rose again, a bitter-sweet fragrance of
+almonds steal towards me from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed
+that on the flowers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour,
+in which I imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as the taste
+of an almond cake lay in the burned parts, or the sweetness of Mlle.
+Vinteuil's cheeks beneath their freckles. Despite the heavy, motionless
+silence of the hawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like
+the murmuring of an intense vitality, with which the whole altar was
+quivering like a roadside hedge explored by living antennae, of which I
+was reminded by seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed
+to have kept the springtime virulence, the irritant power of stinging
+insects now transmuted into flowers.
+
+Outside the church we would stand talking for a moment with M. Vinteuil,
+in the porch. Boys would be chevying one another in the Square, and he
+would interfere, taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the
+big. If his daughter said, in her thick, comfortable voice, how glad she
+had been to see us, immediately it would seem as though some elder and
+more sensitive sister, latent in her, had blushed at this thoughtless,
+schoolboyish utterance, which had, perhaps, made us think that she was
+angling for an invitation to the house. Her father would then arrange
+a cloak over her shoulders, they would clamber into a little dog-cart
+which she herself drove, and home they would both go to Montjouvain.
+As for ourselves, the next day being Sunday, with no need to be up and
+stirring before high mass, if it was a moonlight night and warm, then,
+instead of taking us home at once, my father, in his thirst for personal
+distinction, would lead us on a long walk round by the Calvary, which my
+mother's utter incapacity for taking her bearings, or even for knowing
+which road she might be on, made her regard as a triumph of his
+strategic genius. Sometimes we would go as far as the viaduct, which
+began to stride on its long legs of stone at the railway station, and
+to me typified all the wretchedness of exile beyond the last outposts of
+civilisation, because every year, as we came down from Paris, we would
+be warned to take special care, when we got to Combray, not to miss
+the station, to be ready before the train stopped, since it would start
+again in two minutes and proceed across the viaduct, out of the lands of
+Christendom, of which Combray, to me, represented the farthest limit.
+We would return by the Boulevard de la Gare, which contained the most
+attractive villas in the town. In each of their gardens the moonlight,
+copying the art of Hubert Robert, had scattered its broken staircases
+of white marble, its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar. Its
+beams had swept away the telegraph office. All that was left of it was
+a column, half shattered, but preserving the beauty of a ruin which
+endures for all time. I would by now be dragging my weary limbs, and
+ready to drop with sleep; the balmy scent of the lime-trees seemed a
+consolation which I could obtain only at the price of great suffering
+and exhaustion, and not worthy of the effort. From gates far apart
+the watchdogs, awakened by our steps in the silence, would set up
+an antiphonal barking, as I still hear them bark, at times, in the
+evenings, and it is in their custody (when the public gardens of Combray
+were constructed on its site) that the Boulevard de la Gare must
+have taken refuge, for wherever I may be, as soon as they begin their
+alternate challenge and acceptance, I can see it again with all its
+lime-trees, and its pavement glistening beneath the moon.
+
+Suddenly my father would bring us to a standstill and ask my
+mother--"Where are we?" Utterly worn out by the walk but still proud of
+her husband, she would lovingly confess that she had not the least
+idea. He would shrug his shoulders and laugh. And then, as though it had
+slipped, with his latchkey, from his waistcoat pocket, he would point
+out to us, when it stood before our eyes, the back-gate of our own
+garden, which had come hand-in-hand with the familiar corner of the Rue
+du Saint-Esprit, to await us, to greet us at the end of our wanderings
+over paths unknown. My mother would murmur admiringly "You really are
+wonderful!" And from that instant I had not to take another step; the
+ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where, for so long,
+my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my
+will. Custom came to take me in her arms, carried me all the way up to
+my bed, and laid me down there like a little child.
+
+Although Saturday, by beginning an hour earlier, and by depriving her
+of the services of Françoise, passed more slowly than other days for my
+aunt, yet, the moment it was past, and a new week begun, she would look
+forward with impatience to its return, as something that embodied all
+the novelty and distraction which her frail and disordered body was
+still able to endure. This was not to say, however, that she did not
+long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not
+pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something
+different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of
+energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in
+themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, in
+their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion
+(even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which prosperity has
+silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again
+by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when
+the will, which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue its
+impulse, to renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled
+desires, and consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins
+into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel. Of
+course, since my aunt's strength, which was completely drained by the
+slightest exertion, returned but drop by drop into the pool of her
+repose, the reservoir was very slow in filling, and months would go by
+before she reached that surplus which other people use up in their daily
+activities, but which she had no idea--and could never decide how to
+employ. And I have no doubt that then--just as a desire to have her
+potatoes served with béchamel sauce, for a change, would be formed,
+ultimately, from the pleasure she found in the daily reappearance of
+those mashed potatoes of which she was never 'tired'--she would extract
+from the accumulation of those monotonous days (on which she so much
+depended) a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, instantaneous
+in its happening, but violent enough to compel her to put into effect,
+once for all, one of those changes which she knew would be beneficial to
+her health, but to which she could never make up her mind without some
+such stimulus. She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the
+long luxury of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when
+she felt 'well' and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house
+was being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest of us had already
+perished, a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one stone
+standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have
+plenty of time to escape without undue haste, provided that she rose
+at once from her bed, must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect
+which combined with the two minor advantages of letting her taste the
+full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning, and of
+causing universal stupefaction in the village when she should sally
+forth to conduct our obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but
+erect, the paramount and priceless boon of forcing her at the right
+moment, with no time to be lost, no room for weakening hesitations, to
+go off and spend the summer at her charming farm of Mirougrain, where
+there was a waterfall. Inasmuch as nothing of this sort had ever
+occurred, though indeed she must often have pondered the success of
+such a manoeuvre as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable games of
+patience (and though it must have plunged her in despair from the first
+moment of its realisation, from the first of those little unforeseen
+facts, the first word of calamitous news, whose accents can never
+afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears upon it
+the imprint of actual, physical death, so terribly different from the
+logical abstraction of its possibility) she would fall back from time
+to time, to add an interest to her life, upon imagining other, minor
+catastrophes, which she would follow up with passion. She would beguile
+herself with a sudden suspicion that Françoise had been robbing her,
+that she had set a trap to make certain, and had caught her betrayer
+red-handed; and being in the habit, when she made up a game of cards by
+herself, of playing her own and her adversary's hands at once, she would
+first stammer out Françoise's awkward apologies, and then reply to them
+with such a fiery indignation that any of us who happened to intrude
+upon her at one of these moments would find her bathed in perspiration,
+her eyes blazing, her false hair pushed awry and exposing the baldness
+of her brows. Françoise must often, from the next room, have heard these
+mordant sarcasms levelled at herself, the mere framing of which in words
+would not have relieved my aunt's feelings sufficiently, had they been
+allowed to remain in a purely immaterial form, without the degree
+of substance and reality which she added to them by murmuring them
+half-aloud. Sometimes, however, even these counterpane dramas would not
+satisfy my aunt; she must see her work staged. And so, on a Sunday,
+with all the doors mysteriously closed, she would confide in Eulalie her
+doubts of Françoise's integrity and her determination to be rid of her,
+and on another day she would confide in Françoise her suspicions of the
+disloyalty of Eulalie, to whom the front-door would very soon be closed
+for good. A few days more, and, disgusted with her latest confidant, she
+would again be 'as thick as thieves' with the traitor, while, before the
+next performance, the two would once more have changed their parts. But
+the suspicions which Eulalie might occasionally breed in her were no
+more than a fire of straw, which must soon subside for lack of fuel,
+since Eulalie was not living with her in the house. It was a very
+different matter when the suspect was Françoise, of whose presence under
+the same roof as herself my aunt was perpetually conscious, while for
+fear of catching cold, were she to leave her bed, she would never dare
+go downstairs to the kitchen to see for herself whether there was,
+indeed, any foundation for her suspicions. And so on by degrees, until
+her mind had no other occupation than to attempt, at every hour of the
+day, to discover what was being done, what was being concealed from her
+by Françoise. She would detect the most furtive movement of Françoise's
+features, something contradictory in what she was saying, some desire
+which she appeared to be screening. And she would shew her that she was
+unmasked, by, a single word, which made Françoise turn pale, and which
+my aunt seemed to find a cruel satisfaction in driving into her unhappy
+servant's heart. And the very next Sunday a disclosure by Eulalie--like
+one of those discoveries which suddenly open up an unsuspected field
+for exploration to some new science which has hitherto followed only
+the beaten paths--proved to my aunt that her own worst suspicions fell
+a long way short of the appalling truth. "But Françoise ought to know
+that," said Eulalie, "now that you have given her a carriage."
+
+"Now that I have given her a carriage!" gasped my aunt.
+
+"Oh, but I didn't know; I only thought so; I saw her go by yesterday in
+her open coach, as proud as Artaban, on her way to Roussainville market.
+I supposed that it must be Mme. Octave who had given it to her."
+
+So on by degrees, until Françoise and my aunt, the quarry and the
+hunter, could never cease from trying to forestall each other's devices.
+My mother was afraid lest Françoise should develop a genuine hatred of
+my aunt, who was doing everything in her power to annoy her. However
+that might be, Françoise had come, more and more, to pay an infinitely
+scrupulous attention to my aunt's least word and gesture. When she had
+to ask her for anything she would hesitate, first, for a long time,
+making up her mind how best to begin. And when she had uttered her
+request, she would watch my aunt covertly, trying to guess from the
+expression on her face what she thought of it, and how she would reply.
+And in this way--whereas an artist who had been reading memoirs of the
+seventeenth century, and wished to bring himself nearer to the great
+Louis, would consider that he was making progress in that direction when
+he constructed a pedigree that traced his own descent from some historic
+family, or when he engaged in correspondence with one of the reigning
+Sovereigns of Europe, and so would shut his eyes to the mistake he was
+making in seeking to establish a similarity by an exact and therefore
+lifeless copy of mere outward forms--a middle-aged lady in a small
+country town, by doing no more than yield whole-hearted obedience to her
+own irresistible eccentricities, and to a spirit of mischief engendered
+by the utter idleness of her existence, could see, without ever having
+given a thought to Louis XIV, the most trivial occupations of her daily
+life, her morning toilet, her luncheon, her afternoon nap, assume, by
+virtue of their despotic singularity, something of the interest that was
+to be found in what Saint-Simon used to call the 'machinery' of life at
+Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silence,
+a shade of good humour or of arrogance on her features would provide
+Françoise with matter for a mental commentary as tense with passion and
+terror, as did the silence, the good humour or the arrogance of the King
+when a courtier, or even his greatest nobles, had presented a petition
+to him, at the turning of an avenue, at Versailles.
+
+One Sunday, when my aunt had received simultaneous visits from the Curé
+and from Eulalie, and had been left alone, afterwards, to rest, the
+whole family went upstairs to bid her good night, and Mamma ventured
+to condole with her on the unlucky coincidence that always brought both
+visitors to her door at the same time.
+
+"I hear that things went wrong again to-day, Léonie," she said kindly,
+"you have had all your friends here at once."
+
+And my great-aunt interrupted with: "Too many good things..." for, since
+her daughter's illness, she felt herself in duty bound to revive her as
+far as possible by always drawing her attention to the brighter side of
+things. But my father had begun to speak.
+
+"I should like to take advantage," he said, "of the whole family's being
+here together, to tell you a story, so as not to have to begin all over
+again to each of you separately. I am afraid we are in M. Legrandin's
+bad books; he would hardly say 'How d'ye do' to me this morning."
+
+I did not wait to hear the end of my father's story, for I had been with
+him myself after mass when we had passed M. Legrandin; instead, I went
+downstairs to the kitchen to ask for the bill of fare for our dinner,
+which was of fresh interest to me daily, like the news in a paper, and
+excited me as might the programme of a coming festivity.
+
+As M. Legrandin had passed close by us on our way from church,
+walking by the side of a lady, the owner of a country house in the
+neighbourhood, whom we knew only by sight, my father had saluted him in
+a manner at once friendly and reserved, without stopping in his walk; M.
+Legrandin had barely acknowledged the courtesy, and then with an air of
+surprise, as though he had not recognised us, and with that distant look
+characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable, and who from
+the suddenly receding depths of their eyes seem to have caught sight of
+you at the far end of an interminably straight road, and at so great
+a distance that they content themselves with directing towards you
+an almost imperceptible movement of the head, in proportion to your
+doll-like dimensions.
+
+Now, the lady who was walking with Legrandin was a model of virtue,
+known and highly respected; there could be no question of his being
+out for amorous adventure, and annoyed at being detected; and my father
+asked himself how he could possibly have displeased our friend.
+
+"I should be all the more sorry to feel that he was angry with us," he
+said, "because among all those people in their Sunday clothes there
+is something about him, with his little cut-away coat and his soft
+neckties, so little 'dressed-up,' so genuinely simple; an air of
+innocence, almost, which is really attractive."
+
+But the vote of the family council was unanimous, that my father had
+imagined the whole thing, or that Legrandin, at the moment in question,
+had been preoccupied in thinking about something else. Anyhow, my
+father's fears were dissipated no later than the following evening.
+As we returned from a long walk we saw, near the Pont-Vieux, Legrandin
+himself, who, on account of the holidays, was spending a few days more
+in Combray. He came up to us with outstretched hand: "Do you know,
+master book-lover," he asked me, "this line of Paul Desjardins?
+
+
+  Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.
+
+Is not that a fine rendering of a moment like this? Perhaps you have
+never read Paul Desjardins. Read him, my boy, read him; in these days he
+is converted, they tell me, into a preaching friar, but he used to have
+the most charming water-colour touch--
+
+
+  Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.
+
+May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even
+when the time comes, which is coming now for me, when the woods are all
+black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself,
+as I am doing, by looking up to the sky." He took a cigarette from
+his pocket and stood for a long time, his eyes fixed on the horizon.
+"Goodbye, friends!" he suddenly exclaimed, and left us.
+
+At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was
+for dinner, its preparation would already have begun, and Françoise,
+a colonel with all the forces of nature for her subalterns, as in the
+fairy-tales where giants hire themselves out as scullions, would be
+stirring the coals, putting the potatoes to steam, and, at the right
+moment, finishing over the fire those culinary masterpieces which had
+been first got ready in some of the great array of vessels, triumphs of
+the potter's craft, which ranged from tubs and boilers and cauldrons
+and fish kettles down to jars for game, moulds for pastry, and tiny
+pannikins for cream, and included an entire collection of pots and
+pans of every shape and size. I would stop by the table, where the
+kitchen-maid had shelled them, to inspect the platoons of peas, drawn up
+in ranks and numbered, like little green marbles, ready for a game; but
+what fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine
+and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and
+azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white
+feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a
+rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these
+celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had
+been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which
+covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this
+radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening
+shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all
+night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played
+(lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's
+_Dream_) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of aromatic
+perfume.
+
+Poor Giotto's Charity, as Swann had named her, charged by Françoise with
+the task of preparing them for the table, would have them lying beside
+her in a basket; sitting with a mournful air, as though all the sorrows
+of the world were heaped upon her; and the light crowns of azure which
+capped the asparagus shoots above their pink jackets would be finely and
+separately outlined, star by star, as in Giotto's fresco are the flowers
+banded about the brows, or patterning the basket of his Virtue at Padua.
+And, meanwhile, Françoise would be turning on the spit one of those
+chickens, such as she alone knew how to roast, chickens which had wafted
+far abroad from Combray the sweet savour of her merits, and which, while
+she was serving them to us at table, would make the quality of kindness
+predominate for the moment in my private conception of her character;
+the aroma of that cooked flesh, which she knew how to make so unctuous
+and so tender, seeming to me no more than the proper perfume of one of
+her many virtues.
+
+But the day on which, while my father took counsel with his family upon
+our strange meeting with Legrandin, I went down to the kitchen, was one
+of those days when Giotto's Charity, still very weak and ill after her
+recent confinement, had been unable to rise from her bed; Françoise,
+being without assistance, had fallen into arrears. When I went in, I saw
+her in the back-kitchen which opened on to the courtyard, in process of
+killing a chicken; by its desperate and quite natural resistance, which
+Françoise, beside herself with rage as she attempted to slit its throat
+beneath the ear, accompanied with shrill cries of "Filthy creature!
+Filthy creature!" it made the saintly kindness and unction of our
+servant rather less prominent than it would do, next day at dinner, when
+it made its appearance in a skin gold-embroidered like a chasuble, and
+its precious juice was poured out drop by drop as from a pyx. When it
+was dead Françoise mopped up its streaming blood, in which, however,
+she did not let her rancour drown, for she gave vent to another burst
+of rage, and, gazing down at the carcass of her enemy, uttered a final
+"Filthy creature!"
+
+I crept out of the kitchen and upstairs, trembling all over; I could
+have prayed, then, for the instant dismissal of Françoise. But who
+would have baked me such hot rolls, boiled me such fragrant coffee, and
+even--roasted me such chickens? And, as it happened, everyone else had
+already had to make the same cowardly reckoning. For my aunt Léonie knew
+(though I was still in ignorance of this) that Françoise, who, for her
+own daughter or for her nephews, would have given her life without a
+murmur, shewed a singular implacability in her dealings with the rest
+of the world. In spite of which my aunt still retained her, for, while
+conscious of her cruelty, she could appreciate her services. I began
+gradually to realise that Françoise's kindness, her compunction, the
+sum total of her virtues concealed many of these back-kitchen tragedies,
+just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kings and queens
+who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of
+churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed. I had taken note of
+the fact that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity
+inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance
+separating the sufferers from herself. The tears which flowed from her
+in torrents when she read of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her,
+in a newspaper, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a
+more accurate mental picture of the victims. One night, shortly after
+her confinement, the kitchen-maid was seized with the most appalling
+pains; Mamma heard her groans, and rose and awakened Françoise, who,
+quite unmoved, declared that all the outcry was mere malingering, that
+the girl wanted to 'play the mistress' in the house. The doctor, who
+had been afraid of some such attack, had left a marker in a medical
+dictionary which we had, at the page on which the symptoms were
+described, and had told us to turn up this passage, where we would find
+the measures of 'first aid' to be adopted. My mother sent Françoise
+to fetch the book, warning her not to let the marker drop out. An hour
+elapsed, and Françoise had not returned; my mother, supposing that
+she had gone back to bed, grew vexed, and told me to go myself to the
+bookcase and fetch the volume. I did so, and there found Françoise who,
+in her curiosity to know what the marker indicated, had begun to read
+the clinical account of these after-pains, and was violently sobbing,
+now that it was a question of a type of illness with which she was not
+familiar. At each painful symptom mentioned by the writer she would
+exclaim: "Oh, oh, Holy Virgin, is it possible that God wishes any
+wretched human creature to suffer so? Oh, the poor girl!"
+
+But when I had called her, and she had returned to the bedside of
+Giotto's Charity, her tears at once ceased to flow; she could find no
+stimulus for that pleasant sensation of tenderness and pity which she
+very well knew, having been moved to it often enough by the perusal
+of newspapers; nor any other pleasure of the same kind in her sense of
+weariness and irritation at being pulled out of bed in the middle of
+the night for the kitchen-maid; so that at the sight of those very
+sufferings, the printed account of which had moved her to tears, she
+had nothing to offer but ill-tempered mutterings, mingled with bitter
+sarcasm, saying, when she thought that we had gone out of earshot:
+"Well, she need never have done what she must have done to bring all
+this about! She found that pleasant enough, I dare say! She had better
+not put on any airs now. All the same, he must have been a god-forsaken
+young man to go after _that_. Dear, dear, it's just as they used to say
+in my poor mother's country:
+
+
+  Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs' tails,
+    And dirty sluts in plenty,
+  Smell sweeter than roses in young men's noses
+    When the heart is one-and-twenty."
+
+Although, when her grandson had a slight cold in his head, she would set
+off at night, even if she were ill also, instead of going to bed, to
+see whether he had everything that he wanted, covering ten miles on foot
+before daybreak so as to be in time to begin her work, this same love
+for her own people, and her desire to establish the future greatness of
+her house on a solid foundation reacted, in her policy with regard to
+the other servants, in one unvarying maxim, which was never to let any
+of them set foot in my aunt's room; indeed she shewed a sort of pride
+in not allowing anyone else to come near my aunt, preferring, when she
+herself was ill, to get out of bed and to administer the Vichy water in
+person, rather than to concede to the kitchen-maid the right of entry
+into her mistress's presence. There is a species of hymenoptera,
+observed by Fabre, the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a
+supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls
+in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive
+cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds
+with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which
+their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions)
+depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid,
+will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive
+quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh
+for the larder: in the same way Françoise had adopted, to minister
+to her permanent and unfaltering resolution to render the house
+uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of crafty and pitiless
+stratagems. Many years later we discovered that, if we had been fed on
+asparagus day after day throughout that whole season, it was because the
+smell of the plants gave the poor kitchen-maid, who had to prepare them,
+such violent attacks of asthma that she was finally obliged to leave my
+aunt's service.
+
+Alas! we had definitely to alter our opinion of M. Legrandin. On one
+of the Sundays following our meeting with him on the Pont-Vieux, after
+which my father had been forced to confess himself mistaken, as mass
+drew to an end, and, with the sunshine and the noise of the outer world,
+something else invaded the church, an atmosphere so far from sacred that
+Mme. Goupil, Mme. Percepied (all those, in fact, who a moment ago, when
+I arrived a little late, had been sitting motionless, their eyes fixed
+on their prayer-books; who, I might even have thought, had not seen
+me come in, had not their feet moved slightly to push away the little
+kneeling-desk which was preventing me from getting to my chair) began in
+loud voices to discuss with us all manner of utterly mundane topics, as
+though we were already outside in the Square, we saw, standing on the
+sun-baked steps of the porch, dominating the many-coloured tumult of the
+market, Legrandin himself, whom the husband of the lady we had seen with
+him, on the previous occasion, was just going to introduce to the wife
+of another large landed proprietor of the district. Legrandin's face
+shewed an extraordinary zeal and animation; he made a profound bow, with
+a subsidiary backward movement which brought his spine sharply up into a
+position behind its starting-point, a gesture in which he must have
+been trained by the husband of his sister, Mme. de Cambremer. This rapid
+recovery caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin's
+hips, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but
+this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency, with not the
+least hint in it of spiritual significance, this wave lashed to a fury
+by the wind of an assiduity, an obsequiousness of the basest sort, awoke
+my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different
+from the one whom we knew. The lady gave him some message for her
+coachman, and while he was stepping down to her carriage the impression
+of joy, timid and devout, which the introduction had stamped there,
+still lingered on his face. Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled,
+then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than
+usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left,
+in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he
+abandoned himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he
+were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness. Meanwhile
+we were coming out through the porch; we were passing close beside him;
+he was too well bred to turn his head away; but he fixed his eyes, which
+had suddenly changed to those of a seer, lost in the profundity of his
+vision, on so distant a point of the horizon that he could not see us,
+and so had not to acknowledge our presence. His face emerged, still with
+an air of innocence, from his straight and pliant coat, which looked
+as though conscious of having been led astray, in spite of itself,
+and plunged into surroundings of a detested splendour. And a spotted
+necktie, stirred by the breezes of the Square, continued to float in
+front of Legrandin, like the standard of his proud isolation, of his
+noble independence. Just as we reached the house my mother discovered
+that we had forgotten the 'Saint-Honoré,' and asked my father to go
+back with me and tell them to send it up at once. Near the church we met
+Legrandin, coming towards us with the same lady, whom he was escorting
+to her carriage. He brushed past us, and did not interrupt what he was
+saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue eye, a little
+sign, which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids, and as
+it did not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to
+pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the
+intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which
+they had to find expression, he made that blue chink, which was set
+apart for us, sparkle with all the animation of cordiality, which went
+far beyond mere playfulness, and almost touched the border-line of
+roguery; he subtilised the refinements of good-fellowship into a wink
+of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding, all the
+mysteries of complicity in a plot, and finally exalted his assurances
+of friendship to the level of protestations of affection, even of a
+declaration of love, lighting up for us, and for us alone, with a secret
+and languid flame invisible by the great lady upon his other side, an
+enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice.
+
+Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me to dine with him
+on this same Sunday evening. "Come and bear your aged friend company,"
+he had said to me. "Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us from
+some land to which we shall never go again, come and let me breathe from
+the far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of
+spring among which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with
+the primrose, with the canon's beard, with the gold-cup; come with the
+stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian
+flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter
+daisy, come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to
+embalm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt's garden ere
+the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious
+silken raiment of the lily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the
+many-coloured enamel of the pansies, but come, above all, with the
+spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of winter, wafting apart,
+for the two butterflies' sake, that have waited outside all morning, the
+closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose."
+
+The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought
+still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin. But my grandmother refused
+to believe that he could have been impolite.
+
+"You admit yourself that he appears at church there, quite simply
+dressed, and all that; he hardly looks like a man of fashion." She added
+that; in any event, even if, at the worst, he had been intentionally
+rude, it was far better for us to pretend that we had noticed nothing.
+And indeed my father himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the
+attitude which Legrandin had adopted, may still have held in reserve a
+final uncertainty as to its true meaning. It was like every attitude
+or action which reveals a man's deep and hidden character; they bear
+no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our
+suspicions by the culprit's evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are
+reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the
+face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether
+indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination; with
+the result that such attitudes, and these alone are of importance in
+indicating character, are the most apt to leave us in perplexity.
+
+I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house, by moonlight. "There
+is a charming quality, is there not," he said to me, "in this silence;
+for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist, whom you will read
+in time to come, claims that there is no remedy but silence and shadow.
+And see you this, my boy, there comes in all lives a time, towards which
+you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can endure but one kind of
+light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the
+stillroom of darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what
+the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence."
+
+I could hear what M. Legrandin was saying; like everything that he said,
+it sounded attractive; but I was disturbed by the memory of a lady whom
+I had seen recently for the first time; and thinking, now that I
+knew that Legrandin was on friendly terms with several of the local
+aristocracy, that perhaps she also was among his acquaintance, I
+summoned up all my courage and said to him: "Tell me, sir, do you, by
+any chance, know the lady--the ladies of Guermantes?" and I felt glad
+because, in pronouncing the name, I had secured a sort of power over
+it, by the mere act of drawing it up out of my dreams and giving it an
+objective existence in the world of spoken things.
+
+But, at the sound of the word Guermantes, I saw in the middle of each of
+our friend's blue eyes a little brown dimple appear, as though they had
+been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of his pupils,
+reacting from the shock, received and secreted the azure overflow.
+His fringed eyelids darkened, and drooped. His mouth, which had been
+stiffened and seared with bitter lines, was the first to recover, and
+smiled, while his eyes still seemed full of pain, like the eyes of a
+good-looking martyr whose body bristles with arrows.
+
+"No, I do not know them," he said, but instead of uttering so simple a
+piece of information, a reply in which there was so little that could
+astonish me, in the natural and conversational tone which would have
+befitted it, he recited it with a separate stress upon each word,
+leaning forward, bowing his head, with at once the vehemence which a man
+gives, so as to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though
+the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some
+strange accident of fortune) and with the emphasis of a man who, finding
+himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation,
+chooses to proclaim it aloud, so as to convince his hearers that the
+confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, but is
+easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation in question, in this
+case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family, might very
+well have been not forced upon, but actually designed by Legrandin
+himself, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or
+mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.
+
+"No," he resumed, explaining by his words the tone in which they were
+uttered. "No, I do not know them; I have never wished to know them; I
+have always made a point of preserving complete independence; at heart,
+as you know, I am a bit of a Radical. People are always coming to me
+about it, telling me I am mistaken in not going to Guermantes, that I
+make myself seem ill-bred, uncivilised, an old bear. But that's not the
+sort of reputation that can frighten me; it's too true! In my heart
+of hearts I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches,
+books--two or three, pictures--rather more, perhaps, and the light of
+the moon when the fresh breeze of youth (such as yours) wafts to my
+nostrils the scent of gardens whose flowers my old eyes are not sharp
+enough, now, to distinguish."
+
+I did not understand very clearly why, in order to refrain from going
+to the houses of people whom one did not know, it should be necessary to
+cling to one's independence, nor how that could give one the appearance
+of a savage or a bear. But what I did understand was this, that
+Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he said that he cared only
+for churches, moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very
+great deal, for people who lived in country houses, and would be so much
+afraid, when in their company, of incurring their displeasure that he
+would never dare to let them see that he numbered, as well, among
+his friends middle-class people, the families of solicitors and
+stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must be known, that it should
+be revealed in his absence, when he was out of earshot, that judgment
+should go against him (if so it must) by default: in a word, he was a
+snob. Of course he would never have admitted all or any of this in the
+poetical language which my family and I so much admired. And if I asked
+him, "Do you know the Guermantes family?" Legrandin the talker would
+reply, "No, I have never cared to know them." But unfortunately the
+talker was now subordinated to another Legrandin, whom he kept carefully
+hidden in his breast, whom he would never consciously exhibit, because
+this other could tell stories about our own Legrandin and about his
+snobbishness which would have ruined his reputation for ever; and this
+other Legrandin had replied to me already in that wounded look, that
+stiffened smile, the undue gravity of his tone in uttering those
+few words, in the thousand arrows by which our own Legrandin had
+instantaneously been stabbed and sickened, like a Saint Sebastian of
+snobbery:
+
+"Oh, how you hurt me! No, I do not know the Guermantes family. Do not
+remind me of the great sorrow of my life." And since this other,
+this irrepressible, dominant, despotic Legrandin, if he lacked our
+Legrandin's charming vocabulary, shewed an infinitely greater promptness
+in expressing himself, by means of what are called 'reflexes,' it
+followed that, when Legrandin the talker attempted to silence him, he
+would already have spoken, and it would be useless for our friend to
+deplore the bad impression which the revelations of his _alter ego_ must
+have caused, since he could do no more now than endeavour to mitigate
+them.
+
+This was not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he
+inveighed against snobs. He could not (from his own knowledge, at least)
+be aware that he was one also, since it is only with the passions of
+others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to find out
+about our own can be no more than what other people have shewn us. Upon
+ourselves they react but indirectly, through our imagination, which
+substitutes for our actual, primary motives other, secondary motives,
+less stark and therefore more decent. Never had Legrandin's snobbishness
+impelled him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it
+would set his imagination to make that duchess appear, in Legrandin's
+eyes, endowed with all the graces. He would be drawn towards the
+duchess, assuring himself the while that he was yielding to the
+attractions of her mind, and her other virtues, which the vile race of
+snobs could never understand. Only his fellow-snobs knew that he was
+of their number, for, owing to their inability to appreciate the
+intervening efforts of his imagination, they saw in close juxtaposition
+the social activities of Legrandin and their primary cause.
+
+At home, meanwhile, we had no longer any illusions as to M. Legrandin,
+and our relations with him had become much more distant. Mamma would be
+greatly delighted whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin, which
+he continued to call the unpardonable sin, of snobbery. As for my
+father, he found it difficult to take Legrandin's airs in so light, in
+so detached a spirit; and when there was some talk, one year, of sending
+me to spend the long summer holidays at Balbec with my grandmother,
+he said: "I must, most certainly, tell Legrandin that you are going to
+Balbec, to see whether he will offer you an introduction to his sister.
+He probably doesn't remember telling us that she lived within a mile of
+the place."
+
+My grandmother, who held that, when one went to the seaside, one ought
+to be on the beach from morning to night, to taste the salt breezes, and
+that one should not know anyone in the place, because calls and parties
+and excursions were so much time stolen from what belonged, by rights,
+to the sea-air, begged him on no account to speak to Legrandin of our
+plans; for already, in her mind's eye, she could see his sister, Mme. de
+Cambremer, alighting from her carriage at the door of our hotel just
+as we were on the point of going out fishing, and obliging us to remain
+indoors all afternoon to entertain her. But Mamma laughed her fears to
+scorn, for she herself felt that the danger was not so threatening, and
+that Legrandin would shew no undue anxiety to make us acquainted with
+his sister. And, as it happened, there was no need for any of us to
+introduce the subject of Balbec, for it was Legrandin himself who,
+without the least suspicion that we had ever had any intention of
+visiting those parts, walked into the trap uninvited one evening, when
+we met him strolling on the banks of the Vivonne.
+
+"There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which
+are very beautiful, are they not, my friend?" he said to my father.
+"Especially a blue which is far more floral than atmospheric, a
+cineraria blue, which it is surprising to see in the sky. And that
+little pink cloud there, has it not just the tint of some flower, a
+carnation or hydrangea? Nowhere, perhaps, except on the shores of the
+English Channel, where Normandy merges into Brittany, have I been able
+to find such copious examples of what you might call a vegetable kingdom
+in the clouds. Down there, close to Balbec, among all those places which
+are still so uncivilised, there is a little bay, charmingly quiet, where
+the sunsets of the Auge Valley, those red-and-gold sunsets (which,
+all the same, I am very far from despising) seem commonplace and
+insignificant; for in that moist and gentle atmosphere these heavenly
+flower-beds will break into blossom, in a few moments, in the evenings,
+incomparably lovely, and often lasting for hours before they fade.
+Others shed their leaves at once, and then it is more beautiful still
+to see the sky strewn with the scattering of their innumerable petals,
+sulphurous yellow and rosy red. In that bay, which they call the Opal
+Bay, the golden sands appear more charming still from being fastened,
+like fair Andromeda, to those terrible rocks of the surrounding coast,
+to that funereal shore, famed for the number of its wrecks, where every
+winter many a brave vessel falls a victim to the perils of the sea.
+Balbec! the oldest bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our
+soil, the true Armor, the sea, the land's end, the accursed region
+which Anatole France--an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to
+read--has so well depicted, beneath its eternal fogs, as though it were
+indeed the land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. Balbec; yes, they
+are building hotels there now, superimposing them upon its ancient and
+charming soil, which they are powerless to alter; how delightful it is,
+down there, to be able to step out at once into regions so primitive and
+so entrancing."
+
+"Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec?" inquired my father. "This
+young man is just going to spend a couple of months there with his
+grandmother, and my wife too, perhaps."
+
+Legrandin, taken unawares by the question at a moment when he was
+looking directly at my father, was unable to turn aside his gaze, and so
+concentrated it with steadily increasing intensity--smiling mournfully
+the while--upon the eyes of his questioner, with an air of friendliness
+and frankness and of not being afraid to look him in the face, until he
+seemed to have penetrated my father's skull, as it had been a ball of
+glass, and to be seeing, at the moment, a long way beyond and behind it,
+a brightly coloured cloud, which provided him with a mental alibi, and
+would enable him to establish the theory that, just when he was
+being asked whether he knew anyone at Balbec, he had been thinking
+of something else, and so had not heard the question. As a rule these
+tactics make the questioner proceed to ask, "Why, what are you thinking
+about?" But my father, inquisitive, annoyed, and cruel, repeated: "Have
+you friends, then, in that neighbourhood, that you know Balbec so well?"
+
+In a final and desperate effort the smiling gaze of Legrandin struggled
+to the extreme limits of its tenderness, vagueness, candour, and
+distraction; then feeling, no doubt, that there was nothing left for it
+now but to answer, he said to us: "I have friends all the world over,
+wherever there are companies of trees, stricken but not defeated,
+which have come together to offer a common supplication, with pathetic
+obstinacy, to an inclement sky which has no mercy upon them."
+
+"That is not quite what I meant," interrupted my father, obstinate as
+a tree and merciless as the sky. "I asked you, in case anything should
+happen to my mother-in-law and she wanted to feel that she was not all
+alone down there, at the ends of the earth, whether you knew any of the
+people."
+
+"There as elsewhere, I know everyone and I know no one," replied
+Legrandin, who was by no means ready yet to surrender; "places I know
+well, people very slightly. But, down there, the places themselves seem
+to me just like people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality
+which would have been corrupted and ruined by the gift of life. Perhaps
+it is a castle which you encounter upon the cliff's edge; standing there
+by the roadside, where it has halted to contemplate its sorrows before
+an evening sky, still rosy, through which a golden moon is climbing;
+while the fishing-boats, homeward bound, creasing the watered silk of
+the Channel, hoist its pennant at their mastheads and carry its colours.
+Or perhaps it is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, ugly, if
+anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from every eye some
+imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment. That land which
+knows not truth," he continued with Machiavellian subtlety, "that land
+of infinite fiction makes bad reading for any boy; and is certainly
+not what I should choose or recommend for my young friend here, who is
+already so much inclined to melancholy, for a heart already predisposed
+to receive its impressions. Climates that breathe amorous secrets and
+futile regrets may agree with an old and disillusioned man like myself;
+but they must always prove fatal to a temperament which is still
+unformed. Believe me," he went on with emphasis, "the waters of that
+bay--more Breton than Norman--may exert a sedative influence, though
+even that is of questionable value, upon a heart which, like mine, is no
+longer unbroken, a heart for whose wounds there is no longer anything
+to compensate. But at your age, my boy, those waters are
+contra-indicated.... Good night to you, neighbours," he added, moving
+away from us with that evasive abruptness to which we were accustomed;
+and then, turning towards us, with a physicianly finger raised in
+warning, he resumed the consultation: "No Balbec before you are fifty!"
+he called out to me, "and even then it must depend on the state of the
+heart."
+
+My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him, and tortured
+him with questions, but it was labour in vain: like that scholarly
+swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a wealth
+of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would
+have sufficed to establish him in a more lucrative--but an honourable
+occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have
+constructed a whole system of ethics, and a celestial geography of Lower
+Normandy, sooner than admit to us that, within a mile of Balbec, his own
+sister was living in her own house; sooner than find himself obliged
+to offer us a letter of introduction, the prospect of which would never
+have inspired him with such terror had he been absolutely certain--as,
+from his knowledge of my grandmother's character, he really ought to
+have been certain--that in no circumstances whatsoever would we have
+dreamed of making use of it.
+
+* * *
+
+We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie
+a visit before dinner. In the first weeks of our Combray holidays, when
+the days ended early, we would still be able to see, as we turned
+into the Rue du Saint-Esprit, a reflection of the western sky from the
+windows of the house and a band of purple at the foot of the Calvary,
+which was mirrored further on in the pond; a fiery glow which,
+accompanied often by a cold that burned and stung, would associate
+itself in my mind with the glow of the fire over which, at that very
+moment, was roasting the chicken that was to furnish me, in place of the
+poetic pleasure I had found in my walk, with the sensual pleasures of
+good feeding, warmth and rest. But in summer, when we came back to the
+house, the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our
+visit to aunt Léonie its rays, sinking until they touched and lay along
+her window-sill, would there be caught and held by the large inner
+curtains and the bands which tied them back to the wall, and split and
+scattered and filtered; and then, at last, would fall upon and inlay
+with tiny flakes of gold the lemonwood of her chest-of-drawers,
+illuminating the room in their passage with the same delicate, slanting,
+shadowed beams that fall among the boles of forest trees. But on some
+days, though very rarely, the chest-of-drawers would long since have
+shed its momentary adornments, there would no longer, as we turned into
+the Rue du Saint-Esprit, be any reflection from the western sky burning
+along the line of window-panes; the pond beneath the Calvary would
+have lost its fiery glow, sometimes indeed had changed already to an
+opalescent pallor, while a long ribbon of moonlight, bent and broken
+and broadened by every ripple upon the water's surface, would be lying
+across it, from end to end. Then, as we drew near the house, we would
+make out a figure standing upon the doorstep, and Mamma would say to me:
+"Good heavens! There is Françoise looking out for us; your aunt must be
+anxious; that means we are late."
+
+And without wasting time by stopping to take off our 'things' we would
+fly upstairs to my aunt Léonie's room to reassure her, to prove to her
+by our bodily presence that all her gloomy imaginings were false, that,
+on the contrary, nothing had happened to us, but that we had gone the
+'Guermantes way,' and, good lord, when one took that walk, my aunt knew
+well enough that one could never say at what time one would be home.
+
+"There, Françoise," my aunt would say, "didn't I tell you that they must
+have gone the Guermantes way? Good gracious! They must be hungry! And
+your nice leg of mutton will be quite dried up now, after all the hours
+it's been waiting. What a time to come in! Well, and so you went the
+Guermantes way?"
+
+"But, Leonie, I supposed you knew," Mamma would answer. "I thought
+that Françoise had seen us go out by the little gate, through the
+kitchen-garden."
+
+For there were, in the environs of Combray, two 'ways' which we used to
+take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually
+leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen:
+the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also 'Swann's
+way,' because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of M.
+Swann's estate, and the 'Guermantes way.' Of Méséglise-la-Vineuse, to
+tell the truth, I never knew anything more than the way there, and
+the strange people who would come over on Sundays to take the air in
+Combray, people whom, this time, neither my aunt nor any of us would
+'know at all,' and whom we would therefore assume to be 'people who must
+have come over from Méséglise.' As for Guermantes, I was to know it well
+enough one day, but that day had still to come; and, during the whole
+of my boyhood, if Méséglise was to me something as inaccessible as the
+horizon, which remained hidden from sight, however far one went, by the
+folds of a country which no longer bore the least resemblance to the
+country round Combray; Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than
+the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way,' a
+sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator.
+And so to 'take the Guermantes way' in order to get to Méséglise, or
+vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to
+turn to the east in order to reach the west. Since my father used always
+to speak of the 'Méséglise way' as comprising the finest view of a plain
+that he knew anywhere, and of the 'Guermantes way' as typical of river
+scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as
+two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belongs
+only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of
+them appeared to me as a precious thing, which exhibited the special
+excellence of the whole, while, immediately beside them, in the first
+stages of our walk, before we had reached the sacred soil of one or the
+other, the purely material roads, at definite points on which they
+were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal scenery of a
+river, were no more worth the trouble of looking at them than, to a keen
+playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets which may
+happen to run past the walls of a theatre. But, above all, I set between
+them, far more distinctly than the mere distance in miles and yards and
+inches which separated one from the other, the distance that there was
+between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one
+of those distances of the mind which time serves only to lengthen, which
+separate things irremediably from one another, keeping them for ever
+upon different planes. And this distinction was rendered still more
+absolute because the habit we had of never going both ways on the same
+day, or in the course of the same walk, but the 'Méséglise way' one time
+and the 'Guermantes way' another, shut them up, so to speak, far apart
+and unaware of each other's existence, in the sealed vessels--between
+which there could be no communication--of separate afternoons.
+
+When we had decided to go the 'Méséglise way' we would start (without
+undue haste, and even if the sky were clouded over, since the walk was
+not very long, and did not take us too far from home), as though we were
+not going anywhere in particular, by the front-door of my aunt's house,
+which opened on to the Rue du Saint-Esprit. We would be greeted by
+the gunsmith, we would drop our letters into the box, we would tell
+Théodore, from Françoise, as we passed, that she had run out of oil
+or coffee, and we would leave the town by the road which ran along the
+white fence of M. Swann's park. Before reaching it we would be met on
+our way by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers.
+Out of the fresh little green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised
+inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or purple
+blossom, which glowed, even in the shade, with the sunlight in which
+they had been bathed. Some of them, half-concealed by the little
+tiled house, called the Archers' Lodge, in which Swann's keeper lived,
+overtopped its gothic gable with their rosy minaret. The nymphs of
+spring would have seemed coarse and vulgar in comparison with these
+young houris, who retained, in this French garden, the pure and vivid
+colouring of a Persian miniature. Despite my desire to throw my arms
+about their pliant forms and to draw down towards me the starry locks
+that crowned their fragrant heads, we would pass them by without
+stopping, for my parents had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann's
+marriage, and, so as not to appear to be looking into his park, we
+would, instead of taking the road which ran beside its boundary and then
+climbed straight up to the open fields, choose another way, which led in
+the same direction, but circuitously, and brought us out rather too far
+from home.
+
+One day my grandfather said to my 'father: "Don't you remember Swann's
+telling us yesterday that his wife and daughter had gone off to Rheims
+and that he was taking the opportunity of spending a day or two in
+Paris? We might go along by the park, since the ladies are not at home;
+that will make it a little shorter."
+
+We stopped for a moment by the fence. Lilac-time was nearly over; some
+of the trees still thrust aloft, in tall purple chandeliers, their tiny
+balls of blossom, but in many places among their foliage where, only
+a week before, they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam,
+these were now spent and shrivelled and discoloured, a hollow scum, dry
+and scentless. My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects
+the appearance of the place was still the same, and how far it had
+altered since the walk that he had taken with old M. Swann, on the day
+of his wife's death; and he seized the opportunity to tell us, once
+again, the story of that walk.
+
+In front of us a path bordered with nasturtiums rose in the full glare
+of the sun towards the house. But to our right the park stretched away
+into the distance, on level ground. Overshadowed by the tall trees which
+stood close around it, an 'ornamental water' had been constructed by
+Swann's parents but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is
+the material upon which man has to work; certain spots will persist in
+remaining surrounded by the vassals of their own especial sovereignty,
+and will raise their immemorial standards among all the 'laid-out'
+scenery of a park, just as they would have done far from any human
+interference, in a solitude which must everywhere return to engulf
+them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed position, and
+superimposing itself upon the work of man's hands. And so it was that,
+at the foot of the path which led down to this artificial lake, there
+might be seen, in its two tiers woven of trailing forget-me-nots below
+and of periwinkle flowers above, the natural, delicate, blue garland
+which binds the luminous, shadowed brows of water-nymphs; while the
+iris, its swords sweeping every way in regal profusion, stretched out
+over agrimony and water-growing king-cups the lilied sceptres, tattered
+glories of yellow and purple, of the kingdom of the lake.
+
+The absence of Mlle. Swann, which--since it preserved me from the
+terrible risk of seeing her appear on one of the paths, and of being
+identified and scorned by this so privileged little girl who had
+Bergotte for a friend and used to go with him to visit cathedrals--made
+the exploration of Tansonville, now for the first time permitted me, a
+matter of indifference to myself, seemed however to invest the property,
+in my grandfather's and father's eyes, with a fresh and transient charm,
+and (like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering) to
+make the day extraordinarily propitious for a walk in this direction;
+I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see, by a
+miracle, Mlle. Swann appear, with her father, so close to us that we
+should not have time to escape, and should therefore be obliged to make
+her acquaintance. And so, when I suddenly noticed a straw basket lying
+forgotten on the grass by the side of a line whose float was bobbing
+in the water, I made a great effort to keep my father and grandfather
+looking in another direction, away from this sign that she might, after
+all, be in residence. Still, as Swann had told us that he ought not,
+really, to go away just then, as he had some people staying in the
+house, the line might equally belong to one of these guests. Not a
+footstep was to be heard on any of the paths. Somewhere in one of the
+tall trees, making a stage in its height, an invisible bird, desperately
+attempting to make the day seem shorter, was exploring with a long,
+continuous note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it
+received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of
+silence and of immobility that, one would have said, it had arrested
+for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more
+quickly. The sunlight fell so implacably from a fixed sky that one was
+naturally inclined to slip away out of the reach of its attentions, and
+even the slumbering water, whose repose was perpetually being invaded by
+the insects that swarmed above its surface, while it dreamed, no doubt,
+of some imaginary maelstrom, intensified the uneasiness which the sight
+of that floating cork had wrought in me, by appearing to draw it at
+full speed across the silent reaches of a mirrored firmament; now almost
+vertical, it seemed on the point of plunging down out of sight, and
+I had begun to ask myself whether, setting aside the longing and the
+terror that I had of making her acquaintance, it was not actually my
+duty to warn Mlle. Swann that the fish was biting--when I was obliged
+to run after my father and grandfather, who were calling me, and were
+surprised that I had not followed them along the little path, climbing
+up hill towards the open fields, into which they had already turned. I
+found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom.
+The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer
+visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their
+altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the
+ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a window; the scent
+that swept out over me from them was as rich, and as circumscribed in
+its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and
+the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of
+glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating 'nerves'
+in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in church,
+framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the perpendicular tracery
+of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white, like
+strawberry-beds in spring. How simple and rustic, in comparison with
+these, would seem the dog-roses which, in a few weeks' time, would be
+climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the
+smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be undone and
+scattered by the first breath of wind.
+
+But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in,
+to marshal before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose
+in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb
+myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with
+the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as
+certain intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation
+of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting
+me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play
+over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their
+secret. I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return
+to them with renewed strength. My eyes followed up the slope which,
+outside the hedge, rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed
+and been lost by its fellows, or a few cornflowers that had fallen
+lazily behind, and decorated the ground here and there with their
+flowers like the border of a tapestry, in which may be seen at intervals
+hints of the rustic theme which appears triumphant in the panel itself;
+infrequent still, spaced apart as the scattered houses which warn us
+that we are approaching a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse
+of waving corn beneath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single
+poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and holding against the breeze
+its scarlet ensign, over the buoy of rich black earth from which it
+sprang, made my heart beat as does a wayfarer's when he perceives, upon
+some low-lying ground, an old and broken boat which is being caulked and
+made seaworthy, and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of
+it, "The Sea!"
+
+And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands
+before those masterpieces of painting which, one imagines, one will
+be better able to 'take in' when one has looked away, for a moment, at
+something else; but in vain did I shape my fingers into a frame, so as
+to have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes; the sentiment which
+they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing
+to free itself, to float across and become one with the flowers. They
+themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any
+other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing. And then, inspiring
+me with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite
+painter quite different from any of those that we already know, or,
+better still, when some one has taken us and set us down in front of a
+picture of which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch,
+or when a piece of music which we have heard played over on the piano
+bursts out again in our ears with all the splendour and fullness of an
+orchestra, my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the hedge
+of Tansonville, said: "You are fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink
+one; isn't it pretty?"
+
+And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink, and
+lovelier even than the white. It, too, was in holiday attire, for one of
+those days which are the only true holidays, the holy days of religion,
+because they are not appointed by any capricious accident, as secular
+holidays are appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for
+such observances, which have nothing about them that is essentially
+festal--but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the
+flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to
+leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about
+the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them 'in colour,'
+and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of
+Combray, to the 'plain,' if one was to judge by the scale of prices
+at the 'stores' in the Square, or at Camus's, where the most expensive
+biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. And for my own part I set a
+higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed
+to tinge it with crushed strawberries. And these flowers had chosen
+precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some
+exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival, which colours,
+inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those
+whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of children, and for that
+reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other
+tints, even after the child's mind has realised that they offer no
+gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the
+dressmaker. And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before
+the white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was in no
+artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal
+intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself
+who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from
+a village shop, labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some
+procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too
+ravishing in colour, this rustic 'pompadour.' High up on the branches,
+like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets
+of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on
+the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler
+in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of
+pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly
+than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the
+hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to
+blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone. Taking its place
+in the hedge, but as different from the rest as a young girl in holiday
+attire among a crowd of dowdy women in everyday clothes, who are staying
+at home, equipped and ready for the 'Month of Mary,' of which it seemed
+already to form a part, it shone and smiled in its cool, rosy garments,
+a Catholic bush indeed, and altogether delightful.
+
+The hedge allowed us a glimpse, inside the park, of an alley bordered
+with jasmine, pansies, and verbenas, among which the stocks held open
+their fresh plump purses, of a pink as fragrant and as faded as old
+Spanish leather, while on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted
+green, coiling across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over the
+flowers whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan
+of infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops. Suddenly I stood still, unable
+to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our
+eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes
+possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish
+hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her
+hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish
+freckles. Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know,
+and indeed have never since learned how to reduce to its objective
+elements any strong impression, since I had not, as they say, enough
+'power of observation' to isolate the sense of their colour, for a long
+time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright
+eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her
+complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps, if her eyes had not been
+quite so black--which was what struck one most forcibly on first meeting
+her--I should not have been, as I was, especially enamoured of their
+imagined blue.
+
+I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger
+from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out,
+petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture,
+bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the
+body; then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and
+father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her, by
+making me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously
+appealing look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to
+see, to know me. She cast a glance forwards and sideways, so as to take
+stock of my grandfather and father, and doubtless the impression she
+formed of them was that we were all absurd people, for she turned away
+with an indifferent and contemptuous air, withdrew herself so as to
+spare her face the indignity of remaining within their field of
+vision; and while they, continuing to walk on without noticing her, had
+overtaken and passed me, she allowed her eyes to wander, over the space
+that lay between us, in my direction, without any particular expression,
+without appearing to have seen me, but with an intensity, a half-hidden
+smile which I was unable to interpret, according to the instruction I
+had received in the ways of good breeding, save as a mark of infinite
+disgust; and her hand, at the same time, sketched in the air an
+indelicate gesture, for which, when it was addressed in public to a
+person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which
+I carried in my mind supplied only one meaning, namely, a deliberate
+insult.
+
+"Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?" called out in a piercing
+tone of authority a lady in white, whom I had not seen until that
+moment, while, a little way beyond her, a gentleman in a suit of linen
+'ducks,' whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed
+to be starting from his head; the little girl's smile abruptly faded,
+and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in
+my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable and sly.
+
+And so was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me like a
+talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her whom
+its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality, whereas, a
+moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen. So it came
+to me, uttered across the heads of the stocks and jasmines, pungent and
+cool as the drops which fell from the green watering-pipe; impregnating
+and irradiating the zone of pure air through which it had passed, which
+it set apart and isolated from all other air, with the mystery of the
+life of her whom its syllables designated to the happy creatures that
+lived and walked and travelled in her company; unfolding through the
+arch of the pink hawthorn, which opened at the height of my shoulder,
+the quintessence of their familiarity--so exquisitely painful to
+myself--with her, and with all that unknown world of her existence, into
+which I should never penetrate.
+
+For a moment (while we moved away, and my grandfather murmured: "Poor
+Swann, what a life they are leading him; fancy sending him away so
+that she can be left alone with her Charlus--for that was Charlus: I
+recognised him at once! And the child, too; at her age, to be mixed up
+in all that!") the impression left on me by the despotic tone in which
+Gilberte's mother had spoken to her, without her replying, by exhibiting
+her to me as being obliged to yield obedience to some one else, as not
+being indeed superior to the whole world, calmed my sufferings somewhat,
+revived some hope in me, and cooled the ardour of my love. But very soon
+that love surged up again in me like a reaction by which my humiliated
+heart was endeavouring to rise to Gilberte's level, or to draw her down
+to its own. I loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the
+inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep
+some memory of me. I knew her to be so beautiful that I should have
+liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and
+shout, "I think you are hideous, grotesque; you are utterly disgusting!"
+However, I walked away, carrying with me, then and for ever afterwards,
+as the first illustration of a type of happiness rendered inaccessible
+to a little boy of my kind by certain laws of nature which it was
+impossible to transgress, the picture of a little girl with reddish
+hair, and a skin freckled with tiny pink marks, who held a trowel in
+her hand, and smiled as she directed towards me a long and subtle and
+inexpressive stare. And already the charm with which her name, like a
+cloud of incense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn through
+which she and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to
+conquer, to cover, to embalm, to beautify everything with which it had
+any association: her grandparents, whom my own had been so unspeakably
+fortunate as to know, the glorious profession of a stockholder, even
+the melancholy neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysées, where she lived in
+Paris.
+
+"Léonie," said my grandfather on our return, "I wish we had had you with
+us this afternoon. You would never have known Tansonville. If I had had
+the courage I would have cut you a branch of that pink hawthorn you used
+to like so much." And so my grandfather told her the story of our walk,
+either just to amuse her, or perhaps because there was still some hope
+that she might be stimulated to rise from her bed and to go out of
+doors. For in earlier days she had been very fond of Tansonville, and,
+moreover, Swann's visits had been the last that she had continued to
+receive, at a time when she had already closed her doors to all the
+world. And just as, when he called, in these later days, to inquire for
+her (and she was still the only person in our household whom he would
+ask to see), she would send down to say that she was tired at the moment
+and resting, but that she would be happy to see him another time,
+so, this evening, she said to my grandfather, "Yes, some day when the
+weather is fine I shall go for a drive as far as the gate of the park."
+And in saying this she was quite sincere. She would have liked to see
+Swann and Tansonville again; but the mere wish to do so sufficed for all
+that remained of her strength, which its fulfilment would have more
+than exhausted. Sometimes a spell of fine weather made her a little more
+energetic, she would rise and put on her clothes; but before she had
+reached the outer room she would be 'tired' again, and would insist on
+returning to her bed. The process which had begun in her--and in her a
+little earlier only than it must come to all of us--was the great and
+general renunciation which old age makes in preparation for death, the
+chrysalis stage of life, which may be observed wherever life has been
+unduly prolonged; even in old lovers who have lived for one another with
+the utmost intensity of passion, and in old friends bound by the closest
+ties of mental sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the
+necessary journey, or even to cross the street to see one another, cease
+to correspond, and know well that they will communicate no more in this
+world. My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not
+see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but
+this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more
+readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made
+it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by
+the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to
+measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to
+her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the
+blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose.
+
+My aunt did not go to see the pink hawthorn in the hedge, but at all
+hours of the day I would ask the rest of my family whether she was
+not going to go, whether she used not, at one time, to go often to
+Tansonville, trying to make them speak of Mlle. Swann's parents and
+grandparents, who appeared to me to be as great and glorious as gods.
+The name, which had for me become almost mythological, of Swann--when I
+talked with my family I would grow sick with longing to hear them
+utter it; I dared not pronounce it myself, but I would draw them into a
+discussion of matters which led naturally to Gilberte and her family, in
+which she was involved, in speaking of which I would feel myself not too
+remotely banished from her company; and I would suddenly force my father
+(by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather's business
+had been in our family before his day, or that the hedge with the pink
+hawthorn which my aunt Léonie wished to visit was on common ground) to
+correct my statements, to say, as though in opposition to me and of his
+own accord: "No, no, the business belonged to _Swann's_ father, that
+hedge is part of _Swann's_ park." And then I would be obliged to pause
+for breath; so stifling was the pressure, upon that part of me where it
+was for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment when I heard
+it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other name, because
+it was burdened with the weight of all the occasions on which I had
+secretly uttered it in my mind. It caused me a pleasure which I was
+ashamed to have dared to demand from my parents, for so great was it
+that to have procured it for me must have involved them in an immensity
+of effort, and with no recompense, since for them there was no pleasure
+in the sound. And so I would prudently turn the conversation. And by
+a scruple of conscience, also. All the singular seductions which I had
+stored up in the sound of that word Swann, I found again as soon as it
+was uttered. And then it occurred to me suddenly that my parents could
+not fail to experience the same emotions, that they must find themselves
+sharing my point of view, that they perceived in their turn, that they
+condoned, that they even embraced my visionary longings, and I was as
+wretched as though I had ravished and corrupted the innocence of their
+hearts.
+
+That year my family fixed the day of their return to Paris rather
+earlier than usual. On the morning of our departure I had had my
+hair curled, to be ready to face the photographer, had had a new hat
+carefully set upon my head, and had been buttoned into a velvet jacket;
+a little later my mother, after searching everywhere for me, found me
+standing in tears on that steep little hillside close to Tansonville,
+bidding a long farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches
+to my bosom, and (like a princess in a tragedy, oppressed by the weight
+of all her senseless jewellery) with no gratitude towards the officious
+hand which had, in curling those ringlets, been at pains to collect all
+my hair upon my forehead; trampling underfoot the curl-papers which I
+had torn from my head, and my new hat with them. My mother was not at
+all moved by my tears, but she could not suppress a cry at the sight of
+my battered headgear and my ruined jacket. I did not, however, hear her.
+"Oh, my poor little hawthorns," I was assuring them through my sobs, "it
+is not you that want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you.
+You, you have never done me any harm. So I shall always love you." And,
+drying my eyes, I promised them that, when I grew up, I would never copy
+the foolish example of other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring
+days, instead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would make
+excursions into the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in bloom.
+
+Once in the fields we never left them again during the rest of our
+Méséglise walk. They were perpetually crossed, as though by invisible
+streams of traffic, by the wind, which was to me the tutelary genius of
+Combray. Every year, on the day of our arrival, in order to feel that I
+really was at Combray, I would climb the hill to find it running again
+through my clothing, and setting me running in its wake. One always
+had the wind for companion when one went the 'Méséglise way,' on
+that swelling plain which stretched, mile beyond mile, without any
+disturbance of its gentle contour. I knew that Mlle. Swann used often
+to go and spend a few days at Laon, and, for all that it was many
+miles away, the distance was obviated by the absence of any intervening
+obstacle; when, on hot afternoons, I would see a breath of wind emerge
+from the farthest horizon, bowing the heads of the corn in distant
+fields, pouring like a flood over all that vast expanse, and finally
+settling down, warm and rustling, among the clover and sainfoin at my
+feet, that plain which was common to us both seemed then to draw us
+together, to unite us; I would imagine that the same breath had passed
+by her also, that there was some message from her in what it was
+whispering to me, without my being able to understand it, and I would
+catch and kiss it as it passed. On my left was a village called Champieu
+(_Campus Pagani_, according to the Curé). On my right I could see
+across the cornfields the two crocketed, rustic spires of
+Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, plated,
+honeycombed, yellowed, and roughened as two ears of wheat.
+
+At regular intervals, among the inimitable ornamentation of their
+leaves, which can be mistaken for those of no other fruit-tree, the
+apple-trees were exposing their broad petals of white satin, or hanging
+in shy bunches their unopened, blushing buds. It was while going
+the 'Méséglise way' that I first noticed the circular shadow which
+apple-trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable
+threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slantingly downwards
+from beneath their leaves, and which I would see my father slash through
+with his stick without ever making them swerve from their straight path.
+
+Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little
+cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have
+to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary
+clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the
+background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I was glad to
+find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of
+art were very different--at least in my earlier years, before Bloch had
+attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies--from those in
+which the moon seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have
+recognised her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by Saintine,
+some landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out sharply against the
+sky, in the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and
+as incomplete as were, at that date, my own impressions, and which it
+enraged my grandmother's sisters to see me admire. They held that one
+ought to set before children, and that children shewed their own innate
+good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would
+continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt
+they regarded aesthetic values as material objects which an unclouded
+vision could not fail to discern, without needing to have their
+equivalent in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in one's
+heart.
+
+It was along the 'Méséglise way,' at Montjouvain, a house built on the
+edge of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep, shrub-grown hill, that
+M. Vinteuil lived. And so we used often to meet his daughter driving her
+dogcart at full speed along the road. After a certain year we never
+saw her alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than
+herself, with an evil reputation in the neighbourhood, who in the end
+installed herself permanently, one day, at Montjouvain. People said:
+"That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded by love not to see what everyone
+is talking about, and to let his daughter--a man who is horrified if you
+use a word in the wrong sense--bring a woman like that to live under his
+roof. He says that she is a most superior woman, with a heart of gold,
+and that she would have shewn extraordinary musical talent if she had
+only been trained. He may be sure it is not music that she is teaching
+his daughter." But M. Vinteuil assured them that it was, and indeed
+it is remarkable that people never fail to arouse admiration of their
+normal qualities in the relatives of anyone with whom they are in
+physical intercourse. Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly
+decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them
+of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine
+resplendent in the eyes of all beholders. Dr. Percepied, whose loud
+voice and bushy eyebrows enabled him to play to his heart's content the
+part of 'double-dealer,' a part to which he was not, otherwise, adapted,
+without in the least degree compromising his unassailable and quite
+unmerited reputation of being a kind-hearted old curmudgeon, could make
+the Curé and everyone else laugh until they cried by saying in a harsh
+voice: "What d'ye say to this, now? It seems that she plays music with
+her friend, Mlle. Vinteuil. That surprises you, does it? Oh, I know
+nothing, nothing at all. It was Papa Vinteuil who told me all about
+it yesterday. After all, she has every right to be fond of music, that
+girl. I should never dream of thwarting the artistic vocation of a
+child; nor Vinteuil either, it seems. And then he plays music too,
+with his daughter's friend. Why, gracious heavens, it must be a regular
+musical box, that house out there! What are you laughing at? I say
+they've been playing too much music, those people. I met Papa Vinteuil
+the other day, by the cemetery. It was all he could do to keep on his
+feet."
+
+Anyone who, like ourselves, had seen M. Vinteuil, about this time,
+avoiding people whom he knew, and turning away as soon as he caught
+sight of them, changed in a few months into an old man, engulfed in a
+sea of sorrows, incapable of any effort not directly aimed at promoting
+his daughter's happiness, spending whole days beside his wife's grave,
+could hardly have failed to realise that he was gradually dying of a
+broken heart, could hardly have supposed that he paid no attention to
+the rumours which were going about. He knew, perhaps he even believed,
+what his neighbours were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid
+his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of
+circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which
+he himself has been most outspoken in condemning, without at first
+recognising it beneath the disguise which it assumes on entering his
+presence, so as to wound him and to make him suffer; the odd words, the
+unaccountable attitude, one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand
+reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil's sensibility it must
+have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have
+to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed
+to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there
+needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a
+vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by
+no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might
+blend the colours of their eyes. And yet however much M. Vinteuil
+may have known of his daughter's conduct it did not follow that his
+adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to
+the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that
+engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they
+can aim at them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without
+weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one
+after another, without interruption into the bosom of a family, will not
+make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of
+its physician. But when M. Vinteuil regarded his daughter and himself
+from the point of view of the world, and of their reputation, when he
+attempted to place himself by her side in the rank which they occupied
+in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was bound to give
+judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in precisely
+the terms which the inhabitant of Combray most hostile to him and his
+daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her in 'low,' in the
+very 'lowest water,' inextricably stranded; and his manners had of late
+been tinged with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked
+above him and to whom he must now look up (however far beneath him they
+might hitherto have been), that tendency to search for some means of
+rising again to their level, which is an almost mechanical result of any
+human misfortune.
+
+One day, when we were walking with Swann in one of the streets of
+Combray, M. Vinteuil, turning out of another street, found himself so
+suddenly face to face with us all that he had not time to escape; and
+Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who,
+amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's
+shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence, the
+outward signs of which serve to enhance and gratify the self-esteem of
+the bestower because he feels that they are all the more precious to him
+upon whom they are bestowed, conversed at great length with M. Vinteuil,
+with whom for a long time he had been barely on speaking terms, and
+invited him, before leaving us, to send his daughter over, one day,
+to play at Tansonville. It was an invitation which, two years earlier,
+would have enraged M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much
+gratitude that he felt himself obliged to refrain from the indiscretion
+of accepting. Swann's friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to
+be in itself so honourable, so precious a support for his cause that he
+felt it would perhaps be better to make no use of it, so as to have the
+wholly Platonic satisfaction of keeping it in reserve.
+
+"What a charming man!" he said to us, after Swann had gone, with the
+same enthusiasm and veneration which make clever and pretty women of the
+middle classes fall victims to the physical and intellectual charms of a
+duchess, even though she be ugly and a fool. "What a charming man! What
+a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage!"
+
+And then, so strong an element of hypocrisy is there in even the most
+sincere of men, who cast off, while they are talking to anyone, the
+opinion they actually hold of him and will express when he is no longer
+there, my family joined with M. Vinteuil in deploring Swann's marriage,
+invoking principles and conventions which (all the more because they
+invoked them in common with him, as though we were all thorough good
+fellows of the same sort) they appeared to suggest were in no way
+infringed at Montjouvain. M. Vinteuil did not send his daughter to visit
+Swann, an omission which Swann was the first to regret. For constantly,
+after meeting M. Vinteuil, he would remember that he had been meaning
+for a long time to ask him about some one of the same name as himself,
+one of his relatives, Swann supposed. And on this occasion he determined
+that he would not forget what he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil
+should appear with his daughter at Tansonville.
+
+Since the 'Méséglise way' was the shorter of the two that we used to
+take for our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for
+days of uncertain weather, it followed that the climate of Méséglise
+shewed an unduly high rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the
+fringe of Roussainville wood, so that we could, at any moment, run for
+shelter beneath its dense thatch of leaves.
+
+Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its
+roundness, but whose edge the sun gilded in return. The brightness,
+though not the light of day, would then be shut off from a landscape
+in which all life appeared to be suspended, while the little village
+of Roussainville carved in relief upon the sky the white mass of its
+gables, with a startling precision of detail. A gust of wind blew from
+its perch a rook, which floated away and settled in the distance, while
+beneath a paling sky the woods on the horizon assumed a deeper tone of
+blue, as though they were painted in one of those cameos which you still
+find decorating the walls of old houses.
+
+But on other days would begin to fall the rain, of which we had had due
+warning from the little barometer-figure which the spectacle-maker hung
+out in his doorway. Its drops, like migrating birds which fly off in a
+body at a given moment, would come down out of the sky in close marching
+order. They would never drift apart, would make no movement at random in
+their rapid course, but each one, keeping in its place, would draw
+after it the drop which was following, and the sky would be as greatly
+darkened as by the swallows flying south. We would take refuge among the
+trees. And when it seemed that their flight was accomplished, a few last
+drops, feebler and slower than the rest, would still come down. But we
+would emerge from our shelter, for the rain was playing a game, now,
+among the branches, and, even when it was almost dry again underfoot, a
+stray drop or two, lingering in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and
+hang glistening from the point of it until suddenly it splashed plump
+upon our upturned faces from the whole height of the tree.
+
+Often, too, we would hurry for shelter, tumbling in among all its stony
+saints and patriarchs, into the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs. How
+typically French that church was! Over its door the saints, the kings
+of chivalry with lilies in their hands, the wedding scenes and funerals
+were carved as they might have been in the mind of Françoise. The
+sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil,
+precisely as Françoise in her kitchen would break into speech about
+Saint Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to
+depreciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents, whom she considered
+less 'righteous.' One could see that the ideas which the mediaeval
+artist and the mediaeval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in
+the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history,
+ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were
+derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct,
+unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive. Another Combray
+person whom I could discern also, potential and typified, in the gothic
+sculptures of Saint-André-des-Champs was young Théodore, the assistant
+in Camus's shop. And, indeed, Françoise herself was well aware that she
+had in him a countryman and contemporary, for when my aunt was too ill
+for Françoise to be able, unaided, to lift her in her bed or to carry
+her to her chair, rather than let the kitchen-maid come upstairs
+and, perhaps, 'make an impression' on my aunt, she would send out for
+Théodore. And this lad, who was regarded, and quite rightly, in the town
+as a 'bad character,' was so abounding in that spirit which had served
+to decorate the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, and particularly in the
+feelings of respect due, in Françoise eyes, to all 'poor invalids,' and,
+above all, to her own 'poor mistress,' that he had, when he bent down
+to raise my aunt's head from her pillow, the same air of préraphaélite
+simplicity and zeal which the little angels in the bas-reliefs wear, who
+throng, with tapers in their hands, about the deathbed of Our Lady, as
+though those carved faces of stone, naked and grey like trees in winter,
+were, like them, asleep only, storing up life and waiting to flower
+again in countless plebeian faces, reverend and cunning as the face of
+Théodore, and glowing with the ruddy brilliance of ripe apples.
+
+There, too, not fastened to the wall like the little angels, but
+detached from the porch, of more than human stature, erect upon her
+pedestal as upon a footstool, which had been placed there to save her
+feet from contact with the wet ground, stood a saint with the full
+cheeks, the firm breasts which swelled out inside her draperies like
+a cluster of ripe grapes inside a bag, the narrow forehead, short and
+stubborn nose, deep-set eyes, and strong, thick-skinned, courageous
+expression of the country-women of those parts. This similarity, which
+imparted to the statue itself a kindliness that I had not looked to
+find in it, was corroborated often by the arrival of some girl from
+the fields, come, like ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose
+presence there--as when the leaves of a climbing plant have grown up
+beside leaves carved in stone--seemed intended by fate to allow us, by
+confronting it with its type in nature, to form a critical estimate
+of the truth of the work of art. Before our eyes, in the distance, a
+promised or an accursed land, Roussainville, within whose walls I had
+never penetrated, Roussainville was now, when the rain had ceased for
+us, still being chastised, like a village in the Old Testament, by
+all the innumerable spears and arrows of the storm, which beat down
+obliquely upon the dwellings of its inhabitants, or else had already
+received the forgiveness of the Almighty, Who had restored to it the
+light of His sun, which fell upon it in rays of uneven length, like the
+rays of a monstrance upon an altar.
+
+Sometimes, when the weather had completely broken, we were obliged to go
+home and to remain shut up indoors. 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 a cloudy darkness shone
+out like little boats which had folded their sails and would ride at
+anchor, all night, upon the sea. 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.
+Sitting in the little parlour, where I would pass the time until dinner
+with a book, I might hear the water 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, to assure me of the fine weather's continuing; it might
+rain as it pleased, but to-morrow, over the white fence of Tansonville,
+there would surge and flow, numerous as ever, a sea of little
+heart-shaped leaves; and without the least anxiety I could watch the
+poplar in the Rue des Perchamps praying for mercy, bowing in desperation
+before the storm; without the least anxiety I could hear, at the far end
+of the garden, the last peals of thunder growling among our lilac-trees.
+
+If the weather was bad all morning, my family would abandon the idea of
+a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit
+of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards
+Méséglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to Combray
+to settle the division of my aunt Léonie's estate; for she had died at
+last, leaving both parties among her neighbours triumphant in the
+fact of her demise--those who had insisted that her mode of life was
+enfeebling and must ultimately kill her, and, equally, those who had
+always maintained that she suffered from some disease not imaginary,
+but organic, by the visible proof of which the most sceptical would
+be obliged to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to it;
+causing no intense grief to any save one of her survivors, but to that
+one a grief savage in its violence. During the long fortnight of my
+aunt's last illness Françoise never went out of her room for an instant,
+never took off her clothes, allowed no one else to do anything for my
+aunt, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave.
+Then, at last, we understood that the sort of terror in which Françoise
+had lived of my aunt's harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had
+developed in her a sentiment which we had mistaken for hatred, and which
+was really veneration and love. Her true mistress, whose decisions it
+had been impossible to foresee, from whose stratagems it had been
+so hard to escape, of whose good nature it had been so easy to take
+advantage, her sovereign, her mysterious and omnipotent monarch was no
+more. Compared with such a mistress we counted for very little. The
+time had long passed when, on our first coming to spend our holidays
+at Combray, we had been of equal importance, in Françoise eyes, with my
+aunt.
+
+During that autumn my parents, finding the days so fully occupied with
+the legal formalities that had to be gone through, and discussions with
+solicitors and farmers, that they had little time for walks which, as it
+happened, the weather made precarious, began to let me go, without them,
+along the 'Méséglise way,' wrapped up in a huge Highland plaid which
+protected me from the rain, and which I was all the more ready to throw
+over my shoulders because I felt that the stripes of its gaudy tartan
+scandalised Françoise, whom it was impossible to convince that the
+colour of one's clothes had nothing whatever to do with one's mourning
+for the dead, and to whom the grief which we had shewn on my aunt's
+death was wholly unsatisfactory, since we had not entertained the
+neighbours to a great funeral banquet, and did not adopt a special tone
+when we spoke of her, while I at times might be heard humming a tune. I
+am sure that in a book--and to that extent my feelings were closely akin
+to those of Françoise--such a conception of mourning, in the manner
+of the _Chanson de Roland_ and of the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs,
+would have seemed most attractive. But the moment that Françoise herself
+approached, some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her angry,
+and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I
+regretted my aunt's death because she had been a good woman in spite of
+her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that
+she might easily have been my aunt and yet have been so odious that her
+death would not have caused me a moment's sorrow; statements which, in a
+book, would have struck me as merely fatuous.
+
+And if Françoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused
+reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to
+plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: "I don't know how to
+_espress_ myself"--I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal
+common sense worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: "All the same
+she was a _geological_ relation; there is always the respect due to your
+_geology_," I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good
+of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot
+speak her own language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Françoise,
+the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most
+contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too
+prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage
+of life.
+
+My walks, that autumn, were all the more delightful because I used
+to take them after long hours spent over a book. When I was tired of
+reading, after a whole morning in the house, I would throw my plaid
+across my shoulders and set out; my body, which in a long spell of
+enforced immobility had stored up an accumulation of vital energy, was
+now obliged, like a spinning-top wound and let go, to spend this in
+every direction. The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees
+of Roussainville wood, the bushes against which Montjouvain leaned its
+back, all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must
+hear my shouts of happiness, blows and shouts being indeed no more than
+expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which, not
+being developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the
+light of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course
+of elucidation, found it easier and more pleasant to drift into an
+immediate outlet. And so it is that the bulk of what appear to be the
+emotional renderings of our inmost sensations do no more than relieve us
+of the burden of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us in
+an indistinct form which does not teach us how it should be interpreted.
+When I attempt to reckon up all that I owe to the 'Méséglise way,' all
+the humble discoveries of which it was either the accidental setting or
+the direct inspiration and cause, I am reminded that it was in that same
+autumn, on one of those walks, near the bushy precipice which guarded
+Montjouvain from the rear, that I was struck for the first time by
+this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms of
+expression. After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had put up a
+brisk fight, as I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, and reached
+a little hut, roofed with tiles, in which M. Vinteuil's gardener kept
+his tools, the sun shone out again, and its golden rays, washed clean
+by the shower, blazed once more in the sky, on the trees, on the wall
+of the hut, and on the still wet tiles of the roof, which had a chicken
+perching upon its ridge. The wind pulled out sideways the wild grass
+that grew in the wall, and the chicken's downy feathers, both of which
+things let themselves float upon the wind's breath to their full extent,
+with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless matter. The
+tiled roof cast upon the pond, whose reflections were now clear again
+in the sunlight, a square of pink marble, the like of which I had never
+observed before. And, seeing upon the water, where it reflected the
+wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my
+enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: "Damn, damn, damn, damn!"
+But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content
+myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour to see more
+clearly into the sources of my enjoyment.
+
+And it was at that moment, too--thanks to a peasant who went past,
+apparently in a bad enough humour already, but more so when he nearly
+received my umbrella in his face, and who replied without any cordiality
+to my "Fine day, what! good to be out walking!"--that I learned
+that identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts of all men
+simultaneously, by a pre-established order. Later on I discovered that,
+whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the
+friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment
+have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and
+wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed. And if I had been
+thinking with affection of my parents, and forming the most sensible and
+proper plans for giving them pleasure, they would have been using
+the same interval of time to discover some misdeed that I had already
+forgotten, and would begin to scold me severely, just as I flung myself
+upon them with a kiss.
+
+Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would be
+added an alternative feeling, so that I could not be clear in my mind to
+which I should give the casting vote; a feeling stimulated by the desire
+to see rise up before my eyes a peasant-girl whom I might clasp in my
+arms. Coming abruptly, and without giving me time to trace it accurately
+to its source among so many ideas of a very different kind, the pleasure
+which accompanied this desire seemed only a degree superior to what was
+given me by my other thoughts. I found an additional merit in everything
+that was in my mind at the moment, in the pink reflection of the tiled
+roof, the wild grass in the wall, the village of Roussainville into
+which I had long desired to penetrate, the trees of its wood and the
+steeple of its church, created in them by this fresh emotion which made
+them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that
+had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear me more swiftly
+towards them when it filled my sails with a potent, unknown, and
+propitious breeze. But if this desire that a woman should appear added
+for me something more exalting than the charms of nature, they in their
+turn enlarged what I might, in the woman's charm, have found too much
+restricted. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers
+also, and that, as for the spirit of those horizons, of the village of
+Roussainville, of the books which I was reading that year, it was her
+kiss which would make me master of them all; and, my imagination drawing
+strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding
+through all the realms of my imagination, my desire had no longer any
+bounds. Moreover--just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature,
+the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas
+of things set on one side, we believe with the profoundest faith in the
+originality, in the individual existence of the place in which we may
+happen to be--the passing figure which my desire evoked seemed to be
+not any one example of the general type of 'woman,' but a necessary and
+natural product of the soil. For at that time everything which was not
+myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious,
+more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear
+to full-grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made
+no distinction. I had a desire for a peasant-girl from Méséglise or
+Roussainville, for a fisher-girl from Balbec, just as I had a desire for
+Balbec and Méséglise. The pleasure which those girls were empowered to
+give me would have seemed less genuine, I should have had no faith in
+it any longer, if I had been at liberty to modify its conditions as I
+chose. To meet in Paris a fisher-girl from Balbec or a peasant-girl from
+Méséglise would have been like receiving the present of a shell which
+I had never seen upon the beach, or of a fern which I had never found
+among the woods, would have stripped from the pleasure which she was
+about to give me all those other pleasures in the thick of which my
+imagination had enwrapped her. But to wander thus among the woods of
+Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods
+and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty.
+That girl whom I never saw save dappled with the shadows of their
+leaves, was to me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the
+rest, and one whose structure would enable me to approach more closely
+than in them to the intimate savour of the land from which she had
+sprung. I could believe this all the more readily (and also that
+the caresses by which she would bring that savour to my senses were
+themselves of a particular kind, yielding a pleasure which I could
+never derive from any but herself) since I was still, and must for long
+remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact
+of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has
+tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one
+regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that
+is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and
+formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one
+seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in
+anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself,
+but only how to escape from oneself. Obscurely awaited, immanent and
+concealed, it rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it
+makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender
+glance, in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to us, more
+than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for the kindness of
+heart of our companion and for her touching predilection of ourselves,
+which we measure by the benefits, by the happiness that she showers upon
+us.
+
+Alas, it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keep of Roussainville,
+that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village,
+appealing to it as to the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my
+earliest desire when, from the top floor of our house at Combray, from
+the little room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered out and seen
+nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window,
+while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for
+unknown climes, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of
+self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of
+my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to
+my death, even--until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among
+the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window,
+tumbled all about my body. In vain I called upon it now. In vain I
+compressed the whole landscape into my field of vision, draining it with
+an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it a female creature. I
+might go alone as far as the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs: never did
+I find there the girl whom I should inevitably have met, had I been with
+my grandfather, and so unable to engage her in conversation. I would fix
+my eyes, without limit of time, upon the trunk of a distant tree, from
+behind which she must appear and spring towards me; my closest scrutiny
+left the horizon barren as before; night was falling; without any hope
+now would I concentrate my attention, as though to force up out of it
+the creatures which it must conceal, upon that sterile soil, that stale
+and outworn land; and it was no longer in lightness of heart, but with
+sullen anger that I aimed blows at the trees of Roussainville wood, from
+among which no more living creatures made their appearance than if they
+had been trees painted on the stretched canvas background of a panorama,
+when, unable to resign myself to having to return home without having
+held in my arms the woman I so greatly desired, I was yet obliged to
+retrace my steps towards Combray, and to admit to myself that the chance
+of her appearing in my path grew smaller every moment. And if she had
+appeared, would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have
+regarded me as mad, for I no longer thought of those desires which came
+to me on my walks, but were never realized, as being shared by others,
+or as having any existence apart from myself. They seemed nothing more
+now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my
+temperament. They were in no way connected now with nature, with the
+world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and
+significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional
+framework, just as the action of a novel is framed in the railway
+carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time.
+
+And it is perhaps from another impression which I received at
+Montjouvain, some years later, an impression which at that time was
+without meaning, that there arose, long afterwards, my idea of that
+cruel side of human passion called 'sadism.' We shall see, in due
+course, that for quite another reason the memory of this impression was
+to play an important part in my life. It was during a spell of very hot
+weather; my parents, who had been obliged to go away for the whole day,
+had told me that I might stay out as late as I pleased; and having
+gone as far as the Montjouvain pond, where I enjoyed seeing again the
+reflection of the tiled roof of the hut, I had lain down in the shade
+and gone to sleep among the bushes on the steep slope that rose up
+behind the house, just where I had waited for my parents, years before,
+one day when they had gone to call on M. Vinteuil. It was almost dark
+when I awoke, and I wished to rise and go away, but I saw Mlle. Vinteuil
+(or thought, at least, that I recognised her, for I had not seen her
+often at Combray, and then only when she was still a child, whereas
+she was now growing into a young woman), who probably had just come in,
+standing in front of me, and only a few feet away from me, in that room
+in which her father had entertained mine, and which she had now made
+into a little sitting-room for herself. The window was partly open; the
+lamp was lighted; I could watch her every movement without her being
+able to see me; but, had I gone away, I must have made a rustling sound
+among the bushes, she would have heard me, and might have thought that I
+had been hiding there in order to spy upon her.
+
+She was in deep mourning, for her father had but lately died. We had
+not gone to see her; my mother had not cared to go, on account of that
+virtue which alone in her fixed any bounds to her benevolence--namely,
+modesty; but she pitied the girl from the depths of her heart. My
+mother had not forgotten the sad end of M. Vinteuil's life, his complete
+absorption, first in having to play both mother and nursery-maid to his
+daughter, and, later, in the suffering which she had caused him; she
+could see the tortured expression which was never absent from the old
+man's face in those terrible last years; she knew that he had definitely
+abandoned the task of transcribing in fair copies the whole of his later
+work, the poor little pieces, we imagined, of an old music-master, a
+retired village organist, which, we assumed, were of little or no value
+in themselves, though we did not despise them, because they were of such
+great value to him and had been the chief motive of his life before he
+sacrificed them to his daughter; pieces which, being mostly not even
+written down, but recorded only in his memory, while the rest were
+scribbled on loose sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must now remain
+unknown for ever; my mother thought, also, of that other and still more
+cruel renunciation to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that of seeing
+the girl happily settled, with an honest and respectable future; when
+she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come
+upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and
+shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness,
+which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having
+virtually killed her father. "Poor M. Vinteuil," my mother would say,
+"he lived for his daughter, and now he has died for her, without getting
+his reward. Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what form? It can only
+come to him from her."
+
+At the far end of Mlle. Vinteuil's sitting-room, on the mantelpiece,
+stood a small photograph of her father which she went briskly to fetch,
+just as the sound of carriage wheels was heard from the road outside,
+then flung herself down on a sofa and drew close beside her a little
+table on which she placed the photograph, just as, long ago, M. Vinteuil
+had 'placed' beside him the piece of music which he would have liked
+to play over to my parents. And then her friend came in. Mlle. Vinteuil
+greeted her without rising, clasping her hands behind her head, and
+drew her body to one side of the sofa, as though to 'make room.' But no
+sooner had she done this than she appeared to feel that she was perhaps
+suggesting a particular position to her friend, with an emphasis which
+might well be regarded as importunate. She thought that her friend would
+prefer, no doubt, to sit down at some distance from her, upon a chair;
+she felt that she had been indiscreet; her sensitive heart took fright;
+stretching herself out again over the whole of the sofa, she closed her
+eyes and began to yawn, so as to indicate that it was a desire to sleep,
+and that alone, which had made her lie down there. Despite the rude
+and hectoring familiarity with which she treated her companion I could
+recognise in her the obsequious and reticent advances, the abrupt
+scruples and restraints which had characterised her father. Presently
+she rose and came to the window, where she pretended to be trying to
+close the shutters and not succeeding.
+
+"Leave them open," said her friend. "I am hot."
+
+"But it's too dreadful! People will see us," Mlle. Vinteuil answered.
+And then she guessed, probably, that her friend would think that she had
+uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other
+words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from
+prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak. And so, although
+I could not see her face clearly enough, I am sure that the expression
+must have appeared on it which my grandmother had once found so
+delightful, when she hastily went on: "When I say 'see us' I mean, of
+course, see us reading. It's so dreadful to think that in every trivial
+little thing you do some one may be overlooking you."
+
+With the instinctive generosity of her nature, a courtesy beyond her
+control, she refrained from uttering the studied words which, she had
+felt, were indispensable for the full realisation of her desire. And
+perpetually, in the depths of her being, a shy and suppliant maiden
+would kneel before that other element, the old campaigner, battered but
+triumphant, would intercede with him and oblige him to retire.
+
+"Oh, yes, it is so extremely likely that people are looking at us at
+this time of night in this densely populated district!" said her friend,
+with bitter irony. "And what if they are?" she went on, feeling bound
+to annotate with a malicious yet affectionate wink these words which
+she was repeating, out of good nature, like a lesson prepared beforehand
+which, she knew, it would please Mlle. Vinteuil to hear. "And what if
+they are? All the better that they should see us."
+
+Mlle. Vinteuil shuddered and rose to her feet. In her sensitive
+and scrupulous heart she was ignorant what words ought to flow,
+spontaneously, from her lips, so as to produce the scene for which her
+eager senses clamoured. She reached out as far as she could across the
+limitations of her true character to find the language appropriate to
+a vicious young woman such as she longed to be thought, but the
+words which, she imagined, such a young woman might have uttered with
+sincerity sounded unreal in her own mouth. And what little she allowed
+herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained
+timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech; while
+she kept on interrupting herself with: "You're sure you aren't cold? You
+aren't too hot? You don't want to sit and read by yourself?...
+
+"Your ladyship's thoughts seem to be rather 'warm' this evening," she
+concluded, doubtless repeating a phrase which she had heard used, on
+some earlier occasion, by her friend.
+
+In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the
+sting of her friend's sudden kiss; she gave a little scream and
+ran away; and then they began to chase one another about the room,
+scrambling over the furniture, their wide sleeves fluttering like
+wings, clucking and crowing like a pair of amorous fowls. At last Mlle.
+Vinteuil fell down exhausted upon the sofa, where she was screened from
+me by the stooping body of her friend. But the latter now had her back
+turned to the little table on which the old music-master's portrait had
+been arranged. Mlle. Vinteuil realised that her friend would not see
+it unless her attention were drawn to it, and so exclaimed, as if she
+herself had just noticed it for the first time: "Oh! there's my father's
+picture looking at us; I can't think who can have put it there; I'm sure
+I've told them twenty times, that is not the proper place for it."
+
+I remembered the words that M. Vinteuil had used to my parents in
+apologising for an obtrusive sheet of music. This photograph was, of
+course, in common use in their ritual observances, was subjected to
+daily profanation, for the friend replied in words which were evidently
+a liturgical response: "Let him stay there. He can't trouble us any
+longer. D'you think he'd start whining, d'you think he'd pack you out
+of the house if he could see you now, with the window open, the ugly old
+monkey?"
+
+To which Mlle. Vinteuil replied, "Oh, please!"--a gentle reproach
+which testified to the genuine goodness of her nature, not that it
+was prompted by any resentment at hearing her father spoken of in this
+fashion (for that was evidently a feeling which she had trained herself,
+by a long course of sophistries, to keep in close subjection at such
+moments), but rather because it was the bridle which, so as to avoid all
+appearance of egotism, she herself used to curb the gratification which
+her friend was attempting to procure for her. It may well have been,
+too, that the smiling moderation with which she faced and answered these
+blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared to her
+frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form
+of that criminal attitude towards life which she was endeavouring to
+adopt. But she could not resist the attraction of being treated with
+affection by a woman who had just shewn herself so implacable towards
+the defenceless dead; she sprang on to the knees of her friend and held
+out a chaste brow to be kissed; precisely as a daughter would have done
+to her mother, feeling with exquisite joy that they would thus, between
+them, inflict the last turn of the screw of cruelty, in robbing M.
+Vinteuil, as though they were actually rifling his tomb, of the sacred
+rights of fatherhood. Her friend took the girl's head in her hands and
+placed a kiss on her brow with a docility prompted by the real affection
+she had for Mlle. Vinteuil, as well as by the desire to bring what
+distraction she could into the dull and melancholy life of an orphan.
+
+"Do you know what I should like to do to that old horror?" she said,
+taking up the photograph. She murmured in Mlle. Vinteuil's ear something
+that I could not distinguish.
+
+"Oh! You would never dare."
+
+"Not dare to spit on it? On that?" shouted the friend with deliberate
+brutality.
+
+I heard no more, for Mlle. Vinteuil, who now seemed weary, awkward,
+preoccupied, sincere, and rather sad, came back to the window and drew
+the shutters close; but I knew now what was the reward that M. Vinteuil,
+in return for all the suffering that he had endured in his lifetime, on
+account of his daughter, had received from her after his death.
+
+And yet I have since reflected that if M. Vinteuil had been able to be
+present at this scene, he might still, and in spite of everything, have
+continued to believe in his daughter's soundness of heart, and that he
+might even, in so doing, have been not altogether wrong. It was true
+that in all Mlle. Vinteuil's actions the appearance of evil was so
+strong and so consistent that it would have been hard to find it
+exhibited in such completeness save in what is nowadays called a
+'sadist'; it is behind the footlights of a Paris theatre, and not under
+the homely lamp of an actual country house, that one expects to see a
+girl leading her friend on to spit upon the portrait of a father who has
+lived and died for nothing and no one but herself; and when we find in
+real life a desire for melodramatic effect, it is generally the 'sadic'
+instinct that is responsible for it. It is possible that, without being
+in the least inclined towards 'sadism,' a girl might have shewn the
+same outrageous cruelty as Mlle. Vinteuil in desecrating the memory and
+defying the wishes of her dead father, but she would not have given them
+deliberate expression in an act so crude in its symbolism, so lacking
+in subtlety; the criminal element in her behaviour would have been less
+evident to other people, and even to herself, since she would not have
+admitted to herself that she was doing wrong. But, appearances apart, in
+Mlle. Vinteuil's soul, at least in the earlier stages, the evil element
+was probably not unmixed. A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil,
+which a wholly wicked person could not be, for in that case the evil
+would not have been external, it would have seemed quite natural to her,
+and would not even have been distinguishable from herself; and as for
+virtue, respect for the dead, filial obedience, since she would never
+have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious
+delight in their profanation. 'Sadists' of Mlle. Vinteuil's sort are
+creatures so purely sentimental, so virtuous by nature, that even
+sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, a privilege reserved
+for the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it
+they endeavour to impersonate, to assume all the outward appearance of
+wicked people, for themselves and their partners in guilt, so as to gain
+the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their own
+gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. And
+I could understand how she must have longed for such an escape when I
+realised that it was impossible for her to effect it. At the moment when
+she wished to be thought the very antithesis of her father, what she at
+once suggested to me were the mannerisms, in thought and speech, of
+the poor old music-master. Indeed, his photograph was nothing; what she
+really desecrated, what she corrupted into ministering to her pleasures,
+but what remained between them and her and prevented her from any
+direct enjoyment of them, was the likeness between her face and his, his
+mother's blue eyes which he had handed down to her, like some trinket to
+be kept in the family, those little friendly movements and inclinations
+which set up between the viciousness of Mlle. Vinteuil and herself a
+phraseology, a mentality not designed for vice, which made her regard it
+as not in any way different from the numberless little social duties and
+courtesies to which she must devote herself every day. It was not evil
+that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it
+was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil. And as, every time that she
+indulged in it, pleasure came to her attended by evil thoughts such as,
+ordinarily, had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to
+see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify it with Evil.
+Perhaps Mlle. Vinteuil felt that at heart her friend was not altogether
+bad, not really sincere when she gave vent to those blasphemous
+utterances. At any rate, she had the pleasure of receiving those kisses
+on her brow, those smiles, those glances; all feigned, perhaps, but akin
+in their base and vicious mode of expression to those which would have
+been discernible on the face of a creature formed not out of kindness
+and long-suffering, but out of self-indulgence and cruelty. She was
+able to delude herself for a moment into believing that she was indeed
+amusing herself in the way in which, with so unnatural an accomplice, a
+girl might amuse herself who really did experience that savage antipathy
+towards her father's memory. Perhaps she would not have thought of
+wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was
+so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself,
+as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings
+which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one
+true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.
+
+If the 'Méséglise way' was so easy, it was a very different matter when
+we took the 'Guermantes way,' for that meant a long walk, and we must
+make sure, first, of the weather. When we seemed to have entered upon a
+spell of fine days, when Françoise, in desperation that not a drop was
+falling upon the 'poor crops,' gazing up at the sky and seeing there
+only a little white cloud floating here and there upon its calm, azure
+surface, groaned aloud and exclaimed: "You would say they were nothing
+more nor less than a lot of dogfish swimming about and sticking up their
+snouts! Ah, they never think of making it rain a little for the poor
+labourers! And then when the corn is all ripe, down it will come,
+rattling all over the place, and think no more of where it is falling
+than if it was on the sea!"--when my father's appeals to the gardener
+had met with the same encouraging answer several times in succession,
+then some one would say, at dinner: "To-morrow, if the weather holds,
+we might go the Guermantes way." And off we would set, immediately after
+luncheon, through the little garden gate which dropped us into the Rue
+des Perchamps, narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with grass-plots
+over which two or three wasps would spend the day botanising, a street
+as quaint as its name, from which its odd characteristics and its
+personality were, I felt, derived; a street for which one might search
+in vain through the Combray of to-day, for the public school now rises
+upon its site. But in my dreams of Combray (like those architects,
+pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying that they can detect, beneath
+a Renaissance rood-loft and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a
+Norman choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it probably
+was in the twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern edifice
+standing, I pierce through it and 'restore' the Rue des Perchamps. And
+for such reconstruction memory furnishes me with more detailed guidance
+than is generally at the disposal of restorers; the pictures which it
+has preserved--perhaps the last surviving in the world to-day, and soon
+to follow the rest into oblivion--of what Combray looked like in my
+childhood's days; pictures which, simply because it was the old Combray
+that traced their outlines upon my mind before it vanished, are as
+moving--if I may compare a humble landscape with those glorious works,
+reproductions of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing on me--as
+those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile
+Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist,
+the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's.
+
+We would pass, in the Rue de l'Oiseau, before the old hostelry of the
+Oiseau Flesché, into whose great courtyard, once upon a time, would
+rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de Montpensier, de Guermantes,
+and de Montmorency, when they had to come down to Combray for some
+litigation with their farmers, or to receive homage from them. We would
+come at length to the Mall, among whose treetops I could distinguish the
+steeple of Saint-Hilaire. And I should have liked to be able to sit down
+and spend the whole day there, reading and listening to the bells, for
+it was so charming there and so quiet that, when an hour struck, you
+would have said not that it broke in upon the calm of the day, but that
+it relieved the day of its superfluity, and that the steeple, with the
+indolent, painstaking exactitude of a person who has nothing else to do,
+had simply, in order to squeeze out and let fall the few golden drops
+which had slowly and naturally accumulated in the hot sunlight, pressed,
+at a given moment, the distended surface of the silence.
+
+The great charm of the 'Guermantes' way was that we had beside us,
+almost all the time, the course of the Vivonne. We crossed it first, ten
+minutes after leaving the house, by a foot-bridge called the Pont-Vieux.
+And every year, when we arrived at Combray, on Easter morning, after the
+sermon, if the weather was fine, I would run there to see (amid all the
+disorder that prevails on the morning of a great festival, the gorgeous
+preparations for which make the everyday household utensils that they
+have not contrived to banish seem more sordid than ever) the river
+flowing past, sky-blue already between banks still black and bare, its
+only companions a clump of daffodils, come out before their time, a few
+primroses, the first in flower, while here and there burned the blue
+flame of a violet, its stem bent beneath the weight of the drop of
+perfume stored in its tiny horn. The Pont-Vieux led to a tow-path which,
+at this point, would be overhung in summer by the bluish foliage of a
+hazel, under which a fisherman in a straw hat seemed to have taken
+root. At Combray, where I knew everyone, and could always detect the
+blacksmith or grocer's boy through his disguise of a beadle's uniform
+or chorister's surplice, this fisherman was the only person whom I was
+never able to identify. He must have known my family, for he used to
+raise his hat when we passed; and then I would always be just on the
+point of asking his name, when some one would make a sign to me to be
+quiet, or I would frighten the fish. We would follow the tow-path which
+ran along the top of a steep bank, several feet above the stream. The
+ground on the other side was lower, and stretched in a series of broad
+meadows as far as the village and even to the distant railway-station.
+Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of
+the castle of the old Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages,
+had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier and defence
+against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of Martinville.
+Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad
+surface of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in
+their day, the bowmen had hurled down stones, the watchmen had gazed out
+over Novepont, Clairefontaine, Martinville-le-Sec, Bailleau-l'Exempt,
+fiefs all of them of Guermantes, a ring in which Combray was locked;
+but fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and
+commanded by boys from the Christian Brothers' school, who came there
+in their playtime, or with lesson-books to be conned; emblems of a past
+that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth, that lay by
+the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong
+food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not the
+little town of to-day only, but an historic city vastly different,
+seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible
+features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups.
+For the buttercups grew past numbering on this spot which they had
+chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in
+whole companies, yellow as the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added
+lustre, I felt, because, being powerless to consummate with my palate
+the pleasure which the sight of them never failed to give me, I would
+let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their gilded expanse, until
+it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of
+absolute, unproductive beauty; and so it had been from my earliest
+childhood, when from the tow-path I had stretched out my arms towards
+them, before even I could pronounce their charming name--a name fit for
+the Prince in some French fairy-tale; colonists, perhaps, in some far
+distant century from Asia, but naturalised now for ever in the village,
+well satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine
+and the water's edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the
+railway-station; yet keeping, none the less, as do some of our old
+paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the
+golden East.
+
+I would amuse myself by watching the glass jars which the boys used
+to lower into the Vivonne, to catch minnows, and which, filled by the
+current of the stream, in which they themselves also were enclosed, at
+once 'containers' whose transparent sides were like solidified water
+and 'contents' plunged into a still larger container of liquid,
+flowing crystal, suggested an image of coolness more delicious and more
+provoking than the same water in the same jars would have done, standing
+upon a table laid for dinner, by shewing it as perpetually in flight
+between the impalpable water, in which my hands could not arrest it, and
+the insoluble glass, in which my palate could not enjoy it. I decided
+that I would come there again with a line and catch fish; I begged for
+and obtained a morsel of bread from our luncheon basket; and threw into
+the Vivonne pellets which had the power, it seemed, to bring about a
+chemical precipitation, for the water at once grew solid round about
+them in oval clusters of emaciated tadpoles, which until then it had, no
+doubt, been holding in solution, invisible, but ready and alert to enter
+the stage of crystallisation.
+
+Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants.
+At first they appeared singly, a lily, for instance, which the current,
+across whose path it had unfortunately grown, would never leave at rest
+for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically propelled, it
+would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally
+repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would
+be straightened out, lengthened, strained almost to breaking-point until
+the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their
+anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called
+its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before
+moving off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after
+another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims
+of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt
+Léonie, who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle
+of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine
+themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always
+retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and
+eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate
+its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange,
+ineluctable, fatal daily round. Such as these was the water-lily,
+and also like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated
+indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who
+would have inquired of them at greater length and in fuller detail from
+the victims themselves, had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him
+to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.
+
+But farther on the current slackened, where the stream ran through a
+property thrown open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of
+aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds into which the Vivonne was
+here diverted were aflower with water-lilies. As the banks at this
+point were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a
+background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we
+were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen
+in its depths a clear, crude blue that was almost violet, suggesting a
+floor of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there, on the surface, floated,
+blushing like a strawberry, the scarlet heart of a lily set in a ring of
+white petals.
+
+Beyond these the flowers were more frequent, but paler, less glossy,
+more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in
+festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream,
+as though after the dreary stripping of the decorations used in some
+Watteau festival, moss-roses in loosened garlands. Elsewhere a corner
+seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily; of a neat pink or
+white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain, with housewifely
+care; while, a little farther again, were others, pressed close together
+in a floating garden-bed, as though pansies had flown out of a garden
+like butterflies and were hovering with blue and burnished wings over
+the transparent shadowiness of this watery border; this skiey border
+also, for it set beneath the flowers a soil of a colour more precious,
+more moving than their own; and both in the afternoon, when it sparkled
+beneath the lilies in the kaleidoscope of a happiness silent, restless,
+and alert, and towards evening, when it was filled like a distant heaven
+with the roseate dreams of the setting sun, incessantly changing and
+ever remaining in harmony, about the more permanent colour of the
+flowers themselves, with the utmost profundity, evanescence, and
+mystery--with a quiet suggestion of infinity; afternoon or evening, it
+seemed to have set them flowering in the heart of the sky.
+
+After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly.
+How often have I watched, and longed to imitate, when I should be free
+to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay stretched
+out on his back, his head down, in the bottom of his boat, letting it
+drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly
+above him, shewing upon his features a foretaste of happiness and peace.
+
+We would sit down among the irises at the water's edge. In the holiday
+sky a lazy cloud streamed out to its full length. Now and then, crushed
+by the burden of idleness, a carp would heave up out of the water, with
+an anxious gasp. It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards
+we would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and
+chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint,
+but solid still and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire,
+which had melted not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed
+to traverse, but, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all
+their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed the flowers at our feet.
+
+Sometimes, at the water's edge and embedded in trees, we would come upon
+a house of the kind called 'pleasure houses,' isolated and lost, seeing
+nothing of the world, save the river which bathed its feet. A young
+woman, whose pensive face and fashionable veils did not suggest a local
+origin, and who had doubtless come there, in the popular phrase, 'to
+bury herself,' to taste the bitter sweetness of feeling that her name,
+and still more the name of him whose heart she had once held, but had
+been unable to keep, were unknown there, stood framed in a window from
+which she had no outlook beyond the boat that was moored beside her
+door. She raised her eyes with an air of distraction when she heard,
+through the trees that lined the bank, the voices of passers-by of whom,
+before they came in sight, she might be certain that never had they
+known, nor would they know, the faithless lover, that nothing in their
+past lives bore his imprint, which nothing in their future would have
+occasion to receive. One felt that in her renunciation of life she had
+willingly abandoned those places in which she would at least have been
+able to see him whom she loved, for others where he had never trod. And
+I watched her, as she returned from some walk along a road where she had
+known that he would not appear, drawing from her submissive fingers long
+gloves of a precious, useless charm.
+
+Never, in the course of our walks along the 'Guermantes way,' might
+we penetrate as far as the source of the Vivonne, of which I had often
+thought, which had in my mind so abstract, so ideal an existence, that I
+had been as much surprised when some one told me that it was actually
+to be found in the same department, and at a given number of miles from
+Combray, as I had been on the day when I had learned that there was
+another fixed point somewhere on the earth's surface, where, according
+to the ancients, opened the jaws of Hell. Nor could we ever reach that
+other goal, to which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself. I
+knew that it was the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse
+de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who did actually
+exist, but whenever I thought about them I pictured them to myself
+either in tapestry, as was the 'Coronation of Esther' which hung in our
+church, or else in changing, rainbow colours, as was Gilbert the Bad in
+his window, where he passed from cabbage green, when I was dipping my
+fingers in the holy water stoup, to plum blue when I had reached our row
+of chairs, or again altogether impalpable, like the image of Geneviève
+de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family, which the magic lantern
+sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the
+ceiling--in short, always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age,
+and bathed, as in a sunset, in the orange light which glowed from the
+resounding syllable 'antes.' And if, in spite of that, they were for
+me, in their capacity as a duke and a duchess, real people, though of
+an unfamiliar kind, this ducal personality was in its turn enormously
+distended, immaterialised, so as to encircle and contain that Guermantes
+of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit 'Guermantes way'
+of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its
+overshadowing trees, and an endless series of hot summer afternoons.
+And I knew that they bore not only the titles of Duc and Duchesse de
+Guermantes, but that since the fourteenth century, when, after vain
+attempts to conquer its earlier lords in battle, they had allied
+themselves by marriage, and so became Counts of Combray, the first
+citizens, consequently, of the place, and yet the only ones among
+its citizens who did not reside in it--Comtes de Combray, possessing
+Combray, threading it on their string of names and titles, absorbing it
+in their personalities, and illustrating, no doubt, in themselves that
+strange and pious melancholy which was peculiar to Combray; proprietors
+of the town, though not of any particular house there; dwelling,
+presumably, out of doors, in the street, between heaven and earth, like
+that Gilbert de Guermantes, of whom I could see, in the stained glass of
+the apse of Saint-Hilaire, only the 'other side' in dull black lacquer,
+if I raised my eyes to look for him, when I was going to Camus's for a
+packet of salt.
+
+And then it happened that, going the 'Guermantes way,' I passed
+occasionally by a row of well-watered little gardens, over whose hedges
+rose clusters of dark blossom. I would stop before them, hoping to gain
+some precious addition to my experience, for I seemed to have before my
+eyes a fragment of that riverside country which I had longed so much
+to see and know since coming upon a description of it by one of my
+favourite authors. And it was with that story-book land, with its
+imagined soil intersected by a hundred bubbling watercourses, that
+Guermantes, changing its form in my mind, became identified, after I
+heard Dr. Percepied speak of the flowers and the charming rivulets and
+fountains that were to be seen there in the ducal park. I used to dream
+that Mme. de Guermantes, taking a sudden capricious fancy for myself,
+invited me there, that all day long she stood fishing for trout by my
+side. And when evening came, holding my hand in her own, as we passed by
+the little gardens of her vassals, she would point out to me the flowers
+that leaned their red and purple spikes along the tops of the low walls,
+and would teach me all their names. She would make me tell her, too, all
+about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me
+that, since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high time to
+decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked
+myself the question, and tried to discover some subjects to which I
+could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind
+would stop like a clock, I would see before me vacuity, nothing, would
+feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that, perhaps, a
+malady of the brain was hindering its development. Sometimes I would
+depend upon my father's arranging everything for me. He was so powerful,
+in such favour with the people who 'really counted,' that he made it
+possible for us to transgress laws which Françoise had taught me to
+regard as more ineluctable than the laws of life and death, as when we
+were allowed to postpone for a year the compulsory repainting of the
+walls of our house, alone among all the houses in that part of Paris,
+or when he obtained permission from the Minister for Mme. Sazerat's
+son, who had been ordered to some watering-place, to take his degree two
+months before the proper time, among the candidates whose surnames began
+with 'A,' instead of having to wait his turn as an 'S.' If I had fallen
+seriously ill, if I had been captured by brigands, convinced that my
+father's understanding with the supreme powers was too complete, that
+his letters of introduction to the Almighty were too irresistible for my
+illness or captivity to turn out anything but vain illusions, in which
+there was no danger actually threatening me, I should have awaited
+with perfect composure the inevitable hour of my return to comfortable
+realities, of my deliverance from bondage or restoration to health.
+Perhaps this want of talent, this black cavity which gaped in my mind
+when I ransacked it for the theme of my future writings, was itself no
+more, either, than an unsubstantial illusion, and would be brought to
+an end by the intervention of my father, who would arrange with the
+Government and with Providence that I should be the first writer of
+my day. But at other times, while my parents were growing impatient
+at seeing me loiter behind instead of following them, my actual life,
+instead of seeming an artificial creation by my father, and one which he
+could modify as he chose, appeared, on the contrary, to be comprised in
+a larger reality which had not been created for my benefit, from whose
+judgments there was no appeal, in the heart of which I was bound,
+helpless, without friend or ally, and beyond which no further
+possibilities lay concealed. It was evident to me then that I existed in
+the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die
+like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one
+of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I
+renounced literature for ever, despite the encouragements that had been
+given me by Bloch. This intimate, spontaneous feeling, this sense of the
+nullity of my intellect, prevailed against all the flattering speeches
+that might be lavished upon me, as a wicked man, when everyone is loud
+in the praise of his good deeds, is gnawed by the secret remorse of
+conscience.
+
+One day my mother said: "You are always talking about Mme. de
+Guermantes. Well, Dr. Percepied did a great deal for her when she was
+ill, four years ago, and so she is coming to Combray for his daughter's
+wedding. You will be able to see her in church." It was from Dr.
+Percepied, as it happened, that I had heard most about Mme. de
+Guermantes, and he had even shewn us the number of an illustrated paper
+in which she was depicted in the costume which she had worn at a fancy
+dress ball given by the Princesse de Léon.
+
+Suddenly, during the nuptial mass, the beadle, by moving to one side,
+enabled me to see, sitting in a chapel, a lady with fair hair and a
+large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk, glossy
+and new and brilliant, and a little spot at the corner of her nose. And
+because on the surface of her face, which was red, as though she had
+been very warm, I could make out, diluted and barely perceptible,
+details which resembled the portrait that had been shewn to me; because,
+more especially, the particular features which I remarked in this lady,
+if I attempted to catalogue them, formulated themselves in precisely the
+same terms:--_a large nose, blue eyes_, as Dr. Percepied had used when
+describing in my presence the Duchesse de Guermantes, I said to myself:
+"This lady is like the Duchesse de Guermantes." Now the chapel from
+which she was following the service was that of Gilbert the Bad; beneath
+its flat tombstones, yellowed and bulging like cells of honey in a comb,
+rested the bones of the old Counts of Brabant; and I remembered having
+heard it said that this chapel was reserved for the Guermantes family,
+whenever any of its members came to attend a ceremony at Combray; there
+was, indeed, but one woman resembling the portrait of Mme. de Guermantes
+who on that day, the very day on which she was expected to come there,
+could be sitting in that chapel: it was she! My disappointment was
+immense. It arose from my not having borne in mind, when I thought of
+Mme. de Guermantes, that I was picturing her to myself in the colours of
+a tapestry or a painted window, as living in another century, as being
+of another substance than the rest of the human race. Never had I taken
+into account that she might have a red face, a mauve scarf like Mme.
+Sazerat; and the oval curve of her cheeks reminded me so strongly of
+people whom I had seen at home that the suspicion brushed against my
+mind (though it was immediately banished) that this lady in her creative
+principle, in the molecules of her physical composition, was perhaps
+not substantially the Duchesse de Guermantes, but that her body, in
+ignorance of the name that people had given it, belonged to a certain
+type of femininity which included, also, the wives of doctors and
+tradesmen. "It is, it must be Mme. de Guermantes, and no one else!" were
+the words underlying the attentive and astonished expression with
+which I was gazing upon this image, which, naturally enough, bore no
+resemblance to those that had so often, under the same title of 'Mme. de
+Guermantes,' appeared to me in dreams, since this one had not been, like
+the others, formed arbitrarily by myself, but had sprung into sight for
+the first time, only a moment ago, here in church; an image which was
+not of the same nature, was not colourable at will, like those others
+that allowed themselves to imbibe the orange tint of a sonorous
+syllable, but which was so real that everything, even to the fiery
+little spot at the corner of her nose, gave an assurance of her
+subjection to the laws of life, as in a transformation scene on the
+stage a crease in the dress of a fairy, a quivering of her tiny finger,
+indicate the material presence of a living actress before our eyes,
+whereas we were uncertain, till then, whether we were not looking merely
+at a projection of limelight from a lantern.
+
+Meanwhile I was endeavouring to apply to this image, which the prominent
+nose, the piercing eyes pinned down and fixed in my field of vision
+(perhaps because it was they that had first struck it, that had made the
+first impression on its surface, before I had had time to wonder
+whether the woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be Mme. de
+Guermantes), to this fresh and unchanging image the idea: "It is Mme. de
+Guermantes"; but I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and
+the image, as though they were two discs moving in separate planes,
+with a space between. But this Mme. de Guermantes of whom I had so often
+dreamed, now that I could see that she had a real existence independent
+of myself, acquired a fresh increase of power over my imagination,
+which, paralysed for a moment by contact with a reality so different
+from anything that it had expected, began to react and to say within me:
+"Great and glorious before the days of Charlemagne, the Guermantes
+had the right of life and death over their vassals; the Duchesse de
+Guermantes descends from Geneviève de Brabant. She does not know, nor
+would she consent to know, any of the people who are here to-day."
+
+And then--oh, marvellous independence of the human gaze, tied to the
+human face by a cord so loose, so long, so elastic that it can stray,
+alone, as far as it may choose--while Mme. de Guermantes sat in the
+chapel above the tombs of her dead ancestors, her gaze lingered here
+and wandered there, rose to the capitals of the pillars, and even rested
+upon myself, like a ray of sunlight straying down the nave, but a ray
+of sunlight which, at the moment when I received its caress, appeared
+conscious of where it fell. As for Mme. de Guermantes herself, since
+she remained there motionless, sitting like a mother who affects not to
+notice the rude or awkward conduct of her children who, in the course
+of their play, are speaking to people whom she does not know, it was
+impossible for me to determine whether she approved or condemned the
+vagrancy of her eyes in the careless detachment of her heart.
+
+I felt it to be important that she should not leave the church before
+I had been able to look long enough upon her, reminding myself that for
+years past I had regarded the sight of her as a thing eminently to be
+desired, and I kept my eyes fixed on her, as though by gazing at her
+I should be able to carry away and incorporate, to store up, for later
+reference, in myself the memory of that prominent nose, those red
+cheeks, of all those details which struck me as so much precious,
+authentic, unparalleled information with regard to her face. And now
+that, whenever I brought my mind to bear upon that face--and
+especially, perhaps, in my determination, that form of the instinct
+of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in
+ourselves, not to admit that I had been in any way deceived--I found
+only beauty there; setting her once again (since they were one and the
+same person, this lady who sat before me and that Duchesse de Guermantes
+whom, until then, I had been used to conjure into an imagined shape)
+apart from and above that common run of humanity with which the sight,
+pure and simple, of her in the flesh had made me for a moment confound
+her, I grew indignant when I heard people saying, in the congregation
+round me: "She is better looking than Mme. Sazerat" or "than Mlle.
+Vinteuil," as though she had been in any way comparable with them. And
+my gaze resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her
+neck, and overlooking the features which might have reminded me of
+the faces of other women, I cried out within myself, as I admired this
+deliberately unfinished sketch: "How lovely she is! What true nobility!
+it is indeed a proud Guermantes, the descendant of Geneviève de Brabant,
+that I have before me!" And the care which I took to focus all my
+attention upon her face succeeded in isolating it so completely that
+to-day, when I call that marriage ceremony to mind, I find it impossible
+to visualise any single person who was present except her, and the
+beadle who answered me in the affirmative when I inquired whether the
+lady was, indeed, Mme. de Guermantes. But her, I can see her still quite
+clearly, especially at the moment when the procession filed into the
+sacristy, lighted by the intermittent, hot sunshine of a windy and rainy
+day, where Mme. de Guermantes found herself in the midst of all
+those Combray people whose names, even, she did not know, but whose
+inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud that she must, in
+return, feel for them a genuine, pitying sympathy, and whom she might
+count on impressing even more forcibly by virtue of her simplicity and
+natural charm. And then, too, since she could not bring into play the
+deliberate glances, charged with a definite meaning, which one directs,
+in a crowd, towards people whom one knows, but must allow her vague
+thoughts to escape continually from her eyes in a flood of blue light
+which she was powerless to control, she was anxious not to distress in
+any way, not to seem to be despising those humbler mortals over whom
+that current flowed, by whom it was everywhere arrested. I can see
+again to-day, above her mauve scarf, silky and buoyant, the gentle
+astonishment in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to
+address it to anyone in particular, but so that everyone might enjoy his
+share of it, the almost timid smile of a sovereign lady who seems to
+be making an apology for her presence among the vassals whom she loves.
+This smile rested upon myself, who had never ceased to follow her with
+my eyes. And I, remembering the glance which she had let fall upon me
+during the service, blue as a ray of sunlight that had penetrated the
+window of Gilbert the Bad, said to myself, "Of course, she is thinking
+about me." I fancied that I had found favour in her sight, that she
+would continue to think of me after she had left the church, and would,
+perhaps, grow pensive again, that evening, at Guermantes, on my account.
+And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to
+make us love a woman that she looks on us with contempt, as I supposed
+Mlle. Swann to have done, while we imagine that she cannot ever be ours,
+it is enough, also, sometimes that she looks on us kindly, as Mme. de
+Guermantes did then, while we think of her as almost ours already. Her
+eyes waxed blue as a periwinkle flower, wholly beyond my reach, yet
+dedicated by her to me; and the sun, bursting out again from behind
+a threatening cloud and darting the full force of its rays on to the
+Square and into the sacristy, shed a geranium glow over the red carpet
+laid down for the wedding, along which Mme. de Guermantes smilingly
+advanced, and covered its woollen texture with a nap of rosy velvet, a
+bloom of light, giving it that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness
+in the pomp of a joyful celebration, which characterises certain pages
+of _Lohengrin_, certain paintings by Carpaccio, and makes us understand
+how Baudelaire was able to apply to the sound of the trumpet the epithet
+'delicious.'
+
+How often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the
+'Guermantes way,' and with what an intensified melancholy did I reflect
+on my lack of qualification for a literary career, and that I must
+abandon all hope of ever becoming a famous author. The regret that I
+felt for this, while I lingered alone to dream for a little by myself,
+made me suffer so acutely that, in order not to feel it, my mind of
+its own accord, by a sort of inhibition in the instant of pain, ceased
+entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction, of the poetic future on
+which my want of talent precluded me from counting. Then, quite apart
+from all those literary preoccupations, and without definite attachment
+to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight reflected from a
+stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to enjoy the
+special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they
+appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something
+which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but which,
+despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover. As I felt that the
+mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there in front
+of them, motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with
+my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt. And if I had then to hasten
+after my grandfather, to proceed on my way, I would still seek to
+recover my sense of them by closing my eyes; I would concentrate upon
+recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which,
+without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming,
+ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they were
+themselves no more than the outer coverings. It was certainly not any
+impression of this kind that could or would restore the hope I had lost
+of succeeding one day in becoming an author and poet, for each of them
+was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual
+value, and suggesting no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an
+unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind; and
+in that way distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own
+impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme
+for some great literary work. So urgent was the task imposed on my
+conscience by these impressions of form or perfume or colour--to strive
+for a perception of what lay hidden beneath them, that I was never
+long in seeking an excuse which would allow me to relax so strenuous an
+effort and to spare myself the fatigue that it involved. As good luck
+would have it, my parents called me; I felt that I had not, for the
+moment, the calm environment necessary for a successful pursuit of my
+researches, and that it would be better to think no more of the matter
+until I reached home, and not to exhaust myself in the meantime to no
+purpose. And so I concerned myself no longer with the mystery that lay
+hidden in a form or a perfume, quite at ease in my mind, since I was
+taking it home with me, protected by its visible and tangible covering,
+beneath which I should find it still alive, like the fish which, on days
+when I had been allowed to go out fishing, I used to carry back in my
+basket, buried in a couch of grass which kept them cool and fresh. Once
+in the house again I would begin to think of something else, and so my
+mind would become littered (as my room was with the flowers that I had
+gathered on my walks, or the odds and ends that people had given me)
+with a stone from the surface of which the sunlight was reflected, a
+roof, the sound of a bell, the smell of fallen leaves, a confused mass
+of different images, under which must have perished long ago the reality
+of which I used to have some foreboding, but which I never had the
+energy to discover and bring to light. Once, however, when we had
+prolonged our walk far beyond its ordinary limits, and so had been very
+glad to encounter, half way home, as afternoon darkened into evening,
+Dr. Percepied, who drove past us at full speed in his carriage, saw and
+recognised us, stopped, and made us jump in beside him, I received an
+impression of this sort which I did not abandon without having first
+subjected it to an examination a little more thorough. I had been set
+on the box beside the coachman, we were going like the wind because
+the Doctor had still, before returning to Combray, to call at
+Martinville-le-Sec, at the house of a patient, at whose door he asked
+us to wait for him. At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that
+special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught
+sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting sun was
+playing, while the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road
+seemed to keep them continually changing their position; and then of a
+third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them
+by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the
+distance, appeared none the less to be standing by their side.
+
+In ascertaining and noting the shape of their spires, the changes
+of aspect, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not
+penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay
+behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at
+once to contain and to conceal.
+
+The steeples appeared so distant, and we ourselves seemed to come so
+little nearer them, that I was astonished when, a few minutes later, we
+drew up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for
+the pleasure which I had found in seeing them upon the horizon, and
+the business of trying to find out what that reason was seemed to me
+irksome; I wished only to keep in reserve in my brain those converging
+lines, moving in the sunshine, and, for the time being, to think of
+them no more. And it is probable that, had I done so, those two steeples
+would have vanished for ever, in a great medley of trees and roofs and
+scents and sounds which I had noticed and set apart on account of the
+obscure sense of pleasure which they gave me, but without ever exploring
+them more fully. I got down from the box to talk to my parents while we
+were waiting for the Doctor to reappear. Then it was time to start; I
+climbed up again to my place, turning my head to look back, once more,
+at my steeples, of which, a little later, I caught a farewell glimpse
+at a turn in the road. The coachman, who seemed little inclined for
+conversation, having barely acknowledged my remarks, I was obliged,
+in default of other society, to fall back on my own, and to attempt to
+recapture the vision of my steeples. And presently their outlines and
+their sunlit surface, as though they had been a sort of rind, were
+stripped apart; a little of what they had concealed from me became
+apparent; an idea came into my mind which had not existed for me a
+moment earlier, framed itself in words in my head; and the pleasure
+with which the first sight of them, just now, had filled me was so much
+enhanced that, overpowered by a sort of intoxication, I could no longer
+think of anything but them. At this point, although we had now travelled
+a long way from Martinville, I turned my head and caught sight of them
+again, quite black this time, for the sun had meanwhile set. Every few
+minutes a turn in the road would sweep them out of sight; then they
+shewed themselves for the last time, and so I saw them no more.
+
+Without admitting to myself that what lay buried within the steeples of
+Martinville must be something analogous to a charming phrase, since it
+was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to
+me, I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the Doctor, and composed,
+in spite of the jolting of the carriage, to appease my conscience and to
+satisfy my enthusiasm, the following little fragment, which I have since
+discovered, and now reproduce, with only a slight revision here and
+there.
+
+Alone, rising from the level of the plain, and seemingly lost in
+that expanse of open country, climbed to the sky the twin steeples of
+Martinville. Presently we saw three: springing into position confronting
+them by a daring volt, a third, a dilatory steeple, that of Vieuxvicq,
+was come to join them. The minutes passed, we were moving rapidly, and
+yet the three steeples were always a long way ahead of us, like
+three birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in
+the sunlight. Then the steeple of Vieuxvicq withdrew, took its proper
+distance, and the steeples of Martinville remained alone, gilded by
+the light of the setting sun, which, even at that distance, I could
+see playing and smiling upon their sloped sides. We had been so long in
+approaching them that I was thinking of the time that must still elapse
+before we could reach them when, of a sudden, the carriage, having
+turned a corner, set us down at their feet; and they had flung
+themselves so abruptly in our path that we had barely time to stop
+before being dashed against the porch of the church.
+
+We resumed our course; we had left Martinville some little time, and
+the village, after accompanying us for a few seconds, had already
+disappeared, when, lingering alone on the horizon to watch our flight,
+its steeples and that of Vieuxvicq waved once again, in token of
+farewell, their sun-bathed pinnacles. Sometimes one would withdraw,
+so that the other two might watch us for a moment still; then the road
+changed direction, they veered in the light like three golden pivots,
+and vanished from my gaze. But, a little later, when we were already
+close to Combray, the sun having set meanwhile, I caught sight of them
+for the last time, far away, and seeming no more now than three flowers
+painted upon the sky above the low line of fields. They made me think,
+too, of three maidens in a legend, abandoned in a solitary place over
+which night had begun to fall; and while we drew away from them at a
+gallop, I could see them timidly seeking their way, and, after some
+awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes, drawing close
+to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing more,
+now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and
+resigned, and so vanishing in the night.
+
+I never thought again of this page, but at the moment when, on my
+corner of the box-seat, where the Doctor's coachman was in the habit
+of placing, in a hamper, the fowls which he had bought at Martinville
+market, I had finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness,
+felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the
+steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I
+myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top
+of my voice.
+
+All day long, during these walks, I had been able to muse upon the
+pleasure that there would be in the friendship of the Duchesse de
+Guermantes, in fishing for trout, in drifting by myself in a boat on the
+Vivonne; and, greedy for happiness, I asked nothing more from life, in
+such moments, than that it should consist always of a series of joyous
+afternoons. But when, on our way home, I had caught sight of a farm, on
+the left of the road, at some distance from two other farms which were
+themselves close together, and from which, to return to Combray, we need
+only turn down an avenue of oaks, bordered on one side by a series of
+orchard-closes, each one planted at regular intervals with apple-trees
+which cast upon the ground, when they were lighted by the setting sun,
+the Japanese stencil of their shadows; then, sharply, my heart would
+begin to beat, I would know that in half an hour we should be at
+home, and that there, as was the rule on days when we had taken the
+'Guermantes way' and dinner was, in consequence, served later than
+usual, I should be sent to bed as soon as I had swallowed my soup, so
+that my mother, kept at table, just as though there had been company to
+dinner, would not come upstairs to say good night to me in bed. The zone
+of melancholy which I then entered was totally distinct from that other
+zone, in which I had been bounding for joy a moment earlier, just as
+sometimes in the sky a band of pink is separated, as though by a line
+invisibly ruled, from a band of green or black. You may see a bird
+flying across the pink; it draws near the border-line, touches it,
+enters and is lost upon the black. The longings by which I had just
+now been absorbed, to go to Guermantes, to travel, to live a life of
+happiness--I was now so remote from them that their fulfilment would
+have afforded me no pleasure. How readily would I have sacrificed them
+all, just to be able to cry, all night long, in the arms of Mamma!
+Shuddering with emotion, I could not take my agonised eyes from my
+mother's face, which was not to appear that evening in the bedroom where
+I could see myself already lying, in imagination; and wished only that
+I were lying dead. And this state would persist until the morrow, when,
+the rays of morning leaning their bars of light, as the gardener might
+lean his ladder, against the wall overgrown with nasturtiums, which
+clambered up it as far as my window-sill, I would leap out of bed to run
+down at once into the garden, with no thought of the fact that evening
+must return, and with it the hour when I must leave my mother. And so
+it was from the 'Guermantes way' that I learned to distinguish between
+these states which reigned alternately in my mind, during certain
+periods, going so far as to divide every day between them, each one
+returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever and
+ague: contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means
+of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to
+myself, in one state what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the
+other.
+
+So the 'Méséglise way' and the 'Guermantes way' remain for me linked
+with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives
+along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in
+sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of
+the mind. Doubtless it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the
+truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have
+opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for
+their discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us
+those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became
+apparent. The flowers which played then among the grass, the water
+which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as
+environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still
+with its unconscious or unheeding air; and, certainly, when they were
+slowly scrutinised by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming
+child--as the face of a king is scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the
+crowd--that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose
+that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in
+all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which
+strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the
+dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no
+echo, upon a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side of a waterplant by
+the current, and formed only to burst--my exaltation of mind has borne
+them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all these
+successive years, while all around them the one-trodden ways have
+vanished, while those who thronged those ways, and even the memory of
+those who thronged those trodden ways, are dead. Sometimes the fragment
+of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in
+such isolation from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my
+mind, like a flowering isle of Delos, and I am unable to say from
+what place, from what time--perhaps, quite simply, from which of my
+dreams--it comes. But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my
+mental soil, as firm sites on which I still may build, that I regard
+the Méséglise and Guermantes 'ways.' It is because I used to think of
+certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along them, that
+the things, the people which they taught me to know, and these alone,
+I still take seriously, still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith
+which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape
+in the memory alone, the flowers that people shew me nowadays for the
+first time never seem to me to be true flowers. The 'Méséglise way'
+with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its
+apple-trees, the 'Guermantes way' with its river full of tadpoles, its
+water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time
+the picture of the land in which I fain would pass my life, in which my
+only requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a boat,
+see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find hidden among
+the cornfields--as Saint-André-des-Champs lay hidden--an old church,
+monumental, rustic, and yellow like a mill-stone; and the cornflowers,
+the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may happen, when I go walking, to
+encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on
+the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart. And
+yet, because there is an element of individuality in places, when I am
+seized with a desire to see again the 'Guermantes way,' it would not
+be satisfied were I led to the banks of a river in which were lilies
+as fair, or even fairer than those in the Vivonne, any more than on my
+return home in the evening, at the hour when there awakened in me that
+anguish which, later on in life, transfers itself to the passion of
+love, and may even become its inseparable companion, I should have
+wished for any strange mother to come in and say good night to me,
+though she were far more beautiful and more intelligent than my own. No:
+just as the one thing necessary to send me to sleep contented (in that
+untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able
+to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes
+in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her
+kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation,
+unburdened by any liability save to myself) was that it should be my
+mother who came, that she should incline towards me that face on which
+there was, beneath her eye, something that was, it appears, a blemish,
+and which I loved as much as all the rest--so what I want to see again
+is the 'Guermantes way' as I knew it, with the farm that stood a little
+apart from the two neighbouring farms, pressed so close together, at the
+entrance to the oak avenue; those meadows upon whose surface, when it
+is polished by the sun to the mirroring radiance of a lake, are outlined
+the leaves of the apple-trees; that whole landscape whose individuality
+sometimes, at night, in my dreams, binds me with a power that is almost
+fantastic, of which I can discover no trace when I awake.
+
+No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly combined in
+me groups of different impressions, for no reason save that they had
+made me feel several separate things at the same time, the Méséglise
+and Guermantes 'ways' left me exposed, in later life, to much
+disillusionment, and even to many mistakes. For often I have wished to
+see a person again without realising that it was simply because that
+person recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom; and I have been
+led to believe, and to make some one else believe in an aftermath of
+affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel. But by
+the same qualities, and by their persistence in those of my impressions,
+to-day, to which they can find an attachment, the two 'ways' give to
+those impressions a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the
+rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for
+me alone. When, on a summer evening, the resounding sky growls like a
+tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the
+'Méséglise way' that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling,
+through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent
+lilac-trees.
+
+And so I would often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at
+Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful evenings there; of other days
+besides, the memory of which had been more lately restored to me by the
+taste--by what would have been called at Combray the 'perfume'---of a
+cup of tea; and, by an association of memories, of a story which, many
+years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love
+affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born; with that
+accuracy of detail which it is easier, often, to obtain when we are
+studying the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than when
+we are trying to chronicle those of our own most intimate friends, an
+accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible
+to speak from one town to another, before we learned of the contrivance
+by which that impossibility has been overcome. All these memories,
+following one after another, were condensed into a single substance,
+but had not so far coalesced that I could not discern between the
+three strata, between my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others,
+inspired more recently by a taste or 'perfume,' and those which were
+actually the memories of another, from whom I had acquired them at
+second hand--no fissures, indeed, no geological faults, but at least
+those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain
+marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation.
+
+It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the
+brief uncertainty of my waking dream, I would know in what room I
+was actually lying, would have reconstructed it round about me in
+the darkness, and--fixing my orientation by memory alone, or with the
+assistance of a feeble glimmer of light at the foot of which I placed
+the curtains and the window--would have reconstructed it complete and
+with its furniture, as an architect and an upholsterer might do, working
+upon an original, discarded plan of the doors and windows; would have
+replaced the mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed
+site. But scarcely had daylight itself--and no longer the gleam from
+a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod, which I had mistaken for
+daylight--traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across
+a blackboard, its first white correcting ray, when the window, with
+its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway, in which I had
+erroneously placed it, while, to make room for it, the writing-table,
+which my memory had clumsily fixed where the window ought to be, would
+hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the mantelpiece, and
+sweeping aside the wall of the passage; the well of the courtyard would
+be enthroned on the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had
+lain, and the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the
+darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings of which I
+had caught glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to flight
+by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted
+forefinger of day.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SWANN IN LOVE
+
+To admit you to the 'little nucleus,' the 'little group,' the 'little
+clan' at the Verdurins', one condition sufficed, but that one was
+indispensable; you must give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose
+articles was that the young pianist, whom Mme. Verdurin had taken under
+her patronage that year, and of whom she said "Really, it oughtn't to
+be allowed, to play Wagner as well as that!" left both Planté
+and Rubinstein 'sitting'; while Dr. Cottard was a more brilliant
+diagnostician than Potain. Each 'new recruit' whom the Verdurins failed
+to persuade that the evenings spent by other people, in other houses
+than theirs, were as dull as ditch-water, saw himself banished
+forthwith. Women being in this respect more rebellious than men, more
+reluctant to lay aside all worldly curiosity and the desire to find out
+for themselves whether other drawing-rooms might not sometimes be as
+entertaining, and the Verdurins feeling, moreover, that this critical
+spirit and this demon of frivolity might, by their contagion, prove
+fatal to the orthodoxy of the little church, they had been obliged to
+expel, one after another, all those of the 'faithful' who were of the
+female sex.
+
+Apart from the doctor's young wife, they were reduced almost exclusively
+that season (for all that Mme. Verdurin herself was a thoroughly 'good'
+woman, and came of a respectable middle-class family, excessively rich
+and wholly undistinguished, with which she had gradually and of her own
+accord severed all connection) to a young woman almost of a 'certain
+class,' a Mme. de Crécy, whom Mme. Verdurin called by her Christian
+name, Odette, and pronounced a 'love,' and to the pianist's aunt, who
+looked as though she had, at one period, 'answered the bell': ladies
+quite ignorant of the world, who in their social simplicity were so
+easily led to believe that the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse
+de Guermantes were obliged to pay large sums of money to other poor
+wretches, in order to have anyone at their dinner-parties, that if
+somebody had offered to procure them an invitation to the house of
+either of those great dames, the old doorkeeper and the woman of 'easy
+virtue' would have contemptuously declined.
+
+The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your 'place laid'
+there. There was never any programme for the evening's entertainment.
+The young pianist would play, but only if he felt inclined, for no one
+was forced to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say: "We're all
+friends here. Liberty Hall, you know!"
+
+If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries, or the
+Prelude to Tristan, Mme. Verdurin would protest, not that the music was
+displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an
+impression. "Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know
+quite well, it's the same every time he plays that. I know what I'm
+in for. Tomorrow, when I want to get up--nothing doing!" If he was not
+going to play they talked, and one of the friends--usually the painter
+who was in favour there that year--would "spin," as M. Verdurin put
+it, "a damned funny yarn that made 'em all split with laughter," and
+especially Mme. Verdurin, for whom--so strong was her habit of taking
+literally the figurative accounts of her emotions--Dr. Cottard, who was
+then just starting in general practice, would "really have to come one
+day and set her jaw, which she had dislocated with laughing too much."
+
+Evening dress was barred, because you were all 'good pals,' and didn't
+want to look like the 'boring people' who were to be avoided like the
+plague, and only asked to the big evenings, which were given as seldom
+as possible, and then only if it would amuse the painter or make the
+musician better known. The rest of the time you were quite happy playing
+charades and having supper in fancy dress, and there was no need to
+mingle any strange element with the little 'clan.'
+
+But just as the 'good pals' came to take a more and more prominent place
+in Mme. Verdurin's life, so the 'bores,' the 'nuisances' grew to include
+everybody and everything that kept her friends away from her, that made
+them sometimes plead 'previous engagements,' the mother of one, the
+professional duties of another, the 'little place in the country' of a
+third. If Dr. Cottard felt bound to say good night as soon as they rose
+from table, so as to go back to some patient who was seriously ill; "I
+don't know," Mme. Verdurin would say, "I'm sure it will do him far more
+good if you don't go disturbing him again this evening; he will have a
+good night without you; to-morrow morning you can go round early and you
+will find him cured." From the beginning of December it would make her
+quite ill to think that the 'faithful' might fail her on Christmas and
+New Year's Days. The pianist's aunt insisted that he must accompany her,
+on the latter, to a family dinner at her mother's.
+
+"You don't suppose she'll die, your mother," exclaimed Mme. Verdurin
+bitterly, "if you don't have dinner with her on New Year's Day, like
+people in the _provinces_!"
+
+Her uneasiness was kindled again in Holy Week: "Now you, Doctor, you're
+a sensible, broad-minded man; you'll come, of course, on Good Friday,
+just like any other day?" she said to Cottard in the first year of the
+little 'nucleus,' in a loud and confident voice, as though there could
+be no doubt of his answer. But she trembled as she waited for it, for if
+he did not come she might find herself condemned to dine alone.
+
+"I shall come on Good Friday--to say good-bye to you, for we are going
+to spend the holidays in Auvergne."
+
+"In Auvergne? To be eaten by fleas and all sorts of creatures! A fine
+lot of good that will do you!" And after a solemn pause: "If you had
+only told us, we would have tried to get up a party, and all gone there
+together, comfortably."
+
+And so, too, if one of the 'faithful' had a friend, or one of the ladies
+a young man, who was liable, now and then, to make them miss an evening,
+the Verdurins, who were not in the least afraid of a woman's having a
+lover, provided that she had him in their company, loved him in their
+company and did not prefer him to their company, would say: "Very well,
+then, bring your friend along." And he would be put to the test, to see
+whether he was willing to have no secrets from Mme. Verdurin, whether he
+was susceptible of being enrolled in the 'little clan.' If he failed
+to pass, the faithful one who had introduced him would be taken on one
+side, and would be tactfully assisted to quarrel with the friend or
+mistress. But if the test proved satisfactory, the newcomer would in
+turn be numbered among the 'faithful.' And so when, in the course of
+this same year, the courtesan told M. Verdurin that she had made the
+acquaintance of such a charming gentleman, M. Swann, and hinted that
+he would very much like to be allowed to come, M. Verdurin carried the
+request at once to his wife. He never formed an opinion on any subject
+until she had formed hers, his special duty being to carry out her
+wishes and those of the 'faithful' generally, which he did with
+boundless ingenuity.
+
+"My dear, Mme. de Crécy has something to say to you. She would like to
+bring one of her friends here, a M. Swann. What do you say?"
+
+"Why, as if anybody could refuse anything to a little piece of
+perfection like that. Be quiet; no one asked your opinion. I tell you
+that you are a piece of perfection."
+
+"Just as you like," replied Odette, in an affected tone, and then went
+on: "You know I'm not fishing for compliments."
+
+"Very well; bring your friend, if he's nice."
+
+Now there was no connection whatsoever between the 'little nucleus' and
+the society which Swann frequented, and a purely worldly man would
+have thought it hardly worth his while, when occupying so exceptional
+a position in the world, to seek an introduction to the Verdurins. But
+Swann was so ardent a lover that, once he had got to know almost all the
+women of the aristocracy, once they had taught him all that there was
+to learn, he had ceased to regard those naturalisation papers, almost a
+patent of nobility, which the Faubourg Saint-Germain had bestowed upon
+him, save as a sort of negotiable bond, a letter of credit with no
+intrinsic value, which allowed him to improvise a status for himself in
+some little hole in the country, or in some obscure quarter of Paris,
+where the good-looking daughter of a local squire or solicitor had taken
+his fancy. For at such times desire, or love itself, would revive in
+him a feeling of vanity from which he was now quite free in his everyday
+life, although it was, no doubt, the same feeling which had originally
+prompted him towards that career as a man of fashion in which he had
+squandered his intellectual gifts upon frivolous amusements, and had
+made use of his erudition in matters of art only to advise society
+ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses; and this
+vanity it was which made him eager to shine, in the sight of any fair
+unknown who had captivated him for the moment, with a brilliance which
+the name of Swann by itself did not emit. And he was most eager when the
+fair unknown was in humble circumstances. Just as it is not by other
+men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought
+a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and 'bounders'
+that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated.
+Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social
+falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people
+whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at
+inferiors. And Swann, who behaved quite simply and was at his ease when
+with a duchess, would tremble for fear of being despised, and would
+instantly begin to pose, were he to meet her grace's maid.
+
+Unlike so many people, who, either from lack of energy or else from a
+resigned sense of the obligation laid upon them by their social grandeur
+to remain moored like houseboats to a certain point on the bank of the
+stream of life, abstain from the pleasures which are offered to them
+above and below that point, that degree in life in which they will
+remain fixed until the day of their death, and are content, in the
+end, to describe as pleasures, for want of any better, those mediocre
+distractions, that just not intolerable tedium which is enclosed there
+with them; Swann would endeavour not to find charm and beauty in the
+women with whom he must pass time, but to pass his time among women whom
+he had already found to be beautiful and charming. And these were, as
+often as not, women whose beauty was of a distinctly 'common' type, for
+the physical qualities which attracted him instinctively, and without
+reason, were the direct opposite of those that he admired in the women
+painted or sculptured by his favourite masters. Depth of character, or
+a melancholy expression on a woman's face would freeze his senses, which
+would, however, immediately melt at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy
+human flesh.
+
+If on his travels he met a family whom it would have been more correct
+for him to make no attempt to know, but among whom a woman caught his
+eye, adorned with a special charm that was new to him, to remain on his
+'high horse' and to cheat the desire that she had kindled in him, to
+substitute a pleasure different from that which he might have tasted in
+her company by writing to invite one of his former mistresses to come
+and join him, would have seemed to him as cowardly an abdication in the
+face of life, as stupid a renunciation of a new form of happiness as if,
+instead of visiting the country where he was, he had shut himself up in
+his own rooms and looked at 'views' of Paris. He did not immure himself
+in the solid structure of his social relations, but had made of them, so
+as to be able to set it up afresh upon new foundations wherever a woman
+might take his fancy, one of those collapsible tents which explorers
+carry about with them. Any part of it which was not portable or could
+not be adapted to some fresh pleasure he would discard as valueless,
+however enviable it might appear to others. How often had his credit
+with a duchess, built up of the yearly accumulation of her desire to
+do him some favour for which she had never found an opportunity, been
+squandered in a moment by his calling upon her, in an indiscreetly
+worded message, for a recommendation by telegraph which would put him
+in touch at once with one of her agents whose daughter he had noticed in
+the country, just as a starving man might barter a diamond for a crust
+of bread. Indeed, when it was too late, he would laugh at himself for
+it, for there was in his nature, redeemed by many rare refinements, an
+element of clownishness. Then he belonged to that class of intelligent
+men who have led a life of idleness, and who seek consolation and,
+perhaps, an excuse in the idea, which their idleness offers to their
+intelligence, of objects as worthy of their interest as any that could
+be attained by art or learning, the idea that 'Life' contains situations
+more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.
+So, at least, he would assure and had no difficulty in persuading the
+more subtle among his friends in the fashionable world, notably the
+Baron de Charlus, whom he liked to amuse with stories of the startling
+adventures that had befallen him, such as when he had met a woman in the
+train, and had taken her home with him, before discovering that she was
+the sister of a reigning monarch, in whose hands were gathered, at that
+moment, all the threads of European politics, of which he found himself
+kept informed in the most delightful fashion, or when, in the complexity
+of circumstances, it depended upon the choice which the Conclave
+was about to make whether he might or might not become the lover of
+somebody's cook.
+
+It was not only the brilliant phalanx of virtuous dowagers, generals
+and academicians, to whom he was bound by such close ties, that Swann
+compelled with so much cynicism to serve him as panders. All his friends
+were accustomed to receive, from time to time, letters which called on
+them for a word of recommendation or introduction, with a diplomatic
+adroitness which, persisting throughout all his successive 'affairs'
+and using different pretexts, revealed more glaringly than the clumsiest
+indiscretion, a permanent trait in his character and an unvarying quest.
+I used often to recall to myself when, many years later, I began to
+take an interest in his character because of the similarities which, in
+wholly different respects, it offered to my own, how, when he used to
+write to my grandfather (though not at the time we are now considering,
+for it was about the date of my own birth that Swann's great 'affair'
+began, and made a long interruption in his amatory practices) the
+latter, recognising his friend's handwriting on the envelope, would
+exclaim: "Here is Swann asking for something; on guard!" And, either
+from distrust or from the unconscious spirit of devilry which urges us
+to offer a thing only to those who do not want it, my grandparents would
+meet with an obstinate refusal the most easily satisfied of his prayers,
+as when he begged them for an introduction to a girl who dined with us
+every Sunday, and whom they were obliged, whenever Swann mentioned her,
+to pretend that they no longer saw, although they would be wondering,
+all through the week, whom they could invite to meet her, and often
+failed, in the end, to find anyone, sooner than make a sign to him who
+would so gladly have accepted.
+
+Occasionally a couple of my grandparents' acquaintance, who had been
+complaining for some time that they never saw Swann now, would announce
+with satisfaction, and perhaps with a slight inclination to make my
+grandparents envious of them, that he had suddenly become as charming as
+he could possibly be, and was never out of their house. My grandfather
+would not care to shatter their pleasant illusion, but would look at my
+grandmother, as he hummed the air of:
+
+
+  What is this mystery?
+  I cannot understand it;
+
+or of:
+
+
+  Vision fugitive...;
+  In matters such as this
+  'Tis best to close one's eyes.
+
+A few months later, if my grandfather asked Swann's new friend "What
+about Swann? Do you still see as much of him as ever?" the other's face
+would lengthen: "Never mention his name to me again!"
+
+"But I thought that you were such friends..."
+
+He had been intimate in this way for several months with some cousins
+of my grandmother, dining almost every evening at their house. Suddenly,
+and without any warning, he ceased to appear. They supposed him to be
+ill, and the lady of the house was going to send to inquire for him
+when, in her kitchen, she found a letter in his hand, which her cook had
+left by accident in the housekeeping book. In this he announced that he
+was leaving Paris and would not be able to come to the house again. The
+cook had been his mistress, and at the moment of breaking off relations
+she was the only one of the household whom he had thought it necessary
+to inform.
+
+But when his mistress for the time being was a woman in society, or at
+least one whose birth was not so lowly, nor her position so irregular
+that he was unable to arrange for her reception in 'society,' then for
+her sake he would return to it, but only to the particular orbit in
+which she moved or into which he had drawn her. "No good depending on
+Swann for this evening," people would say; "don't you remember, it's his
+American's night at the Opera?" He would secure invitations for her to
+the most exclusive drawing-rooms, to those houses where he himself
+went regularly, for weekly dinners or for poker; every evening, after
+a slight 'wave' imparted to his stiffly brushed red locks had tempered
+with a certain softness the ardour of his bold green eyes, he would
+select a flower for his buttonhole and set out to meet his mistress at
+the house of one or other of the women of his circle; and then, thinking
+of the affection and admiration which the fashionable folk, whom he
+always treated exactly as he pleased, would, when he met them there,
+lavish upon him in the presence of the woman whom he loved, he would
+find a fresh charm in that worldly existence of which he had grown
+weary, but whose substance, pervaded and warmly coloured by the
+flickering light which he had slipped into its midst, seemed to him
+beautiful and rare, now that he had incorporated in it a fresh love.
+
+But while each of these attachments, each of these flirtations had been
+the realisation, more or less complete, of a dream born of the sight of
+a face or a form which Swann had spontaneously, and without effort on
+his part, found charming, it was quite another matter when, one day at
+the theatre, he was introduced to Odette de Crécy by an old friend of
+his own, who had spoken of her to him as a ravishing creature with whom
+he might very possibly come to an understanding; but had made her out
+to be harder of conquest than she actually was, so as to appear to be
+conferring a special favour by the introduction. She had struck Swann
+not, certainly, as being devoid of beauty, but as endowed with a style
+of beauty which left him indifferent, which aroused in him no desire,
+which gave him, indeed, a sort of physical repulsion; as one of those
+women of whom every man can name some, and each will name different
+examples, who are the converse of the type which our senses demand. To
+give him any pleasure her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate,
+her cheek-bones too prominent, her features too tightly drawn. Her eyes
+were fine, but so large that they seemed to be bending beneath their own
+weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell
+or in an ill humour. Some time after this introduction at the theatre
+she had written to ask Swann whether she might see his collections,
+which would interest her so much, she, "an ignorant woman with a taste
+for beautiful things," saying that she would know him better when
+once she had seen him in his 'home,' where she imagined him to be "so
+comfortable with his tea and his books"; although she had not concealed
+her surprise at his being in that part of the town, which must be so
+depressing, and was "not nearly smart enough for such a very smart man."
+And when he allowed her to come she had said to him as she left how
+sorry she was to have stayed so short a time in a house into which she
+was so glad to have found her way at last, speaking of him as though he
+had meant something more to her than the rest of the people she knew,
+and appearing to unite their two selves with a kind of romantic bond
+which had made him smile. But at the time of life, tinged already with
+disenchantment, which Swann was approaching, when a man can content
+himself with being in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting
+too much in return, this linking of hearts, if it is no longer, as in
+early youth, the goal towards which love, of necessity, tends, still
+is bound to love by so strong an association of ideas that it may well
+become the cause of love if it presents itself first. In his younger
+days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves;
+later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough
+to make him fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would
+appear--since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective
+pleasure--that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part
+in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical
+order, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life a man has
+already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer
+evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws,
+before his passive and astonished heart. We come to its aid; we falsify
+it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we
+recall and recreate the rest. Since we possess its hymn, engraved on
+our hearts in its entirety, there is no need of any woman to repeat the
+opening lines, potent with the admiration which her beauty inspires, for
+us to remember all that follows. And if she begin in the middle, where
+it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one another only, we are
+well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow
+our partner, without hesitation, at the first pause in her voice.
+
+Odette de Crécy came again to see Swann; her visits grew more frequent,
+and doubtless each visit revived the sense of disappointment which he
+felt at the sight of a face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in
+the interval, not remembering it as either so expressive or, in spite
+of her youth, so faded; he used to regret, while she was talking to
+him, that her really considerable beauty was not of the kind which he
+spontaneously admired. It must be remarked that Odette's face appeared
+thinner and more prominent than it actually was, because her forehead
+and the upper part of her cheeks, a single and almost plane surface,
+were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period,
+drawn forward in a fringe, raised in crimped waves and falling in stray
+locks over her ears; while as for her figure, and she was admirably
+built, it was impossible to make out its continuity (on account of
+the fashion then prevailing, and in spite of her being one of the
+best-dressed women in Paris) for the corset, jetting forwards in an
+arch, as though over an imaginary stomach, and ending in a sharp point,
+beneath which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, gave a woman,
+that year, the appearance of being composed of different sections badly
+fitted together; to such an extent did the frills, the flounces, the
+inner bodice follow, in complete independence, controlled only by the
+fancy of their designer or the rigidity of their material, the line
+which led them to the knots of ribbon, falls of lace, fringes of
+vertically hanging jet, or carried them along the bust, but nowhere
+attached themselves to the living creature, who, according as the
+architecture of their fripperies drew them towards or away from her
+own, found herself either strait-laced to suffocation or else completely
+buried.
+
+But, after Odette had left him, Swann would think with a smile of her
+telling him how the time would drag until he allowed her to come again;
+he remembered the anxious, timid way in which she had once begged him
+that it might not be very long, and the way in which she had looked at
+him then, fixing upon him her fearful and imploring gaze, which gave her
+a touching air beneath the bunches of artificial pansies fastened in
+the front of her round bonnet of white straw, tied with strings of black
+velvet. "And won't you," she had ventured, "come just once and take tea
+with me?" He had pleaded pressure of work, an essay--which, in reality,
+he had abandoned years ago--on Vermeer of Delft. "I know that I am quite
+useless," she had replied, "a little wild thing like me beside a learned
+great man like you. I should be like the frog in the fable! And yet I
+should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun
+it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of
+old papers!" she had gone on, with that self-satisfied air which a smart
+woman adopts when she insists that her one desire is to give herself
+up, without fear of soiling her fingers, to some unclean task, such as
+cooking the dinner, with her "hands right in the dish itself." "You will
+only laugh at me, but this painter who stops you from seeing me," she
+meant Vermeer, "I have never even heard of him; is he alive still? Can I
+see any of his things in Paris, so as to have some idea of what is going
+on behind that great brow which works so hard, that head which I feel
+sure is always puzzling away about things; just to be able to say
+'There, that's what he's thinking about!' What a dream it would be to be
+able to help you with your work."
+
+He had sought an excuse in his fear of forming new friendships, which he
+gallantly described as his fear of a hopeless passion. "You are afraid
+of falling in love? How funny that is, when I go about seeking nothing
+else, and would give my soul just to find a little love somewhere!" she
+had said, so naturally and with such an air of conviction that he had
+been genuinely touched. "Some woman must have made you suffer. And you
+think that the rest are all like her. She can't have understood you: you
+are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about
+you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody
+else."
+
+"And then, besides, there's yourself----" he had continued, "I know what
+women are; you must have a whole heap of things to do, and never any
+time to spare."
+
+"I? Why, I have never anything to do. I am always free, and I always
+will be free if you want me. At whatever hour of the day or night it may
+suit you to see me, just send for me, and I shall be only too delighted
+to come. Will you do that? Do you know what I should really like--to
+introduce you to Mme. Verdurin, where I go every evening. Just fancy my
+finding you there, and thinking that it was a little for my sake that
+you had gone."
+
+No doubt, in thus remembering their conversations, in thinking about her
+thus when he was alone, he did no more than call her image into being
+among those of countless other women in his romantic dreams; but if,
+thanks to some accidental circumstance (or even perhaps without that
+assistance, for the circumstance which presents itself at the moment
+when a mental state, hitherto latent, makes itself felt, may well have
+had no influence whatsoever upon that state), the image of Odette de
+Crécy came to absorb the whole of his dreams, if from those dreams
+the memory of her could no longer be eliminated, then her bodily
+imperfections would no longer be of the least importance, nor would the
+conformity of her body, more or less than any other, to the requirements
+of Swann's taste; since, having become the body of her whom he loved, it
+must henceforth be the only one capable of causing him joy or anguish.
+
+It so happened that my grandfather had known--which was more than could
+be said of any other actual acquaintance--the family of these Verdurins.
+But he had entirely severed his connection with what he called "young
+Verdurin," taking a general view of him as one who had fallen--though
+without losing hold of his millions--among the riff-raff of Bohemia. One
+day he received a letter from Swann asking whether my grandfather could
+put him in touch with the Verdurins. "On guard! on guard!" he exclaimed
+as he read it, "I am not at all surprised; Swann was bound to finish up
+like this. A nice lot of people! I cannot do what he asks, because, in
+the first place, I no longer know the gentleman in question. Besides,
+there must be a woman in it somewhere, and I don't mix myself up in such
+matters. Ah, well, we shall see some fun if Swann begins running after
+the little Verdurins."
+
+And on my grandfather's refusal to act as sponsor, it was Odette herself
+who had taken Swann to the house.
+
+The Verdurins had had dining with them, on the day when Swann made his
+first appearance, Dr. and Mme. Cottard, the young pianist and his aunt,
+and the painter then in favour, while these were joined, in the course
+of the evening, by several more of the 'faithful.'
+
+Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to
+reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or
+in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial
+expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose
+expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a
+simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been
+facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he
+never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features,
+and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which
+you might decipher the question that he never dared to ask: "Do you
+really mean that?" He was no more confident of the manner in which he
+ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally,
+than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by,
+carriages, and anything that occurred with a malicious smile which
+absolved his subsequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved,
+if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware
+of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of
+his own.
+
+On all those points, however, where a plain question appeared to him to
+be permissible, the Doctor was unsparing in his endeavours to cultivate
+the wilderness of his ignorance and uncertainty and so to complete his
+education.
+
+So it was that, following the advice given him by a wise mother on his
+first coming up to the capital from his provincial home, he would never
+let pass either a figure of speech or a proper name that was new to him
+without an effort to secure the fullest information upon it.
+
+As regards figures of speech, he was insatiable in his thirst for
+knowledge, for often imagining them to have a more definite meaning than
+was actually the case, he would want to know what, exactly, was intended
+by those which he most frequently heard used: 'devilish pretty,' 'blue
+blood,' 'a cat and dog life,' 'a day of reckoning,' 'a queen of fashion,
+'to give a free hand,' 'to be at a deadlock,' and so forth; and in
+what particular circumstances he himself might make use of them in
+conversation. Failing these, he would adorn it with puns and other
+'plays upon words' which he had learned by rote. As for the names of
+strangers which were uttered in his hearing, he used merely to repeat
+them to himself in a questioning tone, which, he thought, would suffice
+to furnish him with explanations for which he would not ostensibly seek.
+
+As the critical faculty, on the universal application of which he prided
+himself, was, in reality, completely lacking, that refinement of good
+breeding which consists in assuring some one whom you are obliging in
+any way, without expecting to be believed, that it is really yourself
+that is obliged to him, was wasted on Cottard, who took everything that
+he heard in its literal sense. However blind she may have been to his
+faults, Mme. Verdurin was genuinely annoyed, though she still continued
+to regard him as brilliantly clever, when, after she had invited him to
+see and hear Sarah Bernhardt from a stage box, and had said politely:
+"It is very good of you to have come, Doctor, especially as I'm sure
+you must often have heard Sarah Bernhardt; and besides, I'm afraid we're
+rather too near the stage," the Doctor, who had come into the box with a
+smile which waited before settling upon or vanishing from his face
+until some one in authority should enlighten him as to the merits of the
+spectacle, replied: "To be sure, we are far too near the stage, and
+one is getting sick of Sarah Bernhardt. But you expressed a wish that
+I should come. For me, your wish is a command. I am only too glad to be
+able to do you this little service. What would one not do to please you,
+you are so good." And he went on, "Sarah Bernhardt; that's what they
+call the Voice of God, ain't it? You see, often, too, that she 'sets the
+boards on fire.' That's an odd expression, ain't it?" in the hope of an
+enlightening commentary, which, however, was not forthcoming.
+
+"D'you know," Mme. Verdurin had said to her husband, "I believe we are
+going the wrong way to work when we depreciate anything we offer the
+Doctor. He is a scientist who lives quite apart from our everyday
+existence; he knows nothing himself of what things are worth, and he
+accepts everything that we say as gospel."
+
+"I never dared to mention it," M. Verdurin had answered, "but I've
+noticed the same thing myself." And on the following New Year's Day,
+instead of sending Dr. Cottard a ruby that cost three thousand francs,
+and pretending that it was a mere trifle, M. Verdurin bought an
+artificial stone for three hundred, and let it be understood that it was
+something almost impossible to match.
+
+When Mme. Verdurin had announced that they were to see M. Swann that
+evening; "Swann!" the Doctor had exclaimed in a tone rendered brutal
+by his astonishment, for the smallest piece of news would always take
+utterly unawares this man who imagined himself to be perpetually in
+readiness for anything. And seeing that no one answered him, "Swann! Who
+on earth is Swann?" he shouted, in a frenzy of anxiety which subsided
+as soon as Mme. Verdurin had explained, "Why, Odette's friend, whom she
+told us about."
+
+"Ah, good, good; that's all right, then," answered the Doctor, at once
+mollified. As for the painter, he was overjoyed at the prospect of
+Swann's appearing at the Verdurins', because he supposed him to be in
+love with Odette, and was always ready to assist at lovers' meetings.
+"Nothing amuses me more than match-making," he confided to Cottard; "I
+have been tremendously successful, even with women!"
+
+In telling the Verdurins that Swann was extremely 'smart,' Odette had
+alarmed them with the prospect of another 'bore.' When he arrived,
+however, he made an excellent impression, an indirect cause of which,
+though they did not know it, was his familiarity with the best society.
+He had, indeed, one of those advantages which men who have lived and
+moved in the world enjoy over others, even men of intelligence and
+refinement, who have never gone into society, namely that they no longer
+see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion with which it fills
+the imagination, but regard it as quite unimportant. Their good nature,
+freed from all taint of snobbishness and from the fear of seeming
+too friendly, grown independent, in fact, has the ease, the grace of
+movement of a trained gymnast each of whose supple limbs will carry out
+precisely the movement that is required without any clumsy participation
+by the rest of his body. The simple and elementary gestures used by a
+man of the world when he courteously holds out his hand to the unknown
+youth who is being introduced to him, and when he bows discreetly before
+the Ambassador to whom he is being introduced, had gradually pervaded,
+without his being conscious of it, the whole of Swann's social
+deportment, so that in the company of people of a lower grade than his
+own, such as the Verdurins and their friends, he instinctively shewed an
+assiduity, and made overtures with which, by their account, any of their
+'bores' would have dispensed. He chilled, though for a moment only,
+on meeting Dr. Cottard; for seeing him close one eye with an ambiguous
+smile, before they had yet spoken to one another (a grimace which
+Cottard styled "letting 'em all come"), Swann supposed that the Doctor
+recognised him from having met him already somewhere, probably in some
+house of 'ill-fame,' though these he himself very rarely visited,
+never having made a habit of indulging in the mercenary sort of love.
+Regarding such an allusion as in bad taste, especially before Odette,
+whose opinion of himself it might easily alter for the worse, Swann
+assumed his most icy manner. But when he learned that the lady next to
+the Doctor was Mme. Cottard, he decided that so young a husband would
+not deliberately, in his wife's hearing, have made any allusion to
+amusements of that order, and so ceased to interpret the Doctor's
+expression in the sense which he had at first suspected. The painter at
+once invited Swann to visit his studio with Odette, and Swann found him
+very pleasant. "Perhaps you will be more highly favoured than I have
+been," Mme. Verdurin broke in, with mock resentment of the favour,
+"perhaps you will be allowed to see Cottard's portrait" (for which she
+had given the painter a commission). "Take care, Master Biche," she
+reminded the painter, whom it was a time-honoured pleasantry to address
+as 'Master,' "to catch that nice look in his eyes, that witty little
+twinkle. You know, what I want to have most of all is his smile; that's
+what I've asked you to paint--the portrait of his smile." And since the
+phrase struck her as noteworthy, she repeated it very loud, so as to
+make sure that as many as possible of her guests should hear it, and
+even made use of some indefinite pretext to draw the circle closer
+before she uttered it again. Swann begged to be introduced to everyone,
+even to an old friend of the Verdurins, called Saniette, whose shyness,
+simplicity and good-nature had deprived him of all the consideration due
+to his skill in palaeography, his large fortune, and the distinguished
+family to which he belonged. When he spoke, his words came with
+a confusion which was delightful to hear because one felt that it
+indicated not so much a defect in his speech as a quality of his soul,
+as it were a survival from the age of innocence which he had never
+wholly outgrown. All the consonants which he did not manage to pronounce
+seemed like harsh utterances of which his gentle lips were incapable. By
+asking to be made known to M. Saniette, Swann made M. Verdurin reverse
+the usual form of introduction (saying, in fact, with emphasis on the
+distinction: "M. Swann, pray let me present to you our friend Saniette")
+but he aroused in Saniette himself a warmth of gratitude, which,
+however, the Verdurins never disclosed to Swann, since Saniette rather
+annoyed them, and they did not feel bound to provide him with friends.
+On the other hand the Verdurins were extremely touched by Swann's next
+request, for he felt that he must ask to be introduced to the pianist's
+aunt. She wore a black dress, as was her invariable custom, for she
+believed that a woman always looked well in black, and that nothing
+could be more distinguished; but her face was exceedingly red, as
+it always was for some time after a meal. She bowed to Swann with
+deference, but drew herself up again with great dignity. As she was
+entirely uneducated, and was afraid of making mistakes in grammar and
+pronunciation, she used purposely to speak in an indistinct and garbling
+manner, thinking that if she should make a slip it would be so buried in
+the surrounding confusion that no one could be certain whether she had
+actually made it or not; with the result that her talk was a sort of
+continuous, blurred expectoration, out of which would emerge, at rare
+intervals, those sounds and syllables of which she felt positive.
+Swann supposed himself entitled to poke a little mild fun at her in
+conversation with M. Verdurin, who, however, was not at all amused.
+
+"She is such an excellent woman!" he rejoined. "I grant you that she
+is not exactly brilliant; but I assure you that she can talk most
+charmingly when you are alone with her."
+
+"I am sure she can," Swann hastened to conciliate him. "All I meant was
+that she hardly struck me as 'distinguished,'" he went on, isolating
+the epithet in the inverted commas of his tone, "and, after all, that is
+something of a compliment."
+
+"Wait a moment," said M. Verdurin, "now, this will surprise you; she
+writes quite delightfully. You have never heard her nephew play? It is
+admirable; eh, Doctor? Would you like me to ask him to play something,
+M. Swann?"
+
+"I should count myself most fortunate..." Swann was beginning, a trifle
+pompously, when the Doctor broke in derisively. Having once heard it
+said, and never having forgotten that in general conversation emphasis
+and the use of formal expressions were out of date, whenever he heard a
+solemn word used seriously, as the word 'fortunate' had been used just
+now by Swann, he at once assumed that the speaker was being deliberately
+pedantic. And if, moreover, the same word happened to occur, also, in
+what he called an old 'tag' or 'saw,' however common it might still be
+in current usage, the Doctor jumped to the conclusion that the whole
+thing was a joke, and interrupted with the remaining words of the
+quotation, which he seemed to charge the speaker with having intended
+to introduce at that point, although in reality it had never entered his
+mind.
+
+"Most fortunate for France!" he recited wickedly, shooting up both arms
+with great vigour. M. Verdurin could not help laughing.
+
+"What are all those good people laughing at over there? There's no sign
+of brooding melancholy down in your corner," shouted Mme. Verdurin. "You
+don't suppose I find it very amusing to be stuck up here by myself on
+the stool of repentance," she went on peevishly, like a spoiled child.
+
+Mme. Verdurin was sitting upon a high Swedish chair of waxed pine-wood,
+which a violinist from that country had given her, and which she kept in
+her drawing-room, although in appearance it suggested a school 'form,'
+and 'swore,' as the saying is, at the really good antique furniture
+which she had besides; but she made a point of keeping on view the
+presents which her 'faithful' were in the habit of making her from time
+to time, so that the donors might have the pleasure of seeing them there
+when they came to the house. She tried to persuade them to confine
+their tributes to flowers and sweets, which had at least the merit of
+mortality; but she was never successful, and the house was gradually
+filled with a collection of foot-warmers, cushions, clocks, screens,
+barometers and vases, a constant repetition and a boundless incongruity
+of useless but indestructible objects.
+
+From this lofty perch she would take her spirited part in the
+conversation of the 'faithful,' and would revel in all their fun; but,
+since the accident to her jaw, she had abandoned the effort involved in
+real hilarity, and had substituted a kind of symbolical dumb-show which
+signified, without endangering or even fatiguing her in any way, that
+she was 'laughing until she cried.' At the least witticism aimed by any
+of the circle against a 'bore,' or against a former member of the circle
+who was now relegated to the limbo of 'bores'--and to the utter despair
+of M. Verdurin, who had always made out that he was just as easily
+amused as his wife, but who, since his laughter was the 'real thing,'
+was out of breath in a moment, and so was overtaken and vanquished
+by her device of a feigned but continuous hilarity--she would utter a
+shrill cry, shut tight her little bird-like eyes, which were beginning
+to be clouded over by a cataract, and quickly, as though she had only
+just time to avoid some indecent sight or to parry a mortal blow,
+burying her face in her hands, which completely engulfed it, and
+prevented her from seeing anything at all, she would appear to be
+struggling to suppress, to eradicate a laugh which, were she to give
+way to it, must inevitably leave her inanimate. So, stupefied with
+the gaiety of the 'faithful,' drunken with comradeship, scandal and
+asseveration, Mme. Verdurin, perched on her high seat like a cage-bird
+whose biscuit has been steeped in mulled wine, would sit aloft and sob
+with fellow-feeling.
+
+Meanwhile M. Verdurin, after first asking Swann's permission to light
+his pipe ("No ceremony here, you understand; we're all pals!"), went and
+begged the young musician to sit down at the piano.
+
+"Leave him alone; don't bother him; he hasn't come here to be
+tormented," cried Mme. Verdurin. "I won't have him tormented."
+
+"But why on earth should it bother him?" rejoined M. Verdurin. "I'm sure
+M. Swann has never heard the sonata in F sharp which we discovered; he
+is going to play us the pianoforte arrangement."
+
+"No, no, no, not my sonata!" she screamed, "I don't want to be made to
+cry until I get a cold in the head, and neuralgia all down my face, like
+last time; thanks very much, I don't intend to repeat that performance;
+you are all very kind and considerate; it is easy to see that none of
+you will have to stay in bed, for a week."
+
+This little scene, which was re-enacted as often as the young pianist
+sat down to play, never failed to delight the audience, as though
+each of them were witnessing it for the first time, as a proof of the
+seductive originality of the 'Mistress' as she was styled, and of the
+acute sensitiveness of her musical 'ear.' Those nearest to her would
+attract the attention of the rest, who were smoking or playing cards at
+the other end of the room, by their cries of 'Hear, hear!' which, as
+in Parliamentary debates, shewed that something worth listening to was
+being said. And next day they would commiserate with those who had
+been prevented from coming that evening, and would assure them that the
+'little scene' had never been so amusingly done.
+
+"Well, all right, then," said M. Verdurin, "he can play just the
+andante."
+
+"Just the _andante_! How you do go on," cried his wife. "As if it
+weren't 'just the _andante_' that breaks every bone in my body. The
+'Master' is really too priceless! Just as though, 'in the Ninth,' he
+said 'we need only have the _finale_,' or 'just the overture' of the
+_Meistersinger_."
+
+The Doctor, however, urged Mme. Verdurin to let the pianist play,
+not because he supposed her to be malingering when she spoke of the
+distressing effects that music always had upon her, for he recognised
+the existence of certain neurasthenic states--but from his habit, common
+to many doctors, of at once relaxing the strict letter of a prescription
+as soon as it appeared to jeopardise, what seemed to him far more
+important, the success of some social gathering at which he was present,
+and of which the patient whom he had urged for once to forget her
+dyspepsia or headache formed an essential factor.
+
+"You won't be ill this time, you'll find," he told her, seeking at the
+same time to subdue her mind by the magnetism of his gaze. "And, if you
+are ill, we will cure you."
+
+"Will you, really?" Mme. Verdurin spoke as though, with so great a
+favour in store for her, there was nothing for it but to capitulate.
+Perhaps, too, by dint of saying that she was going to be ill, she had
+worked herself into a state in which she forgot, occasionally, that it
+was all only a 'little scene,' and regarded things, quite sincerely,
+from an invalid's point of view. For it may often be remarked that
+invalids grow weary of having the frequency of their attacks depend
+always on their own prudence in avoiding them, and like to let
+themselves think that they are free to do everything that they most
+enjoy doing, although they are always ill after doing it, provided only
+that they place themselves in the hands of a higher authority which,
+without putting them to the least inconvenience, can and will, by
+uttering a word or by administering a tabloid, set them once again upon
+their feet.
+
+Odette had gone to sit on a tapestry-covered sofa near the piano, saying
+to Mme. Verdurin, "I have my own little corner, haven't I?"
+
+And Mme. Verdurin, seeing Swann by himself upon a chair, made him get
+up. "You're not at all comfortable there; go along and sit by Odette;
+you can make room for M. Swann there, can't you, Odette?"
+
+"What charming Beauvais!" said Swann, stopping to admire the sofa before
+he sat down on it, and wishing to be polite.
+
+"I am glad you appreciate my sofa," replied Mme. Verdurin, "and I warn
+you that if you expect ever to see another like it you may as well
+abandon the idea at once. They never made any more like it. And these
+little chairs, too, are perfect marvels. You can look at them in a
+moment. The emblems in each of the bronze mouldings correspond to the
+subject of the tapestry on the chair; you know, you combine amusement
+with instruction when you look at them;--I can promise you a delightful
+time, I assure you. Just look at the little border around the edges;
+here, look, the little vine on a red background in this one, the Bear
+and the Grapes. Isn't it well drawn? What do you say? I think they knew
+a thing or two about design! Doesn't it make your mouth water, this
+vine? My husband makes out that I am not fond of fruit, because I eat
+less than he does. But not a bit of it, I am greedier than any of you,
+but I have no need to fill my mouth with them when I can feed on them
+with my eyes. What are you all laughing at now, pray? Ask the Doctor;
+he will tell you that those grapes act on me like a regular purge. Some
+people go to Fontainebleau for cures; I take my own little Beauvais cure
+here. But, M. Swann, you mustn't run away without feeling the little
+bronze mouldings on the backs. Isn't it an exquisite surface? No, no,
+not with your whole hand like that; feel them properly!"
+
+"If Mme. Verdurin is going to start playing about with her bronzes,"
+said the painter, "we shan't get any music to-night."
+
+"Be quiet, you wretch! And yet we poor women," she went on, "are
+forbidden pleasures far less voluptuous than this. There is no flesh in
+the world as soft as these. None. When M. Verdurin did me the honour
+of being madly jealous... come, you might at least be polite. Don't say
+that you never have been jealous!"
+
+"But, my dear, I have said absolutely nothing. Look here, Doctor, I call
+you as a witness; did I utter a word?"
+
+Swann had begun, out of politeness, to finger the bronzes, and did not
+like to stop.
+
+"Come along; you can caress them later; now it is you that are going to
+be caressed, caressed in the ear; you'll like that, I think. Here's the
+young gentleman who will take charge of that."
+
+After the pianist had played, Swann felt and shewed more interest in him
+than in any of the other guests, for the following reason:
+
+The year before, at an evening party, he had heard a piece of music
+played on the piano and violin. At first he had appreciated only the
+material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it
+had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the
+violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole,
+he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a
+flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent,
+level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of
+the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at
+a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline,
+or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had
+tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony--he
+knew not which--that had just been played, and had opened and expanded
+his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist
+air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils. Perhaps it was
+owing to his own ignorance of music that he had been able to receive so
+confused an impression, one of those that are, notwithstanding, our only
+purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original,
+and irreducible into any other kind. An impression of this order,
+vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, an impression _sine materia_.
+Presumably the notes which we hear at such moments tend to spread out
+before our eyes, over surfaces greater or smaller according to their
+pitch and volume; to trace arabesque designs, to give us the sensation
+of breadth or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves
+have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to
+escape submersion under those which the following, or even simultaneous
+notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this indefinite perception
+would continue to smother in its molten liquidity the _motifs_ which now
+and then emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and
+drown; recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they
+instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name; ineffable;--if
+our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm
+foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, did not, by fashioning for
+us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to
+contrast them with those that follow. And so, hardly had the delicious
+sensation, which Swann had experienced, died away, before his memory
+had furnished him with an immediate transcript, summary, it is true,
+and provisional, but one on which he had kept his eyes fixed while
+the playing continued, so effectively that, when the same impression
+suddenly returned, it was no longer uncapturable. He was able to picture
+to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the
+strength of its expression; he had before him that definite object which
+was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought,
+and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had
+distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase which emerged for a few moments
+from the waves of sound. It had at once held out to him an invitation to
+partake of intimate pleasures, of whose existence, before hearing it, he
+had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing but this phrase could
+initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and
+strange desire.
+
+With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him here, there, everywhere,
+towards a state of happiness noble, unintelligible, yet clearly
+indicated. And then, suddenly having reached a certain point from which
+he was prepared to follow it, after pausing for a moment, abruptly it
+changed its direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, multiform,
+melancholy, incessant, sweet, it bore him off with it towards a vista
+of joys unknown. Then it vanished. He hoped, with a passionate longing,
+that he might find it again, a third time. And reappear it did, though
+without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a pleasure
+less profound. But when he was once more at home he needed it, he
+was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for a moment
+passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which strengthens and
+enlarges his own power of perception, without his knowing even whether
+he is ever to see her again whom he loves already, although he knows
+nothing of her, not even her name.
+
+Indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, in the first few
+months, to be bringing into Swann's life the possibility of a sort of
+rejuvenation. He had so long since ceased to direct his course towards
+any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of ephemeral
+satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally
+stating his belief even to himself, that he would remain all his life in
+that condition, which death alone could alter. More than this, since his
+mind no longer entertained any lofty ideals, he had ceased to believe
+in (although he could not have expressly denied) their reality. He had
+grown also into the habit of taking refuge in trivial considerations,
+which allowed him to set on one side matters of fundamental importance.
+Just as he had never stopped to ask himself whether he would not have
+done better by not going into society, knowing very well that if he
+had accepted an invitation he must put in an appearance, and that
+afterwards, if he did not actually call, he must at least leave cards
+upon his hostess; so in his conversation he took care never to express
+with any warmth a personal opinion about a thing, but instead would
+supply facts and details which had a value of a sort in themselves, and
+excused him from shewing how much he really knew. He would be extremely
+precise about the recipe for a dish, the dates of a painter's birth and
+death, and the titles of his works. Sometimes, in spite of himself, he
+would let himself go so far as to utter a criticism of a work of art, or
+of some one's interpretation of life, but then he would cloak his words
+in a tone of irony, as though he did not altogether associate himself
+with what he was saying. But now, like a confirmed invalid whom, all
+of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a new course of
+treatment, or, as sometimes happens, an organic change in himself,
+spontaneous and unaccountable, seems to have so far recovered from his
+malady that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond
+all hope, of starting to lead--and better late than never--a wholly
+different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that
+he had heard, in certain other sonatas which he had made people play
+over to him, to see whether he might not, perhaps, discover his phrase
+among them, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which
+he had ceased to believe, but to which, as though the music had had upon
+the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of recreative
+influence, he was conscious once again of a desire, almost, indeed, of
+the power to consecrate his life. But, never having managed to find out
+whose work it was that he had heard played that evening, he had been
+unable to procure a copy, and finally had forgotten the quest. He had
+indeed, in the course of the next few days, encountered several of the
+people who had been at the party with him, and had questioned them;
+but most of them had either arrived after or left before the piece was
+played; some had indeed been in the house, but had gone into another
+room to talk, and those who had stayed to listen had no clearer
+impression than the rest. As for his hosts, they knew that it was a
+recently published work which the musicians whom they had engaged for
+the evening had asked to be allowed to play; but, as these last were now
+on tour somewhere, Swann could learn nothing further. He had, of
+course, a number of musical friends, but, vividly as he could recall the
+exquisite and inexpressible pleasure which the little phrase had given
+him, and could see, still, before his eyes the forms that it had traced
+in outline, he was quite incapable of humming over to them the air. And
+so, at last, he ceased to think of it.
+
+But to-night, at Mme. Verdurin's, scarcely had the little pianist begun
+to play when, suddenly, after a high note held on through two whole
+bars, Swann saw it approaching, stealing forth from underneath that
+resonance, which was prolonged and stretched out over it, like a curtain
+of sound, to veil the mystery of its birth--and recognised, secret,
+whispering, articulate, the airy and fragrant phrase that he had loved.
+And it was so peculiarly itself, it had so personal a charm, which
+nothing else could have replaced, that Swann felt as though he had met,
+in a friend's drawing-room, a woman whom he had seen and admired, once,
+in the street, and had despaired of ever seeing her again. Finally the
+phrase withdrew and vanished, pointing, directing, diligent among the
+wandering currents of its fragrance, leaving upon Swann's features a
+reflection of its smile. But now, at last, he could ask the name of
+his fair unknown (and was told that it was the _andante_ movement of
+Vinteuil's sonata for the piano and violin), he held it safe, could
+have it again to himself, at home, as often as he would, could study its
+language and acquire its secret.
+
+And so, when the pianist had finished, Swann crossed the room and
+thanked him with a vivacity which delighted Mme. Verdurin.
+
+"Isn't he charming?" she asked Swann, "doesn't he just understand it,
+his sonata, the little wretch? You never dreamed, did you, that a piano
+could be made to express all that? Upon my word, there's everything in
+it except the piano! I'm caught out every time I hear it; I think
+I'm listening to an orchestra. Though it's better, really, than an
+orchestra, more complete."
+
+The young pianist bent over her as he answered, smiling and underlining
+each of his words as though he were making an epigram: "You are most
+generous to me."
+
+And while Mme. Verdurin was saying to her husband, "Run and fetch him a
+glass of orangeade; it's well earned!" Swann began to tell Odette how he
+had fallen in love with that little phrase. When their hostess, who was
+a little way off, called out, "Well! It looks to me as though some one
+was saying nice things to you, Odette!" she replied, "Yes, very
+nice," and he found her simplicity delightful. Then he asked for some
+information about this Vinteuil; what else he had done, and at what
+period in his life he had composed the sonata;--what meaning the little
+phrase could have had for him, that was what Swann wanted most to know.
+
+But none of these people who professed to admire this musician (when
+Swann had said that the sonata was really charming Mme. Verdurin had
+exclaimed, "I quite believe it! Charming, indeed! But you don't dare to
+confess that you don't know Vinteuil's sonata; you have no right not to
+know it!"--and the painter had gone on with, "Ah, yes, it's a very fine
+bit of work, isn't it? Not, of course, if you want something 'obvious,'
+something 'popular,' but, I mean to say, it makes a very great
+impression on us artists."), none of them seemed ever to have asked
+himself these questions, for none of them was able to reply.
+
+Even to one or two particular remarks made by Swann on his favourite
+phrase, "D'you know, that's a funny thing; I had never noticed it; I may
+as well tell you that I don't much care about peering at things through
+a microscope, and pricking myself on pin-points of difference; no; we
+don't waste time splitting hairs in this house; why not? well, it's not
+a habit of ours, that's all," Mme. Verdurin replied, while Dr. Cottard
+gazed at her with open-mouthed admiration, and yearned to be able to
+follow her as she skipped lightly from one stepping-stone to another
+of her stock of ready-made phrases. Both he, however, and Mme. Cottard,
+with a kind of common sense which is shared by many people of humble
+origin, would always take care not to express an opinion, or to pretend
+to admire a piece of music which they would confess to each other, once
+they were safely at home, that they no more understood than they could
+understand the art of 'Master' Biche. Inasmuch as the public cannot
+recognise the charm, the beauty, even the outlines of nature save in the
+stereotyped impressions of an art which they have gradually assimilated,
+while an original artist starts by rejecting those impressions, so
+M. and Mme. Cottard, typical, in this respect, of the public, were
+incapable of finding, either in Vinteuil's sonata or in Biche's
+portraits, what constituted harmony, for them, in music or beauty in
+painting. It appeared to them, when the pianist played his sonata, as
+though he were striking haphazard from the piano a medley of notes which
+bore no relation to the musical forms to which they themselves were
+accustomed, and that the painter simply flung the colours haphazard upon
+his canvas. When, on one of these, they were able to distinguish a human
+form, they always found it coarsened and vulgarised (that is to say
+lacking all the elegance of the school of painting through whose
+spectacles they themselves were in the habit of seeing the people--real,
+living people, who passed them in the streets) and devoid of truth, as
+though M. Biche had not known how the human shoulder was constructed, or
+that a woman's hair was not, ordinarily, purple.
+
+And yet, when the 'faithful' were scattered out of earshot, the Doctor
+felt that the opportunity was too good to be missed, and so (while Mme.
+Verdurin was adding a final word of commendation of Vinteuil's sonata)
+like a would-be swimmer who jumps into the water, so as to learn, but
+chooses a moment when there are not too many people looking on:
+"Yes, indeed; he's what they call a musician _di primo cartello_!" he
+exclaimed, with a sudden determination.
+
+Swann discovered no more than that the recent publication of Vinteuil's
+sonata had caused a great stir among the most advanced school of
+musicians, but that it was still unknown to the general public.
+
+"I know some one, quite well, called Vinteuil," said Swann, thinking of
+the old music-master at Combray who had taught my grandmother's sisters.
+
+"Perhaps that's the man!" cried Mme. Verdurin.
+
+"Oh, no!" Swann burst out laughing. "If you had ever seen him for a
+moment you wouldn't put the question."
+
+"Then to put the question is to solve the problem?" the Doctor
+suggested.
+
+"But it may well be some relative," Swann went on. "That would be bad
+enough; but, after all, there is no reason why a genius shouldn't have
+a cousin who is a silly old fool. And if that should be so, I swear
+there's no known or unknown form of torture I wouldn't undergo to
+get the old fool to introduce me to the man who composed the sonata;
+starting with the torture of the old fool's company, which would be
+ghastly."
+
+The painter understood that Vinteuil was seriously ill at the moment,
+and that Dr. Potain despaired of his life.
+
+"What!" cried Mme. Verdurin, "Do people still call in Potain?"
+
+"Ah! Mme. Verdurin," Cottard simpered, "you forget that you are speaking
+of one of my colleagues--I should say, one of my masters."
+
+The painter had heard, somewhere, that Vinteuil was threatened with the
+loss of his reason. And he insisted that signs of this could be detected
+in certain passages in the sonata. This remark did not strike Swann as
+ridiculous; rather, it puzzled him. For, since a purely musical work
+contains none of those logical sequences, the interruption or confusion
+of which, in spoken or written language, is a proof of insanity, so
+insanity diagnosed in a sonata seemed to him as mysterious a thing as
+the insanity of a dog or a horse, although instances may be observed of
+these.
+
+"Don't speak to me about 'your masters'; you know ten times as much as
+he does!" Mme. Verdurin answered Dr. Cottard, in the tone of a woman who
+has the courage of her convictions, and is quite ready to stand up to
+anyone who disagrees with her. "Anyhow, you don't kill your patients!"
+
+"But, Madame, he is in the Academy." The Doctor smiled with bitter
+irony. "If a sick person prefers to die at the hands of one of the
+Princes of Science... It is far more smart to be able to say, 'Yes, I
+have Potain.'"
+
+"Oh, indeed! More smart, is it?" said Mme. Verdurin. "So there are
+fashions, nowadays, in illness, are there? I didn't know that.... Oh,
+you do make me laugh!" she screamed, suddenly, burying her face in her
+hands. "And here was I, poor thing, talking quite seriously, and never
+seeing that you were pulling my leg."
+
+As for M. Verdurin, finding it rather a strain to start laughing again
+over so small a matter, he was content with puffing out a cloud of smoke
+from his pipe, while he reflected sadly that he could never again hope
+to keep pace with his wife in her Atalanta-flights across the field of
+mirth.
+
+"D'you know; we like your friend so very much," said Mme. Verdurin,
+later, when Odette was bidding her good night. "He is so unaffected,
+quite charming. If they're all like that, the friends you want to bring
+here, by all means bring them."
+
+M. Verdurin remarked that Swann had failed, all the same, to appreciate
+the pianist's aunt.
+
+"I dare say he felt a little strange, poor man," suggested Mme.
+Verdurin. "You can't expect him to catch the tone of the house the first
+time he comes; like Cottard, who has been one of our little 'clan' now
+for years. The first time doesn't count; it's just for looking round and
+finding out things. Odette, he understands all right, he's to join us
+to-morrow at the Châtelet. Perhaps you might call for him and bring
+him."
+
+"No, he doesn't want that."
+
+"Oh, very well; just as you like. Provided he doesn't fail us at the
+last moment."
+
+Greatly to Mme. Verdurin's surprise, he never failed them. He would go
+to meet them, no matter where, at restaurants outside Paris (not that
+they went there much at first, for the season had not yet begun), and
+more frequently at the play, in which Mme. Verdurin delighted. One
+evening, when they were dining at home, he heard her complain that she
+had not one of those permits which would save her the trouble of waiting
+at doors and standing in crowds, and say how useful it would be to them
+at first-nights, and gala performances at the Opera, and what a nuisance
+it had been, not having one, on the day of Gambetta's funeral. Swann
+never spoke of his distinguished friends, but only of such as might be
+regarded as detrimental, whom, therefore, he thought it snobbish, and
+in not very good taste to conceal; while he frequented the Faubourg
+Saint-Germain he had come to include, in the latter class, all his
+friends in the official world of the Third Republic, and so broke in,
+without thinking: "I'll see to that, all right. You shall have it in
+time for the _Danicheff_ revival. I shall be lunching with the Prefect
+of Police to-morrow, as it happens, at the Elysée."
+
+"What's that? The Elysée?" Dr. Cottard roared in a voice of thunder.
+
+"Yes, at M. Grévy's," replied Swann, feeling a little awkward at the
+effect which his announcement had produced.
+
+"Are you often taken like that?" the painter asked Cottard, with
+mock-seriousness.
+
+As a rule, once an explanation had been given, Cottard would say: "Ah,
+good, good; that's all right, then," after which he would shew not the
+least trace of emotion. But this time Swann's last words, instead of the
+usual calming effect, had that of heating, instantly, to boiling-point
+his astonishment at the discovery that a man with whom he himself
+was actually sitting at table, a man who had no official position, no
+honours or distinction of any sort, was on visiting terms with the Head
+of the State.
+
+"What's that you say? M. Grévy? Do you know M. Grévy?" he demanded of
+Swann, in the stupid and incredulous tone of a constable on duty at the
+palace, when a stranger has come up and asked to see the President of
+the Republic; until, guessing from his words and manner what, as the
+newspapers say, 'it is a case of,' he assures the poor lunatic that he
+will be admitted at once, and points the way to the reception ward of
+the police infirmary.
+
+"I know him slightly; we have some friends in common" (Swann dared not
+add that one of these friends was the Prince of Wales). "Anyhow, he is
+very free with his invitations, and, I assure you, his luncheon-parties
+are not the least bit amusing; they're very simple affairs, too, you
+know; never more than eight at table," he went on, trying desperately
+to cut out everything that seemed to shew off his relations with the
+President in a light too dazzling for the Doctor's eyes.
+
+Whereupon Cottard, at once conforming in his mind to the literal
+interpretation of what Swann was saying, decided that invitations from
+M. Grévy were very little sought after, were sent out, in fact, into
+the highways and hedge-rows. And from that moment he never seemed at
+all surprised to hear that Swann, or anyone else, was 'always at
+the Elysée'; he even felt a little sorry for a man who had to go to
+luncheon-parties which, he himself admitted, were a bore.
+
+"Ah, good, good; that's quite all right then," he said, in the tone of
+a customs official who has been suspicious up to now, but, after hearing
+your explanations, stamps your passport and lets you proceed on your
+journey without troubling to examine your luggage.
+
+"I can well believe you don't find them amusing, those parties; indeed,
+it's very good of you to go to them!" said Mme. Verdurin, who regarded
+the President of the Republic only as a 'bore' to be especially dreaded,
+since he had at his disposal means of seduction, and even of compulsion,
+which, if employed to captivate her 'faithful,' might easily make them
+'fail.' "It seems, he's as deaf as a post; and eats with his fingers."
+
+"Upon my word! Then it can't be much fun for you, going there." A
+note of pity sounded in the Doctor's voice; and then struck by the
+number--only eight at table--"Are these luncheons what you would
+describe as 'intimate'?" he inquired briskly, not so much out of idle
+curiosity as in his linguistic zeal.
+
+But so great and glorious a figure was the President of the French
+Republic in the eyes of Dr. Cottard that neither the modesty of Swann
+nor the spite of Mme. Verdurin could ever wholly efface that first
+impression, and he never sat down to dinner with the Verdurins without
+asking anxiously, "D'you think we shall see M. Swann here this evening?
+He is a personal friend of M. Grévy's. I suppose that means he's what
+you'd call a 'gentleman'?" He even went to the length of offering Swann
+a card of invitation to the Dental Exhibition.
+
+"This will let you in, and anyone you take with you," he explained, "but
+dogs are not admitted. I'm just warning you, you understand, because
+some friends of mine went there once, who hadn't been told, and there
+was the devil to pay."
+
+As for M. Verdurin, he did not fail to observe the distressing effect
+upon his wife of the discovery that Swann had influential friends of
+whom he had never spoken.
+
+If no arrangement had been made to 'go anywhere,' it was at the
+Verdurins' that Swann would find the 'little nucleus' assembled, but
+he never appeared there except in the evenings, and would hardly ever
+accept their invitations to dinner, in spite of Odette's entreaties.
+
+"I could dine with you alone somewhere, if you'd rather," she suggested.
+
+"But what about Mme. Verdurin?"
+
+"Oh, that's quite simple. I need only say that my dress wasn't ready, or
+that my cab came late. There is always some excuse."
+
+"How charming of you."
+
+But Swann said to himself that, if he could make Odette feel (by
+consenting to meet her only after dinner) that there were other
+pleasures which he preferred to that of her company, then the desire
+that she felt for his would be all the longer in reaching the point of
+satiety. Besides, as he infinitely preferred to Odette's style of beauty
+that of a little working girl, as fresh and plump as a rose, with whom
+he happened to be simultaneously in love, he preferred to spend the
+first part of the evening with her, knowing that he was sure to see
+Odette later on. For the same reason, he would never allow Odette to
+call for him at his house, to take him on to the Verdurins'. The little
+girl used to wait, not far from his door, at a street corner; Rémi, his
+coachman, knew where to stop; she would jump in beside him, and hold him
+in her arms until the carriage drew up at the Verdurins'. He would enter
+the drawing-room; and there, while Mme. Verdurin, pointing to the roses
+which he had sent her that morning, said: "I am furious with you!" and
+sent him to the place kept for him, by the side of Odette, the pianist
+would play to them--for their two selves, and for no one else--that
+little phrase by Vinteuil which was, so to speak, the national anthem of
+their love. He began, always, with a sustained tremolo from the violin
+part, which, for several bars, was unaccompanied, and filled all the
+foreground; until suddenly it seemed to be drawn aside, and--just as in
+those interiors by Pieter de Hooch, where the subject is set back a
+long way through the narrow framework of a half-opened door--infinitely
+remote, in colour quite different, velvety with the radiance of some
+intervening light, the little phrase appeared, dancing, pastoral,
+interpolated, episodic, belonging to another world. It passed, with
+simple and immortal movements, scattering on every side the bounties of
+its grace, smiling ineffably still; but Swann thought that he could now
+discern in it some disenchantment. It seemed to be aware how vain, how
+hollow was the happiness to which it shewed the way. In its airy grace
+there was, indeed, something definitely achieved, and complete in
+itself, like the mood of philosophic detachment which follows an
+outburst of vain regret. But little did that matter to him; he looked
+upon the sonata less in its own light--as what it might express, had,
+in fact, expressed to a certain musician, ignorant that any Swann or
+Odette, anywhere in the world, existed, when he composed it, and
+would express to all those who should hear it played in centuries
+to come--than as a pledge, a token of his love, which made even the
+Verdurins and their little pianist think of Odette and, at the same
+time, of himself--which bound her to him by a lasting tie; and at that
+point he had (whimsically entreated by Odette) abandoned the idea of
+getting some 'professional' to play over to him the whole sonata, of
+which he still knew no more than this one passage. "Why do you want the
+rest?" she had asked him. "Our little bit; that's all we need." He went
+farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by
+him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed
+to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had
+a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to
+themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters
+written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with
+the 'water' of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are
+not fashioned exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of
+a 'lass unparalleled.'
+
+It would happen, as often as not, that he had stayed so long outside,
+with his little girl, before going to the Verdurins' that, as soon as
+the little phrase had been rendered by the pianist, Swann would discover
+that it was almost time for Odette to go home. He used to take her back
+as far as the door of her little house in the Rue La Pérouse, behind the
+Arc de Triomphe. And it was perhaps on this account, and so as not to
+demand the monopoly of her favours, that he sacrificed the pleasure (not
+so essential to his well-being) of seeing her earlier in the evening,
+of arriving with her at the Verdurins', to the exercise of this other
+privilege, for which she was grateful, of their leaving together; a
+privilege which he valued all the more because, thanks to it, he had
+the feeling that no one else would see her, no one would thrust himself
+between them, no one could prevent him from remaining with her in
+spirit, after he had left her for the night.
+
+And so, night after night, she would be taken home in Swann's carriage;
+and one night, after she had got down, and while he stood at the gate
+and murmured "Till to-morrow, then!" she turned impulsively from him,
+plucked a last lingering chrysanthemum in the tiny garden which flanked
+the pathway from the street to her house, and as he went back to his
+carriage thrust it into his hand. He held it pressed to his lips during
+the drive home, and when, in due course, the flower withered, locked it
+away, like something very precious, in a secret drawer of his desk.
+
+He would escort her to her gate, but no farther. Twice only had he gone
+inside to take part in the ceremony--of such vital importance in her
+life--of 'afternoon tea.' The loneliness and emptiness of those
+short streets (consisting, almost entirely, of low-roofed houses,
+self-contained but not detached, their monotony interrupted here and
+there by the dark intrusion of some sinister little shop, at once
+an historical document and a sordid survival from the days when the
+district was still one of ill repute), the snow which had lain on the
+garden-beds or clung to the branches of the trees, the careless disarray
+of the season, the assertion, in this man-made city, of a state of
+nature, had all combined to add an element of mystery to the warmth, the
+flowers, the luxury which he had found inside.
+
+Passing by (on his left-hand side, and on what, although raised some way
+above the street, was the ground floor of the house) Odette's bedroom,
+which looked out to the back over another little street running parallel
+with her own, he had climbed a staircase that went straight up between
+dark painted walls, from which hung Oriental draperies, strings of
+Turkish beads, and a huge Japanese lantern, suspended by a silken cord
+from the ceiling (which last, however, so that her visitors should not
+have to complain of the want of any of the latest comforts of
+Western civilisation, was lighted by a gas-jet inside), to the two
+drawing-rooms, large and small. These were entered through a narrow
+lobby, the wall of which, chequered with the lozenges of a wooden
+trellis such as you see on garden walls, only gilded, was lined from
+end to end by a long rectangular box in which bloomed, as though in a
+hothouse, a row of large chrysanthemums, at that time still
+uncommon, though by no means so large as the mammoth blossoms which
+horticulturists have since succeeded in making grow. Swann was
+irritated, as a rule, by the sight of these flowers, which had then been
+'the rage' in Paris for about a year, but it had pleased him, on this
+occasion, to see the gloom of the little lobby shot with rays of pink
+and gold and white by the fragrant petals of these ephemeral stars,
+which kindle their cold fires in the murky atmosphere of winter
+afternoons. Odette had received him in a tea-gown of pink silk, which
+left her neck and arms bare. She had made him sit down beside her in one
+of the many mysterious little retreats which had been contrived in the
+various recesses of the room, sheltered by enormous palmtrees growing
+out of pots of Chinese porcelain, or by screens upon which were fastened
+photographs and fans and bows of ribbon. She had said at once, "You're
+not comfortable there; wait a minute, I'll arrange things for you," and
+with a titter of laughter, the complacency of which implied that
+some little invention of her own was being brought into play, she
+had installed behind his head and beneath his feet great cushions of
+Japanese silk, which she pummelled and buffeted as though determined to
+lavish on him all her riches, and regardless of their value. But when
+her footman began to come into the room, bringing, one after another,
+the innumerable lamps which (contained, mostly, in porcelain vases)
+burned singly or in pairs upon the different pieces of furniture as upon
+so many altars, rekindling in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of
+this winter afternoon, the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate,
+more human--filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of
+some solitary lover, wandering in the street below and brought to a
+standstill before the mystery of the human presence which those lighted
+windows at once revealed and screened from sight--she had kept an eye
+sharply fixed on the servant, to see whether he set each of the lamps
+down in the place appointed it. She felt that, if he were to put
+even one of them where it ought not to be, the general effect of her
+drawing-room would be destroyed, and that her portrait, which rested
+upon a sloping easel draped with plush, would not catch the light. And
+so, with feverish impatience, she followed the man's clumsy movements,
+scolding him severely when he passed too close to a pair of beaupots,
+which she made a point of always tidying herself, in case the plants
+should be knocked over--and went across to them now to make sure that he
+had not broken off any of the flowers. She found something 'quaint' in
+the shape of each of her Chinese ornaments, and also in her orchids, the
+cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite
+flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least
+like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk
+or satin. "It looks just as though it had been cut out of the lining
+of my cloak," she said to Swann, pointing to an orchid, with a shade of
+respect in her voice for so 'smart' a flower, for this distinguished,
+unexpected sister whom nature had suddenly bestowed upon her, so far
+removed from her in the scale of existence, and yet so delicate, so
+refined, so much more worthy than many real women of admission to
+her drawing-room. As she drew his attention, now to the fiery-tongued
+dragons painted upon a bowl or stitched upon a fire-screen, now to a
+fleshy cluster of orchids, now to a dromedary of inlaid silver-work with
+ruby eyes, which kept company, upon her mantelpiece, with a toad carved
+in jade, she would pretend now to be shrinking from the ferocity of the
+monsters or laughing at their absurdity, now blushing at the indecency
+of the flowers, now carried away by an irresistible desire to run across
+and kiss the toad and dromedary, calling them 'darlings.' And these
+affectations were in sharp contrast to the sincerity of some of her
+attitudes, notably her devotion to Our Lady of the Laghetto who had
+once, when Odette was living at Nice, cured her of a mortal illness, and
+whose medal, in gold, she always carried on her person, attributing
+to it unlimited powers. She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon
+or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," went on, smiling, "A
+cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you
+like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to
+her, something precious, and love is so far obliged to find some
+justification for itself, some guarantee of its duration in pleasures
+which, on the contrary, would have no existence apart from love and must
+cease with its passing, that when he left her, at seven o'clock, to go
+and dress for the evening, all the way home, sitting bolt upright in
+his brougham, unable to repress the happiness with which the afternoon's
+adventure had filled him, he kept on repeating to himself: "What fun
+it would be to have a little woman like that in a place where one could
+always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding,
+a really good cup of tea." An hour or so later he received a note from
+Odette, and at once recognised that florid handwriting, in which an
+affectation of British stiffness imposed an apparent discipline upon its
+shapeless characters, significant, perhaps, to less intimate eyes
+than his, of an untidiness of mind, a fragmentary education, a want of
+sincerity and decision. Swann had left his cigarette-case at her house.
+"Why," she wrote, "did you not forget your heart also? I should never
+have let you have that back."
+
+More important, perhaps, was a second visit which he paid her, a little
+later. On his way to the house, as always when he knew that they were to
+meet, he formed a picture of her in his mind; and the necessity, if he
+was to find any beauty in her face, of fixing his eyes on the fresh and
+rosy protuberance of her cheekbones, and of shutting out all the rest of
+those cheeks which were so often languorous and sallow, except when
+they were punctuated with little fiery spots, plunged him in acute
+depression, as proving that one's ideal is always unattainable, and
+one's actual happiness mediocre. He was taking her an engraving which
+she had asked to see. She was not very well; she received him, wearing
+a wrapper of mauve _crêpe de Chine_, which draped her bosom, like a
+mantle, with a richly embroidered web. As she stood there beside him,
+brushing his cheek with the loosened tresses of her hair, bending one
+knee in what was almost a dancer's pose, so that she could lean without
+tiring herself over the picture, at which she was gazing, with bended
+head, out of those great eyes, which seemed so weary and so sullen when
+there was nothing to animate her, Swann was struck by her resemblance to
+the figure of Zipporah, Jethro's Daughter, which is to be seen in one
+of the Sistine frescoes. He had always found a peculiar fascination
+in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general
+characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but
+rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual
+features of men and women whom he knew, as, for instance, in a bust
+of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, the prominent cheekbones, the
+slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own coachman
+Rémi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M. de Palancy; in a
+portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an
+outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen
+eyelids of Dr. du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always regretted,
+in his heart, that he had confined his attention to the social side of
+life, had talked, always, rather than acted, he felt that he might find
+a sort of indulgence bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his
+perception of the fact that they also had regarded with pleasure and had
+admitted into the canon of their works such types of physiognomy as give
+those works the strongest possible certificate of reality and trueness
+to life; a modern, almost a topical savour; perhaps, also, he had so far
+succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he
+felt the necessity of finding in an old masterpiece some such obvious
+and refreshing allusion to a person about whom jokes could be made and
+repeated and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had
+retained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find a genuine
+satisfaction in watching these individual features take on a more
+general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in the
+abstract idea of similarity between an historic portrait and a modern
+original, whom it was not intended to represent. However that might be,
+and perhaps because the abundance of impressions which he, for some time
+past, had been receiving--though, indeed, they had come to him rather
+through the channel of his appreciation of music--had enriched his
+appetite for painting as well, it was with an unusual intensity
+of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his
+character and conduct, that Swann remarked Odette's resemblance to the
+Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano, to whom one shrinks from giving
+his more popular surname, now that 'Botticelli' suggests not so much the
+actual work of the Master as that false and banal conception of it which
+has of late obtained common currency. He no longer based his estimate
+of the merit of Odette's face on the more or less good quality of her
+cheeks, and the softness and sweetness--as of carnation-petals--which,
+he supposed, would greet his lips there, should he ever hazard an
+embrace, but regarded it rather as a skein of subtle and lovely silken
+threads, which his gazing eyes collected and wound together, following
+the curving line from the skein to the ball, where he mingled the
+cadence of her neck with the spring of her hair and the droop of her
+eyelids, as though from a portrait of herself, in which her type was
+made clearly intelligible.
+
+He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in
+her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to
+recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was only thinking
+of her in her absence; and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine
+masterpiece was probably based upon his discovery that it had been
+reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and rendered
+her more precious in his sight. Swann reproached himself with his
+failure, hitherto, to estimate at her true worth a creature whom the
+great Sandro would have adored, and counted himself fortunate that his
+pleasure in the contemplation of Odette found a justification in his own
+system of aesthetic. He told himself that, in choosing the thought of
+Odette as the inspiration of his dreams of ideal happiness, he was not,
+as he had until then supposed, falling back, merely, upon an expedient
+of doubtful and certainly inadequate value, since she contained in
+herself what satisfied the utmost refinement of his taste in art. He
+failed to observe that this quality would not naturally avail to bring
+Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, simply
+because his desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste. The
+words 'Florentine painting' were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him
+(gave him, as it were, a legal title) to introduce the image of Odette
+into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been
+debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form. And
+whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his
+misgivings as to the quality of her face, her figure, the whole of her
+beauty, used to cool the ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept
+away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of
+her on the sure foundations of his aesthetic principles; while the kiss,
+the bodily surrender which would have seemed natural and but moderately
+attractive, had they been granted him by a creature of somewhat withered
+flesh and sluggish blood, coming, as now they came, to crown his
+adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, must, it seemed, prove as
+exquisite as they would be supernatural.
+
+And when he was tempted to regret that, for months past, he had done
+nothing but visit Odette, he would assure himself that he was
+not unreasonable in giving up much of his time to the study of an
+inestimably precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different,
+an especially charming metal, in an unmatched exemplar which he would
+contemplate at one moment with the humble, spiritual, disinterested mind
+of an artist, at another with the pride, the selfishness, the sensual
+thrill of a collector.
+
+On his study table, at which he worked, he had placed, as it were a
+photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro's Daughter. He would
+gaze in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the
+imperfection of her skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair
+that fell along her tired cheeks; and, adapting what he had already felt
+to be beautiful, on aesthetic grounds, to the idea of a living woman,
+he converted it into a series of physical merits which he congratulated
+himself on finding assembled in the person of one whom he might,
+ultimately, possess. The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts a
+spectator to a work of art, now that he knew the type, in warm flesh
+and blood, of Jethro's Daughter, became a desire which more than
+compensated, thenceforward, for that with which Odette's physical charms
+had at first failed to inspire him. When he had sat for a long time
+gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli,
+who seemed all the lovelier in contrast, and as he drew towards him
+the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette
+against his heart.
+
+It was not only Odette's indifference, however, that he must take pains
+to circumvent; it was also, not infrequently, his own; feeling that,
+since Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer
+to have very much to say to him when they did meet, he was afraid
+lest the manner--at once trivial, monotonous, and seemingly
+unalterable--which she now adopted when they were together should
+ultimately destroy in him that romantic hope, that a day might come when
+she would make avowal of her passion, by which hope alone he had become
+and would remain her lover. And so to alter, to give a fresh moral
+aspect to that Odette, of whose unchanging mood he was afraid of growing
+weary, he wrote, suddenly, a letter full of hinted discoveries and
+feigned indignation, which he sent off so that it should reach her
+before dinner-time. He knew that she would be frightened, and that she
+would reply, and he hoped that, when the fear of losing him clutched at
+her heart, it would force from her words such as he had never yet heard
+her utter: and he was right--by repeating this device he had won from
+her the most affectionate letters that she had, so far, written him, one
+of them (which she had sent to him at midday by a special messenger from
+the Maison Dorée--it was the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête given for
+the victims of the recent floods in Murcia) beginning "My dear, my hand
+trembles so that I can scarcely write----"; and these letters he had
+kept in the same drawer as the withered chrysanthemum. Or else, if she
+had not had time to write, when he arrived at the Verdurins' she would
+come running up to him with an "I've something to say to you!" and he
+would gaze curiously at the revelation in her face and speech of what
+she had hitherto kept concealed from him of her heart.
+
+Even as he drew near to the Verdurins' door, and caught sight of the
+great lamp-lit spaces of the drawing-room windows, whose shutters were
+never closed, he would begin to melt at the thought of the charming
+creature whom he would see, as he entered the room, basking in that
+golden light. Here and there the figures of the guests stood out, sharp
+and black, between lamp and window, shutting off the light, like those
+little pictures which one sees sometimes pasted here and there upon a
+glass screen, whose other panes are mere transparencies. He would try
+to make out Odette. And then, when he was once inside, without thinking,
+his eyes sparkled suddenly with such radiant happiness that M. Verdurin
+said to the painter: "H'm. Seems to be getting warm." Indeed, her
+presence gave the house what none other of the houses that he visited
+seemed to possess: a sort of tactual sense, a nervous system which
+ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his
+heart.
+
+And so the simple and regular manifestations of a social organism,
+namely the 'little clan,' were transformed for Swann into a series of
+daily encounters with Odette, and enabled him to feign indifference to
+the prospect of seeing her, or even a desire not to see her; in doing
+which he incurred no very great risk since, even although he had written
+to her during the day, he would of necessity see her in the evening and
+accompany her home.
+
+But one evening, when, irritated by the thought of that inevitable dark
+drive together, he had taken his other 'little girl' all the way to the
+Bois, so as to delay as long as possible the moment of his appearance at
+the Verdurins', he was so late in reaching them that Odette, supposing
+that he did not intend to come, had already left. Seeing the room bare
+of her, Swann felt his heart wrung by sudden anguish; he shook with the
+sense that he was being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he began
+then for the first time to estimate, having always, hitherto, had that
+certainty of finding it whenever he would, which (as in the case of
+all our pleasures) reduced, if it did not altogether blind him to its
+dimensions.
+
+"Did you notice the face he pulled when he saw that she wasn't here?" M.
+Verdurin asked his wife. "I think we may say that he's hooked."
+
+"The face he pulled?" exploded Dr. Cottard who, having left the house
+for a moment to visit a patient, had just returned to fetch his wife and
+did not know whom they were discussing.
+
+"D'you mean to say you didn't meet him on the doorstep--the loveliest of
+Swanns?"
+
+"No. M. Swann has been here?"
+
+"Just for a moment. We had a glimpse of a Swann tremendously agitated.
+In a state of nerves. You see, Odette had left."
+
+"You mean to say that she has gone the 'whole hog' with him; that she
+has 'burned her boats'?" inquired the Doctor cautiously, testing the
+meaning of his phrases.
+
+"Why, of course not; there's absolutely nothing in it; in fact, between
+you and me, I think she's making a great mistake, and behaving like a
+silly little fool, which she is, incidentally."
+
+"Come, come, come!" said M. Verdurin, "How on earth do you know that
+there's 'nothing in it'? We haven't been there to see, have we now?"
+
+"She would have told me," answered Mme. Verdurin with dignity. "I may
+say that she tells me everything. As she has no one else at present, I
+told her that she ought to live with him. She makes out that she can't;
+she admits, she was immensely attracted by him, at first; but he's
+always shy with her, and that makes her shy with him. Besides, she
+doesn't care for him in that way, she says; it's an ideal love,
+'Platonic,' you know; she's afraid of rubbing the bloom off--oh, I don't
+know half the things she says, how should I? And yet he's exactly the
+sort of man she wants."
+
+"I beg to differ from you," M. Verdurin courteously interrupted. "I am
+only half satisfied with the gentleman. I feel that he 'poses.'"
+
+Mme. Verdurin's whole body stiffened, her eyes stared blankly as though
+she had suddenly been turned into a statue; a device by means of which
+she might be supposed not to have caught the sound of that unutterable
+word which seemed to imply that it was possible for people to 'pose'
+in her house, and, therefore, that there were people in the world who
+'mattered more' than herself.
+
+"Anyhow, if there is nothing in it, I don't suppose it's because our
+friend believes in her virtue. And yet, you never know; he seems to
+believe in her intelligence. I don't know whether you heard the way he
+lectured her the other evening about Vinteuil's sonata. I am devoted
+to Odette, but really--to expound theories of aesthetic to her--the man
+must be a prize idiot."
+
+"Look here, I won't have you saying nasty things about Odette," broke in
+Mme. Verdurin in her 'spoiled child' manner. "She is charming."
+
+"There's no reason why she shouldn't be charming; we are not saying
+anything nasty about her, only that she is not the embodiment of either
+virtue or intellect. After all," he turned to the painter, "does it
+matter so very much whether she is virtuous or not? You can't tell; she
+might be a great deal less charming if she were."
+
+On the landing Swann had run into the Verdurins' butler, who had been
+somewhere else a moment earlier, when he arrived, and who had been asked
+by Odette to tell Swann (but that was at least an hour ago) that she
+would probably stop to drink a cup of chocolate at Prévost's on her
+way home. Swann set off at once for Prévost's, but every few yards
+his carriage was held up by others, or by people crossing the street,
+loathsome obstacles each of which he would gladly have crushed beneath
+his wheels, were it not that a policeman fumbling with a note-book would
+delay him even longer than the actual passage of the pedestrian. He
+counted the minutes feverishly, adding a few seconds to each so as to
+be quite certain that he had not given himself short measure, and so,
+possibly, exaggerated whatever chance there might actually be of his
+arriving at Prévost's in time, and of finding her still there. And then,
+in a moment of illumination, like a man in a fever who awakes from sleep
+and is conscious of the absurdity of the dream-shapes among which his
+mind has been wandering without any clear distinction between himself
+and them, Swann suddenly perceived how foreign to his nature were the
+thoughts which he had been revolving in his mind ever since he had heard
+at the Verdurins' that Odette had left, how novel the heartache from
+which he was suffering, but of which he was only now conscious, as
+though he had just woken up. What! all this disturbance simply because
+he would not see Odette, now, till to-morrow, exactly what he had been
+hoping, not an hour before, as he drove toward Mme. Verdurin's. He was
+obliged to admit also that now, as he sat in the same carriage and
+drove to Prévost's, he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone
+even--but that a new personality was there beside him, adhering to him,
+amalgamated with him, a creature from whom he might, perhaps, be unable
+to liberate himself, towards whom he might have to adopt some such
+stratagem as one uses to outwit a master or a malady. And yet, during
+this last moment in which he had felt that another, a fresh personality
+was thus conjoined with his own, life had seemed, somehow, more
+interesting.
+
+It was in vain that he assured himself that this possible meeting at
+Prévost's (the tension of waiting for which so ravished, stripped so
+bare the intervening moments that he could find nothing, not one idea,
+not one memory in his mind beneath which his troubled spirit might take
+shelter and repose) would probably, after all, should it take place, be
+much the same as all their meetings, of no great importance. As on every
+other evening, once he was in Odette's company, once he had begun to
+cast furtive glances at her changing countenance, and instantly to
+withdraw his eyes lest she should read in them the first symbols of
+desire and believe no more in his indifference, he would cease to
+be able even to think of her, so busy would he be in the search for
+pretexts which would enable him not to leave her immediately, and to
+assure himself, without betraying his concern, that he would find her
+again, next evening, at the Verdurins'; pretexts, that is to say, which
+would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day
+more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come
+to him with the vain presence of this woman, whom he might approach, yet
+never dared embrace.
+
+She was not at Prevost's; he must search for her, then, in every
+restaurant upon the boulevards. To save time, while he went in one
+direction, he sent in the other his coachman Rémi (Rizzo's Doge Loredan)
+for whom he presently--after a fruitless search--found himself waiting
+at the spot where the carriage was to meet him. It did not appear, and
+Swann tantalised himself with alternate pictures of the approaching
+moment, as one in which Rémi would say to him: "Sir, the lady is there,"
+or as one in which Rémi would say to him: "Sir, the lady was not in
+any of the cafés." And so he saw himself faced by the close of his
+evening--a thing uniform, and yet bifurcated by the intervening accident
+which would either put an end to his agony by discovering Odette, or
+would oblige him to abandon any hope of finding her that night, to
+accept the necessity of returning home without having seen her.
+
+The coachman returned; but, as he drew up opposite him, Swann asked,
+not "Did you find the lady?" but "Remind me, to-morrow, to order in
+some more firewood. I am sure we must be running short." Perhaps he had
+persuaded himself that, if Rémi had at last found Odette in some café,
+where she was waiting for him still, then his night of misery was
+already obliterated by the realisation, begun already in his mind, of a
+night of joy, and that there was no need for him to hasten towards the
+attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place,
+which would not escape his grasp again. But it was also by the force of
+inertia; there was in his soul that want of adaptability which can be
+seen in the bodies of certain people who, when the moment comes to avoid
+a collision, to snatch their clothes out of reach of a flame, or to
+perform any other such necessary movement, take their time (as the
+saying is), begin by remaining for a moment in their original position,
+as though seeking to find in it a starting-point, a source of strength
+and motion. And probably, if the coachman had interrupted him with,
+"I have found the lady," he would have answered, "Oh, yes, of course;
+that's what I told you to do. I had quite forgotten," and would have
+continued to discuss his supply of firewood, so as to hide from his
+servant the emotion that he had felt, and to give himself time to break
+away from the thraldom of his anxieties and abandon himself to pleasure.
+
+The coachman came back, however, with the report that he could not find
+her anywhere, and added the advice, as an old and privileged servant, "I
+think, sir, that all we can do now is to go home."
+
+But the air of indifference which Swann could so lightly assume when
+Rémi uttered his final, unalterable response, fell from him like a
+cast-off cloak when he saw Rémi attempt to make him abandon hope and
+retire from the quest.
+
+"Certainly not!" he exclaimed. "We must find the lady. It is most
+important. She would be extremely put out--it's a business matter--and
+vexed with me if she didn't see me."
+
+"But I do not see how the lady can be vexed, sir," answered Rémi, "since
+it was she that went away without waiting for you, sir, and said she was
+going to Prévost's, and then wasn't there."
+
+Meanwhile the restaurants were closing, and their lights began to go
+out. Under the trees of the boulevards there were still a few people
+strolling to and fro, barely distinguishable in the gathering darkness.
+Now and then the ghost of a woman glided up to Swann, murmured a few
+words in his ear, asked him to take her home, and left him shuddering.
+Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though
+among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been
+searching for a lost Eurydice.
+
+Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the
+agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious
+as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the
+human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking
+amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided,
+that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not
+necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or
+even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her
+should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled so soon as--in
+the moment when she has failed to meet us--for the pleasure which
+we were on the point of enjoying in her charming company is abruptly
+substituted an anxious torturing desire, whose object is the creature
+herself, an irrational, absurd desire, which the laws of civilised
+society make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage--the
+insensate, agonising desire to possess her.
+
+Swann made Rémi drive him to such restaurants as were still open; it was
+the sole hypothesis, now, of that happiness which he had contemplated
+so calmly; he no longer concealed his agitation, the price he set upon
+their meeting, and promised, in case of success, to reward his coachman,
+as though, by inspiring in him a will to triumph which would reinforce
+his own, he could bring it to pass, by a miracle, that Odette--assuming
+that she had long since gone home to bed,--might yet be found seated in
+some restaurant on the boulevards. He pursued the quest as far as the
+Maison Dorée, burst twice into Tortoni's and, still without catching
+sight of her, was emerging from the Café Anglais, striding with haggard
+gaze towards his carriage, which was waiting for him at the corner of
+the Boulevard des Italiens, when he collided with a person coming in the
+opposite direction; it was Odette; she explained, later, that there had
+been no room at Prévost's, that she had gone, instead, to sup at the
+Maison Dorée, and had been sitting there in an alcove where he must have
+overlooked her, and that she was now looking for her carriage.
+
+She had so little expected to see him that she started back in alarm. As
+for him, he had ransacked the streets of Paris, not that he supposed
+it possible that he should find her, but because he would have suffered
+even more cruelly by abandoning the attempt. But now the joy (which, his
+reason had never ceased to assure him, was not, that evening at least,
+to be realised) was suddenly apparent, and more real than ever
+before; for he himself had contributed nothing to it by anticipating
+probabilities,--it remained integral and external to himself; there
+was no need for him to draw on his own resources to endow it with
+truth--'twas from itself that there emanated, 'twas itself that
+projected towards him that truth whose glorious rays melted and
+scattered like the cloud of a dream the sense of loneliness which had
+lowered over him, that truth upon which he had supported, nay founded,
+albeit unconsciously, his vision of bliss. So will a traveller, who has
+come down, on a day of glorious weather, to the Mediterranean shore, and
+is doubtful whether they still exist, those lands which he has left, let
+his eyes be dazzled, rather than cast a backward glance, by the radiance
+streaming towards him from the luminous and unfading azure at his feet.
+
+He climbed after her into the carriage which she had kept waiting, and
+ordered his own to follow.
+
+She had in her hand a bunch of cattleyas, and Swann could see, beneath
+the film of lace that covered her head, more of the same flowers
+fastened to a swansdown plume. She was wearing, under her cloak, a
+flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on one side so as to reveal a
+large triangular patch of her white silk skirt, with an 'insertion,'
+also of white silk, in the cleft of her low-necked bodice, in which were
+fastened a few more cattleyas. She had scarcely recovered from the shock
+which the sight of Swann had given her, when some obstacle made the
+horse start to one side. They were thrown forward from their seats; she
+uttered a cry, and fell back quivering and breathless.
+
+"It's all right," he assured her, "don't be frightened." And he slipped
+his arm round her shoulder, supporting her body against his own; then
+went on: "Whatever you do, don't utter a word; just make a sign, yes
+or no, or you'll be out of breath again. You won't mind if I put the
+flowers straight on your bodice; the jolt has loosened them. I'm afraid
+of their dropping out; I'm just going to fasten them a little more
+securely."
+
+She was not used to being treated with so much formality by men, and
+smiled as she answered: "No, not at all; I don't mind in the least."
+
+But he, chilled a little by her answer, perhaps, also, to bear out the
+pretence that he had been sincere in adopting the stratagem, or even
+because he was already beginning to believe that he had been, exclaimed:
+"No, no; you mustn't speak. You will be out of breath again. You can
+easily answer in signs; I shall understand. Really and truly now, you
+don't mind my doing this? Look, there is a little--I think it must be
+pollen, spilt over your dress,--may I brush it off with my hand? That's
+not too hard; I'm not hurting you, am I? I'm tickling you, perhaps, a
+little; but I don't want to touch the velvet in case I rub it the wrong
+way. But, don't you see, I really had to fasten the flowers; they would
+have fallen out if I hadn't. Like that, now; if I just push them a
+little farther down.... Seriously, I'm not annoying you, am I? And if
+I just sniff them to see whether they've really lost all their scent? I
+don't believe I ever smelt any before; may I? Tell the truth, now."
+
+Still smiling, she shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly, as who
+should say, "You're quite mad; you know very well that I like it."
+
+He slipped his other hand upwards along Odette's cheek; she fixed her
+eyes on him with that languishing and solemn air which marks the women
+of the old Florentine's paintings, in whose faces he had found the type
+of hers; swimming at the brink of her fringed lids, her brilliant eyes,
+large and finely drawn as theirs, seemed on the verge of breaking from
+her face and rolling down her cheeks like two great tears. She bent her
+neck, as all their necks may be seen to bend, in the pagan scenes as
+well as in the scriptural. And although her attitude was, doubtless,
+habitual and instinctive, one which she knew to be appropriate to such
+moments, and was careful not to forget to assume, she seemed to need all
+her strength to hold her face back, as though some invisible force
+were drawing it down towards Swann's. And Swann it was who, before she
+allowed her face, as though despite her efforts, to fall upon his lips,
+held it back for a moment longer, at a little distance between his
+hands. He had intended to leave time for her mind to overtake her body's
+movements, to recognise the dream which she had so long cherished and to
+assist at its realisation, like a mother invited as a spectator when
+a prize is given to the child whom she has reared and loves. Perhaps,
+moreover, Swann himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not
+yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now for
+the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his
+departure, a traveller strives to bear away with him in memory the view
+of a country to which he may never return.
+
+But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which
+had begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete
+surrender, whether from fear of chilling her, or from reluctance to
+appear, even retrospectively, to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked
+the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which
+could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first
+occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If
+she had any cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: "It is most
+unfortunate; the cattleyas don't need tucking in this evening; they've
+not been disturbed as they were the other night; I think, though, that
+this one isn't quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than
+the others?" Or else, if she had none: "Oh! no cattleyas this evening;
+then there's nothing for me to arrange." So that for some time there
+was no change from the procedure which he had followed on that first
+evening, when he had started by touching her throat, with his fingers
+first and then with his lips, but their caresses began invariably with
+this modest exploration. And long afterwards, when the arrangement (or,
+rather, the ritual pretence of an arrangement) of her cattleyas had
+quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor "Do a cattleya," transmuted
+into a simple verb which they would employ without a thought of its
+original meaning when they wished to refer to the act of physical
+possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing),
+survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long forgotten custom
+from which it sprang. And yet possibly this particular manner of saying
+"to make love" had not the precise significance of its synonyms.
+However disillusioned we may be about women, however we may regard
+the possession of even the most divergent types as an invariable
+and monotonous experience, every detail of which is known and can be
+described in advance, it still becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure
+if the women concerned be--or be thought to be--so difficult as to
+oblige us to base our attack upon some unrehearsed incident in our
+relations with them, as was originally for Swann the arrangement of the
+cattleyas. He trembled as he hoped, that evening, (but Odette, he told
+himself, if she were deceived by his stratagem, could not guess his
+intention) that it was the possession of this woman that would emerge
+for him from their large and richly coloured petals; and the pleasure
+which he already felt, and which Odette tolerated, he thought, perhaps
+only because she was not yet aware of it herself, seemed to him for that
+reason--as it might have seemed to the first man when he enjoyed it amid
+the flowers of the earthly paradise--a pleasure which had never before
+existed, which he was striving now to create, a pleasure--and the
+special name which he was to give to it preserved its identity--entirely
+individual and new.
+
+The ice once broken, every evening, when he had taken her home, he must
+follow her into the house; and often she would come out again in her
+dressing-gown, and escort him to his carriage, and would kiss him before
+the eyes of his coachman, saying: "What on earth does it matter what
+people see?" And on evenings when he did not go to the Verdurins' (which
+happened occasionally, now that he had opportunities of meeting Odette
+elsewhere), when--more and more rarely--he went into society, she would
+beg him to come to her on his way home, however late he might be. The
+season was spring, the nights clear and frosty. He would come away from
+an evening party, jump into his victoria, spread a rug over his knees,
+tell the friends who were leaving at the same time, and who insisted on
+his going home with them, that he could not, that he was not going
+in their direction; then the coachman would start off at a fast trot
+without further orders, knowing quite well where he had to go. His
+friends would be left marvelling, and, as a matter of fact, Swann was
+no longer the same man. No one ever received a letter from him now
+demanding an introduction to a woman. He had ceased to pay any attention
+to women, and kept away from the places in which they were ordinarily to
+be met. In a restaurant, or in the country, his manner was deliberately
+and directly the opposite of that by which, only a few days earlier,
+his friends would have recognised him, that manner which had seemed
+permanently and unalterably his own. To such an extent does passion
+manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not
+only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates
+the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible. On the
+other hand, there was one thing that was, now, invariable, namely that
+wherever Swann might be spending the evening, he never failed to go on
+afterwards to Odette. The interval of space separating her from him
+was one which he must as inevitably traverse as he must descend, by an
+irresistible gravitation, the steep slope of life itself. To be frank,
+as often as not, when he had stayed late at a party, he would have
+preferred to return home at once, without going so far out of his way,
+and to postpone their meeting until the morrow; but the very fact of his
+putting himself to such inconvenience at an abnormal hour in order to
+visit her, while he guessed that his friends, as he left them, were
+saying to one another: "He is tied hand and foot; there must certainly
+be a woman somewhere who insists on his going to her at all hours,"
+made him feel that he was leading the life of the class of men whose
+existence is coloured by a love-affair, and in whom the perpetual
+sacrifice which they are making of their comfort and of their practical
+interests has engendered a spiritual charm. Then, though he may not
+consciously have taken this into consideration, the certainty that she
+was waiting for him, that she was not anywhere or with anyone else, that
+he would see her before he went home, drew the sting from that anguish,
+forgotten, it is true, but latent and ever ready to be reawakened, which
+he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins' before
+his arrival, an anguish the actual cessation of which was so agreeable
+that it might even be called a state of happiness. Perhaps it was to
+that hour of anguish that there must be attributed the importance which
+Odette had since assumed in his life. Other people are, as a rule, so
+immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the
+power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person
+seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with
+poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on
+which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact. Swann
+could not without anxiety ask himself what Odette would mean to him
+in the years that were to come. Sometimes, as he looked up from his
+victoria on those fine and frosty nights of early spring, and saw the
+dazzling moonbeams fall between his eyes and the deserted streets, he
+would think of that other face, gleaming and faintly roseate like the
+moon's, which had, one day, risen on the horizon of his mind and since
+then had shed upon the world that mysterious light in which he saw it
+bathed. If he arrived after the hour at which Odette sent her servants
+to bed, before ringing the bell at the gate of her little garden,
+he would go round first into the other street, over which, at the
+ground-level, among the windows (all exactly alike, but darkened) of
+the adjoining houses, shone the solitary lighted window of her room.
+He would rap upon the pane, and she would hear the signal, and answer,
+before running to meet him at the gate. He would find, lying open on the
+piano, some of her favourite music, the _Valse des Roses_, the _Pauvre
+Fou_ of Tagliafico (which, according to the instructions embodied in her
+will, was to be played at her funeral); but he would ask her, instead,
+to give him the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata. It was true that
+Odette played vilely, but often the fairest impression that remains in
+our minds of a favourite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble
+of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The
+little phrase was associated still, in Swann's mind, with his love for
+Odette. He felt clearly that this love was something to which there were
+no corresponding external signs, whose meaning could not be proved by
+any but himself; he realised, too, that Odette's qualities were not such
+as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in
+her company. And often, when the cold government of reason stood
+unchallenged, he would readily have ceased to sacrifice so many of his
+intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But the
+little phrase, as soon as it struck his ear, had the power to liberate
+in him the room that was needed to contain it; the proportions of
+Swann's soul were altered; a margin was left for a form of enjoyment
+which corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any external
+object, and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely
+individual, but assumed for him an objective reality superior to that
+of other concrete things. This thirst for an untasted charm, the little
+phrase would stimulate it anew in him, but without bringing him any
+definite gratification to assuage it. With the result that those parts
+of Swann's soul in which the little phrase had obliterated all care
+for material interests, those human considerations which affect all men
+alike, were left bare by it, blank pages on which he was at liberty to
+inscribe the name of Odette. Moreover, where Odette's affection might
+seem ever so little abrupt and disappointing, the little phrase would
+come to supplement it, to amalgamate with it its own mysterious essence.
+Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one would have
+said that he was inhaling an anaesthetic which allowed him to breathe
+more deeply. And the pleasure which the music gave him, which was
+shortly to create in him a real longing, was in fact closely akin,
+at such moments, to the pleasure which he would have derived from
+experimenting with perfumes, from entering into contract with a world
+for which we men were not created, which appears to lack form because
+our eyes cannot perceive it, to lack significance because it escapes
+our intelligence, to which we may attain by way of one sense only. Deep
+repose, mysterious refreshment for Swann,--for him whose eyes, although
+delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute
+observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the
+barrenness of his life,--to feel himself transformed into a creature
+foreign to humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost
+a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the world
+through his two ears alone. And as, notwithstanding, he sought in the
+little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence could not descend,
+with what a strange frenzy of intoxication must he strip bare his
+innermost soul of the whole armour of reason, and make it pass,
+unattended, through the straining vessel, down into the dark filter of
+sound. He began to reckon up how much that was painful, perhaps even how
+much secret and unappeased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the phrase;
+and yet to him it brought no suffering. What matter though the phrase
+repeated that love is frail and fleeting, when his love was so strong!
+He played with the melancholy which the phrase diffused, he felt it
+stealing over him, but like a caress which only deepened and sweetened
+his sense of his own happiness. He would make Odette play him the phrase
+again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she played, she
+must never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those
+earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How
+closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until
+lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour,
+as to count the flowers in a meadow in May. Then she would pretend to
+stop, saying: "How do you expect me to play when you keep on holding me?
+I can't do everything at once. Make up your mind what you want; am I to
+play the phrase or do you want to play with me?" Then he would become
+annoyed, and she would burst out with a laugh which was transformed, as
+it left her lips, and descended upon him in a shower of kisses. Or else
+she would look at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face worthy
+to figure in Botticelli's 'Life of Moses,' he would place it there,
+giving to Odette's neck the necessary inclination; and when he had
+finished her portrait in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the
+wall of the Sixtine, the idea that she was, none the less, in the room
+with him still, by the piano, at that very moment, ready to be kissed
+and won, the idea of her material existence, of her being alive, would
+sweep over him with so violent an intoxication that, with eyes starting
+from his head and jaws that parted as though to devour her, he would
+fling himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks.
+And then, as soon as he had left the house, not without returning to
+kiss her once again, because he had forgotten to take away with him, in
+memory, some detail of her fragrance or of her features, while he drove
+home in his victoria, blessing the name of Odette who allowed him to pay
+her these daily visits, which, although they could not, he felt, bring
+any great happiness to her, still, by keeping him immune from the fever
+of jealousy--by removing from him every possibility of a fresh outbreak
+of the heart-sickness which had manifested itself in him that evening,
+when he had failed to find her at the Verdurins'--might help him to
+arrive, without any recurrence of those crises, of which the first had
+been so distressing that it must also be the last, at the termination of
+this strange series of hours in his life, hours almost enchanted, in the
+same manner as these other, following hours, in which he drove through a
+deserted Paris by the light of the moon: noticing as he drove home that
+the satellite had now changed its position, relatively to his own,
+and was almost touching the horizon; feeling that his love, also, was
+obedient to these immutable laws of nature, he asked himself whether
+this period, upon which he had entered, was to last much longer, whether
+presently his mind's eye would cease to behold that dear countenance,
+save as occupying a distant and diminished position, and on the verge of
+ceasing to shed on him the radiance of its charm. For Swann was finding
+in things once more, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had
+found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with
+this difference, that what charm lay in them now was conferred by Odette
+alone. He could feel reawakening in himself the inspirations of his
+boyhood, which had been dissipated among the frivolities of his later
+life, but they all bore, now, the reflection, the stamp of a particular
+being; and during the long hours which he now found a subtle pleasure
+in spending at home, alone with his convalescent spirit, he became
+gradually himself again, but himself in thraldom to another.
+
+He went to her only in the evenings, and knew nothing of how she spent
+her time during the day, any more than he knew of her past; so little,
+indeed, that he had not even the tiny, initial clue which, by allowing
+us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
+And so he never asked himself what she might be doing, or what her life
+had been. Only he smiled sometimes at the thought of how, some years
+earlier, when he still did not know her, some one had spoken to him of a
+woman who, if he remembered rightly, must certainly have been Odette,
+as of a 'tart,' a 'kept' woman, one of those women to whom he still
+attributed (having lived but little in their company) the entire set of
+characteristics, fundamentally perverse, with which they had been, for
+many years, endowed by the imagination of certain novelists. He would
+say to himself that one has, as often as not, only to take the exact
+counterpart of the reputation created by the world in order to judge a
+person fairly, when with such a character he contrasted that of Odette,
+so good, so simple, so enthusiastic in the pursuit of ideals, so nearly
+incapable of not telling the truth that, when he had once begged her, so
+that they might dine together alone, to write to Mme. Verdurin, saying
+that she was unwell, the next day he had seen her, face to face
+with Mme. Verdurin, who asked whether she had recovered, blushing,
+stammering, and, in spite of herself, revealing in every feature how
+painful, what a torture it was to her to act a lie; and, while in her
+answer she multiplied the fictitious details of an imaginary illness,
+seeming to ask pardon, by her suppliant look and her stricken accents,
+for the obvious falsehood of her words.
+
+On certain days, however, though these came seldom, she would call upon
+him in the afternoon, to interrupt his musings or the essay on Vermeer
+to which he had latterly returned. His servant would come in to say that
+Mme. de Crécy was in the small drawing-room. He would go in search of
+her, and, when he opened the door, on Odette's blushing countenance, as
+soon as she caught sight of Swann, would appear--changing the curve
+of her lips, the look in her eyes, the moulding of her cheeks--an
+all-absorbing smile. Once he was left alone he would see again that
+smile, and her smile of the day before, another with which she had
+greeted him sometime else, the smile which had been her answer, in the
+carriage that night, when he had asked her whether she objected to his
+rearranging her cattleyas; and the life of Odette at all other times,
+since he knew nothing of it, appeared to him upon a neutral and
+colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon
+which one sees, here and there, in every corner and in all directions,
+traced in three colours upon the buff paper, innumerable smiles. But,
+once in a while, illuminating a chink of that existence which Swann
+still saw as a complete blank, even if his mind assured him that it was
+not so, because he was unable to imagine anything that might occupy it,
+some friend who knew them both, and suspecting that they were in love,
+had not dared to tell him anything about her that was of the least
+importance, would describe Odette's figure, as he had seen her, that
+very morning, going on foot up the Rue Abbattucci, in a cape trimmed
+with skunks, wearing a Rembrandt hat, and a bunch of violets in her
+bosom. This simple outline reduced Swann to utter confusion by enabling
+him suddenly to perceive that Odette had an existence which was not
+wholly subordinated to his own; he burned to know whom she had been
+seeking to fascinate by this costume in which he had never seen her; he
+registered a vow to insist upon her telling him where she had been going
+at that intercepted moment, as though, in all the colourless life--a
+life almost nonexistent, since she was then invisible to him--of his
+mistress, there had been but a single incident apart from all those
+smiles directed towards himself; namely, her walking abroad beneath a
+Rembrandt hat, with a bunch of violets in her bosom.
+
+Except when he asked her for Vinteuil's little phrase instead of the
+_Valse des Roses_, Swann made no effort to induce her to play the things
+that he himself preferred, nor, in literature any more than in music, to
+correct the manifold errors of her taste. He fully realised that she was
+not intelligent. When she said how much she would like him to tell her
+about the great poets, she had imagined that she would suddenly get
+to know whole pages of romantic and heroic verse, in the style of the
+Vicomte de Borelli, only even more moving. As for Vermeer of Delft, she
+asked whether he had been made to suffer by a woman, if it was a woman
+that had inspired him, and once Swann had told her that no one knew, she
+had lost all interest in that painter. She would often say: "I'm sure,
+poetry; well, of course, there'd be nothing like it if it was all true,
+if the poets really believed the things they said. But as often as not
+you'll find there's no one so mean and calculating as those fellows. I
+know something about poetry. I had a friend, once, who was in love with
+a poet of sorts. In his verses he never spoke of anything but love, and
+heaven, and the stars. Oh! she was properly taken in! He had more than
+three hundred thousand francs out of her before he'd finished." If,
+then, Swann tried to shew her in what artistic beauty consisted, how one
+ought to appreciate poetry or painting, after a minute or two she would
+cease to listen, saying: "Yes... I never thought it would be like that."
+And he felt that her disappointment was so great that he preferred to
+lie to her, assuring her that what he had said was nothing, that he
+had only touched the surface, that he had not time to go into it all
+properly, that there was more in it than that. Then she would interrupt
+with a brisk, "More in it? What?... Do tell me!", but he did not tell
+her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different
+from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching; he was
+afraid, too, lest, disillusioned in the matter of art, she might at the
+same time be disillusioned in the greater matter of love.
+
+With the result that she found Swann inferior, intellectually, to what
+she had supposed. "You're always so reserved; I can't make you out." She
+marvelled increasingly at his indifference to money, at his courtesy
+to everyone alike, at the delicacy of his mind. And indeed it happens,
+often enough, to a greater man than Swann ever was, to a scientist or
+artist, when he is not wholly misunderstood by the people among whom
+he lives, that the feeling in them which proves that they have been
+convinced of the superiority of his intellect is created not by any
+admiration for his ideas--for those are entirely beyond them--but by
+their respect for what they term his good qualities. There was also the
+respect with which Odette was inspired by the thought of Swann's social
+position, although she had no desire that he should attempt to secure
+invitations for herself. Perhaps she felt that such attempts would be
+bound to fail; perhaps, indeed, she feared lest, merely by speaking of
+her to his friends, he should provoke disclosures of an unwelcome kind.
+The fact remains that she had consistently held him to his promise never
+to mention her name. Her reason for not wishing to go into society was,
+she had told him, a quarrel which she had had, long ago, with another
+girl, who had avenged herself by saying nasty things about her. "But,"
+Swann objected, "surely, people don't all know your friend." "Yes,
+don't you see, it's like a spot of oil; people are so horrid." Swann was
+unable, frankly, to appreciate this point; on the other hand, he knew
+that such generalisations as "People are so horrid," and "A word of
+scandal spreads like a spot of oil," were generally accepted as true;
+there must, therefore, be cases to which they were literally applicable.
+Could Odette's case be one of these? He teased himself with the
+question, though not for long, for he too was subject to that mental
+oppression which had so weighed upon his father, whenever he was faced
+by a difficult problem. In any event, that world of society which
+concealed such terrors for Odette inspired her, probably, with no very
+great longing to enter it, since it was too far removed from the world
+which she already knew for her to be able to form any clear conception
+of it. At the same time, while in certain respects she had retained a
+genuine simplicity (she had, for instance, kept up a friendship with a
+little dressmaker, now retired from business, up whose steep and dark
+and fetid staircase she clambered almost every day), she still thirsted
+to be in the fashion, though her idea of it was not altogether that held
+by fashionable people. For the latter, fashion is a thing that emanates
+from a comparatively small number of leaders, who project it to a
+considerable distance--with more or less strength according as one
+is nearer to or farther from their intimate centre--over the widening
+circle of their friends and the friends of their friends, whose names
+form a sort of tabulated index. People 'in society' know this index by
+heart, they are gifted in such matters with an erudition from which they
+have extracted a sort of taste, of tact, so automatic in its operation
+that Swann, for example, without needing to draw upon his knowledge of
+the world, if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had
+been guests at a dinner, could tell at once how fashionable the dinner
+had been, just as a man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can
+estimate exactly the literary merit of its author. But Odette was one
+of those persons (an extremely numerous class, whatever the fashionable
+world may think, and to be found in every section of society) who do
+not share this knowledge, but imagine fashion to be something of quite
+another kind, which assumes different aspects according to the circle to
+which they themselves belong, but has the special characteristic--common
+alike to the fashion of which Odette used to dream and to that before
+which Mme. Cottard bowed--of being directly accessible to all. The other
+kind, the fashion of 'fashionable people,' is, it must be admitted,
+accessible also; but there are inevitable delays. Odette would say of
+some one: "He never goes to any place that isn't really smart."
+
+And if Swann were to ask her what she meant by that, she would answer,
+with a touch of contempt, "Smart places! Why, good heavens, just fancy,
+at your age, having to be told what the smart places are in Paris! What
+do you expect me to say? Well, on Sunday mornings there's the Avenue de
+l'Impératrice, and round the lake at five o'clock, and on Thursdays
+the Eden-Théâtre, and the Hippodrome on Fridays; then there are the
+balls..."
+
+"What balls?"
+
+"Why, silly, the balls people give in Paris; the smart ones, I mean.
+Wait now, Herbinger, you know who I mean, the fellow who's in one of
+the jobbers' offices; yes, of course, you must know him, he's one of the
+best-known men in Paris, that great big fair-haired boy who wears
+such swagger clothes; he always has a flower in his buttonhole and a
+light-coloured overcoat with a fold down the back; he goes about with
+that old image, takes her to all the first-nights. Very well! He gave
+a ball the other night, and all the smart people in Paris were there.
+I should have loved to go! but you had to shew your invitation at the
+door, and I couldn't get one anywhere. After all, I'm just as glad,
+now, that I didn't go; I should have been killed in the crush, and seen
+nothing. Still, just to be able to say one had been to Herbinger's ball.
+You know how vain I am! However, you may be quite certain that half the
+people who tell you they were there are telling stories.... But I am
+surprised that you weren't there, a regular 'tip-topper' like you."
+
+Swann made no attempt, however, to modify this conception of fashion;
+feeling that his own came no nearer to the truth, was just as fatuous,
+devoid of all importance, he saw no advantage to be gained by imparting
+it to his mistress, with the result that, after a few months, she ceased
+to take any interest in the people to whose houses he went, except
+when they were the means of his obtaining tickets for the paddock at
+race-meetings or first-nights at the theatre. She hoped that he would
+continue to cultivate such profitable acquaintances, but she had come to
+regard them as less smart since the day when she had passed the Marquise
+de Villeparisis in the street, wearing a black serge dress and a bonnet
+with strings.
+
+"But she looks like a pew-opener, like an old charwoman, darling! That a
+marquise! Goodness knows I'm not a marquise, but you'd have to pay me
+a lot of money before you'd get me to go about Paris rigged out like
+that!"
+
+Nor could she understand Swann's continuing to live in his house on the
+Quai d'Orléans, which, though she dared not tell him so, she considered
+unworthy of him.
+
+It was true that she claimed to be fond of 'antiques,' and used to
+assume a rapturous and knowing air when she confessed how she loved
+to spend the whole day 'rummaging' in second-hand shops, hunting for
+'bric-à-brac,' and things of the 'right date.' Although it was a point
+of honour, to which she obstinately clung, as though obeying some old
+family custom, that she should never answer any questions, never give
+any account of what she did during the daytime, she spoke to Swann once
+about a friend to whose house she had been invited, and had found that
+everything in it was 'of the period.' Swann could not get her to tell
+him what 'period' it was. Only after thinking the matter over she
+replied that it was 'mediaeval'; by which she meant that the walls were
+panelled. Some time later she spoke to him again of her friend, and
+added, in the hesitating but confident tone in which one refers to a
+person whom one has met somewhere, at dinner, the night before, of whom
+one had never heard until then, but whom one's hosts seemed to regard as
+some one so celebrated and important that one hopes that one's listener
+will know quite well who is meant, and will be duly impressed: "Her
+dining-room... is... eighteenth century!" Incidentally, she had thought
+it hideous, all bare, as though the house were still unfinished; women
+looked frightful in it, and it would never become the fashion. She
+mentioned it again, a third time, when she shewed Swann a card with the
+name and address of the man who had designed the dining-room, and whom
+she wanted to send for, when she had enough money, to see whether he
+could not do one for her too; not one like that, of course, but one
+of the sort she used to dream of, one which, unfortunately, her little
+house would not be large enough to contain, with tall sideboards,
+Renaissance furniture and fireplaces like the Château at Blois. It was
+on this occasion that she let out to Swann what she really thought of
+his abode on the Quai d'Orléans; he having ventured the criticism that
+her friend had indulged, not in the Louis XVI style, for, he went on,
+although that was not, of course, done, still it might be made charming,
+but in the 'Sham-Antique.'
+
+"You wouldn't have her live, like you, among a lot of broken-down chairs
+and threadbare carpets!" she exclaimed, the innate respectability of
+the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the
+acquired dilettantism of the 'light woman.'
+
+People who enjoyed 'picking-up' things, who admired poetry, despised
+sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour
+and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of
+humanity. There was no need actually to have those tastes, provided
+one talked enough about them; when a man had told her at dinner that he
+loved to wander about and get his hands all covered with dust in the
+old furniture shops, that he would never be really appreciated in
+this commercial age, since he was not concerned about the things that
+interested it, and that he belonged to another generation altogether,
+she would come home saying: "Why, he's an adorable creature; so
+sensitive! I had no idea," and she would conceive for him a strong and
+sudden friendship. But, on the other hand, men who, like Swann, had
+these tastes but did not speak of them, left her cold. She was obliged,
+of course, to admit that Swann was most generous with his money, but she
+would add, pouting: "It's not the same thing, you see, with him,"
+and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the
+practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.
+
+Feeling that, often, he could not give her in reality the pleasures of
+which she dreamed, he tried at least to ensure that she should be happy
+in his company, tried not to contradict those vulgar ideas, that bad
+taste which she displayed on every possible occasion, which all the same
+he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came from her,
+which even fascinated him, for were they not so many more of those
+characteristic features, by virtue of which the essential qualities
+of the woman emerged, and were made visible? And so, when she was in a
+happy mood because she was going to see the _Reine Topaze_, or when her
+eyes grew serious, troubled, petulant, if she was afraid of missing the
+flower-show, or merely of not being in time for tea, with muffins and
+toast, at the Rue Royale tea-rooms, where she believed that regular
+attendance was indispensable, and set the seal upon a woman's
+certificate of 'smartness,' Swann, enraptured, as all of us are, at
+times, by the natural behaviour of a child, or by the likeness of a
+portrait, which appears to be on the point of speaking, would feel so
+distinctly the soul of his mistress rising to fill the outlines of her
+face that he could not refrain from going across and welcoming it
+with his lips. "Oh, then, so little Odette wants us to take her to the
+flower-show, does she? she wants to be admired, does she? very well, we
+will take her there, we can but obey her wishes." As Swann's sight was
+beginning to fail, he had to resign himself to a pair of spectacles,
+which he wore at home, when working, while to face the world he adopted
+a single eyeglass, as being less disfiguring. The first time that she
+saw it in his eye, she could not contain herself for joy: "I really do
+think--for a man, that is to say--it is tremendously smart! How nice you
+look with it! Every inch a gentleman. All you want now is a title!" she
+concluded, with a tinge of regret in her voice. He liked Odette to say
+these things, just as, if he had been in love with a Breton girl, he
+would have enjoyed seeing her in her coif and hearing her say that she
+believed in ghosts. Always until then, as is common among men whose
+taste for the fine arts develops independently of their sensuality, a
+grotesque disparity had existed between the satisfactions which he would
+accord to either taste simultaneously; yielding to the seduction of
+works of art which grew more and more subtle as the women in whose
+company he enjoyed them grew more illiterate and common, he would take a
+little servant-girl to a screened box in a theatre where there was some
+decadent piece which he had wished to see performed, or to an exhibition
+of impressionist painting, with the conviction, moreover, that an
+educated, 'society' woman would have understood them no better, but
+would not have managed to keep quiet about them so prettily. But, now
+that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share her
+sympathies, to strive to be one with her in spirit was a task so
+attractive that he tried to find satisfaction in the things that she
+liked, and did find a pleasure, not only in copying her habits but in
+adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because, as those habits
+and opinions sprang from no roots in her intelligence, they suggested
+to him nothing except that love, for the sake of which he had preferred
+them to his own. If he went again to _Serge Panine_, if he looked out
+for opportunities of going to watch Olivier Métra conducting, it was for
+the pleasure of being initiated into every one of the ideas in Odette's
+mind, of feeling that he had an equal share in all her tastes. This
+charm of drawing him closer to her, which her favourite plays and
+pictures and places possessed, struck him as being more mysterious than
+the intrinsic charm of more beautiful things and places, which appealed
+to him by their beauty, but without recalling her. Besides, having
+allowed the intellectual beliefs of his youth to grow faint, until his
+scepticism, as a finished 'man of the world,' had gradually penetrated
+them unawares, he held (or at least he had held for so long that he had
+fallen into the habit of saying) that the objects which we admire have
+no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of
+dates and castes, and consists in a series of fashions, the most vulgar
+of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most
+refined. And as he had decided that the importance which Odette attached
+to receiving cards for a private view was not in itself any more
+ridiculous than the pleasure which he himself had at one time felt in
+going to luncheon with the Prince of Wales, so he did not think that the
+admiration which she professed for Monte-Carlo or for the Righi was any
+more unreasonable than his own liking for Holland (which she imagined
+as ugly) and for Versailles (which bored her to tears). And so he denied
+himself the pleasure of visiting those places, consoling himself with
+the reflection that it was for her sake that he wished to feel, to like
+nothing that was not equally felt and liked by her.
+
+Like everything else that formed part of Odette's environment, and was
+no more, in a sense, than the means whereby he might see and talk to her
+more often, he enjoyed the society of the Verdurins. With them, since,
+at the heart of all their entertainments, dinners, musical evenings,
+games, suppers in fancy dress, excursions to the country, theatre
+parties, even the infrequent 'big evenings' when they entertained
+'bores,' there were the presence of Odette, the sight of Odette,
+conversation with Odette, an inestimable boon which the Verdurins, by
+inviting him to their house, bestowed on Swann, he was happier in the
+little 'nucleus' than anywhere else, and tried to find some genuine
+merit in each of its members, imagining that his tastes would lead him
+to frequent their society for the rest of his life. Never daring to
+whisper to himself, lest he should doubt the truth of the suggestion,
+that he would always be in love with Odette, at least when he tried to
+suppose that he would always go to the Verdurins' (a proposition
+which, a priori, raised fewer fundamental objections on the part of his
+intelligence), he saw himself for the future continuing to meet Odette
+every evening; that did not, perhaps, come quite to the same thing as
+his being permanently in love with her, but for the moment while he was
+in love with her, to feel that he would not, one day, cease to see her
+was all that he could ask. "What a charming atmosphere!" he said to
+himself. "How entirely genuine life is to these people! They are far
+more intelligent, far more artistic, surely, than the people one knows.
+Mme. Verdurin, in spite of a few trifling exaggerations which are rather
+absurd, has a sincere love of painting and music! What a passion for
+works of art, what anxiety to give pleasure to artists! Her ideas about
+some of the people one knows are not quite right, but then their ideas
+about artistic circles are altogether wrong! Possibly I make no great
+intellectual demands upon conversation, but I am perfectly happy talking
+to Cottard, although he does trot out those idiotic puns. And as for
+the painter, if he is rather unpleasantly affected when he tries to be
+paradoxical, still he has one of the finest brains that I have ever come
+across. Besides, what is most important, one feels quite free there, one
+does what one likes without constraint or fuss. What a flow of humour
+there is every day in that drawing-room! Certainly, with a few rare
+exceptions, I never want to go anywhere else again. It will become more
+and more of a habit, and I shall spend the rest of my life among them."
+
+And as the qualities which he supposed to be an intrinsic part of
+the Verdurin character were no more, really, than their superficial
+reflection of the pleasure which had been enjoyed in their society by
+his love for Odette, those qualities became more serious, more profound,
+more vital, as that pleasure increased. Since Mme. Verdurin gave Swann,
+now and then, what alone could constitute his happiness; since, on an
+evening when he felt anxious because Odette had talked rather more to
+one of the party than to another, and, in a spasm of irritation, would
+not take the initiative by asking her whether she was coming home, Mme.
+Verdurin brought peace and joy to his troubled spirit by the spontaneous
+exclamation: "Odette! You'll see M. Swann home, won't you?"; since,
+when the summer holidays came, and after he had asked himself uneasily
+whether Odette might not leave Paris without him, whether he would still
+be able to see her every day, Mme. Verdurin was going to invite them
+both to spend the summer with her in the country; Swann, unconsciously
+allowing gratitude and self-interest to filter into his intelligence and
+to influence his ideas, went so far as to proclaim that Mme. Verdurin
+was "a great and noble soul." Should any of his old fellow-pupils in the
+Louvre school of painting speak to him of some rare or eminent artist,
+"I'd a hundred times rather," he would reply, "have the Verdurins." And,
+with a solemnity of diction which was new in him: "They are magnanimous
+creatures, and magnanimity is, after all, the one thing that matters,
+the one thing that gives us distinction here on earth. Look you, there
+are only two classes of men, the magnanimous, and the rest; and I have
+reached an age when one has to take sides, to decide once and for all
+whom one is going to like and dislike, to stick to the people one likes,
+and, to make up for the time one has wasted with the others, never to
+leave them again as long as one lives. Very well!" he went on, with the
+slight emotion which a man feels when, even without being fully aware of
+what he is doing, he says something, not because it is true but because
+he enjoys saying it, and listens to his own voice uttering the words
+as though they came from some one else, "The die is now cast; I have
+elected to love none but magnanimous souls, and to live only in an
+atmosphere of magnanimity. You ask me whether Mme. Verdurin is really
+intelligent. I can assure you that she has given me proofs of a nobility
+of heart, of a loftiness of soul, to which no one could possibly
+attain--how could they?--without a corresponding loftiness of mind.
+Without question, she has a profound understanding of art. But it is
+not, perhaps, in that that she is most admirable; every little action,
+ingeniously, exquisitely kind, which she has performed for my sake,
+every friendly attention, simple little things, quite domestic and yet
+quite sublime, reveal a more profound comprehension of existence than
+all your textbooks of philosophy."
+
+* * *
+
+He might have reminded himself, all the same, that there were various
+old friends of his family who were just as simple as the Verdurins,
+companions of his early days who were just as fond of art, that he knew
+other 'great-hearted creatures,' and that, nevertheless, since he had
+cast his vote in favour of simplicity, the arts, and magnanimity, he had
+entirely ceased to see them. But these people did not know Odette, and,
+if they had known her, would never have thought of introducing her to
+him.
+
+And so there was probably not, in the whole of the Verdurin circle, a
+single one of the 'faithful' who loved them, or believed that he loved
+them, as dearly as did Swann. And yet, when M. Verdurin said that he was
+not satisfied with Swann, he had not only expressed his own sentiments,
+he had unwittingly discovered his wife's. Doubtless Swann had too
+particular an affection for Odette, as to which he had failed to take
+Mme. Verdurin daily into his confidence; doubtless the very discretion
+with which he availed himself of the Verdurins' hospitality, refraining,
+often, from coming to dine with them for a reason which they never
+suspected, and in place of which they saw only an anxiety on his part
+not to have to decline an invitation to the house of some 'bore' or
+other; doubtless, also, and despite all the precautions which he had
+taken to keep it from them, the gradual discovery which they were
+making of his brilliant position in society--doubtless all these things
+contributed to their general annoyance with Swann. But the real, the
+fundamental reason was quite different. What had happened was that they
+had at once discovered in him a locked door, a reserved, impenetrable
+chamber in which he still professed silently to himself that the
+Princesse de Sagan was not grotesque, and that Cottard's jokes were
+not amusing; in a word (and for all that he never once abandoned his
+friendly attitude towards them all, or revolted from their dogmas), they
+had discovered an impossibility of imposing those dogmas upon him, of
+entirely converting him to their faith, the like of which they had never
+come across in anyone before. They would have forgiven his going to the
+houses of 'bores' (to whom, as it happened, in his heart of hearts he
+infinitely preferred the Verdurins and all their little 'nucleus') had
+he consented to set a good example by openly renouncing those 'bores'
+in the presence of the 'faithful.' But that was an abjuration which, as
+they well knew, they were powerless to extort.
+
+What a difference was there in a 'newcomer' whom Odette had asked them
+to invite, although she herself had met him only a few times, and on
+whom they were building great hopes--the Comte de Forcheville! (It
+turned out that he was nothing more nor less than the brother-in-law of
+Saniette, a discovery which filled all the 'faithful' with amazement:
+the manners of the old palaeographer were so humble that they had always
+supposed him to be of a class inferior, socially, to their own, and
+had never expected to learn that he came of a rich and relatively
+aristocratic family.) Of course, Forcheville was enormously the 'swell,'
+which Swann was not or had quite ceased to be; of course, he would never
+dream of placing, as Swann now placed, the Verdurin circle above any
+other. But he lacked that natural refinement which prevented Swann from
+associating himself with the criticisms (too obviously false to be worth
+his notice) that Mme. Verdurin levelled at people whom he knew. As for
+the vulgar and affected tirades in which the painter sometimes indulged,
+the bag-man's pleasantries which Cottard used to hazard,--whereas
+Swann, who liked both men sincerely, could easily find excuses for these
+without having either the courage or the hypocrisy to applaud them,
+Forcheville, on the other hand, was on an intellectual level which
+permitted him to be stupified, amazed by the invective (without in the
+least understanding what it all was about), and to be frankly delighted
+by the wit. And the very first dinner at the Verdurins' at which
+Forcheville was present threw a glaring light upon all the differences
+between them, made his qualities start into prominence and precipitated
+the disgrace of Swann.
+
+There was, at this dinner, besides the usual party, a professor from
+the Sorbonne, one Brichot, who had met M. and Mme. Verdurin at a
+watering-place somewhere, and, if his duties at the university and his
+other works of scholarship had not left him with very little time
+to spare, would gladly have come to them more often. For he had that
+curiosity, that superstitious outlook on life, which, combined with a
+certain amount of scepticism with regard to the object of their studies,
+earn for men of intelligence, whatever their profession, for doctors
+who do not believe in medicine, for schoolmasters who do not believe in
+Latin exercises, the reputation of having broad, brilliant, and indeed
+superior minds. He affected, when at Mme. Verdurin's, to choose his
+illustrations from among the most topical subjects of the day, when he
+spoke of philosophy or history, principally because he regarded those
+sciences as no more, really, than a preparation for life itself, and
+imagined that he was seeing put into practice by the 'little clan'
+what hitherto he had known only from books; and also, perhaps,
+because, having had drilled into him as a boy, and having unconsciously
+preserved, a feeling of reverence for certain subjects, he thought that
+he was casting aside the scholar's gown when he ventured to treat those
+subjects with a conversational licence, which seemed so to him only
+because the folds of the gown still clung.
+
+Early in the course of the dinner, when M. de Forcheville, seated on the
+right of Mme. Verdurin, who, in the 'newcomer's' honour, had taken great
+pains with her toilet, observed to her: "Quite original, that white
+dress," the Doctor, who had never taken his eyes off him, so curious was
+he to learn the nature and attributes of what he called a "de," and was
+on the look-out for an opportunity of attracting his attention, so as
+to come into closer contact with him, caught in its flight the adjective
+'_blanche_' and, his eyes still glued to his plate, snapped out,
+"_Blanche_? Blanche of Castile?" then, without moving his head, shot
+a furtive glance to right and left of him, doubtful, but happy on the
+whole. While Swann, by the painful and futile effort which he made to
+smile, testified that he thought the pun absurd, Forcheville had shewn
+at once that he could appreciate its subtlety, and that he was a man of
+the world, by keeping within its proper limits a mirth the spontaneity
+of which had charmed Mme. Verdurin.
+
+"What are you to say of a scientist like that?" she asked Forcheville.
+"You can't talk seriously to him for two minutes on end. Is that the
+sort of thing you tell them at your hospital?" she went on, turning to
+the Doctor. "They must have some pretty lively times there, if that's
+the case. I can see that I shall have to get taken in as a patient!"
+
+"I think I heard the Doctor speak of that wicked old humbug, Blanche of
+Castile, if I may so express myself. Am I not right, Madame?" Brichot
+appealed to Mme. Verdurin, who, swooning with merriment, her eyes
+tightly closed, had buried her face in her two hands, from between
+which, now and then, escaped a muffled scream.
+
+"Good gracious, Madame, I would not dream of shocking the
+reverent-minded, if there are any such around this table, _sub rosa_...
+I recognise, moreover, that our ineffable and Athenian--oh, how
+infinitely Athenian--Republic is capable of honouring, in the person of
+that obscurantist old she-Capet, the first of our chiefs of police. Yes,
+indeed, my dear host, yes, indeed!" he repeated in his ringing voice,
+which sounded a separate note for each syllable, in reply to a protest
+by M. Verdurin. "The Chronicle of Saint Denis, and the authenticity of
+its information is beyond question, leaves us no room for doubt on that
+point. No one could be more fitly chosen as Patron by a secularising
+proletariat than that mother of a Saint, who let him see some pretty
+fishy saints besides, as Suger says, and other great St. Bernards of the
+sort; for with her it was a case of taking just what you pleased."
+
+"Who is that gentleman?" Forcheville asked Mme. Verdurin. "He seems to
+speak with great authority."
+
+"What! Do you mean to say you don't know the famous Brichot? Why, he's
+celebrated all over Europe."
+
+"Oh, that's Bréchot, is it?" exclaimed Forcheville, who had not quite
+caught the name. "You must tell me all about him"; he went on, fastening
+a pair of goggle eyes on the celebrity. "It's always interesting to
+meet well-known people at dinner. But, I say, you ask us to very select
+parties here. No dull evenings in this house, I'm sure."
+
+"Well, you know what it is really," said Mme. Verdurin modestly.
+"They feel safe here. They can talk about whatever they like, and the
+conversation goes off like fireworks. Now Brichot, this evening, is
+nothing. I've seen him, don't you know, when he's been with me, simply
+dazzling; you'd want to go on your knees to him. Well, with anyone else
+he's not the same man, he's not in the least witty, you have to drag the
+words out of him, he's even boring."
+
+"That's strange," remarked Forcheville with fitting astonishment.
+
+A sort of wit like Brichot's would have been regarded as out-and-out
+stupidity by the people among whom Swann had spent his early life,
+for all that it is quite compatible with real intelligence. And the
+intelligence of the Professor's vigorous and well-nourished brain might
+easily have been envied by many of the people in society who seemed
+witty enough to Swann. But these last had so thoroughly inculcated into
+him their likes and dislikes, at least in everything that pertained
+to their ordinary social existence, including that annex to social
+existence which belongs, strictly speaking, to the domain of
+intelligence, namely, conversation, that Swann could not see anything
+in Brichot's pleasantries; to him they were merely pedantic, vulgar,
+and disgustingly coarse. He was shocked, too, being accustomed to
+good manners, by the rude, almost barrack-room tone which this
+student-in-arms adopted, no matter to whom he was speaking. Finally,
+perhaps, he had lost all patience that evening as he watched Mme.
+Verdurin welcoming, with such unnecessary warmth, this Forcheville
+fellow, whom it had been Odette's unaccountable idea to bring to the
+house. Feeling a little awkward, with Swann there also, she had asked
+him on her arrival: "What do you think of my guest?"
+
+And he, suddenly realising for the first time that Forcheville, whom
+he had known for years, could actually attract a woman, and was quite a
+good specimen of a man, had retorted: "Beastly!" He had, certainly,
+no idea of being jealous of Odette, but did not feel quite so happy as
+usual, and when Brichot, having begun to tell them the story of Blanche
+of Castile's mother, who, according to him, "had been with Henry
+Plantagenet for years before they were married," tried to prompt Swann
+to beg him to continue the story, by interjecting "Isn't that so, M.
+Swann?" in the martial accents which one uses in order to get down to
+the level of an unintelligent rustic or to put the 'fear of God' into
+a trooper, Swann cut his story short, to the intense fury of their
+hostess, by begging to be excused for taking so little interest in
+Blanche of Castile, as he had something that he wished to ask the
+painter. He, it appeared, had been that afternoon to an exhibition of
+the work of another artist, also a friend of Mme. Verdurin, who had
+recently died, and Swann wished to find out from him (for he valued
+his discrimination) whether there had really been anything more in this
+later work than the virtuosity which had struck people so forcibly in
+his earlier exhibitions.
+
+"From that point of view it was extraordinary, but it did not seem to me
+to be a form of art which you could call 'elevated,'" said Swann with a
+smile.
+
+"Elevated... to the height of an Institute!" interrupted Cottard,
+raising his arms with mock solemnity. The whole table burst out
+laughing.
+
+"What did I tell you?" said Mme. Verdurin to Forcheville. "It's simply
+impossible to be serious with him. When you least expect it, out he
+comes with a joke."
+
+But she observed that Swann, and Swann alone, had not unbent. For one
+thing he was none too well pleased with Cottard for having secured a
+laugh at his expense in front of Forcheville. But the painter, instead
+of replying in a way that might have interested Swann, as he would
+probably have done had they been alone together, preferred to win the
+easy admiration of the rest by exercising his wit upon the talent of
+their dead friend.
+
+"I went up to one of them," he began, "just to see how it was done; I
+stuck my nose into it. Yes, I don't think! Impossible to say whether
+it was done with glue, with soap, with sealing-wax, with sunshine, with
+leaven, with excrem..."
+
+"And one make twelve!" shouted the Doctor, wittily, but just too late,
+for no one saw the point of his interruption.
+
+"It looks as though it were done with nothing at all," resumed the
+painter. "No more chance of discovering the trick than there is in the
+'Night Watch,' or the 'Regents,' and it's even bigger work than either
+Rembrandt or Hals ever did. It's all there,--and yet, no, I'll take my
+oath it isn't."
+
+Then, just as singers who have reached the highest note in their
+compass, proceed to hum the rest of the air in falsetto, he had to be
+satisfied with murmuring, smiling the while, as if, after all, there had
+been something irresistibly amusing in the sheer beauty of the painting:
+"It smells all right; it makes your head go round; it catches your
+breath; you feel ticklish all over--and not the faintest clue to how
+it's done. The man's a sorcerer; the thing's a conjuring-trick, it's
+a miracle," bursting outright into laughter, "it's dishonest!" Then
+stopping, solemnly raising his head, pitching his voice on a double-bass
+note which he struggled to bring into harmony, he concluded, "And it's
+so loyal!"
+
+Except at the moment when he had called it "bigger than the 'Night
+Watch,'" a blasphemy which had called forth an instant protest from Mme.
+Verdurin, who regarded the 'Night Watch' as the supreme masterpiece of
+the universe (conjointly with the 'Ninth' and the 'Samothrace'), and at
+the word "excrement," which had made Forcheville throw a sweeping glance
+round the table to see whether it was 'all right,' before he allowed his
+lips to curve in a prudish and conciliatory smile, all the party
+(save Swann) had kept their fascinated and adoring eyes fixed upon the
+painter.
+
+"I do so love him when he goes up in the air like that!" cried
+Mme. Verdurin, the moment that he had finished, enraptured that the
+table-talk should have proved so entertaining on the very night that
+Forcheville was dining with them for the first time. "Hallo, you!" she
+turned to her husband, "what's the matter with you, sitting there gaping
+like a great animal? You know, though, don't you," she apologised
+for him to the painter, "that he can talk quite well when he chooses;
+anybody would think it was the first time he had ever listened to you.
+If you had only seen him while you were speaking; he was just drinking
+it all in. And to-morrow he will tell us everything you said, without
+missing a word."
+
+"No, really, I'm not joking!" protested the painter, enchanted by the
+success of his speech. "You all look as if you thought I was pulling
+your legs, that it was just a trick. I'll take you to see the show, and
+then you can say whether I've been exaggerating; I'll bet you anything
+you like, you'll come away more 'up in the air' than I am!"
+
+"But we don't suppose for a moment that you're exaggerating; we only
+want you to go on with your dinner, and my husband too. Give M. Biche
+some more sole, can't you see his has got cold? We're not in any hurry;
+you're dashing round as if the house was on fire. Wait a little; don't
+serve the salad just yet."
+
+Mme. Cottard, who was a shy woman and spoke but seldom, was not lacking,
+for all that, in self-assurance when a happy inspiration put the right
+word in her mouth. She felt that it would be well received; the thought
+gave her confidence, and what she was doing was done with the object not
+so much of shining herself, as of helping her husband on in his career.
+And so she did not allow the word 'salad,' which Mme. Verdurin had just
+uttered, to pass unchallenged.
+
+"It's not a Japanese salad, is it?" she whispered, turning towards
+Odette.
+
+And then, in her joy and confusion at the combination of neatness
+and daring which there had been in making so discreet and yet so
+unmistakable an allusion to the new and brilliantly successful play by
+Dumas, she broke down in a charming, girlish laugh, not very loud, but
+so irresistible that it was some time before she could control it.
+
+"Who is that lady? She seems devilish clever," said Forcheville.
+
+"No, it is not. But we will have one for you if you will all come to
+dinner on Friday."
+
+"You will think me dreadfully provincial, sir," said Mme. Cottard to
+Swann, "but, do you know, I haven't been yet to this famous _Francillon_
+that everybody's talking about. The Doctor has been (I remember now,
+he told me what a very great pleasure it had been to him to spend the
+evening with you there) and I must confess, I don't see much sense in
+spending money on seats for him to take me, when he's seen the play
+already. Of course an evening at the Théâtre-Français is never wasted,
+really; the acting's so good there always; but we have some very nice
+friends," (Mme. Cottard would hardly ever utter a proper name, but
+restricted herself to "some friends of ours" or "one of my friends," as
+being more 'distinguished,' speaking in an affected tone and with all
+the importance of a person who need give names only when she chooses)
+"who often have a box, and are kind enough to take us to all the
+new pieces that are worth going to, and so I'm certain to see this
+_Francillon_ sooner or later, and then I shall know what to think. But I
+do feel such a fool about it, I must confess, for, whenever I pay a
+call anywhere, I find everybody talking--it's only natural--about that
+wretched Japanese salad. Really and truly, one's beginning to get just a
+little tired of hearing about it," she went on, seeing that Swann seemed
+less interested than she had hoped in so burning a topic. "I must admit,
+though, that it's sometimes quite amusing, the way they joke about it:
+I've got a friend, now, who is most original, though she's really a
+beautiful woman, most popular in society, goes everywhere, and she tells
+me that she got her cook to make one of these Japanese salads, putting
+in everything that young M. Dumas says you're to put in, in the play.
+Then she asked just a few friends to come and taste it. I was not among
+the favoured few, I'm sorry to say. But she told us all about it on her
+next 'day'; it seems it was quite horrible, she made us all laugh
+till we cried. I don't know; perhaps it was the way she told it," Mme.
+Cottard added doubtfully, seeing that Swann still looked grave.
+
+And, imagining that it was, perhaps, because he had not been amused by
+_Francillon_: "Well, I daresay I shall be disappointed with it, after
+all. I don't suppose it's as good as the piece Mme. de Crécy worships,
+_Serge Panine_. There's a play, if you like; so deep, makes you
+think! But just fancy giving a receipt for a salad on the stage of the
+Théâtre-Français! Now, _Serge Panine_--! But then, it's like everything
+that comes from the pen of M. Georges Ohnet, it's so well written. I
+wonder if you know the _Maître des Forges_, which I like even better
+than _Serge Panine_."
+
+"Pardon me," said Swann with polite irony, "but I can assure you that
+my want of admiration is almost equally divided between those
+masterpieces."
+
+"Really, now; that's very interesting. And what don't you like about
+them? Won't you ever change your mind? Perhaps you think he's a little
+too sad. Well, well, what I always say is, one should never argue about
+plays or novels. Everyone has his own way of looking at things, and what
+may be horrible to you is, perhaps, just what I like best."
+
+She was interrupted by Forcheville's addressing Swann. What had happened
+was that, while Mme. Cottard was discussing _Francillon_, Forcheville
+had been expressing to Mme. Verdurin his admiration for what he called
+the "little speech" of the painter. "Your friend has such a flow of
+language, such a memory!" he had said to her when the painter had
+come to a standstill, "I've seldom seen anything like it. He'd make a
+first-rate preacher. By Jove, I wish I was like that. What with him and
+M. Bréchot you've drawn two lucky numbers to-night; though I'm not so
+sure that, simply as a speaker, this one doesn't knock spots off the
+Professor. It comes more naturally with him, less like reading from a
+book. Of course, the way he goes on, he does use some words that are
+a bit realistic, and all that; but that's quite the thing nowadays;
+anyhow, it's not often I've seen a man hold the floor as cleverly as
+that, 'hold the spittoon,' as we used to say in the regiment, where, by
+the way, we had a man he rather reminds me of. You could take anything
+you liked--I don't know what--this glass, say; and he'd talk away about
+it for hours; no, not this glass; that's a silly thing to say, I'm
+sorry; but something a little bigger, like the battle of Waterloo, or
+anything of that sort, he'd tell you things you simply wouldn't believe.
+Why, Swann was in the regiment then; he must have known him."
+
+"Do you see much of M. Swann?" asked Mme. Verdurin.
+
+"Oh dear, no!" he answered, and then, thinking that if he made himself
+pleasant to Swann he might find favour with Odette, he decided to
+take this opportunity of flattering him by speaking of his fashionable
+friends, but speaking as a man of the world himself, in a tone of
+good-natured criticism, and not as though he were congratulating Swann
+upon some undeserved good fortune: "Isn't that so, Swann? I never see
+anything of you, do I?--But then, where on earth is one to see him? The
+creature spends all his time shut up with the La Trémoïlles, with the
+Laumes and all that lot!" The imputation would have been false at any
+time, and was all the more so, now that for at least a year Swann had
+given up going to almost any house but the Verdurins'. But the mere
+names of families whom the Verdurins did not know were received by them
+in a reproachful silence. M. Verdurin, dreading the painful impression
+which the mention of these 'bores,' especially when flung at her in this
+tactless fashion, and in front of all the 'faithful,' was bound to
+make on his wife, cast a covert glance at her, instinct with anxious
+solicitude. He saw then that in her fixed resolution to take no notice,
+to have escaped contact, altogether, with the news which had just been
+addressed to her, not merely to remain dumb but to have been deaf
+as well, as we pretend to be when a friend who has been in the wrong
+attempts to slip into his conversation some excuse which we should
+appear to be accepting, should we appear to have heard it without
+protesting, or when some one utters the name of an enemy, the very
+mention of whom in our presence is forbidden; Mme. Verdurin, so that
+her silence should have the appearance, not of consent but of the
+unconscious silence which inanimate objects preserve, had suddenly
+emptied her face of all life, of all mobility; her rounded forehead was
+nothing, now, but an exquisite study in high relief, which the name of
+those La Trémoïlles, with whom Swann was always 'shut up,' had failed
+to penetrate; her nose, just perceptibly wrinkled in a frown, exposed to
+view two dark cavities that were, surely, modelled from life. You would
+have said that her half-opened lips were just about to speak. It was
+all no more, however, than a wax cast, a mask in plaster, the sculptor's
+design for a monument, a bust to be exhibited in the Palace of Industry,
+where the public would most certainly gather in front of it and marvel
+to see how the sculptor, in expressing the unchallengeable dignity of
+the Verdurins, as opposed to that of the La Trémoïlles or Laumes, whose
+equals (if not, indeed, their betters) they were, and the equals and
+betters of all other 'bores' upon the face of the earth, had managed to
+invest with a majesty that was almost Papal the whiteness and rigidity
+of his stone. But the marble at last grew animated and let it be
+understood that it didn't do to be at all squeamish if one went to that
+house, since the woman was always tipsy and the husband so uneducated
+that he called a corridor a 'collidor'!
+
+"You'd need to pay me a lot of money before I'd let any of that lot set
+foot inside my house," Mme. Verdurin concluded, gazing imperially down
+on Swann.
+
+She could scarcely have expected him to capitulate so completely as to
+echo the holy simplicity of the pianist's aunt, who at once exclaimed:
+"To think of that, now! What surprises me is that they can get anybody
+to go near them; I'm sure I should be afraid; one can't be too careful.
+How can people be so common as to go running after them?"
+
+But he might, at least, have replied, like Forcheville: "Gad, she's a
+duchess; there are still plenty of people who are impressed by that sort
+of thing," which would at least have permitted Mme. Verdurin the final
+retort, "And a lot of good may it do them!" Instead of which, Swann
+merely smiled, in a manner which shewed, quite clearly, that he could
+not, of course, take such an absurd suggestion seriously. M. Verdurin,
+who was still casting furtive and intermittent glances at his wife,
+could see with regret, and could understand only too well that she was
+now inflamed with the passion of a Grand Inquisitor who cannot succeed
+in stamping out a heresy; and so, in the hope of bringing Swann round
+to a retractation (for the courage of one's opinions is always a form of
+calculating cowardice in the eyes of the 'other side'), he broke in:
+
+"Tell us frankly, now, what you think of them yourself. We shan't repeat
+it to them, you may be sure."
+
+To which Swann answered: "Why, I'm not in the least afraid of the
+Duchess (if it is of the La Trémoïlles that you're speaking). I can
+assure you that everyone likes going to see her. I don't go so far as
+to say that she's at all 'deep'--" he pronounced the word as if it meant
+something ridiculous, for his speech kept the traces of certain mental
+habits which the recent change in his life, a rejuvenation illustrated
+by his passion for music, had inclined him temporarily to discard,
+so that at times he would actually state his views with considerable
+warmth--"but I am quite sincere when I say that she is intelligent,
+while her husband is positively a bookworm. They are charming people."
+
+His explanation was terribly effective; Mme. Verdurin now realised that
+this one state of unbelief would prevent her 'little nucleus' from ever
+attaining to complete unanimity, and was unable to restrain herself, in
+her fury at the obstinacy of this wretch who could not see what anguish
+his words were causing her, but cried aloud, from the depths of her
+tortured heart, "You may think so if you wish, but at least you need not
+say so to us."
+
+"It all depends upon what you call intelligence." Forcheville felt that
+it was his turn to be brilliant. "Come now, Swann, tell us what you mean
+by intelligence."
+
+"There," cried Odette, "that's one of the big things I beg him to tell
+me about, and he never will."
+
+"Oh, but..." protested Swann.
+
+"Oh, but nonsense!" said Odette.
+
+"A water-butt?" asked the Doctor.
+
+"To you," pursued Forcheville, "does intelligence mean what they call
+clever talk; you know, the sort of people who worm their way into
+society?"
+
+"Finish your sweet, so that they can take your plate away!" said Mme.
+Verdurin sourly to Saniette, who was lost in thought and had stopped
+eating. And then, perhaps a little ashamed of her rudeness, "It doesn't
+matter; take your time about it; there's no hurry; I only reminded you
+because of the others, you know; it keeps the servants back."
+
+"There is," began Brichot, with a resonant smack upon every syllable, "a
+rather curious definition of intelligence by that pleasing old anarchist
+Fénelon..."
+
+"Just listen to this!" Mme. Verdurin rallied Forcheville and the Doctor.
+"He's going to give us Fénelon's definition of intelligence. That's
+interesting. It's not often you get a chance of hearing that!"
+
+But Brichot was keeping Fénelon's definition until Swann should
+have given his own. Swann remained silent, and, by this fresh act of
+recreancy, spoiled the brilliant tournament of dialectic which Mme.
+Verdurin was rejoicing at being able to offer to Forcheville.
+
+"You see, it's just the same as with me!" Odette was peevish. "I'm not
+at all sorry to see that I'm not the only one he doesn't find quite up
+to his level."
+
+"These de La Trémouailles whom Mme. Verdurin has exhibited to us as so
+little to be desired," inquired Brichot, articulating vigorously, "are
+they, by any chance, descended from the couple whom that worthy old
+snob, Sévigné, said she was delighted to know, because it was so good
+for her peasants? True, the Marquise had another reason, which in her
+case probably came first, for she was a thorough journalist at heart,
+and always on the look-out for 'copy.' And, in the journal which she
+used to send regularly to her daughter, it was Mme. de La Trémouaille,
+kept well-informed through all her grand connections, who supplied the
+foreign politics."
+
+"Oh dear, no. I'm quite sure they aren't the same family," said Mme.
+Verdurin desperately.
+
+Saniette who, ever since he had surrendered his untouched plate to the
+butler, had been plunged once more in silent meditation, emerged finally
+to tell them, with a nervous laugh, a story of how he had once dined
+with the Duc de La Trémoïlle, the point of which was that the Duke
+did not know that George Sand was the pseudonym of a woman. Swann,
+who really liked Saniette, felt bound to supply him with a few facts
+illustrative of the Duke's culture, which would prove that such
+ignorance on his part was literally impossible; but suddenly he stopped
+short; he had realised, as he was speaking, that Saniette needed no
+proof, but knew already that the story was untrue for the simple reason
+that he had at that moment invented it. The worthy man suffered acutely
+from the Verdurins' always finding him so dull; and as he was conscious
+of having been more than ordinarily morose this evening, he had made up
+his mind that he would succeed in being amusing, at least once, before
+the end of dinner. He surrendered so quickly, looked so wretched at the
+sight of his castle in ruins, and replied in so craven a tone to Swann,
+appealing to him not to persist in a refutation which was already
+superfluous, "All right; all right; anyhow, even if I have made a
+mistake that's not a crime, I hope," that Swann longed to be able
+to console him by insisting that the story was indubitably true and
+exquisitely funny. The Doctor, who had been listening, had an idea that
+it was the right moment to interject "_Se non è vero_," but he was not
+quite certain of the words, and was afraid of being caught out.
+
+After dinner, Forcheville went up to the Doctor. "She can't have been
+at all bad looking, Mme. Verdurin; anyhow, she's a woman you can really
+talk to; that's all I want. Of course she's getting a bit broad in the
+beam. But Mme. de Crécy! There's a little woman who knows what's what,
+all right. Upon my word and soul, you can see at a glance she's got
+the American eye, that girl has. We are speaking of Mme. de Crécy," he
+explained, as M. Verdurin joined them, his pipe in his mouth. "I should
+say that, as a specimen of the female form--"
+
+"I'd rather have it in my bed than a clap of thunder!" the words came
+tumbling from Cottard, who had for some time been waiting in vain until
+Forcheville should pause for breath, so that he might get in his hoary
+old joke, a chance for which might not, he feared, come again, if the
+conversation should take a different turn; and he produced it now with
+that excessive spontaneity and confidence which may often be noticed
+attempting to cover up the coldness, and the slight flutter of emotion,
+inseparable from a prepared recitation. Forcheville knew and saw the
+joke, and was thoroughly amused. As for M. Verdurin, he was unsparing
+of his merriment, having recently discovered a way of expressing it by
+a symbol, different from his wife's, but equally simple and obvious.
+Scarcely had he begun the movement of head and shoulders of a man
+who was 'shaking with laughter' than he would begin also to cough, as
+though, in laughing too violently, he had swallowed a mouthful of smoke
+from his pipe. And by keeping the pipe firmly in his mouth he could
+prolong indefinitely the dumb-show of suffocation and hilarity. So he
+and Mme. Verdurin (who, at the other side of the room, where the painter
+was telling her a story, was shutting her eyes preparatory to flinging
+her face into her hands) resembled two masks in a theatre, each
+representing Comedy, but in a different way.
+
+M. Verdurin had been wiser than he knew in not taking his pipe out of
+his mouth, for Cottard, having occasion to leave the room for a moment,
+murmured a witty euphemism which he had recently acquired and repeated
+now whenever he had to go to the place in question: "I must just go and
+see the Duc d'Aumale for a minute," so drolly, that M. Verdurin's cough
+began all over again.
+
+"Now, then, take your pipe out of your mouth; can't you see, you'll
+choke if you try to bottle up your laughter like that," counselled Mme.
+Verdurin, as she came round with a tray of liqueurs.
+
+"What a delightful man your husband is; he has the wit of a dozen!"
+declared Forcheville to Mme. Cottard. "Thank you, thank you, an old
+soldier like me can never say 'No' to a drink."
+
+"M. de Forcheville thinks Odette charming," M. Verdurin told his wife.
+
+"Why, do you know, she wants so much to meet you again some day at
+luncheon. We must arrange it, but don't on any account let Swann hear
+about it. He spoils everything, don't you know. I don't mean to say that
+you're not to come to dinner too, of course; we hope to see you very
+often. Now that the warm weather's coming, we're going to have dinner
+out of doors whenever we can. That won't bore you, will it, a quiet
+little dinner, now and then, in the Bois? Splendid, splendid, that will
+be quite delightful....
+
+"Aren't you going to do any work this evening, I say?" she screamed
+suddenly to the little pianist, seeing an opportunity for displaying,
+before a 'newcomer' of Forcheville's importance, at once her unfailing
+wit and her despotic power over the 'faithful.'
+
+"M. de Forcheville was just going to say something dreadful about you,"
+Mme. Cottard warned her husband as he reappeared in the room. And he,
+still following up the idea of Forcheville's noble birth, which had
+obsessed him all through dinner, began again with: "I am treating a
+Baroness just now, Baroness Putbus; weren't there some Putbuses in the
+Crusades? Anyhow they've got a lake in Pomerania that's ten times the
+size of the Place de la Concorde. I am treating her for dry arthritis;
+she's a charming woman. Mme. Verdurin knows her too, I believe."
+
+Which enabled Forcheville, a moment later, finding himself alone with
+Mme. Cottard, to complete his favourable verdict on her husband with:
+"He's an interesting man, too; you can see that he knows some good
+people. Gad! but they get to know a lot of things, those doctors."
+
+"D'you want me to play the phrase from the sonata for M. Swann?" asked
+the pianist.
+
+"What the devil's that? Not the sonata-snake, I hope!" shouted M. de
+Forcheville, hoping to create an effect. But Dr. Cottard, who had
+never heard this pun, missed the point of it, and imagined that M. de
+Forcheville had made a mistake. He dashed in boldly to correct it: "No,
+no. The word isn't _serpent-à-sonates_, it's _serpent-à-sonnettes_!" he
+explained in a tone at once zealous, impatient, and triumphant.
+
+Forcheville explained the joke to him. The Doctor blushed.
+
+"You'll admit it's not bad, eh, Doctor?"
+
+"Oh! I've known it for ages."
+
+Then they were silenced; heralded by the waving tremolo of the
+violin-part, which formed a bristling bodyguard of sound two octaves
+above it--and as in a mountainous country, against the seeming
+immobility of a vertically falling torrent, one may distinguish, two
+hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley--the
+little phrase had just appeared, distant but graceful, protected by
+the long, gradual unfurling of its transparent, incessant and sonorous
+curtain. And Swann, in his heart of hearts, turned to it, spoke to it as
+to a confidant in the secret of his love, as to a friend of Odette who
+would assure him that he need pay no attention to this Forcheville.
+
+"Ah! you've come too late!" Mme. Verdurin greeted one of the 'faithful,'
+whose invitation had been only 'to look in after dinner,' "we've been
+having a simply incomparable Brichot! You never heard such eloquence!
+But he's gone. Isn't that so, M. Swann? I believe it's the first time
+you've met him," she went on, to emphasize the fact that it was to her
+that Swann owed the introduction. "Isn't that so; wasn't he delicious,
+our Brichot?"
+
+Swann bowed politely.
+
+"No? You weren't interested?" she asked dryly.
+
+"Oh, but I assure you, I was quite enthralled. He is perhaps a little
+too peremptory, a little too jovial for my taste. I should like to see
+him a little less confident at times, a little more tolerant, but one
+feels that he knows a great deal, and on the whole he seems a very sound
+fellow."
+
+The party broke up very late. Cottard's first words to his wife were: "I
+have rarely seen Mme. Verdurin in such form as she was to-night."
+
+"What exactly is your Mme. Verdurin? A bit of a bad hat, eh?" said
+Forcheville to the painter, to whom he had offered a 'lift.' Odette
+watched his departure with regret; she dared not refuse to let Swann
+take her home, but she was moody and irritable in the carriage, and,
+when he asked whether he might come in, replied, "I suppose so," with an
+impatient shrug of her shoulders. When they had all gone, Mme. Verdurin
+said to her husband: "Did you notice the way Swann laughed, such an
+idiotic laugh, when we spoke about Mme. La Trémoïlle?"
+
+She had remarked, more than once, how Swann and Forcheville suppressed
+the particle 'de' before that lady's name. Never doubting that it was
+done on purpose, to shew that they were not afraid of a title, she had
+made up her mind to imitate their arrogance, but had not quite
+grasped what grammatical form it ought to take. Moreover, the natural
+corruptness of her speech overcoming her implacable republicanism,
+she still said instinctively "the de La Trémoïlles," or, rather (by
+an abbreviation sanctified by the usage of music-hall singers and the
+writers of the 'captions' beneath caricatures, who elide the 'de'),
+"the d'La Trémoïlles," but she corrected herself at once to "Madame La
+Trémoïlle.--The _Duchess_, as Swann calls her," she added ironically,
+with a smile which proved that she was merely quoting, and would not,
+herself, accept the least responsibility for a classification so puerile
+and absurd.
+
+"I don't mind saying that I thought him extremely stupid."
+
+M. Verdurin took it up. "He's not sincere. He's a crafty customer,
+always hovering between one side and the other. He's always trying to
+run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. What a difference between
+him and Forcheville. There, at least, you have a man who tells you
+straight out what he thinks. Either you agree with him or you don't.
+Not like the other fellow, who's never definitely fish or fowl. Did you
+notice, by the way, that Odette seemed all out for Forcheville, and I
+don't blame her, either. And then, after all, if Swann tries to come
+the man of fashion over us, the champion of distressed Duchesses, at any
+rate the other man has got a title; he's always Comte de Forcheville!"
+he let the words slip delicately from his lips, as though, familiar with
+every page of the history of that dignity, he were making a scrupulously
+exact estimate of its value, in relation to others of the sort.
+
+"I don't mind saying," Mme. Verdurin went on, "that he saw fit to utter
+some most venomous, and quite absurd insinuations against Brichot.
+Naturally, once he saw that Brichot was popular in this house, it was a
+way of hitting back at us, of spoiling our party. I know his sort, the
+dear, good friend of the family, who pulls you all to pieces on the
+stairs as he's going away."
+
+"Didn't I say so?" retorted her husband. "He's simply a failure; a poor
+little wretch who goes through life mad with jealousy of anything that's
+at all big."
+
+Had the truth been known, there was not one of the 'faithful' who was
+not infinitely more malicious than Swann; but the others would all take
+the precaution of tempering their malice with obvious pleasantries, with
+little sparks of emotion and cordiality; while the least indication of
+reserve on Swann's part, undraped in any such conventional formula
+as "Of course, I don't want to say anything--" to which he would have
+scorned to descend, appeared to them a deliberate act of treachery.
+There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least
+'freedom of speech' is thought revolting because they have not begun
+by flattering the public taste, and serving up to it the commonplace
+expressions to which it is used; it was by the same process that Swann
+infuriated M. Verdurin. In his case as in theirs it was the novelty
+of his language which led his audience to suspect the blackness of his
+designs.
+
+Swann was still unconscious of the disgrace that threatened him at the
+Verdurins', and continued to regard all their absurdities in the most
+rosy light, through the admiring eyes of love.
+
+As a rule he made no appointments with Odette except for the evenings;
+he was afraid of her growing tired of him if he visited her during the
+day as well; at the same time he was reluctant to forfeit, even for
+an hour, the place that he held in her thoughts, and so was constantly
+looking out for an opportunity of claiming her attention, in any way
+that would not be displeasing to her. If, in a florist's or a jeweller's
+window, a plant or an ornament caught his eye, he would at once think
+of sending them to Odette, imagining that the pleasure which the casual
+sight of them had given him would instinctively be felt, also, by her,
+and would increase her affection for himself; and he would order them to
+be taken at once to the Rue La pérouse, so as to accelerate the moment
+in which, as she received an offering from him, he might feel himself,
+in a sense, transported into her presence. He was particularly anxious,
+always, that she should receive these presents before she went out
+for the evening, so that her sense of gratitude towards him might give
+additional tenderness to her welcome when he arrived at the Verdurins',
+might even--for all he knew--if the shopkeeper made haste, bring him a
+letter from her before dinner, or herself, in person, upon his doorstep,
+come on a little extraordinary visit of thanks. As in an earlier phase,
+when he had experimented with the reflex action of anger and contempt
+upon her character, he sought now by that of gratification to elicit
+from her fresh particles of her intimate feelings, which she had never
+yet revealed.
+
+Often she was embarrassed by lack of money, and under pressure from
+a creditor would come to him for assistance. He enjoyed this, as he
+enjoyed everything which could impress Odette with his love for herself,
+or merely with his influence, with the extent of the use that she might
+make of him. Probably if anyone had said to him, at the beginning, "It's
+your position that attracts her," or at this stage, "It's your money
+that she's really in love with," he would not have believed the
+suggestion, nor would he have been greatly distressed by the thought
+that people supposed her to be attached to him, that people felt them
+to be united by any ties so binding as those of snobbishness or wealth.
+But even if he had accepted the possibility, it might not have caused
+him any suffering to discover that Odette's love for him was based on a
+foundation more lasting than mere affection, or any attractive qualities
+which she might have found in him; on a sound, commercial interest; an
+interest which would postpone for ever the fatal day on which she might
+be tempted to bring their relations to an end. For the moment, while
+he lavished presents upon her, and performed all manner of services,
+he could rely on advantages not contained in his person, or in his
+intellect, could forego the endless, killing effort to make himself
+attractive. And this delight in being a lover, in living by love alone,
+of the reality of which he was inclined to be doubtful, the price which,
+in the long run, he must pay for it, as a dilettante in immaterial
+sensations, enhanced its value in his eyes--as one sees people who are
+doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are
+really enjoyable, become convinced that they are, as also of the rare
+quality and absolute detachment of their own taste, when they have
+agreed to pay several pounds a day for a room in an hotel, from which
+that sight and that sound may be enjoyed.
+
+One day, when reflections of this order had brought him once again to
+the memory of the time when some one had spoken to him of Odette as of
+a 'kept' woman, and when, once again, he had amused himself with
+contrasting that strange personification, the 'kept' woman--an
+iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities, embroidered,
+as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers,
+interwoven with precious jewels--with that Odette upon whose face he
+had watched the passage of the same expressions of pity for a sufferer,
+resentment of an act of injustice, gratitude for an act of kindness,
+which he had seen, in earlier days, on his own mother's face, and on
+the faces of friends; that Odette, whose conversation had so frequently
+turned on the things that he himself knew better than anyone, his
+collections, his room, his old servant, his banker, who kept all his
+title-deeds and bonds;--the thought of the banker reminded him that he
+must call on him shortly, to draw some money. And indeed, if, during the
+current month, he were to come less liberally to the aid of Odette in
+her financial difficulties than in the month before, when he had given
+her five thousand francs, if he refrained from offering her a diamond
+necklace for which she longed, he would be allowing her admiration for
+his generosity to decline, that gratitude which had made him so happy,
+and would even be running the risk of her imagining that his love
+for her (as she saw its visible manifestations grow fewer) had itself
+diminished. And then, suddenly, he asked himself whether that was not
+precisely what was implied by 'keeping' a woman (as if, in fact, that
+idea of 'keeping' could be derived from elements not at all mysterious
+nor perverse, but belonging to the intimate routine of his daily life,
+such as that thousand-franc note, a familiar and domestic object, torn
+in places and mended with gummed paper, which his valet, after paying
+the household accounts and the rent, had locked up in a drawer in
+the old writing-desk whence he had extracted it to send it, with four
+others, to Odette) and whether it was not possible to apply to Odette,
+since he had known her (for he never imagined for a moment that she
+could ever have taken a penny from anyone else, before), that title,
+which he had believed so wholly inapplicable to her, of 'kept' woman. He
+could not explore the idea further, for a sudden access of that mental
+lethargy which was, with him, congenital, intermittent and providential,
+happened, at that moment, to extinguish every particle of light in his
+brain, as instantaneously as, at a later period, when electric lighting
+had been everywhere installed, it became possible, merely by fingering
+a switch, to cut off all the supply of light from a house. His mind
+fumbled, for a moment, in the darkness, he took off his spectacles,
+wiped the glasses, passed his hands over his eyes, but saw no light
+until he found himself face to face with a wholly different idea, the
+realisation that he must endeavour, in the coming month, to send Odette
+six or seven thousand-franc notes instead of five, simply as a surprise
+for her and to give her pleasure.
+
+In the evening, when he did not stay at home until it was time to meet
+Odette at the Verdurins', or rather at one of the open-air restaurants
+which they liked to frequent in the Bois and especially at Saint-Cloud,
+he would go to dine in one of those fashionable houses in which, at one
+time, he had been a constant guest. He did not wish to lose touch with
+people who, for all that he knew, might be of use, some day, to Odette,
+and thanks to whom he was often, in the meantime, able to procure for
+her some privilege or pleasure. Besides, he had been used for so long to
+the refinement and comfort of good society that, side by side with his
+contempt, there had grown up also a desperate need for it, with the
+result that, when he had reached the point after which the humblest
+lodgings appeared to him as precisely on a par with the most princely
+mansions, his senses were so thoroughly accustomed to the latter that he
+could not enter the former without a feeling of acute discomfort. He
+had the same regard--to a degree of identity which they would never have
+suspected--for the little families with small incomes who asked him to
+dances in their flats ("straight upstairs to the fifth floor, and the
+door on the left") as for the Princesse de Parme, who gave the most
+splendid parties in Paris; but he had not the feeling of being actually
+'at the ball' when he found himself herded with the fathers of families
+in the bedroom of the lady of the house, while the spectacle of
+wash-hand-stands covered over with towels, and of beds converted into
+cloak-rooms, with a mass of hats and great-coats sprawling over their
+counterpanes, gave him the same stifling sensation that, nowadays,
+people who have been used for half a lifetime to electric light derive
+from a smoking lamp or a candle that needs to be snuffed. If he were
+dining out, he would order his carriage for half-past seven; while he
+changed his clothes, he would be wondering, all the time, about Odette,
+and in this way was never alone, for the constant thought of Odette
+gave to the moments in which he was separated from her the same peculiar
+charm as to those in which she was at his side. He would get into his
+carriage and drive off, but he knew that this thought had jumped in
+after him and had settled down upon his knee, like a pet animal which
+he might take everywhere, and would keep with him at the dinner-table,
+unobserved by his fellow-guests. He would stroke and fondle it, warm
+himself with it, and, as a feeling of languor swept over him, would
+give way to a slight shuddering movement which contracted his throat
+and nostrils--a new experience, this,--as he fastened the bunch of
+columbines in his buttonhole. He had for some time been feeling neither
+well nor happy, especially since Odette had brought Forcheville to the
+Verdurins', and he would have liked to go away for a while to rest in
+the country. But he could never summon up courage to leave Paris, even
+for a day, while Odette was there. The weather was warm; it was the
+finest part of the spring. And for all that he was driving through a
+city of stone to immure himself in a house without grass or garden, what
+was incessantly before his eyes was a park which he owned, near Combray,
+where, at four in the afternoon, before coming to the asparagus-bed,
+thanks to the breeze that was wafted across the fields from Méséglise,
+he could enjoy the fragrant coolness of the air as well beneath an
+arbour of hornbeams in the garden as by the bank of the pond, fringed
+with forget-me-not and iris; and where, when he sat down to dinner,
+trained and twined by the gardener's skilful hand, there ran all about
+his table currant-bush and rose.
+
+After dinner, if he had an early appointment in the Bois or at
+Saint-Cloud, he would rise from table and leave the house so
+abruptly--especially if it threatened to rain, and so to scatter the
+'faithful' before their normal time--that on one occasion the Princesse
+des Laumes (at whose house dinner had been so late that Swann had left
+before the coffee came in, to join the Verdurins on the Island in the
+Bois) observed:
+
+"Really, if Swann were thirty years older, and had diabetes, there might
+be some excuse for his running away like that. He seems to look upon us
+all as a joke."
+
+He persuaded himself that the spring-time charm, which he could not go
+down to Combray to enjoy, he would find at least on the Ile des Cygnes
+or at Saint-Cloud. But as he could think only of Odette, he would
+return home not knowing even if he had tasted the fragrance of the young
+leaves, or if the moon had been shining. He would be welcomed by the
+little phrase from the sonata, played in the garden on the restaurant
+piano. If there was none in the garden, the Verdurins would have taken
+immense pains to have a piano brought out either from a private room
+or from the restaurant itself; not because Swann was now restored to
+favour; far from it. But the idea of arranging an ingenious form of
+entertainment for some one, even for some one whom they disliked, would
+stimulate them, during the time spent in its preparation, to a momentary
+sense of cordiality and affection. Now and then he would remind himself
+that another fine spring evening was drawing to a close, and would force
+himself to notice the trees and the sky. But the state of excitement
+into which Odette's presence never failed to throw him, added to a
+feverish ailment which, for some time now, had scarcely left him,
+robbed him of that sense of quiet and comfort which is an indispensable
+background to the impressions that we derive from nature.
+
+One evening, when Swann had consented to dine with the Verdurins, and
+had mentioned during dinner that he had to attend, next day, the annual
+banquet of an old comrades' association, Odette had at once exclaimed
+across the table, in front of everyone, in front of Forcheville, who was
+now one of the 'faithful,' in front of the painter, in front of Cottard:
+
+"Yes, I know, you have your banquet to-morrow; I sha'n't see you, then,
+till I get home; don't be too late."
+
+And although Swann had never yet taken offence, at all seriously,
+at Odette's demonstrations of friendship for one or other of the
+'faithful,' he felt an exquisite pleasure on hearing her thus avow,
+before them all, with that calm immodesty, the fact that they saw each
+other regularly every evening, his privileged position in her house, and
+her own preference for him which it implied. It was true that Swann had
+often reflected that Odette was in no way a remarkable woman; and in
+the supremacy which he wielded over a creature so distinctly inferior to
+himself there was nothing that especially flattered him when he heard
+it proclaimed to all the 'faithful'; but since he had observed that,
+to several other men than himself, Odette seemed a fascinating and
+desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused
+a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest
+particles of her heart. And he had begun to attach an incalculable value
+to those moments passed in her house in the evenings, when he held her
+upon his knee, made her tell him what she thought about this or that,
+and counted over that treasure to which, alone of all his earthly
+possessions, he still clung. And so, after this dinner, drawing her
+aside, he took care to thank her effusively, seeking to indicate to
+her by the extent of his gratitude the corresponding intensity of
+the pleasures which it was in her power to bestow on him, the supreme
+pleasure being to guarantee him immunity, for as long as his love should
+last and he remain vulnerable, from the assaults of jealousy.
+
+When he came away from his banquet, the next evening, it was pouring
+rain, and he had nothing but his victoria. A friend offered to take
+him home in a closed carriage, and as Odette, by the fact of her having
+invited him to come, had given him an assurance that she was expecting
+no one else, he could, with a quiet mind and an untroubled heart, rather
+than set off thus in the rain, have gone home and to bed. But perhaps,
+if she saw that he seemed not to adhere to his resolution to end every
+evening, without exception, in her company, she might grow careless, and
+fail to keep free for him just the one evening on which he particularly
+desired it.
+
+It was after eleven when he reached her door, and as he made his apology
+for having been unable to come away earlier, she complained that it was
+indeed very late; the storm had made her unwell, her head ached, and
+she warned him that she would not let him stay longer than half an hour,
+that at midnight she would send him away; a little while later she felt
+tired and wished to sleep.
+
+"No cattleya, then, to-night?" he asked, "and I've been looking forward
+so to a nice little cattleya."
+
+But she was irresponsive; saying nervously: "No, dear, no cattleya
+tonight. Can't you see, I'm not well?"
+
+"It might have done you good, but I won't bother you."
+
+She begged him to put out the light before he went; he drew the curtains
+close round her bed and left her. But, when he was in his own house
+again, the idea suddenly struck him that, perhaps, Odette was expecting
+some one else that evening, that she had merely pretended to be tired,
+that she had asked him to put the light out only so that he should
+suppose that she was going to sleep, that the moment he had left
+the house she had lighted it again, and had reopened her door to the
+stranger who was to be her guest for the night. He looked at his watch.
+It was about an hour and a half since he had left her; he went out, took
+a cab, and stopped it close to her house, in a little street running at
+right angles to that other street, which lay at the back of her house,
+and along which he used to go, sometimes, to tap upon her bedroom
+window, for her to let him in. He left his cab; the streets were all
+deserted and dark; he walked a few yards and came out almost opposite
+her house. Amid the glimmering blackness of all the row of windows, the
+lights in which had long since been put out, he saw one, and only one,
+from which overflowed, between the slats of its shutters, dosed like a
+wine-press over its mysterious golden juice, the light that filled the
+room within, a light which on so many evenings, as soon as he saw it,
+far off, as he turned into the street, had rejoiced his heart with its
+message: "She is there--expecting you," and now tortured him with: "She
+is there with the man she was expecting." He must know who; he tiptoed
+along by the wall until he reached the window, but between the slanting
+bars of the shutters he could see nothing; he could hear, only, in the
+silence of the night, the murmur of conversation. What agony he suffered
+as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere were moving, behind
+the closed sash, the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that
+murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his
+own departure, the perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at
+that moment tasting with the stranger.
+
+And yet he was not sorry that he had come; the torment which had forced
+him to leave his own house had lost its sharpness when it lost its
+uncertainty, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, at that
+first moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was definitely there, almost
+within his grasp, before his eyes, in the full glare of the lamp-light,
+caught and kept there, an unwitting prisoner, in that room into which,
+when he would, he might force his way to surprise and seize it; or
+rather he would tap upon the shutters, as he had often done when he had
+come there very late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn
+that he knew, that he had seen the light and had heard the voices; while
+he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing at him,
+as sharing with that other the knowledge of how effectively he had been
+tricked, now it was he that saw them, confident and persistent in
+their error, tricked and trapped by none other than himself, whom they
+believed to be a mile away, but who was there, in person, there with a
+plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to
+tap upon the shutter. And, perhaps, what he felt (almost an agreeable
+feeling) at that moment was something more than relief at the solution
+of a doubt, at the soothing of a pain; was an intellectual pleasure.
+If, since he had fallen in love, things had recovered a little of the
+delicate attraction that they had had for him long ago--though only when
+a light was shed upon them by a thought, a memory of Odette--now it was
+another of the faculties, prominent in the studious days of his youth,
+that Odette had quickened with new life, the passion for truth, but for
+a truth which, too, was interposed between himself and his mistress,
+receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the
+sole object of which (an infinitely precious object, and one almost
+impersonal in its absolute beauty) was Odette--Odette in her activities,
+her environment, her projects, and her past. At every other period in
+his life, the little everyday words and actions of another person had
+always seemed wholly valueless to Swann; if gossip about such things
+were repeated to him, he would dismiss it as insignificant, and while he
+listened it was only the lowest, the most commonplace part of his
+mind that was interested; at such moments he felt utterly dull and
+uninspired. But in this strange phase of love the personality of another
+person becomes so enlarged, so deepened, that the curiosity which
+he could now feel aroused in himself, to know the least details of a
+woman's daily occupation, was the same thirst for knowledge with which
+he had once studied history. And all manner of actions, from which,
+until now, he would have recoiled in shame, such as spying, to-night,
+outside a window, to-morrow, for all he knew, putting adroitly
+provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening
+at doors, seemed to him, now, to be precisely on a level with the
+deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation
+of old monuments, that was to say, so many different methods of
+scientific investigation, each one having a definite intellectual value
+and being legitimately employable in the search for truth.
+
+As his hand stole out towards the shutters he felt a pang of shame at
+the thought that Odette would now know that he had suspected her, that
+he had returned, that he had posted himself outside her window. She
+had often told him what a horror she had of jealous men, of lovers who
+spied. What he was going to do would be extremely awkward, and she would
+detest him for ever after, whereas now, for the moment, for so long as
+he refrained from knocking, perhaps even in the act of infidelity, she
+loved him still. How often is not the prospect of future happiness
+thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate
+gratification. But his desire to know the truth was stronger, and seemed
+to him nobler than his desire for her. He knew that the true story
+of certain events, which he would have given his life to be able to
+reconstruct accurately and in full, was to be read within that window,
+streaked with bars of light, as within the illuminated, golden boards of
+one of those precious manuscripts, by whose wealth of artistic treasures
+the scholar who consults them cannot remain unmoved. He yearned for
+the satisfaction of knowing the truth which so impassioned him in that
+brief, fleeting, precious transcript, on that translucent page, so warm,
+so beautiful. And besides, the advantage which he felt--which he so
+desperately wanted to feel--that he had over them, lay perhaps not so
+much in knowing as in being able to shew them that he knew. He drew
+himself up on tiptoe. He knocked. They had not heard; he knocked again;
+louder; their conversation ceased. A man's voice--he strained his ears
+to distinguish whose, among such of Odette's friends as he knew, the
+voice could be--asked:
+
+"Who's that?"
+
+He could not be certain of the voice. He knocked once again. The window
+first, then the shutters were thrown open. It was too late, now, to
+retire, and since she must know all, so as not to seem too contemptible,
+too jealous and inquisitive, he called out in a careless, hearty,
+welcoming tone:
+
+"Please don't bother; I just happened to be passing, and saw the light.
+I wanted to know if you were feeling better."
+
+He looked up. Two old gentlemen stood facing him, in the window, one
+of them with a lamp in his hand; and beyond them he could see into
+the room, a room that he had never seen before. Having fallen into the
+habit, when he came late to Odette, of identifying her window by
+the fact that it was the only one still lighted in a row of windows
+otherwise all alike, he had been misled, this time, by the light, and
+had knocked at the window beyond hers, in the adjoining house. He made
+what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction
+of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having
+feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference,
+he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof
+of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and
+finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other
+enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he ceased even to
+think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering
+course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would
+startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness,
+and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain. As though this had
+been a bodily pain, Swann's mind was powerless to alleviate it; in the
+case of bodily pain, however, since it is independent of the mind, the
+mind can dwell upon it, can note that it has diminished, that it has
+momentarily ceased. But with this mental pain, the mind, merely by
+recalling it, created it afresh. To determine not to think of it was but
+to think of it still, to suffer from it still. And when, in conversation
+with his friends, he forgot his sufferings, suddenly a word casually
+uttered would make him change countenance as a wounded man does when a
+clumsy hand has touched his aching limb. When he came away from Odette,
+he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled the smile with which, in gentle
+mockery, she had spoken to him of this man or of that, a smile which was
+all tenderness for himself; he recalled the gravity of her head which
+she seemed to have lifted from its axis to let it droop and fall, as
+though against her will, upon his lips, as she had done on that first
+evening in the carriage; her languishing gaze at him while she lay
+nestling in his arms, her bended head seeming to recede between her
+shoulders, as though shrinking from the cold.
+
+But then, at once, his jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love,
+presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile
+with which she had greeted him that very evening,--with which, now,
+perversely, she was mocking Swann while she tendered her love to
+another--of that lowering of her head, but lowered now to fall on other
+lips, and (but bestowed upon a stranger) of all the marks of affection
+that she had shewn to him. And all these voluptuous memories which he
+bore away from her house were, as one might say, but so many sketches,
+rough plans, like the schemes of decoration which a designer submits to
+one in outline, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes,
+aflame or faint with passion, which she was capable of adopting for
+others. With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he
+tasted in her company, every new caress that he invented (and had been
+so imprudent as to point out to her how delightful it was), every fresh
+charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they
+would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his secret
+torture-chamber.
+
+A fresh turn was given to the screw when Swann recalled a sudden
+expression which he had intercepted, a few days earlier, and for the
+first time, in Odette's eyes. It was after dinner at the Verdurins'.
+Whether it was because Forcheville, aware that Saniette, his
+brother-in-law, was not in favour with them, had decided to make a butt
+of him, and to shine at his expense, or because he had been annoyed
+by some awkward remark which Saniette had made to him, although it had
+passed unnoticed by the rest of the party who knew nothing of whatever
+tactless allusion it might conceal, or possibly because he had been for
+some time looking out for an opportunity of securing the expulsion from
+the house of a fellow-guest who knew rather too much about him, and
+whom he knew to be so nice-minded that he himself could not help feeling
+embarrassed at times merely by his presence in the room, Forcheville
+replied to Saniette's tactless utterance with such a volley of abuse,
+going out of his way to insult him, emboldened, the louder he shouted,
+by the fear, the pain, the entreaties of his victim, that the poor
+creature, after asking Mme. Verdurin whether he should stay and
+receiving no answer, had left the house in stammering confusion and with
+tears in his eyes. Odette had looked on, impassive, at this scene; but
+when the door had closed behind Saniette, she had forced the normal
+expression of her face down, as the saying is, by several pegs, so as to
+bring herself on to the same level of vulgarity as Forcheville; her eyes
+had sparkled with a malicious smile of congratulation upon his audacity,
+of ironical pity for the poor wretch who had been its victim; she
+had darted at him a look of complicity in the crime, which so clearly
+implied: "That's finished him off, or I'm very much mistaken. Did you
+see what a fool he looked? He was actually crying," that Forcheville,
+when his eyes met hers, sobered in a moment from the anger, or pretended
+anger with which he was still flushed, smiled as he explained: "He need
+only have made himself pleasant and he'd have been here still; a good
+scolding does a man no harm, at any time."
+
+One day when Swann had gone out early in the afternoon to pay a call,
+and had failed to find the person at home whom he wished to see, it
+occurred to him to go, instead, to Odette, at an hour when, although he
+never went to her house then as a rule, he knew that she was always at
+home, resting or writing letters until tea-time, and would enjoy seeing
+her for a moment, if it did not disturb her. The porter told him that he
+believed Odette to be in; Swann rang the bell, thought that he heard a
+sound, that he heard footsteps, but no one came to the door. Anxious and
+annoyed, he went round to the other little street, at the back of her
+house, and stood beneath her bedroom window; the curtains were drawn and
+he could see nothing; he knocked loudly upon the pane, he shouted; still
+no one came. He could see that the neighbours were staring at him. He
+turned away, thinking that, after all, he had perhaps been mistaken in
+believing that he heard footsteps; but he remained so preoccupied with
+the suspicion that he could turn his mind to nothing else. After waiting
+for an hour, he returned. He found her at home; she told him that she
+had been in the house when he rang, but had been asleep; the bell had
+awakened her; she had guessed that it must be Swann, and had run out
+to meet him, but he had already gone. She had, of course, heard him
+knocking at the window. Swann could at once detect in this story one of
+those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise,
+console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood
+which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated,
+and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude. It was true
+that, when Odette had just done something which she did not wish to
+disclose, she would take pains to conceal it in a secret place in her
+heart. But as soon as she found herself face to face with the man to
+whom she was obliged to lie, she became uneasy, all her ideas melted
+like wax before a flame, her inventive and her reasoning faculties
+were paralysed, she might ransack her brain but would find only a void;
+still, she must say something, and there lay within her reach precisely
+the fact which she had wished to conceal, which, being the truth, was
+the one thing that had remained. She broke off from it a tiny fragment,
+of no importance in itself, assuring herself that, after all, it was
+the best thing to do, since it was a detail of the truth, and less
+dangerous, therefore, than a falsehood. "At any rate, this is true,"
+she said to herself; "that's always something to the good; he may make
+inquiries; he will see that this is true; it won't be this, anyhow, that
+will give me away." But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she
+had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth
+had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except to those
+contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily
+detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she
+might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and
+by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was
+elsewhere.
+
+"She admits that she heard me ring, and then knock, that she knew it was
+myself, that she wanted to see me," Swann thought to himself. "But that
+doesn't correspond with the fact that she did not let me in."
+
+He did not, however, draw her attention to this inconsistency, for he
+thought that, if left to herself, Odette might perhaps produce some
+falsehood which would give him a faint indication of the truth; she
+spoke; he did not interrupt her, he gathered up, with an eager and
+sorrowful piety, the words that fell from her lips, feeling (and rightly
+feeling, since she was hiding the truth behind them as she spoke) that,
+like the veil of a sanctuary, they kept a vague imprint, traced a
+faint outline of that infinitely precious and, alas, undiscoverable
+truth;--what she had been doing, that afternoon, at three o'clock, when
+he had called,--a truth of which he would never possess any more than
+these falsifications, illegible and divine traces, a truth which would
+exist henceforward only in the secretive memory of this creature, who
+would contemplate it in utter ignorance of its value, but would never
+yield it up to him. It was true that he had, now and then, a strong
+suspicion that Odette's daily activities were not in themselves
+passionately interesting, and that such relations as she might have with
+other men did not exhale, naturally, in a universal sense, or for every
+rational being, a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting with
+fever or of inciting to suicide. He realised, at such moments, that that
+interest, that gloom, existed in him only as a malady might exist, and
+that, once he was cured of the malady, the actions of Odette, the kisses
+that she might have bestowed, would become once again as innocuous as
+those of countless other women. But the consciousness that the painful
+curiosity with which Swann now studied them had its origin only in
+himself was not enough to make him decide that it was unreasonable to
+regard that curiosity as important, and to take every possible step
+to satisfy it. Swann had, in fact, reached an age the philosophy of
+which--supported, in his case, by the current philosophy of the day, as
+well as by that of the circle in which he had spent most of his life,
+the group that surrounded the Princesse des Laumes, in which one's
+intelligence was understood to increase with the strength of one's
+disbelief in everything, and nothing real and incontestable was to be
+discovered, except the individual tastes of each of its members--is no
+longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the
+philosophy of men who, instead of fixing their aspirations upon external
+objects, endeavour to separate from the accumulation of the years
+already spent a definite residue of habits and passions which they
+can regard as characteristic and permanent, and with which they will
+deliberately arrange, before anything else, that the kind of existence
+which they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious. Swann deemed
+it wise to make allowance in his life for the suffering which he derived
+from not knowing what Odette had done, just as he made allowance for the
+impetus which a damp climate always gave to his eczema; to anticipate
+in his budget the expenditure of a considerable sum on procuring, with
+regard to the daily occupations of Odette, information the lack of
+which would make him unhappy, just as he reserved a margin for the
+gratification of other tastes from which he knew that pleasure was to be
+expected (at least, before he had fallen in love) such as his taste for
+collecting things, or for good cooking.
+
+When he proposed to take leave of Odette, and to return home, she begged
+him to stay a little longer, and even detained him forcibly, seizing him
+by the arm as he was opening the door to go. But he gave no thought to
+that, for, among the crowd of gestures and speeches and other little
+incidents which go to make up a conversation, it is inevitable that we
+should pass (without noticing anything that arouses our interest) by
+those that hide a truth for which our suspicions are blindly searching,
+whereas we stop to examine others beneath which nothing lies concealed.
+She kept on saying: "What a dreadful pity; you never by any chance come
+in the afternoon, and the one time you do come then I miss you." He knew
+very well that she was not sufficiently in love with him to be so
+keenly distressed merely at having missed his visit, but as she was a
+good-natured woman, anxious to give him pleasure, and often sorry when
+she had done anything that annoyed him, he found it quite natural that
+she should be sorry, on this occasion, that she had deprived him of that
+pleasure of spending an hour in her company, which was so very great a
+pleasure, if not to herself, at any rate to him. All the same, it was a
+matter of so little importance that her air of unrelieved sorrow began
+at length to bewilder him. She reminded him, even more than was
+usual, of the faces of some of the women created by the painter of
+the Primavera.' She had, at that moment, their downcast, heartbroken
+expression, which seems ready to succumb beneath the burden of a grief
+too heavy to be borne, when they are merely allowing the Infant Jesus to
+play with a pomegranate, or watching Moses pour water into a trough. He
+had seen the same sorrow once before on her face, but when, he could
+no longer say. Then, suddenly, he remembered it; it was when Odette had
+lied, in apologising to Mme. Verdurin on the evening after the dinner
+from which she had stayed away on a pretext of illness, but really so
+that she might be alone with Swann. Surely, even had she been the most
+scrupulous of women, she could hardly have felt remorse for so innocent
+a lie. But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and
+served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most
+terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so, when
+she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for
+her defence, unconfident of success, she was inclined to weep from sheer
+exhaustion, as children weep sometimes when they have not slept. She
+knew, also, that her lie, as a rule, was doing a serious injury to the
+man to whom she was telling it, and that she might find herself at
+his mercy if she told it badly. Therefore she felt at once humble and
+culpable in his presence. And when she had to tell an insignificant,
+social lie its hazardous associations, and the memories which it
+recalled, would leave her weak with a sense of exhaustion and penitent
+with a consciousness of wrongdoing.
+
+What depressing lie was she now concocting for Swann's benefit, to give
+her that pained expression, that plaintive voice, which seemed to falter
+beneath the effort that she was forcing herself to make, and to plead
+for pardon? He had an idea that it was not merely the truth about what
+had occurred that afternoon that she was endeavouring to hide from him,
+but something more immediate, something, possibly, which had not yet
+happened, but might happen now at any time, and, when it did, would
+throw a light upon that earlier event. At that moment, he heard the
+front-door bell ring. Odette never stopped speaking, but her words
+dwindled into an inarticulate moan. Her regret at not having seen Swann
+that afternoon, at not having opened the door to him, had melted into a
+universal despair.
+
+He could hear the gate being closed, and the sound of a carriage, as
+though some one were going away--probably the person whom Swann must on
+no account meet--after being told that Odette was not at home. And then,
+when he reflected that, merely by coming at an hour when he was not in
+the habit of coming, he had managed to disturb so many arrangements of
+which she did not wish him to know, he had a feeling of discouragement
+that amounted, almost, to distress. But since he was in love with
+Odette, since he was in the habit of turning all his thoughts towards
+her, the pity with which he might have been inspired for himself he felt
+for her only, and murmured: "Poor darling!" When finally he left her,
+she took up several letters which were lying on the table, and asked him
+if he would be so good as to post them for her. He walked along to the
+post-office, took the letters from his pocket, and, before dropping each
+of them into the box, scanned its address. They were all to tradesmen,
+except the last, which was to Forcheville. He kept it in his hand. "If
+I saw what was in this," he argued, "I should know what she calls him,
+what she says to him, whether there really is anything between them.
+Perhaps, if I don't look inside, I shall be lacking in delicacy towards
+Odette, since in this way alone I can rid myself of a suspicion which
+is, perhaps, a calumny on her, which must, in any case, cause her
+suffering, and which can never possibly be set at rest, once the letter
+is posted."
+
+He left the post-office and went home, but he had kept the last letter
+in his pocket. He lighted a candle, and held up close to its flame the
+envelope which he had not dared to open. At first he could distinguish
+nothing, but the envelope was thin, and by pressing it down on to the
+stiff card which it enclosed he was able, through the transparent paper,
+to read the concluding words. They were a coldly formal signature. If,
+instead of its being himself who was looking at a letter addressed to
+Forcheville, it had been Forcheville who had read a letter addressed
+to Swann, he might have found words in it of another, a far more tender
+kind! He took a firm hold of the card, which was sliding to and fro, the
+envelope being too large for it and then, by moving it with his finger
+and thumb, brought one line after another beneath the part of the
+envelope where the paper was not doubled, through which alone it was
+possible to read.
+
+In spite of all these manoeuvres he could not make it out clearly. Not
+that it mattered, for he had seen enough to assure himself that the
+letter was about some trifling incident of no importance, and had
+nothing at all to do with love; it was something to do with Odette's
+uncle. Swann had read quite plainly at the beginning of the line "I
+was right," but did not understand what Odette had been right in doing,
+until suddenly a word which he had not been able, at first, to decipher,
+came to light and made the whole sentence intelligible: "I was right to
+open the door; it was my uncle." To open the door! Then Forcheville had
+been there when Swann rang the bell, and she had sent him away; hence
+the sound that Swann had heard.
+
+After that he read the whole letter; at the end she apologised for
+having treated Forcheville with so little ceremony, and reminded him
+that he had left his cigarette-case at her house, precisely what she
+had written to Swann after one of his first visits. But to Swann she had
+added: "Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let
+you have that back." To Forcheville nothing of that sort; no allusion
+that could suggest any intrigue between them. And, really, he was
+obliged to admit that in all this business Forcheville had been worse
+treated than himself, since Odette was writing to him to make him
+believe that her visitor had been an uncle. From which it followed that
+he, Swann, was the man to whom she attached importance, and for whose
+sake she had sent the other away. And yet, if there had been nothing
+between Odette and Forcheville, why not have opened the door at once,
+why have said, "I was right to open the door; it was my uncle." Right?
+if she was doing nothing wrong at that moment how could Forcheville
+possibly have accounted for her not opening the door? For a time Swann
+stood still there, heartbroken, bewildered, and yet happy; gazing at
+this envelope which Odette had handed to him without a scruple, so
+absolute was her trust in his honour; through its transparent window
+there had been disclosed to him, with the secret history of an incident
+which he had despaired of ever being able to learn, a fragment of the
+life of Odette, seen as through a narrow, luminous incision, cut into
+its surface without her knowledge. Then his jealousy rejoiced at the
+discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent existence,
+fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of every thing that would feed its
+vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself. Now it had food in
+store, and Swann could begin to grow uneasy afresh every evening, over
+the visits that Odette had received about five o'clock, and could
+seek to discover where Forcheville had been at that hour. For Swann's
+affection for Odette still preserved the form which had been imposed on
+it, from the beginning, by his ignorance of the occupations in which she
+passed her days, as well as by the mental lethargy which prevented him
+from supplementing that ignorance by imagination. He was not jealous, at
+first, of the whole of Odette's life, but of those moments only in which
+an incident, which he had perhaps misinterpreted, had led him to suppose
+that Odette might have played him false. His jealousy, like an octopus
+which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle,
+fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o'clock in
+the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was
+incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the
+perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.
+
+From without, however, everything brought him fresh suffering. He
+decided to separate Odette from Forcheville, by taking her away for a
+few days to the south. But he imagined that she was coveted by every
+male person in the hotel, and that she coveted them in return. And so
+he, who, in old days, when he travelled, used always to seek out new
+people and crowded places, might now be seen fleeing savagely from human
+society as if it had cruelly injured him. And how could he not have
+turned misanthrope, when in every man he saw a potential lover for
+Odette? Thus his jealousy did even more than the happy, passionate
+desire which he had originally felt for Odette had done to alter Swann's
+character, completely changing, in the eyes of the world, even the
+outward signs by which that character had been intelligible.
+
+A month after the evening on which he had intercepted and read Odette's
+letter to Forcheville, Swann went to a dinner which the Verdurins were
+giving in the Bois. As the party was breaking up he noticed a series of
+whispered discussions between Mme. Verdurin and several of her guests,
+and thought that he heard the pianist being reminded to come next day to
+a party at Chatou; now he, Swann, had not been invited to any party.
+
+The Verdurins had spoken only in whispers, and in vague terms, but the
+painter, perhaps without thinking, shouted out: "There must be no lights
+of any sort, and he must play the Moonlight Sonata in the dark, for us
+to see by."
+
+Mme. Verdurin, seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed that
+expression in which the two-fold desire to make the speaker be quiet and
+to preserve, oneself, an appearance of guilelessness in the eyes of the
+listener, is neutralised in an intense vacuity; in which the unflinching
+signs of intelligent complicity are overlaid by the smiles of innocence,
+an expression invariably adopted by anyone who has noticed a blunder,
+the enormity of which is thereby at once revealed if not to those who
+have made it, at any rate to him in whose hearing it ought not to have
+been made. Odette seemed suddenly to be in despair, as though she had
+decided not to struggle any longer against the crushing difficulties of
+life, and Swann was anxiously counting the minutes that still separated
+him from the point at which, after leaving the restaurant, while he
+drove her home, he would be able to ask for an explanation, to make her
+promise, either that she would not go to Chatou next day, or that she
+would procure an invitation for him also, and to lull to rest in her
+arms the anguish that still tormented him. At last the carriages were
+ordered. Mme. Verdurin said to Swann:
+
+"Good-bye, then. We shall see you soon, I hope," trying, by the
+friendliness of her manner and the constraint of her smile, to prevent
+him from noticing that she was not saying, as she would always have
+until then:
+
+"To-morrow, then, at Chatou, and at my house the day after." M. and Mme.
+Verdurin made Forcheville get into their carriage; Swann's was drawn up
+behind it, and he waited for theirs to start before helping Odette into
+his own.
+
+"Odette, we'll take you," said Mme. Verdurin, "we've kept a little
+corner specially for you, beside M. de Forcheville."
+
+"Yes, Mme. Verdurin," said Odette meekly.
+
+"What! I thought I was to take you home," cried Swann, flinging
+discretion to the winds, for the carriage-door hung open, time was
+precious, and he could not, in his present state, go home without her.
+
+"But Mme. Verdurin has asked me..."
+
+"That's all right, you can quite well go home alone; we've left you like
+this dozens of times," said Mme. Verdurin.
+
+"But I had something important to tell Mme. de Crécy."
+
+"Very well, you can write it to her instead."
+
+"Good-bye," said Odette, holding out her hand.
+
+He tried hard to smile, but could only succeed in looking utterly
+dejected.
+
+"What do you think of the airs that Swann is pleased to put on with
+us?" Mme. Verdurin asked her husband when they had reached home. "I was
+afraid he was going to eat me, simply because we offered to take Odette
+back. It really is too bad, that sort of thing. Why doesn't he say,
+straight out, that we keep a disorderly house? I can't conceive how
+Odette can stand such manners. He positively seems to be saying, all the
+time, 'You belong to me!' I shall tell Odette exactly what I think about
+it all, and I hope she will have the sense to understand me." A moment
+later she added, inarticulate with rage: "No, but, don't you see, the
+filthy creature..." using unconsciously, and perhaps in satisfaction of
+the same obscure need to justify herself--like Françoise at Combray when
+the chicken refused to die--the very words which the last convulsions of
+an inoffensive animal in its death agony wring from the peasant who is
+engaged in taking its life. And when Mme. Verdurin's carriage had moved
+on, and Swann's took its place, his coachman, catching sight of his
+face, asked whether he was unwell, or had heard bad news.
+
+Swann sent him away; he preferred to walk, and it was on foot, through
+the Bois, that he came home. He talked to himself, aloud, and in
+the same slightly affected tone which he had been used to adopt
+when describing the charms of the 'little nucleus' and extolling the
+magnanimity of the Verdurins. But just as the conversation, the smiles,
+the kisses of Odette became as odious to him as he had once found
+them charming, if they were diverted to others than himself, so the
+Verdurins' drawing-room, which, not an hour before, had still seemed
+to him amusing, inspired with a genuine feeling for art and even with
+a sort of moral aristocracy, now that it was another than himself whom
+Odette was going to meet there, to love there without restraint, laid
+bare to him all its absurdities, its stupidity, its shame.
+
+He drew a fanciful picture, at which he shuddered in disgust, of the
+party next evening at Chatou. "Imagine going to Chatou, of all places!
+Like a lot of drapers after closing time! Upon my word, these people are
+sublime in their smugness; they can't really exist; they must all have
+come out of one of Labiche's plays!"
+
+The Cottards would be there; possibly Brichot. "Could anything be more
+grotesque than the lives of these little creatures, hanging on to one
+another like that. They'd imagine they were utterly lost, upon my soul
+they would, if they didn't all meet again to-morrow at _Chatou_!"
+Alas! there would be the painter there also, the painter who enjoyed
+match-making, who would invite Forcheville to come with Odette to his
+studio. He could see Odette, in a dress far too smart for the country,
+"for she is so vulgar in that way, and, poor little thing, she is such a
+fool!"
+
+He could hear the jokes that Mme. Verdurin would make after dinner,
+jokes which, whoever the 'bore' might be at whom they were aimed,
+had always amused him because he could watch Odette laughing at them,
+laughing with him, her laughter almost a part of his. Now he felt that
+it was possibly at him that they would make Odette laugh. "What a fetid
+form of humour!" he exclaimed, twisting his mouth into an expression of
+disgust so violent that he could feel the muscles of his throat stiffen
+against his collar. "How, in God's name, can a creature made in His
+image find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms? The
+least sensitive nose must be driven away in horror from such stale
+exhalations. It is really impossible to believe that any human being is
+incapable of understanding that, in allowing herself merely to smile at
+the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand
+to her, she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be
+impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell
+so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin
+sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot
+possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!" he cried,
+tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his body. "God knows
+that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out of that sewer, and to
+teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But human patience has
+its limits, and mine is at an end," he concluded, as though this sacred
+mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from
+longer than a few minutes ago, as though he had not undertaken it only
+since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms might, perchance, be
+directed at himself, and might have the effect of detaching Odette from
+him.
+
+He could see the pianist sitting down to play the Moonlight Sonata, and
+the grimaces of Mme. Verdurin, in terrified anticipation of the wrecking
+of her nerves by Beethoven's music. "Idiot, liar!" he shouted, "and a
+creature like that imagines that she's fond of _Art_!" She would say to
+Odette, after deftly insinuating a few words of praise for Forcheville,
+as she had so often done for himself: "You can make room for M. de
+Forcheville there, can't you, Odette?"... '"In the dark!' Codfish!
+Pander!"... 'Pander' was the name he applied also to the music which
+would invite them to sit in silence, to dream together, to gaze in each
+other's eyes, to feel for each other's hands. He felt that there was
+much to be said, after all, for a sternly censorous attitude towards
+the arts, such as Plato adopted, and Bossuet, and the old school of
+education in France.
+
+In a word, the life which they led at the Verdurins', which he had so
+often described as 'genuine,' seemed to him now the worst possible form
+of life, and their 'little nucleus' the most degraded class of society.
+"It really is," he repeated, "beneath the lowest rung of the social
+ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante. Beyond a doubt, the august words
+of the Florentine refer to the Verdurins! When one comes to think of it,
+surely people 'in society' (and, though one may find fault with them now
+and then, still, after all they are a very different matter from that
+gang of blackmailers) shew a profound sagacity in refusing to know
+them, or even to dirty the tips of their fingers with them. What a sound
+intuition there is in that '_Noli me tangere_' motto of the Faubourg
+Saint-Germain."
+
+He had long since emerged from the paths and avenues of the Bois, he had
+almost reached his own house, and still, for he had not yet thrown off
+the intoxication of grief, or his whim of insincerity, but was ever more
+and more exhilarated by the false intonation, the artificial sonority
+of his own voice, he continued to perorate aloud in the silence of the
+night: "People 'in society' have their failings, as no one knows better
+than I; but, after all, they are people to whom some things, at least,
+are impossible. So-and-so" (a fashionable woman whom he had known)
+"was far from being perfect, but, after all, one did find in her a
+fundamental delicacy, a loyalty in her conduct which made her, whatever
+happened, incapable of a felony, which fixes a vast gulf between her and
+an old hag like Verdurin. Verdurin! What a name! Oh, there's something
+complete about them, something almost fine in their trueness to type;
+they're the most perfect specimens of their disgusting class! Thank God,
+it was high time that I stopped condescending to promiscuous intercourse
+with such infamy, such dung."
+
+But, just as the virtues which he had still attributed, an hour or so
+earlier, to the Verdurins, would not have sufficed, even although the
+Verdurins had actually possessed them, if they had not also favoured
+and protected his love, to excite Swann to that state of intoxication
+in which he waxed tender over their magnanimity, an intoxication which,
+even when disseminated through the medium of other persons, could
+have come to him from Odette alone;--so the immorality (had it really
+existed) which he now found in the Verdurins would have been powerless,
+if they had not invited Odette with Forcheville and without him, to
+unstop the vials of his wrath and to make him scarify their 'infamy.'
+Doubtless Swann's voice shewed a finer perspicacity than his own when it
+refused to utter those words full of disgust at the Verdurins and their
+circle, and of joy at his having shaken himself free of it, save in an
+artificial and rhetorical tone, and as though his words had been chosen
+rather to appease his anger than to express his thoughts. The latter, in
+fact, while he abandoned himself to invective, were probably, though he
+did not know it, occupied with a wholly different matter, for once he
+had reached his house, no sooner had he closed the front-door behind him
+than he suddenly struck his forehead, and, making his servant open the
+door again, dashed out into the street shouting, in a voice which,
+this time, was quite natural; "I believe I have found a way of getting
+invited to the dinner at Chatou to-morrow!" But it must have been a
+bad way, for M. Swann was not invited; Dr. Cottard, who, having been
+summoned to attend a serious case in the country, had not seen the
+Verdurins for some days, and had been prevented from appearing at
+Chatou, said, on the evening after this dinner, as he sat down to table
+at their house:
+
+"Why, aren't we going to see M. Swann this evening? He is quite what you
+might call a personal friend..." "I sincerely trust that we sha'n't!"
+cried Mme. Verdurin. "Heaven preserve us from him; he's too deadly for
+words, a stupid, ill-bred boor."
+
+On hearing these words Cottard exhibited an intense astonishment blended
+with entire submission, as though in the face of a scientific truth
+which contradicted everything that he had previously believed, but was
+supported by an irresistible weight of evidence; with timorous
+emotion he bowed his head over his plate, and merely replied:
+"Oh--oh--oh--oh--oh!" traversing, in an orderly retirement of his
+forces, into the depths of his being, along a descending scale, the
+whole compass of his voice. After which there was no more talk of Swann
+at the Verdurins'.
+
+And so that drawing-room which had brought Swann and Odette together
+became an obstacle in the way of their meeting. She no longer said to
+him, as she had said in the early days of their love: "We shall meet,
+anyhow, to-morrow evening; there's a supper-party at the Verdurins',"
+but "We sha'n't be able to meet to-morrow evening; there's a
+supper-party at the Verdurins'." Or else the Verdurins were taking her
+to the Opéra-Comique, to see _Une Nuit de Cléopâtre_, and Swann could
+read in her eyes that terror lest he should ask her not to go, which,
+but a little time before, he could not have refrained from greeting
+with a kiss as it flitted across the face of his mistress, but which now
+exasperated him. "Yet I'm not really angry," he assured himself, "when I
+see how she longs to run away and scratch from maggots in that
+dunghill of cacophony. I'm disappointed; not for myself, but for her;
+disappointed to find that, after living for more than six months in
+daily contact with myself, she has not been capable of improving her
+mind even to the point of spontaneously eradicating from it a taste for
+Victor Massé! More than that, to find that she has not arrived at the
+stage of understanding that there are evenings on which anyone with
+the least shade of refinement of feeling should be willing to forego
+an amusement when she is asked to do so. She ought to have the sense to
+say: 'I shall not go,' if it were only from policy, since it is by what
+she answers now that the quality of her soul will be determined once and
+for all." And having persuaded himself that it was solely, after all,
+in order that he might arrive at a favourable estimate of Odette's
+spiritual worth that he wished her to stay at home with him that evening
+instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, he adopted the same line of
+reasoning with her, with the same degree of insincerity as he had
+used with himself, or even with a degree more, for in her case he was
+yielding also to the desire to capture her by her own self-esteem.
+
+"I swear to you," he told her, shortly before she was to leave for the
+theatre, "that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a
+selfish man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have
+a thousand other things to do this evening, and I shall feel that I have
+been tricked and trapped myself, and shall be thoroughly annoyed, if,
+after all, you tell me that you are not going. But my occupations, my
+pleasures are not everything; I must think of you also. A day may come
+when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to
+reproach me with not having warned you at the decisive hour in which
+I felt that I was going to pass judgment on you, one of those stern
+judgments which love cannot long resist. You see, your _Nuit de
+Cléopâtre_ (what a title!) has no bearing on the point. What I must know
+is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of
+mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are
+incapable of foregoing a pleasure. For if you are such, how could anyone
+love you, for you are not even a person, a definite, imperfect, but at
+least perceptible entity. You are a formless water that will trickle
+down any slope that it may come upon, a fish devoid of memory, incapable
+of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to
+dash itself, a hundred times a day, against a wall of glass, always
+mistaking it for water. Do you realise that your answer will have the
+effect--I do not say of making me cease from that moment to love you,
+that goes without saying, but of making you less attractive to my
+eyes when I realise that you are not a person, that you are beneath
+everything in the world and have not the intelligence to raise yourself
+one inch higher? Obviously, I should have preferred to ask you, as
+though it had been a matter of little or no importance, to give up your
+_Nuit de Cléopâtre_ (since you compel me to sully my lips with so abject
+a name), in the hope that you would go to it none the less. But, since
+I had resolved to weigh you in the balance, to make so grave an issue
+depend upon your answer, I considered it more honourable to give you due
+warning."
+
+Meanwhile, Odette had shewn signs of increasing emotion and uncertainty.
+Although the meaning of his tirade was beyond her, she grasped that it
+was to be included among the scenes of reproach or supplication, scenes
+which her familiarity with the ways of men enabled her, without paying
+any heed to the words that were uttered, to conclude that men would not
+make unless they were in love; that, from the moment when they were in
+love, it was superfluous to obey them, since they would only be more in
+love later on. And so, she would have heard Swann out with the utmost
+tranquillity had she not noticed that it was growing late, and that if
+he went on speaking for any length of time she would "never" as she told
+him with a fond smile, obstinate but slightly abashed, "get there in
+time for the Overture."
+
+On other occasions he had assured himself that the one thing which,
+more than anything else, would make him cease to love her, would be her
+refusal to abandon the habit of lying. "Even from the point of view of
+coquetry, pure and simple," he had told her, "can't you see how much
+of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying? By a frank
+admission--how many faults you might redeem! Really, you are far less
+intelligent than I supposed!" In vain, however, did Swann expound to
+her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have
+succeeded in overthrowing any universal system of mendacity, but Odette
+had no such system; she contented herself, merely, whenever she wished
+Swann to remain in ignorance of anything that she had done, with not
+telling him of it. So that a lie was, to her, something to be used only
+as a special expedient; and the one thing that could make her decide
+whether she should avail herself of a lie or not was a reason which,
+too, was of a special and contingent order, namely the risk of Swann's
+discovering that she had not told him the truth.
+
+Physically, she was passing through an unfortunate phase; she was
+growing stouter, and the expressive, sorrowful charm, the surprised,
+wistful expressions which she had formerly had, seemed to have vanished
+with her first youth, with the result that she became most precious to
+Swann at the very moment when he found her distinctly less good-looking.
+He would gaze at her for hours on end, trying to recapture the charm
+which he had once seen in her and could not find again. And yet the
+knowledge that, within this new and strange chrysalis, it was still
+Odette that lurked, still the same volatile temperament, artful and
+evasive, was enough to keep Swann seeking, with as much passion as ever,
+to captivate her. Then he would look at photographs of her, taken two
+years before, and would remember how exquisite she had been. And that
+would console him, a little, for all the sufferings that he voluntarily
+endured on her account.
+
+When the Verdurins took her off to Saint-Germain, or to Chatou, or to
+Meulan, as often as not, if the weather was fine, they would propose
+to remain there for the night, and not go home until next day. Mme.
+Verdurin would endeavour to set at rest the scruples of the pianist,
+whose aunt had remained in Paris: "She will be only too glad to be rid
+of you for a day. How on earth could she be anxious, when she knows
+you're with us? Anyhow, I'll take you all under my wing; she can put the
+blame on me."
+
+If this attempt failed, M. Verdurin would set off across country until
+he came to a telegraph office or some other kind of messenger, after
+first finding out which of the 'faithful' had anyone whom they must
+warn. But Odette would thank him, and assure him that she had no message
+for anyone, for she had told Swann, once and for all, that she could
+not possibly send messages to him, before all those people, without
+compromising herself. Sometimes she would be absent for several days
+on end, when the Verdurins took her to see the tombs at Dreux, or to
+Compiègne, on the painter's advice, to watch the sun setting through the
+forest--after which they went on to the Château of Pierrefonds.
+
+"To think that she could visit really historic buildings with me, who
+have spent ten years in the study of architecture, who am constantly
+bombarded, by people who really count, to take them over Beauvais or
+Saint-Loup-de-Naud, and refuse to take anyone but her; and instead of
+that she trundles off with the lowest, the most brutally degraded
+of creatures, to go into ecstasies over the petrified excretions of
+Louis-Philippe and Viollet-le-Duc! One hardly needs much knowledge
+of art, I should say, to do that; though, surely, even without any
+particularly refined sense of smell, one would not deliberately choose
+to spend a holiday in the latrines, so as to be within range of their
+fragrant exhalations."
+
+But when she had set off for Dreux or Pierrefonds--alas, without
+allowing him to appear there, as though by accident, at her side, for,
+as she said, that would "create a dreadful impression,"--he would plunge
+into the most intoxicating romance in the lover's library, the railway
+timetable, from which he learned the ways of joining her there in the
+afternoon, in the evening, even in the morning. The ways? More than
+that, the authority, the right to join her. For, after all, the
+time-table, and the trains themselves, were not meant for dogs. If the
+public were carefully informed, by means of printed advertisements, that
+at eight o'clock in the morning a train started for Pierrefonds which
+arrived there at ten, that could only be because going to Pierrefonds
+was a lawful act, for which permission from Odette would be superfluous;
+an act, moreover, which might be performed from a motive altogether
+different from the desire to see Odette, since persons who had never
+even heard of her performed it daily, and in such numbers as justified
+the labour and expense of stoking the engines.
+
+So it came to this; that she could not prevent him from going to
+Pierrefonds if he chose to do so. Now that was precisely what he found
+that he did choose to do, and would at that moment be doing were he,
+like the travelling public, not acquainted with Odette. For a long
+time past he had wanted to form a more definite impression of
+Viollet-le-Duc's work as a restorer. And the weather being what it was,
+he felt an overwhelming desire to spend the day roaming in the forest of
+Compiègne.
+
+It was, indeed, a piece of bad luck that she had forbidden him access
+to the one spot that tempted him to-day. To-day! Why, if he went down
+there, in defiance of her prohibition, he would be able to see her that
+very day! But then, whereas, if she had met, at Pierrefonds, some one
+who did not matter, she would have hailed him with obvious pleasure:
+"What, you here?" and would have invited him to come and see her at the
+hotel where she was staying with the Verdurins, if, on the other hand,
+it was himself, Swann, that she encountered there, she would be annoyed,
+would complain that she was being followed, would love him less in
+consequence, might even turn away in anger when she caught sight of him.
+"So, then, I am not to be allowed to go away for a day anywhere!" she
+would reproach him on her return, whereas in fact it was he himself who
+was not allowed to go.
+
+He had had the sudden idea, so as to contrive to visit Compiègne and
+Pierrefonds without letting it be supposed that his object was to meet
+Odette, of securing an invitation from one of his friends, the Marquis
+de Forestelle, who had a country house in that neighbourhood. This
+friend, to whom Swann suggested the plan without disclosing its
+ulterior purpose, was beside himself with joy; he did not conceal his
+astonishment at Swann's consenting at last, after fifteen years, to come
+down and visit his property, and since he did not (he told him) wish
+to stay there, promised to spend some days, at least, in taking him for
+walks and excursions in the district. Swann imagined himself down there
+already with M. de Forestelle. Even before he saw Odette, even if he did
+not succeed in seeing her there, what a joy it would be to set foot on
+that soil where, not knowing the exact spot in which, at any moment, she
+was to be found, he would feel all around him the thrilling possibility
+of her suddenly appearing: in the courtyard of the Château, now
+beautiful in his eyes since it was on her account that he had gone to
+visit it; in all the streets of the town, which struck him as romantic;
+down every ride of the forest, roseate with the deep and tender glow of
+sunset;--innumerable and alternative hiding-places, to which would fly
+simultaneously for refuge, in the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes, his
+happy, vagabond and divided heart. "We mustn't, on any account," he
+would warn M. de Forestelle, "run across Odette and the Verdurins. I
+have just heard that they are at Pierrefonds, of all places, to-day. One
+has plenty of time to see them in Paris; it would hardly be worth while
+coming down here if one couldn't go a yard without meeting them." And
+his host would fail to understand why, once they had reached the place,
+Swann would change his plans twenty times in an hour, inspect the
+dining-rooms of all the hotels in Compiègne without being able to make
+up his mind to settle down in any of them, although he had found no
+trace anywhere of the Verdurins, seeming to be in search of what he had
+claimed to be most anxious to avoid, and would in fact avoid, the moment
+he found it, for if he had come upon the little 'group,' he would have
+hastened away at once with studied indifference, satisfied that he had
+seen Odette and she him, especially that she had seen him when he was
+not, apparently, thinking about her. But no; she would guess at
+once that it was for her sake that he had come there. And when M. de
+Forestelle came to fetch him, and it was time to start, he excused
+himself: "No, I'm afraid not; I can't go to Pierrefonds to-day. You see,
+Odette is there." And Swann was happy in spite of everything in feeling
+that if he, alone among mortals, had not the right to go to Pierrefonds
+that day, it was because he was in fact, for Odette, some one who
+differed from all other mortals, her lover; and because that restriction
+which for him alone was set upon the universal right to travel freely
+where one would, was but one of the many forms of that slavery, that
+love which was so dear to him. Decidedly, it was better not to risk a
+quarrel with her, to be patient, to wait for her return. He spent his
+days in poring over a map of the forest of Compiègne, as though it
+had been that of the 'Pays du Tendre'; he surrounded himself with
+photographs of the Château of Pierrefonds. When the day dawned on which
+it was possible that she might return, he opened the time-table
+again, calculated what train she must have taken, and, should she have
+postponed her departure, what trains were still left for her to take. He
+did not leave the house, for fear of missing a telegram, he did not go
+to bed, in case, having come by the last train, she decided to surprise
+him with a midnight visit. Yes! The front-door bell rang. There seemed
+some delay in opening the door, he wanted to awaken the porter, he
+leaned out of the window to shout to Odette, if it was Odette, for
+in spite of the orders which he had gone downstairs a dozen times to
+deliver in person, they were quite capable of telling her that he was
+not at home. It was only a servant coming in. He noticed the incessant
+rumble of passing carriages, to which he had never before paid any
+attention. He could hear them, one after another, a long way off, coming
+nearer, passing his door without stopping, and bearing away into the
+distance a message which was not for him. He waited all night, to no
+purpose, for the Verdurins had returned unexpectedly, and Odette had
+been in Paris since midday; it had not occurred to her to tell him; not
+knowing what to do with herself she had spent the evening alone at a
+theatre, had long since gone home to bed, and was peacefully asleep.
+
+As a matter of fact, she had never given him a thought. And such moments
+as these, in which she forgot Swann's very existence, were of more value
+to Odette, did more to attach him to her, than all her infidelities. For
+in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had
+once before been effective in making his interest blossom into love, on
+the night when he had failed to find Odette at the Verdurins' and had
+hunted for her all evening. And he did not have (as I had, afterwards,
+at Combray in my childhood) happy days in which to forget the sufferings
+that would return with the night. For his days, Swann must pass them
+without Odette; and as he told himself, now and then, to allow so pretty
+a woman to go out by herself in Paris was just as rash as to leave a
+case filled with jewels in the middle of the street. In this mood he
+would scowl furiously at the passers-by, as though they were so many
+pickpockets. But their faces--a collective and formless mass--escaped
+the grasp of his imagination, and so failed to feed the flame of his
+jealousy. The effort exhausted Swann's brain, until, passing his hand
+over his eyes, he cried out: "Heaven help me!" as people, after lashing
+themselves into an intellectual frenzy in their endeavours to master the
+problem of the reality of the external world, or that of the immortality
+of the soul, afford relief to their weary brains by an unreasoning
+act of faith. But the thought of his absent mistress was incessantly,
+indissolubly blended with all the simplest actions of Swann's daily
+life--when he took his meals, opened his letters, went for a walk or
+to bed--by the fact of his regret at having to perform those actions
+without her; like those initials of Philibert the Fair which, in the
+church of Brou, because of her grief, her longing for him, Margaret of
+Austria intertwined everywhere with her own. On some days, instead of
+staying at home, he would go for luncheon to a restaurant not far off,
+to which he had been attracted, some time before, by the excellence of
+its cookery, but to which he now went only for one of those reasons,
+at once mystical and absurd, which people call 'romantic'; because this
+restaurant (which, by the way, still exists) bore the same name as the
+street in which Odette lived: the Lapérouse. Sometimes, when she had
+been away on a short visit somewhere, several days would elapse before
+she thought of letting him know that she had returned to Paris. And
+then she would say quite simply, without taking (as she would once have
+taken) the precaution of covering herself, at all costs, with a little
+fragment borrowed from the truth, that she had just, at that very
+moment, arrived by the morning train. What she said was a falsehood;
+at least for Odette it was a falsehood, inconsistent, lacking (what it
+would have had, if true) the support of her memory of her actual arrival
+at the station; she was even prevented from forming a mental picture of
+what she was saying, while she said it, by the contradictory picture, in
+her mind, of whatever quite different thing she had indeed been doing at
+the moment when she pretended to have been alighting from the train. In
+Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled
+and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so
+indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had
+come by the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann would have been
+convinced that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or
+hour, since his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette.
+These words had never appeared to him false except when, before hearing
+them, he had suspected that they were going to be. For him to believe
+that she was lying, an anticipatory suspicion was indispensable. It was
+also, however, sufficient. Given that, everything that Odette might say
+appeared to him suspect. Did she mention a name: it was obviously that
+of one of her lovers; once this supposition had taken shape, he would
+spend weeks in tormenting himself; on one occasion he even approached a
+firm of 'inquiry agents' to find out the address and the occupation of
+the unknown rival who would give him no peace until he could be proved
+to have gone abroad, and who (he ultimately learned) was an uncle of
+Odette, and had been dead for twenty years.
+
+Although she would not allow him, as a rule, to meet her at public
+gatherings, saying that people would talk, it happened occasionally
+that, at an evening party to which he and she had each been invited--at
+Forcheville's, at the painter's, or at a charity ball given in one of
+the Ministries--he found himself in the same room with her. He could
+see her, but dared not remain for fear of annoying her by seeming to be
+spying upon the pleasures which she tasted in other company, pleasures
+which--while he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed,
+as anxiously as I myself was to go to bed, some years later, on the
+evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray--seemed illimitable to
+him since he had not been able to see their end. And, once or twice,
+he derived from such evenings that kind of happiness which one would be
+inclined (did it not originate in so violent a reaction from an anxiety
+abruptly terminated) to call peaceful, since it consists in a pacifying
+of the mind: he had looked in for a moment at a revel in the painter's
+studio, and was getting ready to go home; he was leaving behind him
+Odette, transformed into a brilliant stranger, surrounded by men to whom
+her glances and her gaiety, which were not for him, seemed to hint at
+some voluptuous pleasure to be enjoyed there or elsewhere (possibly at
+the Bal des Incohérents, to which he trembled to think that she might be
+going on afterwards) which made Swann more jealous than the thought of
+their actual physical union, since it was more difficult to imagine; he
+was opening the door to go, when he heard himself called back in these
+words (which, by cutting off from the party that possible ending which
+had so appalled him, made the party itself seem innocent in retrospect,
+made Odette's return home a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible,
+but tender and familiar, a thing that kept close to his side, like
+a part of his own daily life, in his carriage; a thing that stripped
+Odette herself of the excess of brilliance and gaiety in her appearance,
+shewed that it was only a disguise which she had assumed for a moment,
+for his sake and not in view of any mysterious pleasures, a disguise of
+which she had already wearied)--in these words, which Odette flung out
+after him as he was crossing the threshold: "Can't you wait a minute for
+me? I'm just going; we'll drive back together and you can drop me." It
+was true that on one occasion Forcheville had asked to be driven home at
+the same time, but when, on reaching Odette's gate, he had begged to be
+allowed to come in too, she had replied, with a finger pointed at Swann:
+"Ah! That depends on this gentleman. You must ask him. Very well, you
+may come in, just for a minute, if you insist, but you mustn't stay
+long, for, I warn you, he likes to sit and talk quietly with me, and
+he's not at all pleased if I have visitors when he's here. Oh, if you
+only knew the creature as I know him; isn't that so, my love, there's no
+one that really knows you, is there, except me?"
+
+And Swann was, perhaps, even more touched by the spectacle of her
+addressing him thus, in front of Forcheville, not only in these tender
+words of predilection, but also with certain criticisms, such as: "I
+feel sure you haven't written yet to your friends, about dining with
+them on Sunday. You needn't go if you don't want to, but you might at
+least be polite," or "Now, have you left your essay on Vermeer here, so
+that you can do a little more to it to-morrow? What a lazy-bones! I'm
+going to make you work, I can tell you," which proved that Odette kept
+herself in touch with his social engagements and his literary work, that
+they had indeed a life in common. And as she spoke she bestowed on him a
+smile which he interpreted as meaning that she was entirely his.
+
+And then, while she was making them some orangeade, suddenly, just as
+when the reflector of a lamp that is badly fitted begins by casting
+all round an object, on the wall beyond it, huge and fantastic shadows
+which, in time, contract and are lost in the shadow of the object
+itself, all the terrible and disturbing ideas which he had formed of
+Odette melted away and vanished in the charming creature who stood there
+before his eyes. He had the sudden suspicion that this hour spent in
+Odette's house, in the lamp-light, was, perhaps, after all, not an
+artificial hour, invented for his special use (with the object of
+concealing that frightening and delicious thing which was incessantly
+in his thoughts without his ever being able to form a satisfactory
+impression of it, an hour of Odette's real life, of her life when he was
+not there, looking on) with theatrical properties and pasteboard fruits,
+but was perhaps a genuine hour of Odette's life; that, if he himself
+had not been there, she would have pulled forward the same armchair for
+Forcheville, would have poured out for him, not any unknown brew, but
+precisely that orangeade which she was now offering to them both; that
+the world inhabited by Odette was not that other world, fearful and
+supernatural, in which he spent his time in placing her--and which
+existed, perhaps, only in his imagination, but the real universe,
+exhaling no special atmosphere of gloom, comprising that table at which
+he might sit down, presently, and write, and this drink which he was
+being permitted, now, to taste; all the objects which he contemplated
+with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing
+his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves
+were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable
+realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took
+shape and grew solid before his eyes, and at the same time they soothed
+his troubled heart. Ah! had fate but allowed him to share a single
+dwelling with Odette, so that in her house he should be in his own; if,
+when asking his servant what there would be for luncheon, it had been
+Odette's bill of fare that he had learned from the reply; if, when
+Odette wished to go for a walk, in the morning, along the Avenue du
+Bois-de-Boulogne, his duty as a good husband had obliged him, though he
+had no desire to go out, to accompany her, carrying her cloak when she
+was too warm; and in the evening, after dinner, if she wished to stay at
+home, and not to dress, if he had been forced to stay beside her, to
+do what she asked; then how completely would all the trivial details
+of Swann's life, which seemed to him now so gloomy, simply because they
+would, at the same time, have formed part of the life of Odette, have
+taken on--like that lamp, that orangeade, that armchair, which had
+absorbed so much of his dreams, which materialised so much of his
+longing,--a sort of superabundant sweetness and a mysterious solidity.
+
+And yet he was inclined to suspect that the state for which he so much
+longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have created an atmosphere
+favourable to his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature
+always absent, regretted, imagined; when the feeling that he had for her
+was no longer the same mysterious disturbance that was wrought in him by
+the phrase from the sonata, but constant affection and gratitude, when
+those normal relations were established between them which would put an
+end to his melancholy madness; then, no doubt, the actions of Odette's
+daily life would appear to him as being of but little intrinsic
+interest--as he had several times, already, felt that they might be,
+on the day, for instance, when he had read, through its envelope, her
+letter to Forcheville. Examining his complaint with as much scientific
+detachment as if he had inoculated himself with it in order to study
+its effects, he told himself that, when he was cured of it, what Odette
+might or might not do would be indifferent to him. But in his morbid
+state, to tell the truth, he feared death itself no more than such a
+recovery, which would, in fact, amount to the death of all that he then
+was.
+
+After these quiet evenings, Swann's suspicions would be temporarily
+lulled; he would bless the name of Odette, and next day, in the morning,
+would order the most attractive jewels to be sent to her, because her
+kindnesses to him overnight had excited either his gratitude, or the
+desire to see them repeated, or a paroxysm of love for her which had
+need of some such outlet.
+
+But at other times, grief would again take hold of him; he would imagine
+that Odette was Forcheville's mistress, and that, when they had both sat
+watching him from the depths of the Verdurins' landau, in the Bois, on
+the evening before the party at Chatou to which he had not been invited,
+while he implored her in vain, with that look of despair on his face
+which even his coachman had noticed, to come home with him, and then
+turned away, solitary, crushed,--she must have employed, to draw
+Forcheville's attention to him, while she murmured: "Do look at him,
+storming!" the same glance, brilliant, malicious, sidelong, cunning, as
+on the evening when Forcheville had driven Saniette from the Verdurins'.
+
+At such times Swann detested her. "But I've been a fool, too," he would
+argue. "I'm paying for other men's pleasures with my money. All the
+same, she'd better take care, and not pull the string too often, for
+I might very well stop giving her anything at all. At any rate, we'd
+better knock off supplementary favours for the time being. To think
+that, only yesterday, when she said she would like to go to Bayreuth
+for the season, I was such an ass as to offer to take one of those jolly
+little places the King of Bavaria has there, for the two of us. However
+she didn't seem particularly keen; she hasn't said yes or no yet. Let's
+hope that she'll refuse. Good God! Think of listening to Wagner for a
+fortnight on end with her, who takes about as much interest in music as
+a fish does in little apples; it will be fun!" And his hatred, like
+his love, needing to manifest itself in action, he amused himself with
+urging his evil imaginings further and further, because, thanks to the
+perfidies with which he charged Odette, he detested her still more, and
+would be able, if it turned out--as he tried to convince himself--that
+she was indeed guilty of them, to take the opportunity of punishing her,
+emptying upon her the overflowing vials of his wrath. In this way, he
+went so far as to suppose that he was going to receive a letter from
+her, in which she would ask him for money to take the house at Bayreuth,
+but with the warning that he was not to come there himself, as she had
+promised Forcheville and the Verdurins to invite them. Oh, how he
+would have loved it, had it been conceivable that she would have
+that audacity. What joy he would have in refusing, in drawing up that
+vindictive reply, the terms of which he amused himself by selecting and
+declaiming aloud, as though he had actually received her letter.
+
+The very next day, her letter came. She wrote that the Verdurins and
+their friends had expressed a desire to be present at these performances
+of Wagner, and that, if he would be so good as to send her the money,
+she would be able at last, after going so often to their house, to have
+the pleasure of entertaining the Verdurins in hers. Of him she said not
+a word; it was to be taken for granted that their presence at Bayreuth
+would be a bar to his.
+
+Then that annihilating answer, every word of which he had carefully
+rehearsed overnight, without venturing to hope that it could ever be
+used, he had the satisfaction of having it conveyed to her. Alas! he
+felt only too certain that with the money which she had, or could easily
+procure, she would be able, all the same, to take a house at Bayreuth,
+since she wished to do so, she who was incapable of distinguishing
+between Bach and Clapisson. Let her take it, then; she would have to
+live in it more frugally, that was all. No means (as there would have
+been if he had replied by sending her several thousand-franc notes) of
+organising, each evening, in her hired castle, those exquisite little
+suppers, after which she might perhaps be seized by the whim (which,
+it was possible, had never yet seized her) of falling into the arms of
+Forcheville. At any rate, this loathsome expedition, it would not be
+Swann who had to pay for it. Ah! if he could only manage to prevent
+it, if she could sprain her ankle before starting, if the driver of the
+carriage which was to take her to the station would consent (no matter
+how great the bribe) to smuggle her to some place where she could be
+kept for a time in seclusion, that perfidious woman, her eyes tinselled
+with a smile of complicity for Forcheville, which was what Odette had
+become for Swann in the last forty-eight hours.
+
+But she was never that for very long; after a few days the shining,
+crafty eyes lost their brightness and their duplicity, that picture of
+an execrable Odette saying to Forcheville: "Look at him storming!" began
+to grow pale and to dissolve. Then gradually reappeared and rose before
+him, softly radiant, the face of the other Odette, of that Odette who
+also turned with a smile to Forcheville, but with a smile in which there
+was nothing but affection for Swann, when she said: "You mustn't stay
+long, for this gentleman doesn't much like my having visitors when he's
+here. Oh! if you only knew the creature as I know him!" that same smile
+with which she used to thank Swann for some instance of his courtesy
+which she prized so highly, for some advice for which she had asked him
+in one of those grave crises in her life, when she could turn to him
+alone.
+
+Then, to this other Odette, he would ask himself what could have induced
+him to write that outrageous letter, of which, probably, until then,
+she had never supposed him capable, a letter which must have lowered him
+from the high, from the supreme place which, by his generosity, by his
+loyalty, he had won for himself in her esteem. He would become less dear
+to her, since it was for those qualities, which she found neither in
+Forcheville nor in any other, that she loved him. It was for them that
+Odette so often shewed him a reciprocal kindness, which counted for less
+than nothing in his moments of jealousy, because it was not a sign of
+reciprocal desire, was indeed a proof rather of affection than of love,
+but the importance of which he began once more to feel in proportion as
+the spontaneous relaxation of his suspicions, often accelerated by the
+distraction brought to him by reading about art or by the conversation
+of a friend, rendered his passion less exacting of reciprocities.
+
+Now that, after this swing of the pendulum, Odette had naturally
+returned to the place from which Swann's jealousy had for the moment
+driven her, in the angle in which he found her charming, he pictured her
+to himself as full of tenderness, with a look of consent in her eyes,
+and so beautiful that he could not refrain from moving his lips towards
+her, as though she had actually been in the room for him to kiss; and
+he preserved a sense of gratitude to her for that bewitching, kindly
+glance, as strong as though she had really looked thus at him, and it
+had not been merely his imagination that had portrayed it in order to
+satisfy his desire.
+
+What distress he must have caused her! Certainly he found adequate
+reasons for his resentment, but they would not have been sufficient to
+make him feel that resentment, if he had not so passionately loved her.
+Had he not nourished grievances, just as serious, against other women,
+to whom he would, none the less, render willing service to-day, feeling
+no anger towards them because he no longer loved them? If the day ever
+came when he would find himself in the same state of indifference with
+regard to Odette, he would then understand that it was his jealousy
+alone which had led him to find something atrocious, unpardonable, in
+this desire (after all, so natural a desire, springing from a childlike
+ingenuousness and also from a certain delicacy in her nature) to be
+able, in her turn, when an occasion offered, to repay the Verdurins for
+their hospitality, and to play the hostess in a house of her own.
+
+He returned to the other point of view--opposite to that of his love
+and of his jealousy, to which he resorted at times by a sort of mental
+equity, and in order to make allowance for different eventualities--from
+which he tried to form a fresh judgment of Odette, based on the
+supposition that he had never been in love with her, that she was to him
+just a woman like other women, that her life had not been (whenever he
+himself was not present) different, a texture woven in secret apart from
+him, and warped against him.
+
+Wherefore believe that she would enjoy down there with Forcheville or
+with other men intoxicating pleasures which she had never known with
+him, and which his jealousy alone had fabricated in all their elements?
+At Bayreuth, as in Paris, if it should happen that Forcheville thought
+of him at all, it would only be as of some one who counted for a great
+deal in the life of Odette, some one for whom he was obliged to make
+way, when they met in her house. If Forcheville and she scored a
+triumph by being down there together in spite of him, it was he who had
+engineered that triumph by striving in vain to prevent her from going
+there, whereas if he had approved of her plan, which for that matter was
+quite defensible, she would have had the appearance of being there by
+his counsel, she would have felt herself sent there, housed there by
+him, and for the pleasure which she derived from entertaining those
+people who had so often entertained her, it was to him that she would
+have had to acknowledge her indebtedness.
+
+And if--instead of letting her go off thus, at cross-purposes with him,
+without having seen him again--he were to send her this money, if he
+were to encourage her to take this journey, and to go out of his way to
+make it comfortable and pleasant for her, she would come running to him,
+happy, grateful, and he would have the joy--the sight of her face--which
+he had not known for nearly a week, a joy which none other could
+replace. For the moment that Swann was able to form a picture of her
+without revulsion, that he could see once again the friendliness in
+her smile, and that the desire to tear her away from every rival was
+no longer imposed by his jealousy upon his love, that love once again
+became, more than anything, a taste for the sensations which Odette's
+person gave him, for the pleasure which he found in admiring, as one
+might a spectacle, or in questioning, as one might a phenomenon, the
+birth of one of her glances, the formation of one of her smiles, the
+utterance of an intonation of her voice. And this pleasure, different
+from every other, had in the end created in him a need of her, which
+she alone, by her presence or by her letters, could assuage, almost as
+disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse as another need which
+characterised this new period in Swann's life, when the sereness,
+the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a sort of
+spiritual superabundance, without his knowing to what he owed this
+unlooked-for enrichment of his life, any more than a person in delicate
+health who from a certain moment grows stronger, puts on flesh, and
+seems for a time to be on the road to a complete recovery:--this
+other need, which, too, developed in him independently of the visible,
+material world, was the need to listen to music and to learn to know it.
+
+And so, by the chemical process of his malady, after he had created
+jealousy out of his love, he began again to generate tenderness, pity
+for Odette. She had become once more the old Odette, charming and kind.
+He was full of remorse for having treated her harshly. He wished her to
+come to him, and, before she came, he wished to have already procured
+for her some pleasure, so as to watch her gratitude taking shape in her
+face and moulding her smile.
+
+So, too, Odette, certain of seeing him come to her in a few days,
+as tender and submissive as before, and plead with her for a
+reconciliation, became inured, was no longer afraid of displeasing him,
+or even of making him angry, and refused him, whenever it suited her,
+the favours by which he set most store.
+
+Perhaps she did not realise how sincere he had been with her during
+their quarrel, when he had told her that he would not send her any
+money, but would do what he could to hurt her. Perhaps she did not
+realise, either, how sincere he still was, if not with her, at any rate
+with himself, on other occasions when, for the sake of their future
+relations, to shew Odette that he was capable of doing without her, that
+a rupture was still possible between them, he decided to wait some time
+before going to see her again.
+
+Sometimes several days had elapsed, during which she had caused him no
+fresh anxiety; and as, from the next few visits which he would pay her,
+he knew that he was likely to derive not any great pleasure, but, more
+probably, some annoyance which would put an end to the state of calm in
+which he found himself, he wrote to her that he was very busy, and
+would not be able to see her on any of the days that he had suggested.
+Meanwhile, a letter from her, crossing his, asked him to postpone one of
+those very meetings. He asked himself, why; his suspicions, his grief,
+again took hold of him. He could no longer abide, in the new state of
+agitation into which he found himself plunged, by the arrangements which
+he had made in his preceding state of comparative calm; he would run
+to find her, and would insist upon seeing her on each of the following
+days. And even if she had not written first, if she merely acknowledged
+his letter, it was enough to make him unable to rest without seeing
+her. For, upsetting all Swann's calculations, Odette's acceptance had
+entirely changed his attitude. Like everyone who possesses something
+precious, so as to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to
+possess it, he had detached the precious object from his mind, leaving,
+as he thought, everything else in the same state as when it was there.
+But the absence of one part from a whole is not only that, it is not
+simply a partial omission, it is a disturbance of all the other parts, a
+new state which it was impossible to foresee from the old.
+
+But at other times--when Odette was on the point of going away for a
+holiday--it was after some trifling quarrel for which he had chosen the
+pretext, that he decided not to write to her and not to see her until
+her return, giving the appearance (and expecting the reward) of
+a serious rupture, which she would perhaps regard as final, to a
+separation, the greater part of which was inevitable, since she was
+going away, which, in fact, he was merely allowing to start a little
+sooner than it must. At once he could imagine Odette, puzzled, anxious,
+distressed at having received neither visit nor letter from him and this
+picture of her, by calming his jealousy, made it easy for him to break
+himself of the habit of seeing her. At odd moments, no doubt, in the
+furthest recesses of his brain, where his determination had thrust
+it away, and thanks to the length of the interval, the three weeks'
+separation to which he had agreed, it was with pleasure that he would
+consider the idea that he would see Odette again on her return; but it
+was also with so little impatience that he began to ask himself whether
+he would not readily consent to the doubling of the period of so easy an
+abstinence. It had lasted, so far, but three days, a much shorter time
+than he had often, before, passed without seeing Odette, and without
+having, as on this occasion he had, premeditated a separation. And
+yet, there and then, some tiny trace of contrariety in his mind, or
+of weakness in his body,--by inciting him to regard the present as an
+exceptional moment, one not to be governed by the rules, one in which
+prudence itself would allow him to take advantage of the soothing
+effects of a pleasure and to give his will (until the time should come
+when its efforts might serve any purpose) a holiday--suspended the
+action of his will, which ceased to exert its inhibitive control; or,
+without that even, the thought of some information for which he had
+forgotten to ask Odette, such as if she had decided in what colour she
+would have her carriage repainted, or, with regard to some investment,
+whether they were 'ordinary' or 'preference' shares that she wished him
+to buy (for it was all very well to shew her that he could live without
+seeing her, but if, after that, the carriage had to be painted over
+again, if the shares produced no dividend, a fine lot of good he would
+have done),--and suddenly, like a stretched piece of elastic which is
+let go, or the air in a pneumatic machine which is ripped open, the idea
+of seeing her again, from the remote point in time to which it had been
+attached, sprang back into the field of the present and of immediate
+possibilities.
+
+It sprang back thus without meeting any further resistance, so
+irresistible, in fact, that Swann had been far less unhappy in watching
+the end gradually approaching, day by day, of the fortnight which he
+must spend apart from Odette, than he was when kept waiting ten minutes
+while his coachman brought round the carriage which was to take him to
+her, minutes which he passed in transports of impatience and joy, in
+which he recaptured a thousand times over, to lavish on it all the
+wealth of his affection, that idea of his meeting with Odette, which, by
+so abrupt a repercussion, at a moment when he supposed it so remote, was
+once more present and on the very surface of his consciousness. The fact
+was that this idea no longer found, as an obstacle in its course, the
+desire to contrive without further delay to resist its coming, which
+had ceased to have any place in Swann's mind since, having proved to
+himself--or so, at least, he believed--that he was so easily capable of
+resisting it, he no longer saw any inconvenience in postponing a plan of
+separation which he was now certain of being able to put into operation
+whenever he would. Furthermore, this idea of seeing her again came back
+to him adorned with a novelty, a seductiveness, armed with a virulence,
+all of which long habit had enfeebled, but which had acquired new vigour
+during this privation, not of three days but of a fortnight (for a
+period of abstinence may be calculated, by anticipation, as having
+lasted already until the final date assigned to it), and had converted
+what had been, until then, a pleasure in store, which could easily be
+sacrificed, into an unlooked-for happiness which he was powerless to
+resist. Finally, the idea returned to him with its beauty enhanced by
+his own ignorance of what Odette might have thought, might, perhaps,
+have done on finding that he shewed no sign of life, with the result
+that he was going now to meet with the entrancing revelation of an
+Odette almost unknown.
+
+But she, just as she had supposed that his refusal to send her money was
+only a feint, saw nothing but a pretext in the question which he came,
+now, to ask her, about the repainting of her carriage, or the purchase
+of stock. For she could not reconstruct the several phases of these
+crises through which he passed, and in the general idea which she formed
+of them she made no attempt to understand their mechanism, looking only
+to what she knew beforehand, their necessary, never-failing and always
+identical termination. An imperfect idea (though possibly all the more
+profound in consequence), if one were to judge it from the point of
+view of Swann, who would doubtless have considered that Odette failed
+to understand him, just as a morphinomaniac or a consumptive, each
+persuaded that he has been thrown back, one by some outside event,
+at the moment when he was just going to shake himself free from his
+inveterate habit, the other by an accidental indisposition at the
+moment when he was just going to be finally cured, feels himself to be
+misunderstood by the doctor who does not attach the same importance
+to these pretended contingencies, mere disguises, according to him,
+assumed, so as to be perceptible by his patients, by the vice of one
+and the morbid state of the other, which in reality have never ceased
+to weigh heavily and incurably upon them while they were nursing their
+dreams of normality and health. And, as a matter of fact, Swann's
+love had reached that stage at which the physician and (in the case of
+certain affections) the boldest of surgeons ask themselves whether
+to deprive a patient of his vice or to rid him of his malady is still
+reasonable, or indeed possible.
+
+Certainly, of the extent of this love Swann had no direct knowledge.
+When he sought to measure it, it happened sometimes that he found it
+diminished, shrunken almost to nothing; for instance, the very moderate
+liking, amounting almost to dislike, which, in the days before he was
+in love with Odette, he had felt for her expressive features, her faded
+complexion, returned on certain days. "Really, I am making distinct
+headway," he would tell himself on the morrow, "when I come to think it
+over carefully, I find out that I got hardly any pleasure, last night,
+out of being in bed with her; it's an odd thing, but I actually thought
+her ugly." And certainly he was sincere, but his love extended a long
+way beyond the province of physical desire. Odette's person, indeed,
+no longer held any great place in it. When his eyes fell upon the
+photograph of Odette on his table, or when she came to see him, he
+had difficulty in identifying her face, either in the flesh or on the
+pasteboard, with the painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his
+mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, "It is she!" as
+when suddenly some one shews us in a detached, externalised form one
+of our own maladies, and we find in it no resemblance to what we are
+suffering. "She?"--he tried to ask himself what that meant; for it
+is something like love, like death (rather than like those vague
+conceptions of maladies), a thing which one repeatedly calls in
+question, in order to make oneself probe further into it, in the fear
+that the question will find no answer, that the substance will escape
+our grasp--the mystery of personality. And this malady, which was
+Swann's love, had so far multiplied, was so closely interwoven with all
+his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his
+sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so
+entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it
+away without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his case
+was past operation.
+
+By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests
+that when by chance he reappeared in the world of fashion, reminding
+himself that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting
+(although she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate
+of its worth), might, still, add a little to his own value in Odette's
+eyes (as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his
+love itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by
+seeming to denounce such things as less precious than itself), he would
+feel there, simultaneously with his distress at being in places and
+among people that she did not know, the same detached sense of pleasure
+as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were
+depicted the amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used
+to enjoy the thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the
+smartness of his own wardrobe and of his servants' liveries, the
+soundness of his investments, with the same relish as when he read in
+Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, of the machinery of
+daily life at Versailles, what Mme. de Maintenon ate and drank, or the
+shrewd avarice and great pomp of Lulli. And in the small extent to which
+this detachment was not absolute, the reason for this new pleasure which
+Swann was tasting was that he could emigrate for a moment into those few
+and distant parts of himself which had remained almost foreign to his
+love and to his pain. In this respect the personality, with which my
+great-aunt endowed him, of 'young Swann,' as distinct from the more
+individual personality of Charles Swann, was that in which he now most
+delighted. Once when, because it was the birthday of the Princesse de
+Parme (and because she could often be of use, indirectly, to Odette,
+by letting her have seats for galas and jubilees and all that sort of
+thing), he had decided to send her a basket of fruit, and was not quite
+sure where or how to order it, he had entrusted the task to a cousin of
+his mother who, delighted to be doing a commission for him, had written
+to him, laying stress on the fact that she had not chosen all the fruit
+at the same place, but the grapes from Crapote, whose speciality they
+were, the strawberries from Jauret, the pears from Chevet, who always
+had the best, am soon, "every fruit visited and examined, one by one,
+by myself." And in the sequel, by the cordiality with which the
+Princess thanked him, he had been able to judge of the flavour of the
+strawberries and of the ripeness of the pears. But, most of all, that
+"every fruit visited and examined one by one, by myself" had brought
+balm to his sufferings by carrying his mind off to a region which he
+rarely visited, although it was his by right, as the heir of a rich
+and respectable middle-class family in which had been handed down from
+generation to generation the knowledge of the 'right places' and the art
+of ordering things from shops.
+
+Of a truth, he had too long forgotten that he was 'young Swann' not to
+feel, when he assumed that part again for a moment, a keener pleasure
+than he was capable of feeling at other times--when, indeed, he was
+grown sick of pleasure; and if the friendliness of the middle-class
+people, for whom he had never been anything else than 'young Swann,' was
+less animated than that of the aristocrats (though more flattering, for
+all that, since in the middle-class mind friendship is inseparable from
+respect), no letter from a Royal Personage, offering him some princely
+entertainment, could ever be so attractive to Swann as the letter which
+asked him to be a witness, or merely to be present at a wedding in the
+family of some old friends of his parents; some of whom had 'kept up'
+with him, like my grandfather, who, the year before these events, had
+invited him to my mother's wedding, while others barely knew him by
+sight, but were, they thought, in duty bound to shew civility to the
+son, to the worthy successor of the late M. Swann.
+
+But, by virtue of his intimacy, already time-honoured, with so many of
+them, the people of fashion, in a certain sense, were also a part of his
+house, his service, and his family. He felt, when his mind dwelt upon
+his brilliant connections, the same external support, the same solid
+comfort as when he looked at the fine estate, the fine silver, the
+fine table-linen which had come down to him from his forebears. And the
+thought that, if he were seized by a sudden illness and confined to the
+house, the people whom his valet would instinctively run to find would
+be the Duc de Chartres, the Prince de Reuss, the Duc de Luxembourg
+and the Baron de Charlus, brought him the same consolation as our old
+Françoise derived from the knowledge that she would, one day, be buried
+in her own fine clothes, marked with her name, not darned at all (or so
+exquisitely darned that it merely enhanced one's idea of the skill and
+patience of the seamstress), a shroud from the constant image of which
+in her mind's eye she drew a certain satisfactory sense, if not actually
+of wealth and prosperity, at any rate of self-esteem. But most of
+all,--since in every one of his actions and thoughts which had reference
+to Odette, Swann was constantly subdued and swayed by the unconfessed
+feeling that he was, perhaps not less dear, but at least less welcome
+to her than anyone, even the most wearisome of the Verdurins'
+'faithful,'--when he betook himself to a world in which he was the
+paramount example of taste, a man whom no pains were spared to attract,
+whom people were genuinely sorry not to see, he began once again to
+believe in the existence of a happier life, almost to feel an appetite
+for it, as an invalid may feel who has been in bed for months and on a
+strict diet, when he picks up a newspaper and reads the account of an
+official banquet or the advertisement of a cruise round Sicily.
+
+If he was obliged to make excuses to his fashionable friends for not
+paying them visits, it was precisely for the visits that he did pay her
+that he sought to excuse himself to Odette. He still paid them (asking
+himself at the end of each month whether, seeing that he had perhaps
+exhausted her patience, and had certainly gone rather often to see her,
+it would be enough if he sent her four thousand francs), and for each
+visit he found a pretext, a present that he had to bring her, some
+information which she required, M. de Charlus, whom he had met actually
+going to her house, and who had insisted upon Swann's accompanying him.
+And, failing any excuse, he would beg M. de Charlus to go to her
+at once, and to tell her, as though spontaneously, in the course of
+conversation, that he had just remembered something that he had to say
+to Swann, and would she please send a message to Swann's house asking
+him to come to her then and there; but as a rule Swann waited at home
+in vain, and M. de Charlus informed him, later in the evening, that his
+device had not proved successful. With the result that, if she was now
+frequently away from Paris, even when she was there he scarcely saw her;
+that she who, when she was in love with him, used to say, "I am always
+free" and "What can it matter to me, what other people think?" now,
+whenever he wanted to see her, appealed to the proprieties or pleaded
+some engagement. When he spoke of going to a charity entertainment, or a
+private view, or a first-night at which she was to be present, she would
+expostulate that he wished to advertise their relations in public, that
+he was treating her like a woman off the streets. Things came to such a
+pitch that, in an effort to save himself from being altogether forbidden
+to meet her anywhere, Swann, remembering that she knew and was deeply
+attached to my great-uncle Adolphe, whose friend he himself also
+had been, went one day to see him in his little flat in the Rue
+de Bellechasse, to ask him to use his influence with Odette. As it
+happened, she invariably adopted, when she spoke to Swann about my
+uncle, a poetical tone, saying: "Ah, he! He is not in the least
+like you; it is an exquisite thing, a great, a beautiful thing, his
+friendship for me. He's not the sort of man who would have so little
+consideration for me as to let himself be seen with me everywhere in
+public." This was embarrassing for Swann, who did not know quite to what
+rhetorical pitch he should screw himself up in speaking of Odette to my
+uncle. He began by alluding to her excellence, _a priori_, the axiom
+of her seraphic super-humanity, the revelation of her inexpressible
+virtues, no conception of which could possibly be formed. "I should
+like to speak to you about her," he went on, "you, who know what a woman
+supreme above all women, what an adorable being, what an angel Odette
+is. But you know, also, what life is in Paris. Everyone doesn't see
+Odette in the light in which you and I have been privileged to see her.
+And so there are people who think that I am behaving rather foolishly;
+she won't even allow me to meet her out of doors, at the theatre. Now
+you, in whom she has such enormous confidence, couldn't you say a few
+words for me to her, just to assure her that she exaggerates the harm
+which my bowing to her in the street might do her?"
+
+My uncle advised Swann not to see Odette for some days, after which she
+would love him all the more; he advised Odette to let Swann meet her
+everywhere, and as often as he pleased. A few days later Odette told
+Swann that she had just had a rude awakening; she had discovered that
+my uncle was the same as other men; he had tried to take her by assault.
+She calmed Swann, who, at first, was for rushing out to challenge my
+uncle to a duel, but he refused to shake hands with him when they met
+again. He regretted this rupture all the more because he had hoped, if
+he had met my uncle Adolphe again sometimes and had contrived to talk
+things over with him in strict confidence, to be able to get him to
+throw a light on certain rumours with regard to the life that Odette had
+led, in the old days, at Nice. For my uncle Adolphe used to spend the
+winter there, and Swann thought that it might indeed have been there,
+perhaps, that he had first known Odette. The few words which some one
+had let fall, in his hearing, about a man who, it appeared, had been
+Odette's lover, had left Swann dumbfounded. But the very things which he
+would, before knowing them, have regarded as the most terrible to
+learn and the most impossible to believe, were, once he knew them,
+incorporated for all time in the general mass of his sorrow; he admitted
+them, he could no longer have understood their not existing. Only,
+each one of them in its passage traced an indelible line, altering the
+picture that he had formed of his mistress. At one time indeed he felt
+that he could understand that this moral 'lightness,' of which he would
+never have suspected Odette, was perfectly well known, and that at Baden
+or Nice, when she had gone, in the past, to spend several months in
+one or the other place, she had enjoyed a sort of amorous notoriety.
+He attempted, in order to question them, to get into touch again with
+certain men of that stamp; but these were aware that he knew Odette,
+and, besides, he was afraid of putting the thought of her into their
+heads, of setting them once more upon her track. But he, to whom,
+up till then, nothing could have seemed so tedious as was all that
+pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, now that
+he learned that Odette had, perhaps, led a 'gay' life once in those
+pleasure-cities, although he could never find out whether it had been
+solely to satisfy a want of money which, thanks to himself, she no
+longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might, at any
+moment, revive in her, he would lean, in impotent anguish, blinded and
+dizzy, over the bottomless abyss into which had passed, in which had
+been engulfed those years of his own, early in MacMahon's _Septennat_,
+in which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer
+beneath the limes of Baden, and would find in those years a sad but
+splendid profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; and he
+would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant
+details that made up the daily round on the Côte d'Azur in those days,
+if it could have helped him to understand something that still baffled
+him in the smile or in the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does
+the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century
+Florence, so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the
+Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli. He would sit,
+often, without saying a word to her, only gazing at her and dreaming;
+and she would comment: "You do look sad!" It was not very long since,
+from the idea that she was an excellent creature, comparable to the best
+women that he had known, he had passed to that of her being 'kept'; and
+yet already, by an inverse process, he had returned from the Odette de
+Crécy, perhaps too well known to the holiday-makers, to the 'ladies'
+men' of Nice and Baden, to this face, the expression on which was so
+often gentle, to this nature so eminently human. He would ask himself:
+"What does it mean, after all, to say that everyone at Nice knows who
+Odette de Crécy is? Reputations of that sort, even when they're true,
+are always based upon other people's ideas"; he would reflect that this
+legend--even if it were authentic--was something external to Odette,
+was not inherent in her like a mischievous and ineradicable personality;
+that the creature who might have been led astray was a woman with frank
+eyes, a heart full of pity for the sufferings of others, a docile body
+which he had pressed tightly in his arms and explored with his fingers,
+a woman of whom he might one day come into absolute possession if he
+succeeded in making himself indispensable to her. There she was,
+often tired, her face left blank for the nonce by that eager, feverish
+preoccupation with the unknown things which made Swann suffer; she would
+push back her hair with both hands; her forehead, her whole face would
+seem to grow larger; then, suddenly, some ordinary human thought, some
+worthy sentiment such as is to be found in all creatures when, in a
+moment of rest or meditation, they are free to express themselves, would
+flash out from her eyes like a ray of gold. And immediately the whole of
+her face would light up like a grey landscape, swathed in clouds which,
+suddenly, are swept away and the dull scene transfigured, at the moment
+of the sun's setting. The life which occupied Odette at such times, even
+the future which she seemed to be dreamily regarding, Swann could have
+shared with her. No evil disturbance seemed to have left any effect on
+them. Rare as they became, those moments did not occur in vain. By the
+process of memory, Swann joined the fragments together, abolished the
+intervals between them, cast, as in molten gold, the image of an Odette
+compact of kindness and tranquillity, for whom he was to make, later on
+(as we shall see in the second part of this story) sacrifices which the
+other Odette would never have won from him. But how rare those moments
+were, and how seldom he now saw her! Even in regard to their evening
+meetings, she would never tell him until the last minute whether she
+would be able to see him, for, reckoning on his being always free, she
+wished first to be certain that no one else would offer to come to her.
+She would plead that she was obliged to wait for an answer which was of
+the very greatest importance, and if, even after she had made Swann
+come to her house, any of her friends asked her, half-way through the
+evening, to join them at some theatre, or at supper afterwards, she
+would jump for joy and dress herself with all speed. As her toilet
+progressed, every movement that she made brought Swann nearer to the
+moment when he would have to part from her, when she would fly off with
+irresistible force; and when at length she was ready, and, plunging into
+her mirror a last glance strained and brightened by her anxiety to look
+well, smeared a little salve on her lips, fixed a stray loci of hair
+over her brow, and called for her cloak of sky-blue silk with golden
+tassels, Swann would be looking so wretched that she would be unable to
+restrain a gesture of impatience as she flung at him: "So that is how
+you thank me for keeping you here till the last minute! And I thought
+I was being so nice to you. Well, I shall know better another time!"
+Sometimes, at the risk of annoying her, he made up his mind that he
+would find out where she had gone, and even dreamed of a defensive
+alliance with Forcheville, who might perhaps have been able to tell him.
+But anyhow, when he knew with whom she was spending the evening, it
+was very seldom that he could not discover, among all his innumerable
+acquaintance, some one who knew--if only indirectly--the man with
+whom she had gone out, and could easily obtain this or that piece of
+information about him. And while he was writing to one of his friends,
+asking him to try to get a little light thrown upon some point or other,
+he would feel a sense of relief on ceasing to vex himself with questions
+to which there was no answer and transferring to some one else the
+strain of interrogation. It is true that Swann was little the wiser for
+such information as he did receive. To know a thing does not enable us,
+always, to prevent its happening, but after all the things that we know
+we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can
+dispose of them as we choose, which gives us the illusion of a sort of
+power to control them. He was quite happy whenever M. de Charlus was
+with Odette. He knew that between M. de Charlus and her nothing untoward
+could ever happen, that when M. de Charlus went anywhere with her, it
+was out of friendship for himself, and that he would make no difficulty
+about telling him everything that she had done. Sometimes she had
+declared so emphatically to Swann that it was impossible for him to see
+her on a particular evening, she seemed to be looking forward so keenly
+to some outing, that Swann attached a very real importance to the fact
+that M. de Charlus was free to accompany her. Next day, without daring
+to put many questions to M. de Charlus, he would force him, by appearing
+not quite to understand his first answers, to give him more, after each
+of which he would feel himself increasingly relieved, for he very
+soon learned that Odette had spent her evening in the most innocent of
+dissipations.
+
+"But what do you mean, my dear Mémé, I don't quite understand.... You
+didn't go straight from her house to the Musée Grévin? Surely you went
+somewhere else first? No? That is very odd! You don't know how amusing
+you are, my dear Mémé. But what an odd idea of hers to go on to the Chat
+Noir afterwards; it was her idea, I suppose? No? Yours? That's strange.
+After all, it wasn't a bad idea; she must have known dozens of people
+there? No? She never spoke to a soul? How extraordinary! Then you sat
+there like that, just you and she, all by yourselves? I can picture you,
+sitting there! You are a worthy fellow, my dear Mémé; I'm exceedingly
+fond of you."
+
+Swann was now quite at ease. To him, who had so often happened, when
+talking to friends who knew nothing of his love, friends to whom he
+hardly listened, to hear certain detached sentences (as, for instance,
+"I saw Mme. de Crécy yesterday; she was with a man I didn't know."),
+sentences which dropped into his heart and passed at once into a solid
+state, grew hard as stalagmites, and seared and tore him as they lay
+there irremovable,--how charming, by way of contrast, were the words:
+"She didn't know a soul; she never spoke to a soul." How freely they
+coursed through him, how fluid they were, how vaporous, how easy to
+breathe! And yet, a moment later, he was telling himself that Odette
+must find him very dull if those were the pleasures that she preferred
+to his company. And their very insignificance, though it reassured him,
+pained him as if her enjoyment of them had been an act of treachery.
+
+Even when he could not discover where she had gone, it would have
+sufficed to alleviate the anguish that he then felt, for which Odette's
+presence, the charm of her company, was the sole specific (a specific
+which in the long run served, like many other remedies, to aggravate the
+disease, but at least brought temporary relief to his sufferings), it
+would have sufficed, had Odette only permitted him to remain in her
+house while she was out, to wait there until that hour of her return,
+into whose stillness and peace would flow, to be mingled and lost there,
+all memory of those intervening hours which some sorcery, some cursed
+spell had made him imagine as, somehow, different from the rest. But she
+would not; he must return home; he forced himself, on the way, to form
+various plans, ceased to think of Odette; he even reached the stage,
+while he undressed, of turning over all sorts of happy ideas in his
+mind: it was with a light heart, buoyed with the anticipation of going
+to see some favourite work of art on the morrow, that he jumped into
+bed and turned out the light; but no sooner had he made himself ready
+to sleep, relaxing a self-control of which he was not even conscious,
+so habitual had it become, than an icy shudder convulsed his body and he
+burst into sobs. He did not wish to know why, but dried his eyes, saying
+with a smile: "This is delightful; I'm becoming neurasthenic." After
+which he could not save himself from utter exhaustion at the thought
+that, next day, he must begin afresh his attempt to find out what Odette
+had been doing, must use all his influence to contrive to see her. This
+compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without
+result, was so cruel a scourge that one day, noticing a swelling over
+his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a
+tumour which would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with
+anything further, that it was his malady which was going to govern his
+life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed,
+at this period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even
+to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so
+much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his
+struggle.
+
+And yet he would have wished to live until the time came when he no
+longer loved her, when she would have no reason for lying to him, when
+at length he might learn from her whether, on the day when he had gone
+to see her in the afternoon, she had or had not been in the arms of
+Forcheville. Often for several days on end the suspicion that she was
+in love with some one else would distract his mind from the question
+of Forcheville, making it almost immaterial to him, like those new
+developments of a continuous state of ill-health which seem for a little
+time to have delivered us from their predecessors. There were even
+days when he was not tormented by any suspicion. He fancied that he was
+cured. But next morning, when he awoke, he felt in the same place
+the same pain, a sensation which, the day before, he had, as it were,
+diluted in the torrent of different impressions. But it had not stirred
+from its place. Indeed, it was the sharpness of this pain that had
+awakened him.
+
+Since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly important
+matters which took up so much of her time every day (albeit he had lived
+long enough in the world to know that such matters are never anything
+else than pleasures) he could not sustain for any length of time the
+effort to imagine them; his brain would become a void; then he would
+pass a finger over his tired eyelids, in the same way as he might have
+wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogether to think. There
+emerged, however, from this unexplored tract, certain occupations which
+reappeared from time to time, vaguely connected by Odette with some
+obligation towards distant relatives or old friends who, inasmuch as
+they were the only people whom she was in the habit of mentioning
+as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to compose the
+necessary, unalterable setting of her life. Because of the tone in which
+she referred, from time to time, to "the day when I go with my friend
+to the Hippodrome," if, when he felt unwell and had thought, "Perhaps
+Odette would be kind and come to see me," he remembered, suddenly, that
+it was one of those very days, he would correct himself with an "Oh,
+no! It's not worth while asking her to come; I should have thought of it
+before, this is the day when she goes with her friend to the Hippodrome.
+We must confine ourselves to what is possible; no use wasting our time
+in proposing things that can't be accepted and are declined in
+advance." And this duty that was incumbent upon Odette, of going to the
+Hippodrome, to which Swann thus gave way, seemed to him to be not merely
+ineluctable in itself; but the mark of necessity which stamped it seemed
+to make plausible and legitimate everything that was even remotely
+connected with it. If, when Odette, in the street, had acknowledged the
+salute of a passer-by, which had aroused Swann's jealousy, she replied
+to his questions by associating the stranger with any of the two or
+three paramount duties of which she had often spoken to him; if, for
+instance, she said: "That's a gentleman who was in my friend's box the
+other day; the one I go to the Hippodrome with," that explanation would
+set Swann's suspicions at rest; it was, after all, inevitable that
+this friend should have other guests than Odette in her box at the
+Hippodrome, but he had never sought to form or succeeded in forming any
+coherent impression of them. Oh! how he would have loved to know her,
+that friend who went to the Hippodrome, how he would have loved her to
+invite him there with Odette. How readily he would have sacrificed
+all his acquaintance for no matter what person who was in the habit of
+seeing Odette, were she but a manicurist or a girl out of a shop. He
+would have taken more trouble, incurred more expense for them than for
+queens. Would they not have supplied him, out of what was contained in
+their knowledge of the life of Odette, with the one potent anodyne for
+his pain? With what joy would he have hastened to spend his days with
+one or other of those humble folk with whom Odette kept up friendly
+relations, either with some ulterior motive or from genuine simplicity
+of nature. How willingly would he have fixed his abode for ever in the
+attics of some sordid but enviable house, where Odette went but never
+took him, and where, if he had lived with the little retired dressmaker,
+whose lover he would readily have pretended to be, he would have been
+visited by Odette almost daily. In those regions, that were almost
+slums, what a modest existence, abject, if you please, but delightful,
+nourished by tranquillity and happiness, he would have consented to lead
+indefinitely.
+
+It sometimes happened, again, that, when, after meeting Swann, she saw
+some man approaching whom he did not know, he could distinguish upon
+Odette's face that look of sorrow which she had worn on the day when he
+had come to her while Forcheville was there. But this was rare; for, on
+the days when, in spite of all that she had to do, and of her dread
+of what people would think, she did actually manage to see Swann, the
+predominant quality in her attitude, now, was self-assurance; a striking
+contrast, perhaps an unconscious revenge for, perhaps a natural reaction
+from the timorous emotion which, in the early days of their friendship,
+she had felt in his presence, and even in his absence, when she began a
+letter to him with the words: "My dear, my hand trembles so that I can
+scarcely write." (So, at least, she pretended, and a little of that
+emotion must have been sincere, or she would not have been anxious to
+enlarge and emphasise it.) So Swann had been pleasing to her then. Our
+hands do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love.
+When they have ceased to control our happiness how peaceful, how easy,
+how bold do we become in their presence! In speaking to him, in writing
+to him now, she no longer employed those words by which she had
+sought to give herself the illusion that he belonged to her, creating
+opportunities for saying "my" and "mine" when she referred to him: "You
+are all that I have in the world; it is the perfume of our friendship, I
+shall keep it," nor spoke to him of the future, of death itself, as of
+a single adventure which they would have to share. In those early days,
+whatever he might say to her, she would answer admiringly: "You know,
+you will never be like other people!"--she would gaze at his long,
+slightly bald head, of which people who know only of his successes
+used to think: "He's not regularly good-looking, if you like, but he is
+smart; that tuft, that eyeglass, that smile!" and, with more curiosity
+perhaps to know him as he really was than desire to become his mistress,
+she would sigh:
+
+"I do wish I could find out what there is in that head of yours!"
+
+But, now, whatever he might say, she would answer, in a tone sometimes
+of irritation, sometimes indulgent: "Ah! so you never will be like other
+people!"
+
+She would gaze at his head, which was hardly aged at all by his recent
+anxieties (though people now thought of it, by the same mental process
+which enables one to discover the meaning of a piece of symphonic music
+of which one has read the programme, or the 'likenesses' in a child
+whose family one has known: "He's not positively ugly, if you like,
+but he is really rather absurd; that eyeglass, that tuft, that smile!"
+realising in their imagination, fed by suggestion, the invisible
+boundary which divides, at a few months' interval, the head of an ardent
+lover from a cuckold's), and would say:
+
+"Oh, I do wish I could change you; put some sense into that head of
+yours."
+
+Always ready to believe in the truth of what he hoped, if it was only
+Odette's way of behaving to him that left room for doubt, he would fling
+himself greedily upon her words: "You can if you like," he would tell
+her.
+
+And he tried to explain to her that to comfort him, to control him, to
+make him work would be a noble task, to which numbers of other women
+asked for nothing better than to be allowed to devote themselves, though
+it is only fair to add that in those other women's hands the noble
+task would have seemed to Swann nothing more than an indiscreet and
+intolerable usurpation of his freedom of action. "If she didn't love me,
+just a little," he told himself, "she would not wish to have me altered.
+To alter me, she will have to see me more often." And so he was able to
+trace, in these faults which she found in him, a proof at least of
+her interest, perhaps even of her love; and, in fact, she gave him so
+little, now, of the last, that he was obliged to regard as proofs of
+her interest in him the various things which, every now and then, she
+forbade him to do. One day she announced that she did not care for his
+coachman, who, she thought, was perhaps setting Swann against her, and,
+anyhow, did not shew that promptness and deference to Swann's orders
+which she would have liked to see. She felt that he wanted to hear her
+say: "Don't have him again when you come to me," just as he might have
+wanted her to kiss him. So, being in a good temper, she said it; and he
+was deeply moved. That evening, when talking to M. de Charlus, with whom
+he had the satisfaction of being able to speak of her openly (for the
+most trivial remarks that he uttered now, even to people who had never
+heard of her, had always some sort of reference to Odette), he said to
+him:
+
+"I believe, all the same, that she loves me; she is so nice to me now,
+and she certainly takes an interest in what I do."
+
+And if, when he was starting off for her house, getting into his
+carriage with a friend whom he was to drop somewhere on the way,
+his friend said: "Hullo! that isn't Loredan on the box?" with what
+melancholy joy would Swann answer him:
+
+"Oh! Good heavens, no! I can tell you, I daren't take Loredan when I
+go to the Rue La Pérouse; Odette doesn't like me to have Loredan, she
+thinks he doesn't suit me. What on earth is one to do? Women, you know,
+women. My dear fellow, she would be furious. Oh, lord, yes; I've only to
+take Rémi there; I should never hear the last of it!"
+
+These new manners, indifferent, listless, irritable, which Odette now
+adopted with Swann, undoubtedly made him suffer; but he did not realise
+how much he suffered; since it had been with a regular progression, day
+after day, that Odette had chilled towards him, it was only by directly
+contrasting what she was to-day with what she had been at first that he
+could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place. Now
+this change was his deep, his secret wound, which pained him day and
+night, and whenever he felt that his thoughts were straying too near it,
+he would quickly turn them into another channel for fear of being made
+to suffer too keenly. He might say to himself in a vague way: "There
+was a time when Odette loved me more," but he never formed any definite
+picture of that time. Just as he had in his study a cupboard at which he
+contrived never to look, which he turned aside to avoid passing whenever
+he entered or left the room, because in one of its drawers he had locked
+away the chrysanthemum which she had given him on one of those first
+evenings when he had taken her home in his carriage, and the letters in
+which she said: "Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never
+have let you have that back," and "At whatever hour of the day or night
+you may need me, just send me a word, and dispose of me as you please,"
+so there was a place in his heart to which he would never allow his
+thoughts to trespass too near, forcing them, if need be, to evade it by
+a long course of reasoning so that they should not have to pass within
+reach of it; the place in which lingered his memories of happy days.
+
+But his so meticulous prudence was defeated one evening when he had gone
+out to a party.
+
+It was at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's, on the last, for that season,
+of the evenings on which she invited people to listen to the musicians
+who would serve, later on, for her charity concerts. Swann, who had
+intended to go to each of the previous evenings in turn, but had never
+been able to make up his mind, received, while he was dressing for this
+party, a visit from the Baron de Charlus, who came with an offer to
+go with him to the Marquise's, if his company could be of any use in
+helping Swann not to feel quite so bored when he got there, to be a
+little less unhappy. But Swann had thanked him with:
+
+"You can't conceive how glad I should be of your company. But the
+greatest pleasure that you can give me will be if you will go instead
+to see Odette. You know what a splendid influence you have over her. I
+don't suppose she'll be going anywhere this evening, unless she goes to
+see her old dressmaker, and I'm sure she would be delighted if you went
+with her there. In any case, you'll find her at home before then. Try
+to keep her amused, and also to give her a little sound advice. If you
+could arrange something for to-morrow which would please her, something
+that we could all three do together. Try to put out a feeler, too, for
+the summer; see if there's anything she wants to do, a cruise that we
+might all three take; anything you can think of. I don't count upon
+seeing her to-night, myself; still if she would like me to come, or
+if you find a loophole, you've only to send me a line at Mme. de
+Saint-Euverte's up till midnight; after that I shall be here. Ever so
+many thanks for all you are doing for me--you know what I feel about
+you!"
+
+His friend promised to go and do as Swann wished as soon as he had
+deposited him at the door of the Saint-Euverte house, where he arrived
+soothed by the thought that M. de Charlus would be spending the evening
+in the Rue La Pérouse, but in a state of melancholy indifference to
+everything that did not involve Odette, and in particular to the details
+of fashionable life, a state which invested them with the charm that is
+to be found in anything which, being no longer an object of our desire,
+appears to us in its own guise. On alighting from his carriage, in the
+foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic existence which
+hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions,
+and in which they shew a great regard for accuracy of costume and
+setting, Swann was amused to discover the heirs and successors of
+Balzac's 'tigers'--now 'grooms'--. who normally followed their mistress
+when she walked abroad, but now, hatted and booted, were posted out
+of doors, in front of the house on the gravelled drive, or outside the
+stables, as gardeners might be drawn up for inspection at the ends of
+their several flower-beds. The peculiar tendency which he had always
+had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits
+in galleries reasserted itself here, but in a more positive and more
+general form; it was society as a whole, now that he was detached
+from it, which presented itself to him in a series of pictures. In the
+cloak-room, into which, in the old days, when he was still a man of
+fashion, he would have gone in his overcoat, to emerge from it in
+evening dress, but without any impression of what had occurred there,
+his mind having been, during the minute or two that he had spent in
+it, either still at the party which he had just left, or already at the
+party into which he was just about to be ushered, he now noticed, for
+the first time, roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest,
+the scattered pack of splendid effortless animals, the enormous footmen
+who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests, until,
+pointing their noble greyhound profiles, they towered upon their feet
+and gathered in a circle round about him.
+
+One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the
+headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions,
+tortures, and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take
+his 'things.' But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by
+the softness of his cotton gloves, so effectively that, as he approached
+Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his
+person and the most tender regard for his hat. He took it with a care to
+which the precision of his movements imparted something that was almost
+over-fastidious, and with a delicacy that was rendered almost touching
+by the evidence of his splendid strength. Then he passed it to one of
+his satellites, a novice and timid, who was expressing the panic that
+overpowered him by casting furious glances in every direction, and
+displayed all the dumb agitation of a wild animal in the first hours of
+its captivity.
+
+A few feet away, a strapping great lad in livery stood musing,
+motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely decorative warrior
+whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings, lost in
+dreams, leaning upon his shield, while all around him are fighting and
+bloodshed and death; detached from the group of his companions who were
+thronging about Swann, he seemed as determined to remain unconcerned in
+the scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel, greenish eyes, as
+if it had been the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint
+James. He seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race--if,
+indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno and the
+frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had come in contact with it, and
+where it still dreams--fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue
+by some one of the Master's Paduan models, or of Albert Duerer's Saxons.
+And the locks of his reddish hair, crinkled by nature, but glued to his
+head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that Greek
+sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, and which,
+if in its creator's purpose it represents but man, manages at least to
+extract from man's simple outlines such a variety of richness, borrowed,
+as it were, from the whole of animated nature, that a head of hair,
+by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls, or in the
+overlaying of the florid triple diadem of its brushed tresses, can
+suggest at once a bunch of seaweed, a brood of fledgling doves, a bed of
+hyacinths and a serpent's writhing back. Others again, no less colossal,
+were disposed upon the steps of a monumental staircase which, by their
+decorative presence and marmorean immobility, was made worthy to be
+named, like that god-crowned ascent in the Palace of the Doges, the
+'Staircase of the Giants,' and on which Swann now set foot, saddened by
+the thought that Odette had never climbed it. Ah, with what joy would
+he, on the other hand, have raced up the dark, evil-smelling, breakneck
+flights to the little dressmaker's, in whose attic he would so gladly
+have paid the price of a weekly stage-box at the Opera for the right to
+spend the evening there when Odette came, and other days too, for the
+privilege of talking about her, of living among people whom she was in
+the habit of seeing when he was not there, and who, on that account,
+seemed to keep secret among themselves some part of the life of his
+mistress more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious than anything
+that he knew. Whereas upon that pestilential, enviable staircase to
+the old dressmaker's, since there was no other, no service stair in the
+building, one saw in the evening outside every door an empty, unwashed
+milk-can set out, in readiness for the morning round, upon the door-mat;
+on the despicable, enormous staircase which Swann was at that moment
+climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each
+anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter's lodge or
+the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor
+service which they controlled, and doing homage for them to the guests,
+a gate-keeper, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest
+of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by
+themselves like small shopkeepers, and might to-morrow lapse to the
+plebeian service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate),
+scrupulous in carrying out to the letter all the instructions that had
+been heaped upon them before they were allowed to don the brilliant
+livery which they wore only at long intervals, and in which they did not
+feel altogether at their ease, stood each in the arcade of his doorway,
+their splendid pomp tempered by a democratic good-fellowship, like
+saints in their niches, and a gigantic usher, dressed Swiss Guard
+fashion, like the beadle in a church, struck the pavement with his staff
+as each fresh arrival passed him. Coming to the top of the staircase, up
+which he had been followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and
+a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like one of Goya's
+sacristans or a tabellion in an old play, Swann passed by an office in
+which the lackeys, seated like notaries before their massive registers,
+rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name. He next crossed a
+little hall which--just as certain rooms are arranged by their owners
+to serve as the setting for a single work of art (from which they
+take their name), and, in their studied bareness, contain nothing else
+besides--displayed to him as he entered it, like some priceless effigy
+by Benvenuto Cellini of an armed watchman, a young footman, his body
+slightly bent forward, rearing above his crimson gorget an even more
+crimson face, from which seemed to burst forth torrents of fire,
+timidity and zeal, who, as he pierced the Aubusson tapestries that
+screened the door of the room in which the music was being given with
+his impetuous, vigilant, desperate gaze, appeared, with a soldierly
+impassibility or a supernatural faith--an allegory of alarums,
+incarnation of alertness, commemoration of a riot--to be looking out,
+angel or sentinel, from the tower of dungeon or cathedral, for the
+approach of the enemy or for the hour of Judgment. Swann had now only to
+enter the concert-room, the doors of which were thrown open to him by an
+usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as though tendering
+to him the keys of a conquered city. But he thought of the house
+in which at that very moment he might have been, if Odette had but
+permitted, and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a
+door-mat wrung his heart.
+
+He speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness of the human
+male when, on the other side of the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of
+the servants gave place to that of the guests. But even this ugliness of
+faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new
+and uncanny, now that their features,--instead of being to him symbols
+of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who
+until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after,
+boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged--were at rest,
+measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their
+curves and angles. And in these men, in the thick of whom Swann now
+found himself packed, there was nothing (even to the monocle which many
+of them wore, and which, previously, would, at the most, have enabled
+Swann to say that so-and-so wore a monocle) which, no longer restricted
+to the general connotation of a habit, the same in all of them, did not
+now strike him with a sense of individuality in each. Perhaps because
+he did not regard General de Froberville and the Marquis de Bréaute, who
+were talking together just inside the door, as anything more than two
+figures in a picture, whereas they were the old and useful friends who
+had put him up for the Jockey Club and had supported him in duels, the
+General's monocle, stuck like a shell-splinter in his common, scarred,
+victorious, overbearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it
+left half-blinded, like the single-eyed flashing front of the Cyclops,
+appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious
+to receive but which it was certainly not decent to expose, while
+that which M. de Bréaute wore, as a festive badge, with his pearl-grey
+gloves, his crush hat and white tie, substituting it for the familiar
+pair of glasses (as Swann himself did) when he went out to places, bore,
+glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the
+microscope, an infinitesimal gaze that swarmed with friendly feeling and
+never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of ceilings, the delightfulness
+of parties, the interestingness of programmes and the excellence of
+refreshments.
+
+"Hallo! you here! why, it's ages since I've seen you," the General
+greeted Swann and, noticing the look of strain on his face and
+concluding that it was perhaps a serious illness that had kept him away,
+went on, "You're looking well, old man!" while M. de Bréauté turned
+with, "My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?" to a 'society
+novelist' who had just fitted into the angle of eyebrow and cheek his
+own monocle, the sole instrument that he used in his psychological
+investigations and remorseless analyses of character, and who now
+replied, with an air of mystery and importance, rolling the 'r':--"I am
+observing!"
+
+The Marquis de Forestelle's monocle was minute and rimless, and, by
+enforcing an incessant and painful contraction of the eye over which it
+was incrusted like a superfluous cartilage, the presence of which there
+was inexplicable and its substance unimaginable, it gave to his face a
+melancholy refinement, and led women to suppose him capable of suffering
+terribly when in love. But that of M. de Saint-Candé, girdled, like
+Saturn, with an enormous ring, was the centre of gravity of a face which
+composed itself afresh every moment in relation to the glass, while
+his thrusting red nose and swollen sarcastic lips endeavoured by their
+grimaces to rise to the level of the steady flame of wit that sparkled
+in the polished disk, and saw itself preferred to the most ravishing
+eyes in the world by the smart, depraved young women whom it set
+dreaming of artificial charms and a refinement of sensual bliss; and
+then, behind him, M. de Palancy, who with his huge carp's head and
+goggling eyes moved slowly up and down the stream of festive gatherings,
+unlocking his great mandibles at every moment as though in search of
+his orientation, had the air of carrying about upon his person only an
+accidental and perhaps purely symbolical fragment of the glass wall of
+his aquarium, a part intended to suggest the whole which recalled to
+Swann, a fervent admirer of Giotto's Vices and Virtues at Padua, that
+Injustice by whose side a leafy bough evokes the idea of the forests
+that enshroud his secret lair.
+
+Swann had gone forward into the room, under pressure from Mme. de
+Saint-Euverte and in order to listen to an aria from _Orfeo_ which was
+being rendered on the flute, and had taken up a position in a corner
+from which, unfortunately, his horizon was bounded by two ladies of
+'uncertain' age, seated side by side, the Marquise de Cambremer and the
+Vicomtesse de Franquetot, who, because they were cousins, used to spend
+their time at parties in wandering through the rooms, each clutching her
+bag and followed by her daughter, hunting for one another like people at
+a railway station, and could never be at rest until they had reserved,
+by marking them with their fans or handkerchiefs, two adjacent chairs;
+Mme. de Cambremer, since she knew scarcely anyone, being all the more
+glad of a companion, while Mme. de Franquetot, who, on the contrary,
+was extremely popular, thought it effective and original to shew all
+her fine friends that she preferred to their company that of an obscure
+country cousin with whom she had childish memories in common. Filled
+with ironical melancholy, Swann watched them as they listened to the
+pianoforte intermezzo (Liszt's 'Saint Francis preaching to the birds')
+which came after the flute, and followed the virtuoso in his dizzy
+flight; Mme. de Franquetot anxiously, her eyes starting from her head,
+as though the keys over which his fingers skipped with such agility were
+a series of trapezes, from any one of which he might come crashing,
+a hundred feet, to the ground, stealing now and then a glance of
+astonishment and unbelief at her companion, as who should say: "It isn't
+possible, I would never have believed that a human being could do all
+that!"; Mme. de Cambremer, as a woman who had received a sound musical
+education, beating time with her head--transformed for the nonce into
+the pendulum of a metronome, the sweep and rapidity of whose movements
+from one shoulder to the other (performed with that look of wild
+abandonment in her eye which a sufferer shews who is no longer able to
+analyse his pain, nor anxious to master it, and says merely "I can't
+help it") so increased that at every moment her diamond earrings caught
+in the trimming of her bodice, and she was obliged to put straight the
+bunch of black grapes which she had in her hair, though without any
+interruption of her constantly accelerated motion. On the other side
+(and a little way in front) of Mme. de Franquetot, was the Marquise de
+Gallardon, absorbed in her favourite meditation, namely upon her own
+kinship with the Guermantes family, from which she derived both publicly
+and in private a good deal of glory not unmingled with shame, the most
+brilliant ornaments of that house remaining somewhat aloof from her,
+perhaps because she was just a tiresome old woman, or because she was a
+scandalous old woman, or because she came of an inferior branch of the
+family, or very possibly for no reason at all. When she found herself
+seated next to some one whom she did not know, as she was at this moment
+next to Mme. de Franquetot, she suffered acutely from the feeling that
+her own consciousness of her Guermantes connection could not be made
+externally manifest in visible character like those which, in the
+mosaics in Byzantine churches, placed one beneath another, inscribe in a
+vertical column by the side of some Sacred Personage the words which he
+is supposed to be uttering. At this moment she was pondering the fact
+that she had never received an invitation, or even call, from her young
+cousin the Princesse des Laumes, during the six years that had already
+elapsed since the latter's marriage. The thought filled her with
+anger--and with pride; for, by virtue of having told everyone who
+expressed surprise at never seeing her at Mme. des Laumes's, that it
+was because of the risk of meeting the Princesse Mathilde there--a
+degradation which her own family, the truest and bluest of Legitimists,
+would never have forgiven her, she had come gradually to believe that
+this actually was the reason for her not visiting her young cousin. She
+remembered, it is true, that she had several times inquired of Mme. des
+Laumes how they might contrive to meet, but she remembered it only in
+a confused way, and besides did more than neutralise this slightly
+humiliating reminiscence by murmuring, "After all, it isn't for me to
+take the first step; I am at least twenty years older than she is." And
+fortified by these unspoken words she flung her shoulders proudly back
+until they seemed to part company with her bust, while her head, which
+lay almost horizontally upon them, made one think of the 'stuck-on' head
+of a pheasant which is brought to the table regally adorned with its
+feathers. Not that she in the least degree resembled a pheasant, having
+been endowed by nature with a short and squat and masculine figure; but
+successive mortifications had given her a backward tilt, such as one may
+observe in trees which have taken root on the very edge of a precipice
+and are forced to grow backwards to preserve their balance. Since she
+was obliged, in order to console herself for not being quite on a level
+with the rest of the Guermantes, to repeat to herself incessantly that
+it was owing to the uncompromising rigidity of her principles and pride
+that she saw so little of them, the constant iteration had gradually
+remoulded her body, and had given her a sort of 'bearing' which was
+accepted by the plebeian as a sign of breeding, and even kindled, at
+times, a momentary spark in the jaded eyes of old gentlemen in clubs.
+Had anyone subjected Mme. de Gallardon's conversation to that form of
+analysis which by noting the relative frequency of its several terms
+would furnish him with the key to a ciphered message, he would at
+once have remarked that no expression, not even the commonest forms
+of speech, occurred in it nearly so often as "at my cousins the
+Guermantes's," "at my aunt Guermantes's," "Elzéar de Guermantes's
+health," "my cousin Guermantes's box." If anyone spoke to her of a
+distinguished personage, she would reply that, although she was not
+personally acquainted with him, she had seen him hundreds of times at
+her aunt Guermantes's, but she would utter this reply in so icy a tone,
+with such a hollow sound, that it was at once quite clear that if
+she did not know the celebrity personally that was because of all the
+obstinate, ineradicable principles against which her arching shoulders
+were stretched back to rest, as on one of those ladders on which
+gymnastic instructors make us 'extend' so as to develop the expansion of
+our chests.
+
+At this moment the Princesse des Laumes, who had not been expected to
+appear at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's that evening, did in fact arrive. To
+shew that she did not wish any special attention, in a house to which
+she had come by an act of condescension, to be paid to her superior
+rank, she had entered the room with her arms pressed close to her sides,
+even when there was no crowd to be squeezed through, no one attempting
+to get past her; staying purposely at the back, with the air of being
+in her proper place, like a king who stands in the waiting procession at
+the doors of a theatre where the management have not been warned of his
+coming; and strictly limiting her field of vision--so as not to seem to
+be advertising her presence and claiming the consideration that was her
+due--to the study of a pattern in the carpet or of her own skirt, she
+stood there on the spot which had struck her as the most modest (and
+from which, as she very well knew, a cry of rapture from Mme. de
+Saint-Euverte would extricate her as soon as her presence there was
+noticed), next to Mme. de Cambremer, whom, however, she did not know.
+She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her
+passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to
+say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme.
+de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished
+(so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by
+coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly
+and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she
+called 'exaggerating,' and always made a point of letting people see
+that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was
+not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although
+such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of
+that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the
+most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment,
+even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself
+whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary
+concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which,
+it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had
+ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of
+her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards
+the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a
+compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment
+she would merely straighten her shoulder-straps or feel in her golden
+hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny
+diamonds, which formed its simple but effective ornament, studying, with
+a cold interest, her impassioned neighbour, while at another she would
+beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her
+independence, she would beat a different time from the pianist's. When
+he had finished the Liszt Intermezzo and had begun a Prelude by Chopin,
+Mme. de Cambremer turned to Mme. de Franquetot with a tender smile,
+full of intimate reminiscence, as well as of satisfaction (that of
+a competent judge) with the performance. She had been taught in her
+girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures,
+the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by
+seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of
+the direction in which they started, the point which one might have
+expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those
+fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately--with a more
+premeditated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which,
+if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish--to
+clutch at one's heart.
+
+Brought up in a provincial household with few friends or visitors,
+hardly ever invited to a ball, she had fuddled her mind, in the solitude
+of her old manor-house, over setting the pace, now crawling-slow, now
+passionate, whirling, breathless, for all those imaginary waltzing
+couples, gathering them like flowers, leaving the ball-room for a moment
+to listen, where the wind sighed among the pine-trees, on the shore of
+the lake, and seeing of a sudden advancing towards her, more different
+from anything one had ever dreamed of than earthly lovers are, a slender
+young man, whose voice was resonant and strange and false, in white
+gloves. But nowadays the old-fashioned beauty of this music seemed
+to have become a trifle stale. Having forfeited, some years back, the
+esteem of 'really musical' people, it had lost its distinction and its
+charm, and even those whose taste was frankly bad had ceased to find in
+it more than a moderate pleasure to which they hardly liked to confess.
+Mme. de Cambremer cast a furtive glance behind her. She knew that her
+young daughter-in-law (full of respect for her new and noble family,
+except in such matters as related to the intellect, upon which, having
+'got as far' as Harmony and the Greek alphabet, she was specially
+enlightened) despised Chopin, and fell quite ill when she heard him
+played. But finding herself free from the scrutiny of this Wagnerian,
+who was sitting, at some distance, in a group of her own contemporaries,
+Mme. de Cambremer let herself drift upon a stream of exquisite memories
+and sensations. The Princesse des Laumes was touched also. Though
+without any natural gift for music, she had received, some fifteen
+years earlier, the instruction which a music-mistress of the Faubourg
+Saint-Germain, a woman of genius who had been, towards the end of
+her life, reduced to penury, had started, at seventy, to give to the
+daughters and granddaughters of her old pupils. This lady was now dead.
+But her method, an echo of her charming touch, came to life now and
+then in the fingers of her pupils, even of those who had been in other
+respects quite mediocre, had given up music, and hardly ever opened a
+piano. And so Mme. des Laumes could let her head sway to and fro, fully
+aware of the cause, with a perfect appreciation of the manner in which
+the pianist was rendering this Prelude, since she knew it by heart. The
+closing notes of the phrase that he had begun sounded already on her
+lips. And she murmured "How charming it is!" with a stress on the
+opening consonants of the adjective, a token of her refinement by which
+she felt her lips so romantically compressed, like the petals of a
+beautiful, budding flower, that she instinctively brought her eyes into
+harmony, illuminating them for a moment with a vague and sentimental
+gaze. Meanwhile Mme. de Gallardon had arrived at the point of saying to
+herself how annoying it was that she had so few opportunities of meeting
+the Princesse des Laumes, for she meant to teach her a lesson by not
+acknowledging her bow. She did not know that her cousin was in the room.
+A movement of Mme. Franquetot's head disclosed the Princess. At once
+Mme. de Gallardon dashed towards her, upsetting all her neighbours;
+although determined to preserve a distant and glacial manner which
+should remind everyone present that she had no desire to remain on
+friendly terms with a person in whose house one might find oneself, any
+day, cheek by jowl with the Princesse Mathilde, and to whom it was not
+her duty to make advances since she was not 'of her generation,'
+she felt bound to modify this air of dignity and reserve by some
+non-committal remark which would justify her overture and would force
+the Princess to engage in conversation; and so, when she reached her
+cousin, Mme. de Gallardon, with a stern countenance and one hand thrust
+out as though she were trying to 'force' a card, began with: "How is
+your husband?" in the same anxious tone that she would have used if the
+Prince had been seriously ill. The Princess, breaking into a laugh which
+was one of her characteristics, and was intended at once to shew the
+rest of an assembly that she was making fun of some one and also to
+enhance her own beauty by concentrating her features around her animated
+lips and sparkling eyes, answered: "Why; he's never been better in his
+life!" And she went on laughing.
+
+Mme. de Gallardon then drew herself up and, chilling her expression
+still further, perhaps because she was still uneasy about the Prince's
+health, said to her cousin:
+
+"Oriane," (at once Mme. des Laumes looked with amused astonishment
+towards an invisible third, whom she seemed to call to witness that she
+had never authorised Mme. de Gallardon to use her Christian name) "I
+should be so pleased if you would look in, just for a minute, to-morrow
+evening, to hear a quintet, with the clarinet, by Mozart. I should like
+to have your opinion of it."
+
+She seemed not so much to be issuing an invitation as to be asking
+favour, and to want the Princess's opinion of the Mozart quintet just
+as though it had been a dish invented by a new cook, whose talent it
+was most important that an epicure should come to judge.
+
+"But I know that quintet quite well. I can tell you now--that I adore
+it."
+
+"You know, my husband isn't at all well; it's his liver. He would like
+so much to see you," Mme. de Gallardon resumed, making it now a corporal
+work of charity for the Princess to appear at her party.
+
+The Princess never liked to tell people that she would not go to their
+houses. Every day she would write to express her regret at having
+been kept away--by the sudden arrival of her husband's mother, by an
+invitation from his brother, by the Opera, by some excursion to the
+country--from some party to which she had never for a moment dreamed of
+going. In this way she gave many people the satisfaction of feeling that
+she was on intimate terms with them, that she would gladly have come to
+their houses, and that she had been prevented from doing so only by some
+princely occurrence which they were flattered to find competing with
+their own humble entertainment. And then, as she belonged to that
+witty 'Guermantes set'--in which there survived something of the
+alert mentality, stripped of all commonplace phrases and conventional
+sentiments, which dated from Mérimée, and found its final expression in
+the plays of Meilhac and Halévy--she adapted its formula so as to suit
+even her social engagements, transposed it into the courtesy which was
+always struggling to be positive and precise, to approximate itself to
+the plain truth. She would never develop at any length to a hostess the
+expression of her anxiety to be present at her party; she found it more
+pleasant to disclose to her all the various little incidents on which it
+would depend whether it was or was not possible for her to come.
+
+"Listen, and I'll explain," she began to Mme. de Gallardon. "To-morrow
+evening I must go to a friend of mine, who has been pestering me to fix
+a day for ages. If she takes us to the theatre afterwards, then I can't
+possibly come to you, much as I should love to; but if we just stay in
+the house, I know there won't be anyone else there, so I can slip away."
+
+"Tell me, have you seen your friend M. Swann?"
+
+"No! my precious Charles! I never knew he was here. Where is he? I must
+catch his eye."
+
+"It's a funny thing that he should come to old Saint-Euverte's," Mme. de
+Gallardon went on. "Oh, I know he's very clever," meaning by that 'very
+cunning,' "but that makes no difference; fancy a Jew here, and she the
+sister and sister-in-law of two Archbishops."
+
+"I am ashamed to confess that I am not in the least shocked," said the
+Princesse des Laumes.
+
+"I know he's a converted Jew, and all that, and his parents and
+grandparents before him. But they do say that the converted ones are
+worse about their religion than the practising ones, that it's all just
+a pretence; is that true, d'you think?"
+
+"I can throw no light at all on the matter."
+
+The pianist, who was 'down' to play two pieces by Chopin, after
+finishing the Prelude had at once attacked a Polonaise. But once Mme.
+de Gallardon had informed her cousin that Swann was in the room, Chopin
+himself might have risen from the grave and played all his works in
+turn without Mme. des Laumes's paying him the slightest attention. She
+belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human race in which the
+untiring curiosity which the other half feels about the people whom it
+does not know is replaced by an unfailing interest in the people whom it
+does. As with many women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the presence, in
+any room in which she might find herself, of another member of her set,
+even although she had nothing in particular to say to him, would occupy
+her mind to the exclusion of every other consideration. From that
+moment, in the hope that Swann would catch sight of her, the Princess
+could do nothing but (like a tame white mouse when a lump of sugar is
+put down before its nose and then taken away) turn her face, in which
+were crowded a thousand signs of intimate connivance, none of them with
+the least relevance to the sentiment underlying Chopin's music, in the
+direction where Swann was, and, if he moved, divert accordingly the
+course of her magnetic smile.
+
+"Oriane, don't be angry with me," resumed Mme. de Gallardon, who could
+never restrain herself from sacrificing her highest social ambitions,
+and the hope that she might one day emerge into a light that would
+dazzle the world, to the immediate and secret satisfaction of saying
+something disagreeable, "people do say about your M. Swann that he's the
+sort of man one can't have in the house; is that true?"
+
+"Why, you, of all people, ought to know that it's true," replied the
+Princesse des Laumes, "for you must have asked him a hundred times, and
+he's never been to your house once."
+
+And leaving her cousin mortified afresh, she broke out again into a
+laugh which scandalised everyone who was trying to listen to the music,
+but attracted the attention of Mme. de Saint-Euverte, who had stayed,
+out of politeness, near the piano, and caught sight of the Princess now
+for the first time. Mme. de Saint-Euverte was all the more delighted
+to see Mme. des Laumes, as she imagined her to be still at Guermantes,
+looking after her father-in-law, who was ill.
+
+"My dear Princess, you here?"
+
+"Yes, I tucked myself away in a corner, and I've been hearing such
+lovely things."
+
+"What, you've been in the room quite a time?"
+
+"Oh, yes, quite a long time, which seemed very short; it was only long
+because I couldn't see you."
+
+Mme. de Saint-Euverte offered her own chair to the Princess, who
+declined it with:
+
+"Oh, please, no! Why should you? It doesn't matter in the least where
+I sit." And deliberately picking out, so as the better to display the
+simplicity of a really great lady, a low seat without a back: "There
+now, that hassock, that's all I want. It will make me keep my back
+straight. Oh! Good heavens, I'm making a noise again; they'll be telling
+you to have me 'chucked out'."
+
+Meanwhile, the pianist having doubled his speed, the emotion of the
+music-lovers was reaching its climax, a servant was handing refreshments
+about on a salver, and was making the spoons rattle, and, as on every
+other 'party-night', Mme. de Saint-Euverte was making signs to him,
+which he never saw, to leave the room. A recent bride, who had been told
+that a young woman ought never to appear bored, was smiling vigorously,
+trying to catch her hostess's eye so as to flash a token of her
+gratitude for the other's having 'thought of her' in connection with so
+delightful an entertainment. And yet, although she remained more calm
+than Mme. de Franquetot, it was not without some uneasiness that she
+followed the flying fingers; what alarmed her being not the pianist's
+fate but the piano's, on which a lighted candle, jumping at each
+_fortissimo_, threatened, if not to set its shade on fire, at least to
+spill wax upon the ebony. At last she could contain herself no longer,
+and, running up the two steps of the platform on which the piano stood,
+flung herself on the candle to adjust its sconce. But scarcely had her
+hand come within reach of it when, on a final chord, the piece finished,
+and the pianist rose to his feet. Nevertheless the bold initiative shewn
+by this young woman and the moment of blushing confusion between her
+and the pianist which resulted from it, produced an impression that was
+favourable on the whole.
+
+"Did you see what that girl did just now, Princess?" asked General de
+Froberville, who had come up to Mme. des Laumes as her hostess left her
+for a moment. "Odd, wasn't it? Is she one of the performers?"
+
+"No, she's a little Mme. de Cambremer," replied the Princess carelessly,
+and then, with more animation: "I am only repeating what I heard just
+now, myself; I haven't the faintest notion who said it, it was some one
+behind me who said that they were neighbours of Mme. de Saint-Euverte in
+the country, but I don't believe anyone knows them, really. They must be
+'country cousins'! By the way, I don't know whether you're particularly
+'well-up' in the brilliant society which we see before us, because I've
+no idea who all these astonishing people can be. What do you suppose
+they do with themselves when they're not at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's
+parties? She must have ordered them in with the musicians and the chairs
+and the food. 'Universal providers,' you know. You must admit, they're
+rather splendid, General. But can she really have the courage to hire
+the same 'supers' every week? It isn't possible!"
+
+"Oh, but Cambremer is quite a good name; old, too," protested the
+General.
+
+"I see no objection to its being old," the Princess answered dryly, "but
+whatever else it is it's not euphonious," she went on, isolating the
+word euphonious as though between inverted commas, a little affectation
+to which the Guermantes set were addicted.
+
+"You think not, eh! She's a regular little peach, though," said the
+General, whose eyes never strayed from Mme. de Cambremer. "Don't you
+agree with me, Princess?"
+
+"She thrusts herself forward too much; I think, in so young a woman,
+that's not very nice--for I don't suppose she's my generation," replied
+Mme. des Laumes (the last word being common, it appeared, to Gallardon
+and Guermantes). And then, seeing that M. de Froberville was still
+gazing at Mme. de Cambremer, she added, half out of malice towards the
+lady, half wishing to oblige the General: "Not very nice... for her
+husband! I am sorry that I do not know her, since she seems to attract
+you so much; I might have introduced you to her," said the Princess,
+who, if she had known the young woman, would most probably have done
+nothing of the sort. "And now I must say good night, because one of
+my friends is having a birthday party, and I must go and wish her many
+happy returns," she explained, modestly and with truth, reducing the
+fashionable gathering to which she was going to the simple proportions
+of a ceremony which would be boring in the extreme, but at which she was
+obliged to be present, and there would be something touching about her
+appearance. "Besides, I must pick up Basin. While I've been here, he's
+gone to see those friends of his--you know them too, I'm sure,--who are
+called after a bridge--oh, yes, the Iénas."
+
+"It was a battle before it was a bridge, Princess; it was a victory!"
+said the General. "I mean to say, to an old soldier like me," he went
+on, wiping his monocle and replacing it, as though he were laying
+a fresh dressing on the raw wound underneath, while the Princess
+instinctively looked away, "that Empire nobility, well, of course, it's
+not the same thing, but, after all, taking it as it is, it's very fine
+of its kind; they were people who really did fight like heroes."
+
+"But I have the deepest respect for heroes," the Princess assented,
+though with a faint trace of irony. "If I don't go with Basin to see
+this Princesse d'Iéna, it isn't for that, at all; it's simply because
+I don't know them. Basin knows them; he worships them. Oh, no, it's not
+what you think; he's not in love with her. I've nothing to set my face
+against! Besides, what good has it ever done when I have set my face
+against them?" she queried sadly, for the whole world knew that,
+ever since the day upon which the Prince des Laumes had married his
+fascinating cousin, he had been consistently unfaithful to her. "Anyhow,
+it isn't that at all. They're people he has known for ever so long, they
+do him very well, and that suits me down to the ground. But I must tell
+you what he's told me about their house; it's quite enough. Can you
+imagine it, all their furniture is 'Empire'!"
+
+"But, my dear Princess, that's only natural; it belonged to their
+grandparents."
+
+"I don't quite say it didn't, but that doesn't make it any less ugly. I
+quite understand that people can't always have nice things, but at least
+they needn't have things that are merely grotesque. What do you say?
+I can think of nothing more devastating, more utterly smug than that
+hideous style--cabinets covered all over with swans' heads, like
+bath-taps!"
+
+"But I believe, all the same, that they've got some lovely things; why,
+they must have that famous mosaic table on which the Treaty of..."
+
+"Oh, I don't deny, they may have things that are interesting enough
+from the historic point of view. But things like that can't, ever, be
+beautiful ... because they're simply horrible! I've got things like that
+myself, that came to Basin from the Montesquious. Only, they're up in
+the attics at Guermantes, where nobody ever sees them. But, after all,
+that's not the point, I would fly to see them, with Basin; I would even
+go to see them among all their sphinxes and brasses, if I knew them,
+but--I don't know them! D'you know, I was always taught, when I was a
+little girl, that it was not polite to call on people one didn't know."
+She assumed a tone of childish gravity. "And so I am just doing what
+I was taught to do. Can't you see those good people, with a totally
+strange woman bursting into their house? Why, I might get a most hostile
+reception."
+
+And she coquettishly enhanced the charm of the smile which the idea had
+brought to her lips, by giving to her blue eyes, which were fixed on the
+General, a gentle, dreamy expression.
+
+"My dear Princess, you know that they'd be simply wild with joy."
+
+"No, why?" she inquired, with the utmost vivacity, either so as to seem
+unaware that it would be because she was one of the first ladies in
+France, or so as to have the pleasure of hearing the General tell
+her so. "Why? How can you tell? Perhaps they would think it the most
+unpleasant thing that could possibly happen. I know nothing about them,
+but if they're anything like me, I find it quite boring enough to see
+the people I do know; I'm sure if I had to see people I didn't know
+as well, even if they had 'fought like heroes,' I should go stark mad.
+Besides, except when it's an old friend like you, whom one knows quite
+apart from that, I'm not sure that 'heroism' takes one very far in
+society. It's often quite boring enough to have to give a dinner-party,
+but if one had to offer one's arm to Spartacus, to let him take one
+down...! Really, no; it would never be Vercingetorix I should send for,
+to make a fourteenth. I feel sure, I should keep him for really big
+'crushes.' And as I never give any..."
+
+"Ah! Princess, it's easy to see you're not a Guermantes for nothing. You
+have your share of it, all right, the 'wit of the Guermantes'!"
+
+"But people always talk about the wit of the Guermantes; I never could
+make out why. Do you really know any others who have it?" she rallied
+him, with a rippling flow of laughter, her features concentrated, yoked
+to the service of her animation, her eyes sparkling, blazing with
+a radiant sunshine of gaiety which could be kindled only by such
+speeches--even if the Princess had to make them herself--as were in
+praise of her wit or of her beauty. "Look, there's Swann talking to your
+Cambremer woman; over there, beside old Saint-Euverte, don't you see
+him? Ask him to introduce you. But hurry up, he seems to be just going!"
+
+"Did you notice how dreadfully ill he's looking?" asked the General.
+
+"My precious Charles? Ah, he's coming at last; I was beginning to think
+he didn't want to see me!"
+
+Swann was extremely fond of the Princesse des Laumes, and the sight of
+her recalled to him Guermantes, a property close to Combray, and all
+that country which he so dearly loved and had ceased to visit, so as not
+to be separated from Odette. Slipping into the manner, half-artistic,
+half-amorous--with which he could always manage to amuse the Princess--a
+manner which came to him quite naturally whenever he dipped for a moment
+into the old social atmosphere, and wishing also to express in words,
+for his own satisfaction, the longing that he felt for the country:
+
+"Ah!" he exclaimed, or rather intoned, in such a way as to be audible at
+once to Mme. de Saint-Euverte, to whom he spoke, and to Mme. des Laumes,
+for whom he was speaking, "Behold our charming Princess! See, she has
+come up on purpose from Guermantes to hear Saint Francis preach to the
+birds, and has only just had time, like a dear little tit-mouse, to go
+and pick a few little hips and haws and put them in her hair; there are
+even some drops of dew upon them still, a little of the hoar-frost
+which must be making the Duchess, down there, shiver. It is very pretty
+indeed, my dear Princess."
+
+"What! The Princess came up on purpose from Guermantes? But that's too
+wonderful! I never knew; I'm quite bewildered," Mme. de Saint-Euverte
+protested with quaint simplicity, being but little accustomed to Swann's
+way of speaking. And then, examining the Princess's headdress,
+"Why, you're quite right; it is copied from... what shall I say, not
+chestnuts, no,--oh, it's a delightful idea, but how can the Princess
+have known what was going to be on my programme? The musicians didn't
+tell me, even."
+
+Swann, who was accustomed, when he was with a woman whom he had kept
+up the habit of addressing in terms of gallantry, to pay her delicate
+compliments which most other people would not and need not understand,
+did not condescend to explain to Mme. de Saint-Euverte that he had
+been speaking metaphorically. As for the Princess, she was in fits of
+laughter, both because Swann's wit was highly appreciated by her set,
+and because she could never hear a compliment addressed to herself
+without finding it exquisitely subtle and irresistibly amusing.
+
+"Indeed! I'm delighted, Charles, if my little hips and haws meet with
+your approval. But tell me, why did you bow to that Cambremer person,
+are you also her neighbour in the country?"
+
+Mme. de Saint-Euverte, seeing that the Princess seemed quite happy
+talking to Swann, had drifted away.
+
+"But you are, yourself, Princess!"
+
+"I! Why, they must have 'countries' everywhere, those creatures! Don't I
+wish I had!"
+
+"No, not the Cambremers; her own people. She was a Legrandin, and used
+to come to Combray. I don't know whether you are aware that you are
+Comtesse de Combray, and that the Chapter owes you a due."
+
+"I don't know what the Chapter owes me, but I do know that I'm 'touched'
+for a hundred francs, every year, by the Curé, which is a due that I
+could very well do without. But surely these Cambremers have rather a
+startling name. It ends just in time, but it ends badly!" she said with
+a laugh.
+
+"It begins no better." Swann took the point.
+
+"Yes; that double abbreviation!"
+
+"Some one very angry and very proper who didn't dare to finish the first
+word."
+
+"But since he couldn't stop himself beginning the second, he'd have done
+better to finish the first and be done with it. We are indulging in
+the most refined form of humour, my dear Charles, in the very best of
+taste--but how tiresome it is that I never see you now," she went on in
+a coaxing tone, "I do so love talking to you. Just imagine, I could not
+make that idiot Froberville see that there was anything funny about the
+name Cambremer. Do agree that life is a dreadful business. It's only
+when I see you that I stop feeling bored."
+
+Which was probably not true. But Swann and the Princess had the same way
+of looking at the little things of life--the effect, if not the cause of
+which was a close analogy between their modes of expression and even of
+pronunciation. This similarity was not striking because no two things
+could have been more unlike than their voices. But if one took the
+trouble to imagine Swann's utterances divested of the sonority that
+enwrapped them, of the moustache from under which they emerged, one
+found that they were the same phrases, the same inflexions, that they
+had the 'tone' of the Guermantes set. On important matters, Swann and
+the Princess had not an idea in common. But since Swann had become so
+melancholy, and was always in that trembling condition which precedes
+a flood of tears, he had the same need to speak about his grief that
+a murderer has to tell some one about his crime. And when he heard
+the Princess say that life was a dreadful business, he felt as much
+comforted as if she had spoken to him of Odette.
+
+"Yes, life is a dreadful business! We must meet more often, my dear
+friend. What is so nice about you is that you are not cheerful. We could
+spend a most pleasant evening together."
+
+"I'm sure we could; why not come down to Guermantes? My mother-in-law
+would be wild with joy. It's supposed to be very ugly down there, but
+I must say, I find the neighborhood not at all unattractive; I have a
+horror of 'picturesque spots'."
+
+"I know it well, it's delightful!" replied Swann. "It's almost too
+beautiful, too much alive for me just at present; it's a country to
+be happy in. It's perhaps because I have lived there, but things there
+speak to me so. As soon as a breath of wind gets up, and the cornfields
+begin to stir, I feel that some one is going to appear suddenly, that
+I am going to hear some news; and those little houses by the water's
+edge... I should be quite wretched!"
+
+"Oh! my dearest Charles, do take care; there's that appalling Rampillon
+woman; she's seen me; hide me somewhere, do tell me again, quickly, what
+it was that happened to her; I get so mixed up; she's just married off
+her daughter, or her lover (I never can remember),--perhaps both--to
+each other! Oh, no, I remember now, she's been dropped by her Prince...
+Pretend to be talking, so that the poor old Berenice sha'n't come and
+invite me to dinner. Anyhow, I'm going. Listen, my dearest Charles, now
+that I have seen you, once in a blue moon, won't you let me carry you
+off and take you to the Princesse de Parme's, who would be so pleased
+to see you (you know), and Basin too, for that matter; he's meeting me
+there. If one didn't get news of you, sometimes, from Mémé... Remember,
+I never see you at all now!"
+
+Swann declined. Having told M. de Charlus that, on leaving Mme. de
+Saint-Euverte's, he would go straight home, he did not care to run the
+risk, by going on now to the Princesse de Parme's, of missing a message
+which he had, all the time, been hoping to see brought in to him by one
+of the footmen, during the party, and which he was perhaps going to find
+left with his own porter, at home.
+
+"Poor Swann," said Mme. des Laumes that night to her husband; "he is
+always charming, but he does look so dreadfully unhappy. You will see
+for yourself, for he has promised to dine with us one of these days. I
+do feel that it's really absurd that a man of his intelligence should
+let himself be made to suffer by a creature of that kind, who isn't even
+interesting, for they tell me, she's an absolute idiot!" she concluded
+with the wisdom invariably shewn by people who, not being in love
+themselves, feel that a clever man ought to be unhappy only about such
+persons as are worth his while; which is rather like being astonished
+that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so
+insignificant a creature as the common bacillus.
+
+Swann now wished to go home, but, just as he was making his escape,
+General de Froberville caught him and asked for an introduction to Mme.
+de Cambremer, and he was obliged to go back into the room to look for
+her.
+
+"I say, Swann, I'd rather be married to that little woman than killed by
+savages, what do you say?"
+
+The words 'killed by savages' pierced Swann's aching heart; and at once
+he felt the need of continuing the conversation. "Ah!" he began, "some
+fine lives have been lost in that way... There was, you remember, that
+explorer whose remains Dumont d'Urville brought back, La Pérouse..."
+(and he was at once happy again, as though he had named Odette). "He was
+a fine character, and interests me very much, does La Pérouse," he ended
+sadly.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course, La Pérouse," said the General. "It's quite a
+well-known name. There's a street called that."
+
+"Do you know anyone in the Rue La Pérouse?" asked Swann excitedly.
+
+"Only Mme. de Chanlivault, the sister of that good fellow Chaussepierre.
+She gave a most amusing theatre-party the other evening. That's a house
+that will be really smart some day, you'll see!"
+
+"Oh, so she lives in the Rue La Pérouse. It's attractive; I like that
+street; it's so sombre."
+
+"Indeed it isn't. You can't have been in it for a long time; it's not at
+all sombre now; they're beginning to build all round there."
+
+When Swann did finally introduce M. de Froberville to the young Mme. de
+Cambremer, since it was the first time that she had heard the General's
+name, she hastily outlined upon her lips the smile of joy and surprise
+with which she would have greeted him if she had never, in the whole
+of her life, heard anything else; for, as she did not yet know all the
+friends of her new family, whenever anyone was presented to her, she
+assumed that he must be one of them, and thinking that she would shew
+her tact by appearing to have heard 'such a lot about him' since her
+marriage, she would hold out her hand with an air of hesitation which
+was meant as a proof at once of the inculcated reserve which she had to
+overcome and of the spontaneous friendliness which successfully overcame
+it. And so her parents-in-law, whom she still regarded as the most
+eminent pair in France, declared that she was an angel; all the more
+that they preferred to appear, in marrying her to their son, to have
+yielded to the attraction rather of her natural charm than of her
+considerable fortune.
+
+"It's easy to see that you're a musician heart and soul, Madame," said
+the General, alluding to the incident of the candle.
+
+Meanwhile the concert had begun again, and Swann saw that he could not
+now go before the end of the new number. He suffered greatly from being
+shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded
+him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable,
+had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than
+smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of
+insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective
+state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing
+external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which
+even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to
+prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in
+which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was
+entirely absent.
+
+But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition tore
+him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his heart. What
+had happened was that the violin had risen to a series of high notes,
+on which it rested as though expecting something, an expectancy which
+it prolonged without ceasing to hold on to the notes, in the exaltation
+with which it already saw the expected object approaching, and with a
+desperate effort to continue until its arrival, to welcome it before
+itself expired, to keep the way open for a moment longer, with all its
+remaining strength, that the stranger might enter in, as one holds a
+door open that would otherwise automatically close. And before Swann had
+had time to understand what was happening, to think: "It is the little
+phrase from Vinteuil's sonata. I mustn't listen!", all his memories of
+the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded,
+up till that evening, in keeping invisible in the depths of his being,
+deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they
+supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken
+wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his
+present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.
+
+In place of the abstract expressions "the time when I was happy," "the
+time when I was loved," which he had often used until then, and without
+much suffering, for his intelligence had not embodied in them anything
+of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the
+reality, he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the
+peculiar, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all;
+the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she had tossed
+after him into his carriage, which he had kept pressed to his lips, the
+address 'Maison Dorée,' embossed on the note-paper on which he had read
+"My hand trembles so as I write to you," the frowning contraction of her
+eyebrows when she said pleadingly: "You won't let it be very long before
+you send for me?"; he could smell the heated iron of the barber whom he
+used to have in to singe his hair while Loredan went to fetch the little
+working girl; could feel the torrents of rain which fell so often that
+spring, the ice-cold homeward drive in his victoria, by moonlight; all
+the network of mental habits, of seasonable impressions, of sensory
+reactions, which had extended over a series of weeks its uniform meshes,
+by which his body now found itself inextricably held. At that time he
+had been satisfying a sensual curiosity to know what were the pleasures
+of those people who lived for love alone. He had supposed that he could
+stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows also;
+how small a thing the actual charm of Odette was now in comparison with
+that formidable terror which extended it like a cloudy halo all around
+her, that enormous anguish of not knowing at every hour of the day and
+night what she had been doing, of not possessing her wholly, at all
+times and in all places! Alas, he recalled the accents in which she had
+exclaimed: "But I can see you at any time; I am always free!"--she, who
+was never free now; the interest, the curiosity that she had shewn in
+his life, her passionate desire that he should do her the favour--of
+which it was he who, then, had felt suspicious, as of a possibly tedious
+waste of his time and disturbance of his arrangements--of granting her
+access to his study; how she had been obliged to beg that he would let
+her take him to the Verdurins'; and, when he did allow her to come to
+him once a month, how she had first, before he would let himself be
+swayed, had to repeat what a joy it would be to her, that custom of
+their seeing each other daily, for which she had longed at a time when
+to him it had seemed only a tiresome distraction, for which, since that
+time, she had conceived a distaste and had definitely broken herself
+of it, while it had become for him so insatiable, so dolorous a need.
+Little had he suspected how truly he spoke when, on their third meeting,
+as she repeated: "But why don't you let me come to you oftener?" he had
+told her, laughing, and in a vein of gallantry, that it was for fear of
+forming a hopeless passion. Now, alas, it still happened at times that
+she wrote to him from a restaurant or hotel, on paper which bore a
+printed address, but printed in letters of fire that seared his heart.
+"Written from the Hôtel Vouillemont. What on earth can she have gone
+there for? With whom? What happened there?" He remembered the gas-jets
+that were being extinguished along the Boulevard des Italiens when he
+had met her, when all hope was gone among the errant shades upon that
+night which had seemed to him almost supernatural and which now (that
+night of a period when he had not even to ask himself whether he would
+be annoying her by looking for her and by finding her, so certain was he
+that she knew no greater happiness than to see him and to let him take
+her home) belonged indeed to a mysterious world to which one never may
+return again once its doors are closed. And Swann could distinguish,
+standing, motionless, before that scene of happiness in which it lived
+again, a wretched figure which filled him with such pity, because he
+did not at first recognise who it was, that he must lower his head,
+lest anyone should observe that his eyes were filled with tears. It was
+himself.
+
+When he had realised this, his pity ceased; he was jealous, now, of that
+other self whom she had loved, he was jealous of those men of whom he
+had so often said, without much suffering: "Perhaps she's in love with
+them," now that he had exchanged the vague idea of loving, in
+which there is no love, for the petals of the chrysanthemum and the
+'letter-heading' of the Maison d'Or; for they were full of love.
+And then, his anguish becoming too keen, he passed his hand over his
+forehead, let the monocle drop from his eye, and wiped its glass. And
+doubtless, if he had caught sight of himself at that moment, he would
+have added to the collection of the monocles which he had already
+identified, this one which he removed, like an importunate, worrying
+thought, from his head, while from its misty surface, with his
+handkerchief, he sought to obliterate his cares.
+
+There are in the music of the violin--if one does not see the instrument
+itself, and so cannot relate what one hears to its form, which modifies
+the fullness of the sound--accents which are so closely akin to those
+of certain contralto voices, that one has the illusion that a singer has
+taken her place amid the orchestra. One raises one's eyes; one sees only
+the wooden case, magical as a Chinese box; but, at moments, one is
+still tricked by the deceiving appeal of the Siren; at times, too, one
+believes that one is listening to a captive spirit, struggling in the
+darkness of its masterful box, a box quivering with enchantment, like a
+devil immersed in a stoup of holy water; sometimes, again, it is in the
+air, at large, like a pure and supernatural creature that reveals to the
+ear, as it passes, its invisible message.
+
+As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little
+phrase as performing the rites on which it insisted before it would
+consent to appear, as proceeding to utter the incantations necessary
+to procure, and to prolong for a few moments, the miracle of its
+apparition, Swann, who was no more able now to see it than if it had
+belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, who experienced something
+like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness
+with which he had been struck as he approached it, Swann felt that it
+was present, like a protective goddess, a confidant of his love, who, so
+as to be able to come to him through the crowd, and to draw him aside to
+speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And
+as she passed him, light, soothing, as softly murmured as the perfume
+of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which
+he closely scanned, sorry to see them fly away so fast, he made
+involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him,
+the harmonious, fleeting form.
+
+He felt that he was no longer in exile and alone since she, who
+addressed herself to him, spoke to him in a whisper of Odette. For he
+had no longer, as of old, the impression that Odette and he were not
+known to the little phrase. Had it not often been the witness of their
+joys? True that, as often, it had warned him of their frailty. And
+indeed, whereas, in that distant time, he had divined an element of
+suffering in its smile, in its limpid and disillusioned intonation,
+to-night he found there rather the charm of a resignation that was
+almost gay. Of those sorrows, of which the little phrase had spoken
+to him then, which he had seen it--without his being touched by them
+himself--carry past him, smiling, on its sinuous and rapid course, of
+those sorrows which were now become his own, without his having any hope
+of being, ever, delivered from them, it seemed to say to him, as once
+it had said of his happiness: "What does all that matter; it is all
+nothing." And Swann's thoughts were borne for the first time on a wave
+of pity and tenderness towards that Vinteuil, towards that unknown,
+exalted brother who also must have suffered so greatly; what could his
+life have been? From the depths of what well of sorrow could he have
+drawn that god-like strength, that unlimited power of creation?
+
+When it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his
+sufferings, Swann found a sweetness in that very wisdom which, but a
+little while back, had seemed to him intolerable when he thought that
+he could read it on the faces of indifferent strangers, who would regard
+his love as a digression that was without importance. 'Twas because the
+little phrase, unlike them, whatever opinion it might hold on the short
+duration of these states of the soul, saw in them something not, as
+everyone else saw, less serious than the events of everyday life, but,
+on the contrary, so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worthy
+of the trouble of expressing it. Those graces of an intimate sorrow,
+'twas them that the phrase endeavoured to imitate, to create anew; and
+even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and
+in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them,
+the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible. So much so that it
+made their value be confessed, their divine sweetness be tasted by
+all those same onlookers--provided only that they were in any sense
+musical--who, the next moment, would ignore, would disown them in real
+life, in every individual love that came into being beneath their eyes.
+Doubtless the form in which it had codified those graces could not be
+analysed into any logical elements. But ever since, more than a year
+before, discovering to him many of the riches of his own soul, the love
+of music had been born, and for a time at least had dwelt in him, Swann
+had regarded musical _motifs_ as actual ideas, of another world, of
+another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by
+the human mind, which none the less were perfectly distinct one from
+another, unequal among themselves in value and in significance. When,
+after that first evening at the Verdurins', he had had the little
+phrase played over to him again, and had sought to disentangle from his
+confused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress,
+it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the
+closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and
+to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression
+of a frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he
+was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon
+certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's convenience) for the
+mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before ever he knew the
+Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the first time he had heard
+the sonata played. He knew that his memory of the piano falsified still
+further the perspective in which he saw the music, that the field
+open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an
+immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which,
+here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored
+tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of
+passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing
+from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been
+discovered by certain great artists who do us the service, when they
+awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have
+found, of shewing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to
+us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration,
+of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and
+waste and void. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians. In his little
+phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye a clouded surface, there
+was contained, one felt, a matter so consistent, so explicit, to which
+the phrase gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once
+heard it preserved the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of
+their minds. Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and
+happiness, of which at once he knew as well in what respects it was
+peculiar as he would know of the _Princesse de Clèves_, or of _René_,
+should either of those titles occur to him. Even when he was not
+thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the
+same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such
+as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the
+rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned.
+Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we
+return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no
+more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known
+them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for
+example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in
+view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has
+vanished even the memory of the darkness. In that way Vinteuil's phrase,
+like some theme, say, in _Tristan_, which represents to us also a
+certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had
+endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was
+linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one
+of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being
+that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence;
+but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these
+conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either.
+We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who
+shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something
+less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.
+
+So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata
+did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it
+belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural creatures whom we
+have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim
+with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one
+forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access
+to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours. This was what
+Vinteuil had done for the little phrase. Swann felt that the composer
+had been content (with the musical instruments at his disposal) to
+draw aside its veil, to make it visible, following and respecting its
+outlines with a hand so loving, so prudent, so delicate and so sure,
+that the sound altered at every moment, blunting itself to indicate a
+shadow, springing back into life when it must follow the curve of some
+more bold projection. And one proof that Swann was not mistaken when he
+believed in the real existence of this phrase, was that anyone with an
+ear at all delicate for music would at once have detected the imposture
+had Vinteuil, endowed with less power to see and to render its forms,
+sought to dissemble (by adding a line, here and there, of his own
+invention) the dimness of his vision or the feebleness of his hand.
+
+The phrase had disappeared. Swann knew that it would come again at the
+end of the last movement, after a long passage which Mme. Verdurin's
+pianist always 'skipped.' There were in this passage some admirable
+ideas which Swann had not distinguished on first hearing the sonata, and
+which he now perceived, as if they had, in the cloakroom of his memory,
+divested themselves of their uniform disguise of novelty. Swann listened
+to all the scattered themes which entered into the composition of
+the phrase, as its premises enter into the inevitable conclusion of a
+syllogism; he was assisting at the mystery of its birth. "Audacity,"
+he exclaimed to himself, "as inspired, perhaps, as a Lavoisier's or an
+Ampere's, the audacity of a Vinteuil making experiment, discovering
+the secret laws that govern an unknown force, driving across a region
+unexplored towards the one possible goal the invisible team in which he
+has placed his trust and which he never may discern!" How charming
+the dialogue which Swann now heard between piano and violin, at the
+beginning of the last passage. The suppression of human speech, so far
+from letting fancy reign there uncontrolled (as one might have thought),
+had eliminated it altogether. Never was spoken language of such
+inflexible necessity, never had it known questions so pertinent, such
+obvious replies. At first the piano complained alone, like a bird
+deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as from a
+neighbouring tree. It was as at the first beginning of the world, as
+if there were not yet but these twain upon the earth, or rather in this
+world closed against all the rest, so fashioned by the logic of its
+creator that in it there should never be any but themselves; the world
+of this sonata. Was it a bird, was it the soul, not yet made perfect, of
+the little phrase, was it a fairy, invisibly somewhere lamenting, whose
+plaint the piano heard and tenderly repeated? Its cries were so sudden
+that the violinist must snatch up his bow and race to catch them as they
+came. Marvellous bird! The violinist seemed to wish to charm, to tame,
+to woo, to win it. Already it had passed into his soul, already the
+little phrase which it evoked shook like a medium's the body of the
+violinist, 'possessed' indeed. Swann knew that the phrase was going to
+speak to him once again. And his personality was now so divided that
+the strain of waiting for the imminent moment when he would find himself
+face to face, once more, with the phrase, convulsed him in one of those
+sobs which a fine line of poetry or a piece of alarming news will wring
+from us, not when we are alone, but when we repeat one or the other to
+a friend, in whom we see ourselves reflected, like a third person, whose
+probable emotion softens him. It reappeared, but this time to remain
+poised in the air, and to sport there for a moment only, as though
+immobile, and shortly to expire. And so Swann lost nothing of the
+precious time for which it lingered. It was still there, like an
+iridescent bubble that floats for a while unbroken. As a rainbow, when
+its brightness fades, seems to subside, then soars again and, before it
+is extinguished, is glorified with greater splendour than it has ever
+shewn; so to the two colours which the phrase had hitherto allowed to
+appear it added others now, chords shot with every hue in the prism, and
+made them sing. Swann dared not move, and would have liked to compel all
+the other people in the room to remain still also, as if the slightest
+movement might embarrass the magic presence, supernatural, delicious,
+frail, that would so easily vanish. But no one, as it happened, dreamed
+of speaking. The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent,
+perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive),
+breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to
+arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on
+which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on
+which a supernatural ceremony could be performed. It followed that, when
+the phrase at last was finished, and only its fragmentary echoes floated
+among the subsequent themes which had already taken its place, if Swann
+at first was annoyed to see the Comtesse de Monteriender, famed for her
+imbecilities, lean over towards him to confide in him her impressions,
+before even the sonata had come to an end; he could not refrain from
+smiling, and perhaps also found an underlying sense, which she was
+incapable of perceiving, in the words that she used. Dazzled by the
+virtuosity of the performers, the Comtesse exclaimed to Swann: "It's
+astonishing! I have never seen anything to beat it..." But a scrupulous
+regard for accuracy making her correct her first assertion, she added
+the reservation: "anything to beat it... since the table-turning!"
+
+From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had
+once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would
+not be realised now. And the days on which, by a lucky chance, she had
+once more shewn herself kind and loving to him, or if she had paid him
+any attention, he recorded those apparent and misleading signs of
+a slight movement on her part towards him with the same tender and
+sceptical solicitude, the desperate joy that people reveal who, when
+they are nursing a friend in the last days of an incurable malady,
+relate, as significant facts of infinite value: "Yesterday he went
+through his accounts himself, and actually corrected a mistake that we
+had made in adding them up; he ate an egg to-day and seemed quite to
+enjoy it, if he digests it properly we shall try him with a cutlet
+to-morrow,"--although they themselves know that these things are
+meaningless on the eve of an inevitable death. No doubt Swann was
+assured that if he had now been living at a distance from Odette he
+would gradually have lost all interest in her, so that he would have
+been glad to learn that she was leaving Paris for ever; he would have
+had the courage to remain there; but he had not the courage to go.
+
+He had often thought of going. Now that he was once again at work upon
+his essay on Vermeer, he wanted to return, for a few days at least, to
+The Hague, to Dresden, to Brunswick. He was certain that a 'Toilet of
+Diana' which had been acquired by the Mauritshuis at the Goldschmidt
+sale as a Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer. And he would have
+liked to be able to examine the picture on the spot, so as to strengthen
+his conviction. But to leave Paris while Odette was there, and even when
+she was not there--for in strange places where our sensations have not
+been numbed by habit, we refresh, we revive an old pain--was for him so
+cruel a project that he felt himself to be capable of entertaining it
+incessantly in his mind only because he knew himself to be resolute in
+his determination never to put it into effect. But it would happen
+that, while he was asleep, the intention to travel would reawaken in him
+(without his remembering that this particular tour was impossible) and
+would be realised. One night he dreamed that he was going away for a
+year; leaning from the window of the train towards a young man on the
+platform who wept as he bade him farewell, he was seeking to persuade
+this young man to come away also. The train began to move; he awoke
+in alarm, and remembered that he was not going away, that he would see
+Odette that evening, and next day and almost every day. And then, being
+still deeply moved by his dream, he would thank heaven for those special
+circumstances which made him independent, thanks to which he could
+remain in Odette's vicinity, and could even succeed in making her allow
+him to see her sometimes; and, counting over the list of his advantages:
+his social position--his fortune, from which she stood too often in
+need of assistance not to shrink from the prospect of a definite rupture
+(having even, so people said, an ulterior plan of getting him to marry
+her)--his friendship with M. de Charlus, which, it must be confessed,
+had never won him any very great favour from Odette, but which gave him
+the pleasant feeling that she was always hearing complimentary things
+said about him by this common friend for whom she had so great an
+esteem--and even his own intelligence, the whole of which he employed in
+weaving, every day, a fresh plot which would make his presence, if not
+agreeable, at any rate necessary to Odette--he thought of what might
+have happened to him if all these advantages had been lacking, he
+thought that, if he had been, like so many other men, poor and humble,
+without resources, forced to undertake any task that might be offered to
+him, or tied down by parents or by a wife, he might have been obliged
+to part from Odette, that that dream, the terror of which was still so
+recent, might well have been true; and he said to himself: "People don't
+know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they
+are." But he reflected that this existence had lasted already for
+several years, that all that he could now hope for was that it should
+last for ever, that he would sacrifice his work, his pleasures, his
+friends, in fact the whole of his life to the daily expectation of a
+meeting which, when it occurred, would bring him no happiness; and he
+asked himself whether he was not mistaken, whether the circumstances
+that had favoured their relations and had prevented a final rupture had
+not done a disservice to his career, whether the outcome to be
+desired was not that as to which he rejoiced that it happened only in
+dreams--his own departure; and he said to himself that people did not
+know when they were unhappy, that they were never so happy as they
+supposed.
+
+Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, she
+who was out of doors in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares,
+from morning to night. And as she always returned safe and sound, he
+marvelled at the strength, at the suppleness of the human body, which
+was able continually to hold in check, to outwit all the perils that
+environed it (which to Swann seemed innumerable, since his own secret
+desire had strewn them in her path), and so allowed its occupant, the
+soul, to abandon itself, day after day, and almost with impunity, to its
+career of mendacity, to the pursuit of pleasure. And Swann felt a very
+cordial sympathy with that Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he
+admired, who, on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of
+his wives, stabbed her, in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly
+relates, to recover his spiritual freedom. Then he would be ashamed
+of thinking thus only of himself, and his own sufferings would seem to
+deserve no pity now that he himself was disposing so cheaply of Odette's
+very life.
+
+Since he was unable to separate himself from her without a subsequent
+return, if at least he had seen her continuously and without separations
+his grief would ultimately have been assuaged, and his love would,
+perhaps, have died. And from the moment when she did not wish to leave
+Paris for ever he had hoped that she would never go. As he knew that her
+one prolonged absence, every year, was in August and September, he had
+abundant opportunity, several months in advance, to dissociate from it
+the grim picture of her absence throughout Eternity which was lodged in
+him by anticipation, and which, consisting of days closely akin to the
+days through which he was then passing, floated in a cold transparency
+in his mind, which it saddened and depressed, though without causing him
+any intolerable pain. But that conception of the future, that flowing
+stream, colourless and unconfined, a single word from Odette sufficed
+to penetrate through all Swann's defences, and like a block of ice
+immobilised it, congealed its fluidity, made it freeze altogether; and
+Swann felt himself suddenly filled with an enormous and unbreakable mass
+which pressed on the inner walls of his consciousness until he was fain
+to burst asunder; for Odette had said casually, watching him with a
+malicious smile: "Forcheville is going for a fine trip at Whitsuntide.
+He's going to Egypt!" and Swann had at once understood that this meant:
+"I am going to Egypt at Whitsuntide with Forcheville." And, in fact,
+if, a few days later, Swann began: "About that trip that you told me you
+were going to take with Forcheville," she would answer carelessly: "Yes,
+my dear boy, we're starting on the 19th; we'll send you a 'view' of the
+Pyramids." Then he was determined to know whether she was Forcheville's
+mistress, to ask her point-blank, to insist upon her telling him. He
+knew that there were some perjuries which, being so superstitious, she
+would not commit, and besides, the fear, which had hitherto restrained
+his curiosity, of making Odette angry if he questioned her, of making
+himself odious, had ceased to exist now that he had lost all hope of
+ever being loved by her.
+
+One day he received an anonymous letter which told him that Odette had
+been the mistress of countless men (several of whom it named, among
+them Forcheville, M. de Bréauté and the painter) and women, and that she
+frequented houses of ill-fame. He was tormented by the discovery that
+there was to be numbered among his friends a creature capable of
+sending him such a letter (for certain details betrayed in the writer a
+familiarity with his private life). He wondered who it could be. But he
+had never had any suspicion with regard to the unknown actions of other
+people, those which had no visible connection with what they said.
+And when he wanted to know whether it was rather beneath the apparent
+character of M. de Charlus, or of M. des Laumes, or of M. d'Orsan that
+he must place the untravelled region in which this ignoble action might
+have had its birth; as none of these men had ever, in conversation
+with Swann, suggested that he approved of anonymous letters, and as
+everything that they had ever said to him implied that they strongly
+disapproved, he saw no further reason for associating this infamy with
+the character of any one of them more than with the rest. M. de Charlus
+was somewhat inclined to eccentricity, but he was fundamentally good and
+kind; M. des Laumes was a trifle dry, but wholesome and straight. As for
+M. d'Orsan, Swann had never met anyone who, even in the most depressing
+circumstances, would come to him with a more heartfelt utterance, would
+act more properly or with more discretion. So much so that he was unable
+to understand the rather indelicate part commonly attributed to M.
+d'Orsan in his relations with a certain wealthy woman, and that whenever
+he thought of him he was obliged to set that evil reputation on one
+side, as irreconcilable with so many unmistakable proofs of his genuine
+sincerity and refinement. For a moment Swann felt that his mind was
+becoming clouded, and he thought of something else so as to recover
+a little light; until he had the courage to return to those other
+reflections. But then, after not having been able to suspect anyone, he
+was forced to suspect everyone that he knew. After all, M. de Charlus
+might be most fond of him, might be most good-natured; but he was a
+neuropath; to-morrow, perhaps, he would burst into tears on hearing that
+Swann was ill; and to-day, from jealousy, or in anger, or carried away
+by some sudden idea, he might have wished to do him a deliberate injury.
+Really, that kind of man was the worst of all. The Prince des Laumes
+was, certainly, far less devoted to Swann than was M. de Charlus. But
+for that very reason he had not the same susceptibility with regard to
+him; and besides, his was a nature which, though, no doubt, it was cold,
+was as incapable of a base as of a magnanimous action. Swann regretted
+that he had formed no attachments in his life except to such people.
+Then he reflected that what prevents men from doing harm to their
+neighbours is fellow-feeling, that he could not, in the last resort,
+answer for any but men whose natures were analogous to his own, as was,
+so far as the heart went, that of M. de Charlus. The mere thought of
+causing Swann so much distress would have been revolting to him. But
+with a man who was insensible, of another order of humanity, as was the
+Prince des Laumes, how was one to foresee the actions to which he might
+be led by the promptings of a different nature? To have a good heart was
+everything, and M. de Charlus had one. But M. d'Orsan was not lacking
+in that either, and his relations with Swann--cordial, but scarcely
+intimate, arising from the pleasure which, as they held the same views
+about everything, they found in talking together--were more quiescent
+than the enthusiastic affection of M. de Charlus, who was apt to be
+led into passionate activity, good or evil. If there was anyone by
+whom Swann felt that he had always been understood, and (with delicacy)
+loved, it was M. d'Orsan. Yes, but the life he led; it could hardly be
+called honourable. Swann regretted that he had never taken any notice
+of those rumours, that he himself had admitted, jestingly, that he had
+never felt so keen a sense of sympathy, or of respect, as when he was
+in thoroughly 'detrimental' society. "It is not for nothing," he now
+assured himself, "that when people pass judgment upon their neighbour,
+their finding is based upon his actions. It is those alone that are
+significant, and not at all what we say or what we think. Charlus and
+des Laumes may have this or that fault, but they are men of honour.
+Orsan, perhaps, has not the same faults, but he is not a man of honour.
+He may have acted dishonourably once again." Then he suspected Rémi,
+who, it was true, could only have inspired the letter, but he now felt
+himself, for a moment, to be on the right track. To begin with, Loredan
+had his own reasons for wishing harm to Odette. And then, how were we
+not to suppose that our servants, living in a situation inferior to our
+own, adding to our fortunes and to our frailties imaginary riches and
+vices for which they at once envied and despised us, should not find
+themselves led by fate to act in a manner abhorrent to people of our own
+class? He also suspected my grandfather. On every occasion when Swann
+had asked him to do him any service, had he not invariably declined?
+Besides, with his ideas of middle-class respectability, he might have
+thought that he was acting for Swann's good. He suspected, in turn,
+Bergotte, the painter, the Verdurins; paused for a moment to admire
+once again the wisdom of people in society, who refused to mix in the
+artistic circles in which such things were possible, were, perhaps, even
+openly avowed, as excellent jokes; but then he recalled the marks of
+honesty that were to be observed in those Bohemians, and contrasted them
+with the life of expedients, often bordering on fraudulence, to which
+the want of money, the craving for luxury, the corrupting influence of
+their pleasures often drove members of the aristocracy. In a word, this
+anonymous letter proved that he himself knew a human being capable of
+the most infamous conduct, but he could see no reason why that infamy
+should lurk in the depths--which no strange eye might explore--of
+the warm heart rather than the cold, the artist's rather than the
+business-man's, the noble's rather than the flunkey's. What criterion
+ought one to adopt, in order to judge one's fellows? After all, there
+was not a single one of the people whom he knew who might not, in
+certain circumstances, prove capable of a shameful action. Must he then
+cease to see them all? His mind grew clouded; he passed his hands two
+or three times across his brow, wiped his glasses with his handkerchief,
+and remembering that, after all, men who were as good as himself
+frequented the society of M. de Charlus, the Prince des Laumes and
+the rest, he persuaded himself that this meant, if not that they were
+incapable of shameful actions, at least that it was a necessity in human
+life, to which everyone must submit, to frequent the society of people
+who were, perhaps, not incapable of such actions. And he continued to
+shake hands with all the friends whom he had suspected, with the purely
+formal reservation that each one of them had, possibly, been seeking to
+drive him to despair. As for the actual contents of the letter, they
+did not disturb him; for in not one of the charges which it formulated
+against Odette could he see the least vestige of fact. Like many other
+men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind, and was slow in invention. He knew
+quite well as a general truth, that human life is full of contrasts, but
+in the case of any one human being he imagined all that part of his or
+her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the
+part with which he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in the
+light of what was revealed. At such times as he spent with Odette,
+if their conversation turned upon an indelicate act committed, or
+an indelicate sentiment expressed by some third person, she would
+ruthlessly condemn the culprit by virtue of the same moral principles
+which Swann had always heard expressed by his own parents, and to which
+he himself had remained loyal; and then, she would arrange her flowers,
+would sip her tea, would shew an interest in his work. So Swann extended
+those habits to fill the rest of her life, he reconstructed those
+actions when he wished to form a picture of the moments in which he and
+she were apart. If anyone had portrayed her to him as she was, or rather
+as she had been for so long with himself, but had substituted some
+other man, he would have been distressed, for such a portrait would have
+struck him as lifelike. But to suppose that she went to bad houses,
+that she abandoned herself to orgies with other women, that she led
+the crapulous existence of the most abject, the most contemptible of
+mortals--would be an insane wandering of the mind, for the realisation
+of which, thank heaven, the chrysanthemums that he could imagine, the
+daily cups of tea, the virtuous indignation left neither time nor
+place. Only, now and again, he gave Odette to understand that people
+maliciously kept him informed of everything that she did; and making
+opportune use of some detail--insignificant but true--which he had
+accidentally learned, as though it were the sole fragment which he would
+allow, in spite of himself, to pass his lips, out of the numberless
+other fragments of that complete reconstruction of her daily life which
+he carried secretly in his mind, he led her to suppose that he was
+perfectly informed upon matters, which, in reality, he neither knew nor
+suspected, for if he often adjured Odette never to swerve from or make
+alteration of the truth, that was only, whether he realised it or no, in
+order that Odette should tell him everything that she did. No doubt, as
+he used to assure Odette, he loved sincerity, but only as he might
+love a pander who could keep him in touch with the daily life of his
+mistress. Moreover, his love of sincerity, not being disinterested, had
+not improved his character. The truth which he cherished was that which
+Odette would tell him; but he himself, in order to extract that truth
+from her, was not afraid to have recourse to falsehood, that very
+falsehood which he never ceased to depict to Odette as leading every
+human creature down to utter degradation. In a word, he lied as much
+as did Odette, because, while more unhappy than she, he was no less
+egotistical. And she, when she heard him repeating thus to her the
+things that she had done, would stare at him with a look of distrust
+and, at all hazards, of indignation, so as not to appear to be
+humiliated, and to be blushing for her actions. One day, after the
+longest period of calm through which he had yet been able to exist
+without being overtaken by an attack of jealousy, he had accepted an
+invitation to spend the evening at the theatre with the Princesse des
+Laumes. Having opened his newspaper to find out what was being
+played, the sight of the title--_Les Filles de Marbre_, by Théodore
+Barrière,--struck him so cruel a blow that he recoiled instinctively
+from it and turned his head away. Illuminated, as though by a row of
+footlights, in the new surroundings in which it now appeared, that word
+'marble,' which he had lost the power to distinguish, so often had it
+passed, in print, beneath his eyes, had suddenly become visible once
+again, and had at once brought back to his mind the story which Odette
+had told him, long ago, of a visit which she had paid to the Salon at
+the Palais d'Industrie with Mme. Verdurin, who had said to her, "Take
+care, now! I know how to melt you, all right. You're not made of
+marble." Odette had assured him that it was only a joke, and he had
+not attached any importance to it at the time. But he had had more
+confidence in her then than he had now. And the anonymous letter
+referred explicitly to relations of that sort. Without daring to lift
+his eyes to the newspaper, he opened it, turned the page so as not to
+see again the words, _Filles de Marbre_, and began to read mechanically
+the news from the provinces. There had been a storm in the Channel,
+and damage was reported from Dieppe, Cabourg, Beuzeval.... Suddenly he
+recoiled again in horror.
+
+The name of Beuzeval had suggested to him that of another place in the
+same district, Beuzeville, which carried also, bound to it by a hyphen,
+a second name, to wit Bréauté, which he had often seen on maps, but
+without ever previously remarking that it was the same name as that
+borne by his friend M. de Bréauté, whom the anonymous letter accused of
+having been Odette's lover. After all, when it came to M. de Bréauté,
+there was nothing improbable in the charge; but so far as Mme. Verdurin
+was concerned, it was a sheer impossibility. From the fact that Odette
+did occasionally tell a lie, it was not fair to conclude that she never,
+by any chance, told the truth, and in these bantering conversations
+with Mme. Verdurin which she herself had repeated to Swann, he could
+recognize those meaningless and dangerous pleasantries which, in their
+inexperience of life and ignorance of vice, women often utter (thereby
+certifying their own innocence), who--as, for instance, Odette,--would
+be the last people in the world to feel any undue affection for one
+another. Whereas, on the other hand, the indignation with which she
+had scattered the suspicions which she had unintentionally brought into
+being, for a moment, in his mind by her story, fitted in with everything
+that he knew of the tastes, the temperament of his mistress. But at
+that moment, by an inspiration of jealousy, analogous to the inspiration
+which reveals to a poet or a philosopher, who has nothing, so far, but
+an odd pair of rhymes or a detached observation, the idea or the natural
+law which will give power, mastery to his work, Swann recalled for the
+first time a remark which Odette had made to him, at least two years
+before: "Oh, Mme. Verdurin, she won't hear of anything just now but me.
+I'm a 'love,' if you please, and she kisses me, and wants me to go with
+her everywhere, and call her by her Christian name." So far from seeing
+in these expressions any connection with the absurd insinuations,
+intended to create an atmosphere of vice, which Odette had since
+repeated to him, he had welcomed them as a proof of Mme. Verdurin's
+warm-hearted and generous friendship. But now this old memory of her
+affection for Odette had coalesced suddenly with his more recent memory
+of her unseemly conversation. He could no longer separate them in his
+mind, and he saw them blended in reality, the affection imparting a
+certain seriousness and importance to the pleasantries which, in return,
+spoiled the affection of its innocence. He went to see Odette. He sat
+down, keeping at a distance from her. He did not dare to embrace her,
+not knowing whether in her, in himself, it would be affection or anger
+that a kiss would provoke. He sat there silent, watching their love
+expire. Suddenly he made up his mind.
+
+"Odette, my darling," he began, "I know, I am being simply odious, but I
+must ask you a few questions. You remember what I once thought about you
+and Mme. Verdurin? Tell me, was it true? Have you, with her or anyone
+else, ever?"
+
+She shook her head, pursing her lips together; a sign which people
+commonly employ to signify that they are not going, because it would
+bore them to go, when some one has asked, "Are you coming to watch the
+procession go by?", or "Will you be at the review?". But this shake of
+the head, which is thus commonly used to decline participation in
+an event that has yet to come, imparts for that reason an element of
+uncertainty to the denial of participation in an event that is past.
+Furthermore, it suggests reasons of personal convenience, rather than
+any definite repudiation, any moral impossibility. When he saw Odette
+thus make him a sign that the insinuation was false, he realised that it
+was quite possibly true.
+
+"I have told you, I never did; you know quite well," she added, seeming
+angry and uncomfortable.
+
+"Yes, I know all that; but are you quite sure? Don't say to me, 'You
+know quite well'; say, 'I have never done anything of that sort with any
+woman.'"
+
+She repeated his words like a lesson learned by rote, and as though she
+hoped, thereby, to be rid of him: "I have never done anything of that
+sort with any woman."
+
+"Can you swear it to me on your Laghetto medal?"
+
+Swann knew that Odette would never perjure herself on that.
+
+"Oh, you do make me so miserable," she cried, with a jerk of her body
+as though to shake herself free of the constraint of his question. "Have
+you nearly done? What is the matter with you to-day? You seem to have
+made up your mind that I am to be forced to hate you, to curse you!
+Look, I was anxious to be friends with you again, for us to have a nice
+time together, like the old days; and this is all the thanks I get!"
+
+However, he would not let her go, but sat there like a surgeon who waits
+for a spasm to subside that has interrupted his operation but need not
+make him abandon it.
+
+"You are quite wrong in supposing that I bear you the least ill-will in
+the world, Odette," he began with a persuasive and deceitful gentleness.
+"I never speak to you except of what I already know, and I always know a
+great deal more than I say. But you alone can mollify by your confession
+what makes me hate you so long as it has been reported to me only by
+other people. My anger with you is never due to your actions--I can
+and do forgive you everything because I love you--but to your
+untruthfulness, the ridiculous untruthfulness which makes you persist in
+denying things which I know to be true. How can you expect that I shall
+continue to love you, when I see you maintain, when I hear you swear to
+me a thing which I know to be false? Odette, do not prolong this moment
+which is torturing us both. If you are willing to end it at once, you
+shall be free of it for ever. Tell me, upon your medal, yes or no,
+whether you have ever done those things."
+
+"How on earth can I tell?" she was furious. "Perhaps I have, ever so
+long ago, when I didn't know what I was doing, perhaps two or three
+times."
+
+Swann had prepared himself for all possibilities. Reality must,
+therefore, be something which bears no relation to possibilities,
+any more than the stab of a knife in one's body bears to the gradual
+movement of the clouds overhead, since those words "two or three times"
+carved, as it were, a cross upon the living tissues of his heart. A
+strange thing, indeed, that those words, "two or three times," nothing
+more than a few words, words uttered in the air, at a distance, could so
+lacerate a man's heart, as if they had actually pierced it, could sicken
+a man, like a poison that he had drunk. Instinctively Swann thought of
+the remark that he had heard at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's: "I have never
+seen anything to beat it since the table-turning." The agony that he now
+suffered in no way resembled what he had supposed. Not only because, in
+the hours when he most entirely mistrusted her, he had rarely imagined
+such a culmination of evil, but because, even when he did imagine that
+offence, it remained vague, uncertain, was not clothed in the particular
+horror which had escaped with the words "perhaps two or three times,"
+was not armed with that specific cruelty, as different from anything
+that he had known as a new malady by which one is attacked for the first
+time. And yet this Odette, from whom all this evil sprang, was no less
+dear to him, was, on the contrary, more precious, as if, in proportion
+as his sufferings increased, there increased at the same time the price
+of the sedative, of the antidote which this woman alone possessed. He
+wished to pay her more attention, as one attends to a disease which
+one discovers, suddenly, to have grown more serious. He wished that
+the horrible thing which, she had told him, she had done "two or three
+times" might be prevented from occurring again. To ensure that, he must
+watch over Odette. People often say that, by pointing out to a man the
+faults of his mistress, you succeed only in strengthening his attachment
+to her, because he does not believe you; yet how much more so if he
+does! But, Swann asked himself, how could he manage to protect her? He
+might perhaps be able to preserve her from the contamination of any
+one woman, but there were hundreds of other women; and he realised how
+insane had been his ambition when he had begun (on the evening when
+he had failed to find Odette at the Verdurins') to desire the
+possession--as if that were ever possible--of another person. Happily
+for Swann, beneath the mass of suffering which had invaded his soul like
+a conquering horde of barbarians, there lay a natural foundation, older,
+more placid, and silently laborious, like the cells of an injured organ
+which at once set to work to repair the damaged tissues, or the muscles
+of a paralysed limb which tend to recover their former movements. These
+older, these autochthonous in-dwellers in his soul absorbed all Swann's
+strength, for a while, in that obscure task of reparation which gives
+one an illusory sense of repose during convalescence, or after an
+operation. This time it was not so much--as it ordinarily was--in
+Swann's brain that the slackening of tension due to exhaustion took
+effect, it was rather in his heart. But all the things in life that have
+once existed tend to recur, and, like a dying animal that is once more
+stirred by the throes of a convulsion which was, apparently, ended, upon
+Swann's heart, spared for a moment only, the same agony returned of its
+own accord to trace the same cross again. He remembered those moonlit
+evenings, when, leaning back in the victoria that was taking him to
+the Rue La Pérouse, he would cultivate with voluptuous enjoyment the
+emotions of a man in love, ignorant of the poisoned fruit that such
+emotions must inevitably bear. But all those thoughts lasted for no more
+than a second, the time that it took him to raise his hand to his heart,
+to draw breath again and to contrive to smile, so as to dissemble
+his torment. Already he had begun to put further questions. For his
+jealousy, which had taken an amount of trouble, such as no enemy would
+have incurred, to strike him this mortal blow, to make him forcibly
+acquainted with the most cruel pain that he had ever known, his jealousy
+was not satisfied that he had yet suffered enough, and sought to expose
+his bosom to an even deeper wound. Like an evil deity, his jealousy was
+inspiring Swann, was thrusting him on towards destruction. It was not
+his fault, but Odette's alone, if at first his punishment was not more
+severe.
+
+"My darling," he began again, "it's all over now; was it with anyone I
+know?"
+
+"No, I swear it wasn't; besides, I think I exaggerated, I never really
+went as far as that."
+
+He smiled, and resumed with: "Just as you like. It doesn't really
+matter, but it's unfortunate that you can't give me any name. If I were
+able to form an idea of the person that would prevent my ever thinking
+of her again. I say it for your own sake, because then I shouldn't
+bother you any more about it. It's so soothing to be able to form a
+clear picture of things in one's mind. What is really terrible is what
+one cannot imagine. But you've been so sweet to me; I don't want to tire
+you. I do thank you, with all my heart, for all the good that you have
+done me. I've quite finished now. Only one word more: how many times?"
+
+"Oh, Charles! can't you see, you're killing me? It's all ever so long
+ago. I've never given it a thought. Anyone would say that you were
+positively trying to put those ideas into my head again. And then you'd
+be a lot better off!" she concluded, with unconscious stupidity but with
+intentional malice.
+
+"I only wished to know whether it had been since I knew you. It's only
+natural. Did it happen here, ever? You can't give me any particular
+evening, so that I can remind myself what I was doing at the time? You
+understand, surely, that it's not possible that you don't remember with
+whom, Odette, my love."
+
+"But I don't know; really, I don't. I think it was in the Bois, one
+evening when you came to meet us on the Island. You had been dining with
+the Princesse des Laumes," she added, happy to be able to furnish him
+with an exact detail, which testified to her veracity. "At the next
+table there was a woman whom I hadn't seen for ever so long. She said to
+me, 'Come along round behind the rock, there, and look at the moonlight
+on the water!' At first I just yawned, and said, 'No, I'm too tired,
+and I'm quite happy where I am, thank you.' She swore there'd never been
+anything like it in the way of moonlight. 'I've heard that tale before,'
+I said to her; you see, I knew quite well what she was after." Odette
+narrated this episode almost as if it were a joke, either because it
+appeared to her to be quite natural, or because she thought that she was
+thereby minimising its importance, or else so as not to appear ashamed.
+But, catching sight of Swann's face, she changed her tone, and:
+
+"You are a fiend!" she flung at him, "you enjoy tormenting me, making me
+tell you lies, just so that you'll leave me in peace."
+
+This second blow struck at Swann was even more excruciating than the
+first. Never had he supposed it to have been so recent an affair, hidden
+from his eyes that had been too innocent to discern it, not in a past
+which he had never known, but in evenings which he so well remembered,
+which he had lived through with Odette, of which he had supposed himself
+to have such an intimate, such an exhaustive knowledge, and which now
+assumed, retrospectively, an aspect of cunning and deceit and cruelty.
+In the midst of them parted, suddenly, a gaping chasm, that moment on
+the Island in the Bois de Boulogne. Without being intelligent, Odette
+had the charm of being natural. She had recounted, she had acted the
+little scene with so much simplicity that Swann, as he gasped for
+breath, could vividly see it: Odette yawning, the "rock there,"... He
+could hear her answer--alas, how lightheartedly--"I've heard that tale
+before!" He felt that she would tell him nothing more that evening, that
+no further revelation was to be expected for the present. He was silent
+for a time, then said to her:
+
+"My poor darling, you must forgive me; I know, I am hurting you
+dreadfully, but it's all over now; I shall never think of it again."
+
+But she saw that his eyes remained fixed upon the things that he did not
+know, and on that past era of their love, monotonous and soothing in his
+memory because it was vague, and now rent, as with a sword-wound, by the
+news of that minute on the Island in the Bois, by moonlight, while he
+was dining with the Princesse des Laumes. But he had so far acquired
+the habit of finding life interesting--of marvelling at the strange
+discoveries that there were to be made in it--that even while he was
+suffering so acutely that he did not believe it possible to endure such
+agony for any length of time, he was saying to himself: "Life is indeed
+astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears that vice is far
+more common than one has been led to believe. Here is a woman in whom
+I had absolute confidence, who looks so simple, so honest, who, in any
+case, even allowing that her morals are not strict, seemed quite normal
+and healthy in her tastes and inclinations. I receive a most improbable
+accusation, I question her, and the little that she admits reveals far
+more than I could ever have suspected." But he could not confine himself
+to these detached observations. He sought to form an exact estimate of
+the importance of what she had just told him, so as to know whether he
+might conclude that she had done these things often, and was likely to
+do them again. He repeated her words to himself: "I knew quite well what
+she was after." "Two or three times." "I've heard that tale before." But
+they did not reappear in his memory unarmed; each of them held a knife
+with which it stabbed him afresh. For a long time, like a sick man
+who cannot restrain himself from attempting, every minute, to make the
+movement that, he knows, will hurt him, he kept on murmuring to himself:
+"I'm quite happy where I am, thank you," "I've heard that tale before,"
+but the pain was so intense that he was obliged to stop. He was amazed
+to find that actions which he had always, hitherto, judged so lightly,
+had dismissed, indeed, with a laugh, should have become as serious to
+him as a disease which might easily prove fatal. He knew any number
+of women whom he could ask to keep an eye on Odette, but how was he to
+expect them to adjust themselves to his new point of view, and not to
+remain at that which for so long had been his own, which had always
+guided him in his voluptuous existence; not to say to him with a smile:
+"You jealous monster, wanting to rob other people of their pleasure!"
+By what trap-door, suddenly lowered, had he (who had never found, in the
+old days, in his love for Odette, any but the most refined of pleasures)
+been precipitated into this new circle of hell from which he could not
+see how he was ever to escape. Poor Odette! He wished her no harm. She
+was but half to blame. Had he not been told that it was her own mother
+who had sold her, when she was still little more than a child, at Nice,
+to a wealthy Englishman? But what an agonising truth was now contained
+for him in those lines of Alfred de Vigny's _Journal d'un Poète_ which
+he had previously read without emotion: "When one feels oneself smitten
+by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, 'What are 'her
+surroundings? What has been her life?' All one's future happiness lies
+in the answer." Swann was astonished that such simple phrases, spelt
+over in his mind as, "I've heard that tale before," or "I knew quite
+well what she was after," could cause him so much pain. But he realised
+that what he had mistaken for simple phrases were indeed parts of the
+panoply which held and could inflict on him the anguish that he had felt
+while Odette was telling her story. For it was the same anguish that he
+now was feeling afresh. It was no good, his knowing now,--indeed, it
+was no good, as time went on, his having partly forgotten and altogether
+forgiven the offence--whenever he repeated her words his old anguish
+refashioned him as he had been before Odette began to speak: ignorant,
+trustful; his merciless jealousy placed him once again, so that he might
+be effectively wounded by Odette's admission, in the position of a man
+who does not yet know the truth; and after several months this old story
+would still dumbfounder him, like a sudden revelation. He marvelled
+at the terrible recreative power of his memory. It was only by the
+weakening of that generative force, whose fecundity diminishes as age
+creeps over one, that he could hope for a relaxation of his torments.
+But, as soon as the power that any one of Odette's sentences had to make
+Swann suffer seemed to be nearly exhausted, lo and behold another, one
+of those to which he had hitherto paid least attention, almost a
+new sentence, came to relieve the first, and to strike at him with
+undiminished force. The memory of the evening on which he had dined with
+the Princesse des Laumes was painful to him, but it was no more than
+the centre, the core of his pain. That radiated vaguely round about it,
+overflowing into all the preceding and following days. And on whatever
+point in it he might intend his memory to rest, it was the whole of that
+season, during which the Verdurins had so often gone to dine upon the
+Island in the Bois, that sprang back to hurt him. So violently, that by
+slow degrees the curiosity which his jealousy was ever exciting in him
+was neutralised by his fear of the fresh tortures which he would be
+inflicting upon himself were he to satisfy it. He recognised that all
+the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him,
+a period of which he had never sought to form any picture in his mind,
+was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had
+consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete
+incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest her past,
+now colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible, an
+obscene form, with individual and diabolical features. And he continued
+to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not any longer now from
+laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering. He hoped that, some day,
+he might be able to hear the Island in the Bois, or the Princesse des
+Laumes mentioned without feeling any twinge of that old rending pain;
+meanwhile he thought it imprudent to provoke Odette into furnishing him
+with fresh sentences, with the names of more places and people and of
+different events, which, when his malady was still scarcely healed,
+would make it break out again in another form.
+
+But, often enough, the things that he did not know, that he dreaded,
+now, to learn, it was Odette herself who, spontaneously and without
+thought of what she did, revealed them to him; for the gap which her
+vices made between her actual life and the comparatively innocent life
+which Swann had believed, and often still believed his mistress to lead,
+was far wider than she knew. A vicious person, always affecting the same
+air of virtue before people whom he is anxious to keep from having any
+suspicion of his vices, has no register, no gauge at hand from which
+he may ascertain how far those vices (their continuous growth being
+imperceptible by himself) have gradually segregated him from the normal
+ways of life. In the course of their cohabitation, in Odette's mind,
+with the memory of those of her actions which she concealed from Swann,
+her other, her innocuous actions were gradually coloured, infected
+by these, without her being able to detect anything strange in them,
+without their causing any explosion in the particular region of herself
+in which she made them live, but when she related them to Swann, he was
+overwhelmed by the revelation of the duplicity to which they pointed.
+One day, he was trying--without hurting Odette--to discover from her
+whether she had ever had any dealings with procuresses. He was, as a
+matter of fact, convinced that she had not; the anonymous letter had
+put the idea into his mind, but in a purely mechanical way; it had been
+received there with no credulity, but it had, for all that, remained
+there, and Swann, wishing to be rid of the burden--a dead weight, but
+none the less disturbing--of this suspicion, hoped that Odette would now
+extirpate it for ever.
+
+"Oh dear, no! Not that they don't simply persecute me to go to them,"
+her smile revealed a gratified vanity which she no longer saw that it
+was impossible should appear legitimate to Swann. "There was one of them
+waited more than two hours for me yesterday, said she would give me any
+money I asked. It seems, there's an Ambassador who said to her, 'I'll
+kill myself if you don't bring her to me'--meaning me! They told her I'd
+gone out, but she waited and waited, and in the end I had to go myself
+and speak to her, before she'd go away. I do wish you could have seen
+the way I tackled her; my maid was in the next room, listening, and told
+me I shouted fit to bring the house down:--'But when you hear me say
+that I don't want to! The idea of such a thing, I don't like it at all!
+I should hope I'm still free to do as I please and when I please and
+where I please! If I needed the money, I could understand...' The porter
+has orders not to let her in again; he will tell her that I am out of
+town. Oh, I do wish I could have had you hidden somewhere in the room
+while I was talking to her. I know, you'd have been pleased, my dear.
+There's some good in your little Odette, you see, after all, though
+people do say such dreadful things about her."
+
+Besides, her very admissions--when she made any--of faults which she
+supposed him to have discovered, rather served Swann as a starting-point
+for fresh doubts than they put an end to the old. For her admissions
+never exactly coincided with his doubts. In vain might Odette expurgate
+her confession of all its essential part, there would remain in the
+accessories something which Swann had never yet imagined, which crushed
+him anew, and was to enable him to alter the terms of the problem of his
+jealousy. And these admissions he could never forget. His spirit carried
+them along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bosom, like
+corpses in a river. And they poisoned it.
+
+She spoke to him once of a visit that Forcheville had paid her on the
+day of the Paris-Murcie Fête. "What! you knew him as long ago as that?
+Oh, yes, of course you did," he corrected himself, so as not to shew
+that he had been ignorant of the fact. And suddenly he began to tremble
+at the thought that, on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, when he had
+received that letter which he had so carefully preserved, she had been
+having luncheon, perhaps, with Forcheville at the Maison d'Or. She swore
+that she had not. "Still, the Maison d'Or reminds me of something or
+other which, I knew at the time, wasn't true," he pursued, hoping to
+frighten her. "Yes, that I hadn't been there at all that evening when I
+told you I had just come from there, and you had been looking for me
+at Prévost's," she replied (judging by his manner that he knew) with a
+firmness that was based not so much upon cynicism as upon timidity, a
+fear of crossing Swann, which her own self-respect made her anxious to
+conceal, and a desire to shew him that she could be perfectly frank if
+she chose. And so she struck him with all the sharpness and force of a
+headsman wielding his axe, and yet could not be charged with cruelty,
+since she was quite unconscious of hurting him; she even began to laugh,
+though this may perhaps, it is true, have been chiefly to keep him from
+thinking that she was ashamed, at all, or confused. "It's quite true, I
+hadn't been to the Maison Dorée. I was coming away from Forcheville's. I
+had, really, been to Prévost's--that wasn't a story--and he met me there
+and asked me to come in and look at his prints. But some one else came
+to see him. I told you that I was coming from the Maison d'Or because I
+was afraid you might be angry with me. It was rather nice of me, really,
+don't you see? I admit, I did wrong, but at least I'm telling you all
+about it now, a'n't I? What have I to gain by not telling you, straight,
+that I lunched with him on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, if it were
+true? Especially as at that time we didn't know one another quite so
+well as we do now, did we, dear?"
+
+He smiled back at her with the sudden, craven weakness of the utterly
+spiritless creature which these crushing words had made of him. And so,
+even in the months of which he had never dared to think again, because
+they had been too happy, in those months when she had loved him, she was
+already lying to him! Besides that moment (that first evening on which
+they had "done a cattleya") when she had told him that she was coming
+from the Maison Dorée, how many others must there have been, each
+of them covering a falsehood of which Swann had had no suspicion. He
+recalled how she had said to him once: "I need only tell Mme. Verdurin
+that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There is always
+some excuse." From himself too, probably, many times when she had glibly
+uttered such words as explain a delay or justify an alteration of the
+hour fixed for a meeting, those moments must have hidden, without his
+having the least inkling of it at the time, an engagement that she had
+had with some other man, some man to whom she had said: "I need only
+tell Swann that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There
+is always some excuse." And beneath all his most pleasant memories,
+beneath the simplest words that Odette had ever spoken to him in those
+old days, words which he had believed as though they were the words of
+a Gospel, beneath her daily actions which she had recounted to him,
+beneath the most ordinary places, her dressmaker's flat, the Avenue du
+Bois, the Hippodrome, he could feel (dissembled there, by virtue of that
+temporal superfluity which, after the most detailed account of how a day
+has been spent, always leaves something over, that may serve as a hiding
+place for certain unconfessed actions), he could feel the insinuation of
+a possible undercurrent of falsehood which debased for him all that
+had remained most precious, his happiest evenings, the Rue La Pérouse
+itself, which Odette must constantly have been leaving at other hours
+than those of which she told him; extending the power of the dark horror
+that had gripped him when he had heard her admission with regard to
+the Maison Dorée, and, like the obscene creatures in the 'Desolation of
+Nineveh,' shattering, stone by stone, the whole edifice of his past....
+If, now, he turned aside whenever his memory repeated the cruel name of
+the Maison Dorée it was because that name recalled to him, no longer,
+as, such a little time since, at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's party, the good
+fortune which he long had lost, but a misfortune of which he was now
+first aware. Then it befell the Maison Dorée, as it had befallen the
+Island in the Bois, that gradually its name ceased to trouble him.
+For what we suppose to be our love, our jealousy are, neither of them,
+single, continuous and individual passions. They are composed of an
+infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is
+ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude they give us the
+impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann's
+love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed out of death, of
+infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which
+had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time
+without seeing her, those that died would not have been replaced by
+others. But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann's heart
+alternate seeds of love and suspicion.
+
+On certain evenings she would suddenly resume towards him a kindness of
+which she would warn him sternly that he must take immediate advantage,
+under penalty of not seeing it repeated for years to come; he must
+instantly accompany her home, to "do a cattleya," and the desire
+which she pretended to have for him was so sudden, so inexplicable, so
+imperious, the kisses which she lavished on him were so demonstrative
+and so unfamiliar, that this brutal and unnatural fondness made Swann
+just as unhappy as any lie or unkind action. One evening when he had
+thus, in obedience to her command, gone home with her, and while she was
+interspersing her kisses with passionate words, in strange contrast to
+her habitual coldness, he thought suddenly that he heard a sound; he
+rose, searched everywhere and found nobody, but he had not the courage
+to return to his place by her side; whereupon she, in a towering
+rage, broke a vase, with "I never can do anything right with you,
+you impossible person!" And he was left uncertain whether she had not
+actually had some man concealed in the room, whose jealousy she had
+wished to wound, or else to inflame his senses.
+
+Sometimes he repaired to 'gay' houses, hoping to learn something about
+Odette, although he dared not mention her name. "I have a little thing
+here, you're sure to like," the 'manageress' would greet him, and he
+would stay for an hour or so, talking dolefully to some poor girl who
+sat there astonished that he went no further. One of them, who was still
+quite young and attractive, said to him once, "Of course, what I should
+like would be to find a real friend, then he might be quite certain,
+I should never go with any other men again." "Indeed, do you think it
+possible for a woman really to be touched by a man's being in love with
+her, and never to be unfaithful to him?" asked Swann anxiously. "Why,
+surely! It all depends on their characters!" Swann could not help making
+the same remarks to these girls as would have delighted the Princesse
+des Laumes. To the one who was in search of a friend he said, with a
+smile: "But how nice of you, you've put on blue eyes, to go with
+your sash." "And you too, you've got blue cuffs on." "What a charming
+conversation we are having, for a place of this sort! I'm not boring
+you, am I; or keeping you?" "No, I've nothing to do, thank you. If you
+bored me I should say so. But I love hearing you talk." "I am highly
+flattered.... Aren't we behaving prettily?" he asked the 'manageress,'
+who had just looked in. "Why, yes, that's just what I was saying to
+myself, how sensibly they're behaving! But that's how it is! People come
+to my house now, just to talk. The Prince was telling me, only the other
+day, that he's far more comfortable here than with his wife. It seems
+that, nowadays, all the society ladies are like that; a perfect scandal,
+I call it. But I'll leave you in peace now, I know when I'm not wanted,"
+she ended discreetly, and left Swann with the girl who had the blue
+eyes. But presently he rose and said good-bye to her. She had ceased to
+interest him. She did not know Odette.
+
+The painter having been ill, Dr. Cottard recommended a sea-voyage;
+several of the 'faithful' spoke of accompanying him; the Verdurins
+could not face the prospect of being left alone in Paris, so first of
+all hired, and finally purchased a yacht; thus Odette was constantly
+going on a cruise. Whenever she had been away for any length of time,
+Swann would feel that he was beginning to detach himself from her, but,
+as though this moral distance were proportionate to the physical
+distance between them, whenever he heard that Odette had returned to
+Paris, he could not rest without seeing her. Once, when they had gone
+away, as everyone thought, for a month only, either they succumbed to a
+series of temptations, or else M. Verdurin had cunningly arranged
+everything beforehand, to please his wife, and disclosed his plans to
+the 'faithful' only as time went on; anyhow, from Algiers they flitted
+to Tunis; then to Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Asia Minor. They had
+been absent for nearly a year, and Swann felt perfectly at ease and
+almost happy. Albeit M. Verdurin had endeavoured to persuade the
+pianist and Dr. Cottard that their respective aunt and patients had no
+need of them, and that, in any event, it was most rash to allow Mme.
+Cottard to return to Paris, where, Mme. Verdurin assured him, a
+revolution had just broken out, he was obliged to grant them their
+liberty at Constantinople. And the painter came home with them. One
+day, shortly after the return of these four travellers, Swann, seeing
+an omnibus approach him, labelled 'Luxembourg,' and having some
+business there, had jumped on to it and had found himself sitting
+opposite Mme. Cottard, who was paying a round of visits to people whose
+'day' it was, in full review order, with a plume in her hat, a silk
+dress, a muff, an umbrella (which would do for a parasol if the rain
+kept off), a card-case, and a pair of white gloves fresh from the
+cleaners. Wearing these badges of rank, she would, in fine weather, go
+on foot from one house to another in the same neighbourhood, but when
+she had to proceed to another district, would make use of a
+transfer-ticket on the omnibus. For the first minute or two, until the
+natural courtesy of the woman broke through the starched surface of the
+doctor's-wife, not being certain, either, whether she ought to mention
+the Verdurins before Swann, she produced, quite naturally, in her slow
+and awkward, but not unattractive voice, which, every now and then, was
+completely drowned by the rattling of the omnibus, topics selected from
+those which she had picked up and would repeat in each of the score of
+houses up the stairs of which she clambered in the course of an
+afternoon.
+
+"I needn't ask you, M. Swann, whether a man so much in the movement as
+yourself has been to the Mirlitons, to see the portrait by Machard that
+the whole of Paris is running after. Well, and what do you think of it?
+Whose camp are you in, those who bless or those who curse? It's the
+same in every house in Paris now, no one will speak of anything else but
+Machard's portrait; you aren't smart, you aren't really cultured, you
+aren't up-to-date unless you give an opinion on Machard's portrait."
+
+Swann having replied that he had not seen this portrait, Mme. Cottard
+was afraid that she might have hurt his feelings by obliging him to
+confess the omission.
+
+"Oh, that's quite all right! At least you have the courage to be quite
+frank about it. You don't consider yourself disgraced because you
+haven't seen Machard's portrait. I do think that so nice of you. Well
+now, I have seen it; opinion is divided, you know, there are some people
+who find it rather laboured, like whipped cream, they say; but I think
+it's just ideal. Of course, she's not a bit like the blue and yellow
+ladies that our friend Biche paints. That's quite clear. But I must tell
+you, perfectly frankly (you'll think me dreadfully old-fashioned, but I
+always say just what I think), that I don't understand his work. I can
+quite see the good points there are in his portrait of my husband; oh,
+dear me, yes; and it's certainly less odd than most of what he does,
+but even then he had to give the poor man a blue moustache! But Machard!
+Just listen to this now, the husband of my friend, I am on my way to see
+at this very moment (which has given me the very great pleasure of your
+company), has promised her that, if he is elected to the Academy (he
+is one of the Doctor's colleagues), he will get Machard to paint her
+portrait. So she's got something to look forward to! I have another
+friend who insists that she'd rather have Leloir. I'm only a wretched
+Philistine, and I've no doubt Leloir has perhaps more knowledge of
+painting even than Machard. But I do think that the most important
+thing about a portrait, especially when it's going to cost ten thousand
+francs, is that it should be like, and a pleasant likeness, if you know
+what I mean."
+
+Having exhausted this topic, to which she had been inspired by the
+loftiness of her plume, the monogram on her card-case, the little number
+inked inside each of her gloves by the cleaner, and the difficulty of
+speaking to Swann about the Verdurins, Mme. Cottard, seeing that they
+had still a long way to go before they would reach the corner of the
+Rue Bonaparte, where the conductor was to set her down, listened to the
+promptings of her heart, which counselled other words than these.
+
+"Your ears must have been burning," she ventured, "while we were on the
+yacht with Mme. Verdurin. We were talking about you all the time."
+
+Swann was genuinely astonished, for he supposed that his name was never
+uttered in the Verdurins' presence.
+
+"You see," Mme. Cottard went on, "Mme. de Crécy was there; need I say
+more? When Odette is anywhere it's never long before she begins talking
+about you. And you know quite well, it isn't nasty things she says.
+What! you don't believe me!" she went on, noticing that Svrann looked
+sceptical. And, carried away by the sincerity of her conviction, without
+putting any evil meaning into the word, which she used purely in the
+sense in which one employs it to speak of the affection that unites a
+pair of friends: "Why, she _adores_ you! No, indeed; I'm sure it would
+never do to say anything against you when she was about; one would soon
+be taught one's place! Whatever we might be doing, if we were looking at
+a picture, for instance, she would say, 'If only we had him here, he's
+the man who could tell us whether it's genuine or not. There's no one
+like him for that.' And all day long she would be saying, 'What can
+he be doing just now? I do hope, he's doing a little work! It's too
+dreadful that a fellow with such gifts as he has should be so lazy.'
+(Forgive me, won't you.) 'I can see him this very moment; he's thinking
+of us, he's wondering where we are.' Indeed, she used an expression
+which I thought very pretty at the time. M. Verdurin asked her, 'How in
+the world can you see what he's doing, when he's a thousand miles away?'
+And Odette answered, 'Nothing is impossible to the eye of a friend.'
+
+"No, I assure you, I'm not saying it just to flatter you; you have a
+true friend in her, such as one doesn't often find. I can tell you,
+besides, in case you don't know it, that you're the only one. Mme.
+Verdurin told me as much herself on our last day with them (one talks
+more freely, don't you know, before a parting), 'I don't say that Odette
+isn't fond of us, but anything that we may say to her counts for very
+little beside what Swann might say.' Oh, mercy, there's the conductor
+stopping for me; here have I been chatting away to you, and would have
+gone right past the Rue Bonaparte, and never noticed... Will you be so
+very kind as to tell me whether my plume is straight?"
+
+And Mme. Cottard withdrew from her muff, to offer it to Swann, a
+white-gloved hand from which there floated, with a transfer-ticket, an
+atmosphere of fashionable life that pervaded the omnibus, blended with
+the harsher fragrance of newly cleaned kid. And Swann felt himself
+overflowing with gratitude to her, as well as to Mme. Verdurin (and
+almost to Odette, for the feeling that he now entertained for her was
+no longer tinged with pain, was scarcely even to be described, now,
+as love), while from the platform of the omnibus he followed her with
+loving eyes, as she gallantly threaded her way along the Rue Bonaparte,
+her plume erect, her skirt held up in one hand, while in the other she
+clasped her umbrella and her card-case, so that its monogram could be
+seen, her muff dancing in the air before her as she went.
+
+To compete with and so to stimulate the moribund feelings that Swann had
+for Odette, Mme. Cottard, a wiser physician, in this case, than ever
+her husband would have been, had grafted among them others more normal,
+feelings of gratitude, of friendship, which in Swann's mind were to make
+Odette seem again more human (more like other women, since other women
+could inspire the same feelings in him), were to hasten her final
+transformation back into that Odette, loved with an undisturbed
+affection, who had taken him home one evening after a revel at the
+painter's, to drink orangeade with Forcheville, that Odette with whom
+Swann had calculated that he might live in happiness.
+
+In former times, having often thought with terror that a day must come
+when he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had determined to
+keep a sharp look-out, and as soon as he felt that love was beginning to
+escape him, to cling tightly to it and to hold it back. But now, to the
+faintness of his love there corresponded a simultaneous faintness in
+his desire to remain her lover. For a man cannot change, that is to say
+become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the
+self which he has ceased to be. Occasionally the name, if it caught
+his eye in a newspaper, of one of the men whom he supposed to have been
+Odette's lovers, reawakened his jealousy. But it was very slight, and,
+inasmuch as it proved to him that he had not completely emerged from
+that period in which he had so keenly suffered--though in it he had also
+known a way of feeling so intensely happy--and that the accidents of his
+course might still enable him to catch an occasional glimpse, stealthily
+and at a distance, of its beauties, this jealousy gave him, if anything,
+an agreeable thrill, as to the sad Parisian, when he has left Venice
+behind him and must return to France, a last mosquito proves that
+Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this
+particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made
+an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain, while still he
+might, an uninterrupted view of it, he discovered that already it was
+too late; he would have looked back to distinguish, as it might be
+a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had
+departed, but it is so difficult to enter into a state of complete
+duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling
+which one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering
+in his brain, he could see nothing, he would abandon the attempt, would
+take the glasses from his nose and wipe them; and he told himself that
+he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough
+later on, and settled back into his corner with as little curiosity,
+with as much torpor as the drowsy traveller who pulls his cap down over
+his eyes so as to get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing
+him, he feels, faster and faster, out of the country in which he has
+lived for so long, and which he vowed that he would not allow to slip
+away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell. Indeed,
+like the same traveller, if he does not awake until he has crossed the
+frontier and is again in France, when Swann happened to alight, close
+at hand, upon something which proved that Forcheville had been Odette's
+lover, he discovered that it caused him no pain, that love was now
+utterly remote, and he regretted that he had had no warning of the
+moment in which he had emerged from it for ever. And just as, before
+kissing Odette for the first time, he had sought to imprint upon his
+memory the face that for so long had been familiar, before it was
+altered by the additional memory of their kiss, so he could have
+wished--in thought at least--to have been in a position to bid farewell,
+while she still existed, to that Odette who had inspired love in him and
+jealousy, to that Odette who had caused him so to suffer, and whom now
+he would never see again. He was mistaken. He was destined to see
+her once again, a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep, in the
+twilight of a dream. He was walking with Mme. Verdurin, Dr. Cottard,
+a young man in a fez whom he failed to identify, the painter, Odette,
+Napoleon III and my grandfather, along a path which followed the line
+of the coast, and overhung the sea, now at a great height, now by a few
+feet only, so that they were continually going up and down; those of the
+party who had reached the downward slope were no longer visible to those
+who were still climbing; what little daylight yet remained was failing,
+and it seemed as though a black night was immediately to fall on them.
+Now and then the waves dashed against the cliff, and Swann could feel on
+his cheek a shower of freezing spray. Odette told him to wipe this off,
+but he could not, and felt confused and helpless in her company, as well
+as because he was in his nightshirt. He hoped that, in the darkness,
+this might pass unnoticed; Mme. Verdurin, however, fixed her astonished
+gaze upon him for an endless moment, in which he saw her face change
+its shape, her nose grow longer, while beneath it there sprouted a heavy
+moustache. He turned away to examine Odette; her cheeks were pale, with
+little fiery spots, her features drawn and ringed with shadows; but she
+looked back at him with eyes welling with affection, ready to detach
+themselves like tears and to fall upon his face, and he felt that he
+loved her so much that he would have liked to carry her off with him
+at once. Suddenly Odette turned her wrist, glanced at a tiny watch,
+and said: "I must go." She took leave of everyone, in the same formal
+manner, without taking Swann aside, without telling him where they were
+to meet that evening, or next day. He dared not ask, he would have liked
+to follow her, he was obliged, without turning back in her direction,
+to answer with a smile some question by Mme. Verdurin; but his heart was
+frantically beating, he felt that he now hated Odette, he would gladly
+have crushed those eyes which, a moment ago, he had loved so dearly,
+have torn the blood into those lifeless cheeks. He continued to climb
+with Mme. Verdurin, that is to say that each step took him farther from
+Odette, who was going downhill, and in the other direction. A second
+passed and it was many hours since she had left him. The painter
+remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had eclipsed himself immediately
+after Odette. "They had obviously arranged it between them," he added;
+"they must have agreed to meet at the foot of the cliff, but they
+wouldn't say good-bye together; it might have looked odd. She is his
+mistress." The strange young man burst into tears. Swann endeavoured to
+console him. "After all, she is quite right," he said to the young man,
+drying his eyes for him and taking off the fez to make him feel more
+at ease. "I've advised her to do that, myself, a dozen times. Why be
+so distressed? He was obviously the man to understand her." So Swann
+reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at
+first, to identify, was himself also; like certain novelists, he had
+distributed his own personality between two characters, him who was the
+'first person' in the dream, and another whom he saw before him, capped
+with a fez.
+
+As for Napoleon III, it was to Forcheville that some vague association
+of ideas, then a certain modification of the Baron's usual physiognomy,
+and lastly the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honour across his breast,
+had made Swann give that name; but actually, and in everything that the
+person who appeared in his dream represented and recalled to him, it was
+indeed Forcheville. For, from an incomplete and changing set of images,
+Swann in his sleep drew false deductions, enjoying, at the same time,
+such creative power that he was able to reproduce himself by a simple
+act of division, like certain lower organisms; with the warmth that he
+felt in his own palm he modelled the hollow of a strange hand which he
+thought that he was clasping, and out of feelings and impressions of
+which he was not yet conscious, he brought about sudden vicissitudes
+which, by a chain of logical sequences, would produce, at definite
+points in his dream, the person required to receive his love or to
+startle him awake. In an instant night grew black about him; an alarum
+rang, the inhabitants ran past him, escaping from their blazing houses;
+he could hear the thunder of the surging waves, and also of his own
+heart, which, with equal violence, was anxiously beating in his breast.
+Suddenly the speed of these palpitations redoubled, he felt a pain, a
+nausea that were inexplicable; a peasant, dreadfully burned, flung at
+him as he passed: "Come and ask Charlus where Odette spent the night
+with her friend. He used to go about with her, and she tells him
+everything. It was they that started the fire." It was his valet, come
+to awaken him, and saying:--
+
+"Sir, it is eight o'clock, and the barber is here. I have told him to
+call again in an hour."
+
+But these words, as they dived down through the waves of sleep in which
+Swann was submerged, did not reach his consciousness without undergoing
+that refraction which turns a ray of light, at the bottom of a bowl of
+water, into another sun; just as, a moment earlier, the sound of
+the door-bell, swelling in the depths of his abyss of sleep into the
+clangour of an alarum, had engendered the episode of the fire. Meanwhile
+the scenery of his dream-stage scattered in dust, he opened his eyes,
+heard for the last time the boom of a wave in the sea, grown very
+distant. He touched his cheek. It was dry. And yet he could feel the
+sting of the cold spray, and the taste of salt on his lips. He rose,
+and dressed himself. He had made the barber come early because he had
+written, the day before, to my grandfather, to say that he was going,
+that afternoon, to Combray, having learned that Mme. de Cambremer--Mlle.
+Legrandin that had been--was spending a few days there. The association
+in his memory of her young and charming face with a place in the country
+which he had not visited for so long, offered him a combined attraction
+which had made him decide at last to leave Paris for a while. As the
+different changes and chances that bring us into the company of certain
+other people in this life do not coincide with the periods in which we
+are in love with those people, but, overlapping them, may occur before
+love has begun, and may be repeated after love is ended, the earliest
+appearances, in our life, of a creature who is destined to afford us
+pleasure later on, assume retrospectively in our eyes a certain value as
+an indication, a warning, a presage. It was in this fashion that Swann
+had often carried back his mind to the image of Odette, encountered in
+the theatre, on that first evening when he had no thought of ever
+seeing her again--and that he now recalled the party at Mme. de
+Saint-Euverte's, at which he had introduced General de Froberville to
+Mme. de Cambremer. So manifold are our interests in life that it is
+not uncommon that, on a single occasion, the foundations of a happiness
+which does not yet exist are laid down simultaneously with aggravations
+of a grief from which we are still suffering. And, no doubt, that might
+have occurred to Swann elsewhere than at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's. Who,
+indeed, can say whether, in the event of his having gone, that evening,
+somewhere else, other happinesses, other griefs would not have come to
+him, which, later, would have appeared to have been inevitable? But what
+did seem to him to have been inevitable was what had indeed taken place,
+and he was not far short of seeing something providential in the fact
+that he had at last decided to go to Mme. de Saint-Euverte's that
+evening, because his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention
+that life shews, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for any
+length of time, such as to discover what, actually, had been most to be
+wished for, came to the conclusion that the sufferings through which he
+had passed that evening, and the pleasures, at that time unsuspected,
+which were already being brought to birth,--the exact balance between
+which was too difficult to establish--were linked by a sort of
+concatenation of necessity.
+
+But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions
+to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair should not become
+disarranged on the journey, he thought once again of his dream; he
+saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette's pallid
+complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all
+the things which--in the course of those successive bursts of affection
+which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the
+first impression that he had formed of her--he had ceased to observe
+after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless,
+while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of
+those things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared
+in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time,
+the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: "To think
+that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that
+the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did
+not please me, who was not in my style!"
+
+
+
+
+PLACE-NAMES: THE NAME
+
+
+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 seascapes, 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 had 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 them 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 was
+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 the 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 hopping 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 united), 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 in 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 Theodosius, 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 as 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 the 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
+different 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 walking,
+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 see 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 it 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.
+
+
+
+
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