Just as the curtain was rising on this second play I looked up at Mme.

de Guermantes’s box. The Princess was in the act—by a movement that

called into being an exquisite line which my mind pursued into the

void—of turning her head towards the back of the box; her party were all

standing, and also turning towards the back, and between the double

hedge which they thus formed, with all the assurance, the grandeur of

the goddess that she was, but with a strange meekness which so late an

arrival, making every one else get up in the middle of the performance,

blended with the white muslin in which she was attired, just as an

adroitly compounded air of simplicity, shyness and confusion tempered

her triumphant smile, the Duchesse de Guermantes, who had at that moment

entered the box, came towards her cousin, made a profound obeisance to a

young man with fair hair who was seated in the front row, and turning

again towards the amphibian monsters who were floating in the recesses

of the cavern, gave to these demi-gods of the Jockey Club—who at that

moment, and among them all M. de Palancy in particular, were the men

whom I should most have liked to be—the familiar “good evening” of an

old and intimate friend, an allusion to the daily sequence of her

relations with them during the last fifteen years. I felt the mystery,

but could not solve the riddle of that smiling gaze which she addressed

to her friends, in the azure brilliance with which it glowed while she

surrendered her hand to one and then to another, a gaze which, could I

have broken up its prism, analysed its crystallisation, might perhaps

have revealed to me the essential quality of the unknown form of life

which became apparent in it at that moment. The Duc de Guermantes

followed his wife, the flash of his monocle, the gleam of his teeth, the

whiteness of his carnation or of his pleated shirt-front scattering, to

make room for their light, the darkness of his eyebrows, lips and coat;

with a wave of his outstretched hand which he let drop on to their

shoulders, vertically, without moving his head, he commanded the

inferior monsters, who were making way for him, to resume their seats,

and made a profound bow to the fair young man. One would have said that

the Duchess had guessed that her cousin, of whom, it was rumoured, she

was inclined to make fun for what she called her “exaggerations” (a name

which, from her own point of view, so typically French and restrained,

would naturally be applied to the poetry and enthusiasm of the Teuton),

would be wearing this evening one of those costumes in which the Duchess

thought of her as “dressed up”, and that she had decided to give her a

lesson in good taste. Instead of the wonderful downy plumage which, from

the crown of the Princess’s head, fell and swept her throat, instead of

her net of shells and pearls, the Duchess wore in her hair only a simple

aigrette, which, rising above her arched nose and level eyes, reminded

one of the crest on the head of a bird. Her neck and shoulders emerged

from a drift of snow-white muslin, against which fluttered a swansdown

fan, but below this her gown, the bodice of which had for its sole

ornament innumerable spangles (either little sticks and beads of metal,

or possibly brilliants), moulded her figure with a precision that was

positively British. But different as their two costumes were, after the

Princess had given her cousin the chair in which she herself had

previously been sitting, they could be seen turning to gaze at one

another in mutual appreciation.

Possibly a smile would curve the lips of Mme. de Guermantes when next

day she referred to the headdress, a little too complicated, which the

Princess had worn, but certainly she would declare that it had been, all

the same, quite lovely, and marvellously arranged; and the Princess,

whose own tastes found something a little cold, a little austere, a

little “tailor-made” in her cousin’s way of dressing, would discover in

this rigid sobriety an exquisite refinement. Moreover the harmony that

existed between them, the universal and pre-established gravitation

exercised by their upbringing neutralised the contrasts not only in

their apparel but in their attitude. By those invisible magnetic

longitudes which the refinement of their manners traced between them the

expansive nature of the Princess was stopped short, while on the other

side the formal correctness of the Duchess allowed itself to be

attracted and relaxed, turned to sweetness and charm. As, in the play

which was now being performed, to realise how much personal poetry Berma

extracted from it one had only to entrust the part which she was

playing, which she alone could play, to no matter what other actress, so

the spectator who should raise his eyes to the balcony might see in two

smaller boxes there how an “arrangement” supposed to suggest that of the

Princesse de Guermantes simply made the Baronne de Morienval appear

eccentric, pretentious and ill-bred, while an effort, as painstaking as

it must have been costly, to imitate the clothes and style of the

Duchesse de Guermantes only made Mme. de Cambremer look like some

provincial schoolgirl, mounted on wires, rigid, erect, dry, angular,

with a plume of raven’s feathers stuck vertically in her hair. Perhaps

the proper place for this lady was not a theatre in which it was only

with the brightest stars of the season that the boxes (even those in the

highest tier, which from below seemed like great hampers brimming with

human flowers and fastened to the gallery on which they stood by the red

cords of their plush-covered partitions) composed a panorama which

deaths, scandals, illnesses, quarrels would soon alter, but which this

evening was held motionless by attention, heat, giddiness, dust,

smartness or boredom, in that so to speak everlasting moment of

unconscious waiting and calm torpor which, in retrospect, seems always

to have preceded the explosion of a bomb or the first flicker of a fire.

The explanation of Mme. de Cambremer’s presence on this occasion was

that the Princesse de Parme, devoid of snobbishness as are most truly

royal personages, and to make up for this devoured by a pride in and

passion for charity which held an equal place in her heart with her

taste for what she believed to be the Arts, had bestowed a few boxes

here and there upon women like Mme. de Cambremer who were not numbered

among the highest aristocratic society but with whom she was connected

in various charitable undertakings. Mme. de Cambremer never took her

eyes off the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes, which was all the

simpler for her since, not being actually acquainted with either, she

could not be suspected of angling for recognition. Inclusion in the

visiting lists of these two great ladies was nevertheless the goal

towards which she had been marching for the last ten years with untiring

patience. She had calculated that she might reach it, possibly, in five

years more. But having been smitten by a relentless malady, the

inexorable character of which—for she prided herself upon her medical

knowledge—she thought she knew, she was afraid that she might not live

so long. This evening she was happy at least in the thought that all

these women whom she barely knew would see in her company a man who was

one of their own set, the young Marquis de Beausergent, Mme.

d’Argencourt’s brother, who moved impartially in both worlds and with

whom the women of the second were greatly delighted to bedizen

themselves before the eyes of those of the first. He was seated behind

Mme. de Cambremer on a chair placed at an angle, so that he might rake

the other boxes with his glasses. He knew everyone in the house, and, to

greet his friends, with the irresistible charm of his beautifully curved

figure, and fine fair head, he half rose from his seat, stiffening his

body, a smile brightening his blue eyes, with a blend of deference and

detachment, a picture delicately engraved, in its rectangular frame, and

placed at an angle to the wall, like one of those old prints which

portray a great nobleman in his courtly pride. He often accepted these

invitations to go with Mme. de Cambremer to the play. In the theatre

itself, and on their way out, in the lobby, he stood gallantly by her

side in the thick of the throng of more brilliant friends whom he saw

about him, and to whom he refrained from speaking, to avoid any

awkwardness, just as though he had been in doubtful company. If at such

moments there swept by him the Princesse de Guermantes, lightfoot and

fair as Diana, letting trail behind her the folds of an incomparable

cloak, turning after her every head and followed by every eye (and, most

of all, by Mme. de Cambremer’s), M. de Beausergent would become absorbed

in conversation with his companion, acknowledging the friendly and

dazzling smile of the Princess only with constraint, under compulsion,

and with the well-bred reserve, the considerate coldness of a person

whose friendliness might at the moment have been inconvenient.

Had not Mme. de Cambremer known already that the box belonged to the

Princess, she could still have told that the Duchesse de Guermantes was

the guest from the air of keener interest with which she was surveying

the spectacle of stage and stalls, out of politeness to her hostess. But

simultaneously with this centrifugal force, an equal and opposite force

generated by the same desire to be sociable drew her attention back to

her own attire, her plume, her necklace, her bodice and also to that of

the Princess, whose subject, whose slave her cousin seemed thus to

proclaim herself, come thither solely to see her, ready to follow her

elsewhere should it have taken the fancy of the official occupant of the

box to rise and leave, and regarding as composed merely of strangers,

worth looking at simply as curiosities, the rest of the house, in which,

nevertheless, she numbered many friends to whose boxes she regularly

repaired on other evenings and with regard to whom she never failed on

those occasions to demonstrate a similar loyalism, exclusive,

conditional and hebdomadary. Mme. de Cambremer was surprised to see her

there that evening. She knew that the Duchess was staying on very late

at Guermantes, and had supposed her to be there still. But she had been

told, also, that sometimes, when there was some special function in

Paris which she considered it worth her while to attend, Mme. de

Guermantes would order one of her carriages to be brought round as soon

as she had taken tea with the guns, and, as the sun was setting, start

out at a spanking pace through the gathering darkness of the forest,

then over the high road, to join the train at Combray and so be in Paris

the same evening. “Perhaps she has come up from Guermantes on purpose to

hear Berma,” thought Mme. de Cambremer, and marvelled at the thought.

And she remembered having heard Swann say in that ambiguous jargon which

he used in common with M. de Charlus: “The Duchess is one of the noblest

souls in Paris, the cream of the most refined, the choicest society.”

For myself, who derived from the names Guermantes, Bavaria and Condé

what I imagined to be the life, the thoughts of the two cousins (I could

no longer so ascribe their faces, having seen them), I would rather have

had their opinion of _Phèdre_ than that of the greatest critic in the

world. For in his I should have found merely intellect, an intellect

superior to my own but similar in kind. But what the Duchesse and

Princesse de Guermantes might think, an opinion which would have

furnished me with an invaluable clue to the nature of these two poetic

creatures, I imagined with the aid of their names, I endowed with an

irrational charm, and, with the thirst, the longing of a fever-stricken

wretch, what I demanded that their opinion of _Phèdre_ should yield to

me was the charm of the summer afternoons that I had spent in wandering

along the Guermantes way.

Mme. de Cambremer was trying to make out how exactly the cousins were

dressed. For my own part, I never doubted that their garments were

peculiar to themselves, not merely in the sense in which the livery with

red collar or blue facings had belonged once exclusively to the houses

of Guermantes and Condé, but rather as is peculiar to a bird the plumage

which, as well as being a heightening of its beauty, is an extension of

its body. The toilet of these two ladies seemed to me like a

materialisation, snow-white or patterned with colour, of their internal

activity, and, like the gestures which I had seen the Princesse de

Guermantes make, with no doubt in my own mind that they corresponded to

some idea latent in hers, the plumes which swept downward from her brow,

and her cousin’s glittering spangled bodice seemed each to have a

special meaning, to be to one or the other lady an attribute which was

hers and hers alone, the significance of which I would eagerly have

learned; the bird of paradise seemed inseparable from its wearer as her

peacock is from Juno, and I did not believe that any other woman could

usurp that spangled bodice, any more than the fringed and flashing aegis

of Minerva. And when I turned my eyes to their box, far more than on the

ceiling of the theatre, painted with cold and lifeless allegories, it

was as though I had seen, thanks to a miraculous rending of the clouds

that ordinarily veiled it, the Assembly of the Gods in the act of

contemplating the spectacle of mankind, beneath a crimson canopy, in a

clear lighted space, between two pillars of Heaven. I gazed on this

brief transfiguration with a disturbance which was partly soothed by the

feeling that I myself was unknown to these Immortals; the Duchess had

indeed seen me once with her husband, but could surely have kept no

memory of that, and it gave me no pain that she found herself, owing to

the place that she occupied in the box, in a position to gaze down upon

the nameless, collective madrepores of the public in the stalls, for I

had the happy sense that my own personality had been dissolved in

theirs, when, at the moment in which, by the force of certain optical

laws, there must, I suppose, have come to paint itself on the impassive

current of those blue eyes the blurred outline of the protozoon, devoid

of any individual existence, which was myself, I saw a ray illumine

them; the Duchess, goddess turned woman, and appearing in that moment a

thousand times more lovely, raised, pointed in my direction the

white-gloved hand which had been resting on the balustrade of the box,

waved it at me in token of friendship; my gaze felt itself trapped in

the spontaneous incandescence of the flashing eyes of the Princess, who

had unconsciously set them ablaze merely by turning her head to see who

it might be that her cousin was thus greeting, while the Duchess, who

had remembered me, showered upon me the sparkling and celestial torrent

of her smile.

And now every morning, long before the hour at which she would appear, I

went by a devious course to post myself at the corner of the street

along which she generally came, and, when the moment of her arrival

seemed imminent, strolled homewards with an air of being absorbed in

something else, looking the other way and raising my eyes to her face as

I drew level with her, but as though I had not in the least expected to

see her. Indeed, for the first few mornings, so as to be sure of not

missing her, I waited opposite the house. And every time that the

carriage gate opened (letting out one after another so many people who

were none of them she for whom I was waiting) its grinding rattle

continued in my heart in a series of oscillations which it took me a

long time to subdue. For never was devotee of a famous actress whom he

did not know, posting himself and patrolling the pavement outside the

stage door, never was angry or idolatrous crowd, gathered to insult or

to carry in triumph through the streets the condemned assassin or the

national hero whom it believes to be on the point of coming whenever a

sound is heard from the inside of the prison or the palace, never were

these so stirred by their emotion as I was, awaiting the emergence of

this great lady who in her simple attire was able, by the grace of her

movements (quite different from the gait she affected on entering a

drawing-room or a box), to make of her morning walk—and for me there was

no one in the world but herself out walking—a whole poem of elegant

refinement and the finest ornament, the most curious flower of the

season. But after the third day, so that the porter should not discover

my stratagem, I betook myself much farther afield, to some point upon

the Duchess’s usual route. Often before that evening at the theatre I

had made similar little excursions before luncheon when the weather was

fine; if it had been raining, at the first gleam of sunshine I would

hasten downstairs to take a turn, and if, suddenly, coming towards me,

on the still wet pavement changed by the sun into a golden lacquer, in

the transformation scene of a cross-roads dusty with a grey mist which

the sun tanned and gilded, I caught sight of a schoolgirl followed by

her governess or of a dairy-maid with her white sleeves, I stood

motionless, my hand pressed to my heart which was already leaping

towards an unexplored form of life; I tried to bear in mind the street,

the time, the number of the door through which the girl (whom I followed

sometimes) had vanished and failed to reappear. Fortunately the fleeting

nature of these cherished images, which I promised myself that I would

make an effort to see again, prevented them from fixing themselves with

any vividness in my memory. No matter, I was less sad now at the thought

of my own ill health, of my never having summoned up courage to set to

work, to begin a book, the world appeared to me now a pleasanter place

to live in, life a more interesting experience now that I had learned

that the streets of Paris, like the roads round Balbec, were aflower

with those unknown beauties whom I had so often sought to evoke from the

woods of Méséglise, each one of whom aroused a sensual longing which she

alone appeared capable of assuaging.

On coming home from the Opéra-Comique I had added for next morning to

the list of those which for some days past I had been hoping to meet

again the form of Mme. de Guermantes, tall, with her high-piled crown of

silky, golden hair; with the kindness promised me in the smile which she

had directed at me from her cousin’s box. I would follow the course

which Françoise had told me that the Duchess generally took, and I would

try at the same time, in the hope of meeting two girls whom I had seen a

few days earlier, not to miss the break-up of their respective class and

catechism. But in the mean time, ever and again, the scintillating smile

of Mme. de Guermantes, the pleasant sensation it had given me returned.

And without exactly knowing what I was doing, I tried to find a place

for them (as a woman studies the possible effect on her dress of some

set of jewelled buttons that have just been given her) beside the

romantic ideas which I had long held and which Albertine’s coldness,

Gisèle’s premature departure, and before them my deliberate and too long

sustained separation from Gilberte had set free (the idea, for instance

of being loved by a woman, of having a life in common with her); next,

it had been the image of one or other of the two girls seen in the

street that I brought into relation with those ideas, to which

immediately afterwards I was trying to adapt my memory of the Duchess.

Compared with those ideas my memory of Mme. de Guermantes at the

Opéra-Comique was a very little thing, a tiny star twinkling beside the

long tail of a blazing comet; moreover I had been quite familiar with

the ideas long before I came to know Mme. de Guermantes; my memory of

her, on the contrary, I possessed but imperfectly; every now and then it

escaped me; it was during the hours when, from floating vaguely in my

mind in the same way as the images of various other pretty women, it

passed gradually into a unique and definite association—exclusive of

every other feminine form—with those romantic ideas of so much longer

standing than itself, it was during those few hours in which I

remembered it most clearly that I ought to have taken steps to find out

exactly what it was; but I did not then know the importance which it was

to assume for me; it was pleasant merely as a first private meeting with

Mme. de Guermantes inside myself, it was the first, the only accurate

sketch, the only one taken from life, the only one that was really Mme.

de Guermantes; during the few hours in which I was fortunate enough to

retain it without having the sense to pay it any attention, it must all

the same have been charming, that memory, since it was always to it, and

quite freely moreover, to that moment, without haste, without strain,

without the slightest compulsion or anxiety, that my ideas of love

returned; then, as gradually those ideas fixed it more definitely, it

acquired from them a proportionately greater strength but itself became

more vague; presently I could no longer recapture it; and in my dreams I

probably altered it completely, for whenever I saw Mme. de Guermantes I

realised the difference—never twice, as it happened, the same—between

what I had imagined and what I saw. And now every morning, certainly at

the moment when Mme. de Guermantes emerged from her gateway at the top

of the street I saw again her tall figure, her face with its bright eyes

and crown of silken hair—all the things for which I was there waiting;

but, on the other hand, a minute or two later, when, having first turned

my eyes away so as to appear not to be waiting for this encounter which

I had come out to seek, I raised them to look at the Duchess at the

moment in which we converged, what I saw then were red patches (as to

which I knew not whether they were due to the fresh air or to a faulty

complexion) on a sullen face which with the curtest of nods, a long way

removed from the affability of the _Phèdre_ evening, acknowledged my

salute, which I addressed to her daily with an air of surprise, and

which did not seem to please her. And yet, after a few days, during

which the memory of the two girls fought against heavy odds for the

mastery of my amorous feelings against that of Mme. de Guermantes, it

was in the end the latter which, as though of its own accord, generally

prevailed while its competitors withdrew; it was to it that I finally

found myself, deliberately moreover, and as though by preference and for

my own pleasure, to have transferred all my thoughts of love. I had

ceased to dream of the little girls coming from their catechism, or of a

certain dairy-maid; and yet I had also lost all hope of encountering in

the street what I had come out to seek, either the affection promised to

me, at the theatre, in a smile, or the profile, the bright face beneath

its pile of golden hair which were so only when seen from afar. Now I

should not even have been able to say what Mme. de Guermantes was like,

by what I recognised her, for every day, in the picture which she

presented as a whole, the face was different, as were the dress and the

hat.

Why did I one morning, when I saw bearing down on me beneath a violet

hood a sweet, smooth face whose charms were symmetrically arranged about

a pair of blue eyes, a face in which the curve of the nose seemed to

have been absorbed, gauge from a joyous commotion in my bosom that I was

not going to return home without having caught a glimpse of Mme. de

Guermantes; and on the next feel the same disturbance, affect the same

indifference, turn away my eyes in the same careless manner as on the

day before, on the apparition, seen in profile as she crossed from a

side street and crowned by a navy-blue toque, of a beak-like nose

bounding a flushed cheek chequered with a piercing eye, like some

Egyptian deity? Once it was not merely a woman with a bird’s beak that I

saw but almost the bird itself; the outer garments, even the toque of

Mme. de Guermantes were of fur, and since she thus left no cloth

visible, she seemed naturally furred, like certain vultures whose thick,

smooth, dusky, downy plumage suggests rather the skin of a wild beast.

From the midst of this natural plumage, the tiny head arched out its

beak and the two eyes on its surface were piercing-keen and blue.

One day I had been pacing up and down the street for hours on end

without a vestige of Mme. de Guermantes when suddenly, inside a

pastry-cook’s shop tucked in between two of the mansions of this

aristocratic and plebeian quarter, there appeared, took shape the vague

and unfamiliar face of a fashionably dressed woman who was asking to see

some little cakes, and, before I had had time to make her out, there

shot forth at me like a lightning flash, reaching me sooner than its

accompaniment of thunder, the glance of the Duchess; another time,

having failed to meet her and hearing twelve strike, I realised that it

was not worth my while to wait for her any longer, I was sorrowfully

making my way homewards; and, absorbed in my own disappointment, looking

absently after and not seeing a carriage that had overtaken me, I

realised suddenly that the movement of her head which I saw a lady make

through the carriage window was meant for me, and that this lady, whose

features, relaxed and pale, or it might equally be tense and vivid,

composed, beneath a round hat which nestled at the foot of a towering

plume, the face of a stranger whom I had supposed that I did not know,

was Mme. de Guermantes, by whom I had let myself be greeted without so

much as acknowledging her bow. And sometimes I came upon her as I

entered the gate, standing outside the lodge where the detestable porter

whose scrutinous eye I loathed and dreaded was in the act of making her

a profound obeisance and also, no doubt, his daily report. For the

entire staff of the Guermantes household, hidden behind the window

curtains, were trembling as they watched a conversation which they were

unable to overhear, but which meant as they very well knew that one or

other of them would certainly have his “day out” stopped by the Duchess

to whom this Cerberus was betraying him. In view of the whole series of

different faces which Mme. Guermantes displayed thus one after another,

faces that occupied a relative and varying extent, contracted one day,

vast the next, in her person and attire as a whole, my love was not

attached to any one of those changeable and ever-changing elements of

flesh and fabric which replaced one another as day followed day, and

which she could modify, could almost entirely reconstruct without

altering my disturbance because beneath them, beneath the new collar and

the strange cheek, I felt that it was still Mme. de Guermantes. What I

loved was the invisible person who set all this outward show in motion,

her whose hostility so distressed me, whose approach set me trembling,

whose life I would fain have made my own and driven out of it her

friends. She might flaunt a blue feather or shew a fiery cheek without

her actions’ losing their importance for me.

I should not myself have felt that Mme. de Guermantes was tired of

meeting me day after day, had I not learned it indirectly by reading it

on the face, stiff with coldness, disapproval and pity which Françoise

shewed when she was helping me to get ready for these morning walks. The

moment I asked her for my outdoor things I felt a contrary wind arise in

her worn and battered features. I made no attempt to win her confidence,

for I knew that I should not succeed. She had, for at once discovering

any unpleasant thing that might have happened to my parents or myself, a

power the nature of which I have never been able to fathom. Perhaps it

was not supernatural, but was to be explained by sources of information

that were open to her alone: as it may happen that the news which often

reaches a savage tribe several days before the post has brought it to

the European colony has really been transmitted to them not by telepathy

but from hill-top to hill-top by a chain of beacon fires. So, in the

particular instance of my morning walks, possibly Mme. de Guermantes’s

servants had heard their mistress say how tired she was of running into

me every day without fail wherever she went, and had repeated her

remarks to Françoise. My parents might, it is true, have attached some

servant other than Françoise to my person, still I should have been no

better off. Françoise was in a sense less of a servant than the others.

In her way of feeling things, of being kind and pitiful, hard and

distant, superior and narrow, of combining a white skin with red hands

she was still the village maiden whose parents had had “a place of their

own” but having come to grief had been obliged to put her into service.

Her presence in our household was the country air, the social life of a

farm of fifty years ago wafted to us by a sort of reversal of the normal

order of travel whereby it is the place that comes to visit the person.

As the glass cases in a local museum are filled with specimens of the

curious handiwork which the peasants still carve or embroider or

whatever it may be in certain parts of the country, so our flat in Paris

was decorated with the words of Françoise, inspired by a traditional

local sentiment and governed by extremely ancient laws. And she could in

Paris find her way back as though by clues of coloured thread to the

songbirds and cherry trees of her childhood, to her mother’s deathbed,

which she still vividly saw. But in spite of all this wealth of

background, once she had come to Paris and had entered our service she

had acquired—as, obviously, anyone else coming there in her place would

have acquired—the ideas, the system of interpretation used by the

servants on the other floors, compensating for the respect which she was

obliged to shew to us by repeating the rude words that the cook on the

fourth floor had used to her mistress, with a servile gratification so

intense that, for the first time in our lives, feeling a sort of

solidarity between ourselves and the detestable occupant of the fourth

floor flat, we said to ourselves that possibly we too were “employers”

after all. This alteration in Françoise’s character was perhaps

inevitable. Certain forms of existence are so abnormal that they are

bound to produce certain characteristic faults; such was the life led by

the King at Versailles among his courtiers, a life as strange as that of

a Pharaoh or a Doge—and, far more even than his, the life of his

courtiers. The life led by our servants is probably of an even more

monstrous abnormality, which only its familiarity can prevent us from

seeing. But it was actually in details more intimate still that I should

have been obliged, if I had dismissed Françoise, to keep the same

servant. For various others might, in years to come, enter my service;

already furnished with the defects common to all servants, they

underwent nevertheless a rapid transformation with me. As, in the rules

of tactics, an attack in one sector compels a counter-attack in another,

so as not to be hurt by the asperities of my nature, all of them

effected in their own an identical resilience, always at the same

points, and to make up for this took advantage of the gaps in my line to

thrust out advanced posts. Of these gaps I knew nothing, any more than

of the salients to which they gave rise, precisely because they were

gaps. But my servants, by gradually becoming spoiled, taught me of their

existence. It was from the defects which they invariably acquired that I

learned what were my own natural and invariable shortcomings; their

character offered me a sort of negative plate of my own. We had always

laughed, my mother and I, at Mme. Sazerat, who used, in speaking of her

servants, expressions like “the lower orders” or “the servant class”.

But I am bound to admit that what made it useless to think of replacing

Françoise by anyone else was that her successor would inevitably have

belonged just as much to the race of servants in general and to the

class of my servants in particular.

To return to Françoise, I never in my life experienced any humiliation

without having seen beforehand on her face a store of condolences

prepared and waiting; and if then in my anger at the thought of being

pitied by her I tried to pretend that on the contrary I had scored a

distinct success, my lies broke feebly on the wall of her respectful but

obvious unbelief and the consciousness that she enjoyed of her own

infallibility. For she knew the truth. She refrained from uttering it,

and made only a slight movement with her lips as if she still had her

mouth full and was finishing a tasty morsel. She refrained from uttering

it, or so at least I long believed, for at that time I still supposed

that it was by means of words that one communicated the truth to others.

Indeed the words that people used to me recorded their meaning so

unalterably on the sensitive plate of my mind that I could no more

believe it to be possible that anyone who had professed to love me did

not love me than Françoise herself could have doubted when she had read

it in a newspaper that some clergyman or gentleman was prepared, on

receipt of a stamped envelope, to furnish us free of charge with an

infallible remedy for every known complaint or with the means of

multiplying our income an hundredfold. (If, on the other hand, our

doctor were to prescribe for her the simplest ointment to cure a cold in

the head, she, so stubborn to endure the keenest suffering, would

complain bitterly of what she had been made to sniff, insisting that it

tickled her nose and that life was not worth living.) But she was the

first person to prove to me by her example (which I was not to

understand until, long afterwards, when it was given me afresh and to my

greater discomfort, as will be found in the later volumes of this work,

by a person who was dearer to me than Françoise) that the truth has no

need to be uttered to be made apparent, and that one may perhaps gather

it with more certainty, without waiting for words, without even

bothering one’s head about them, from a thousand outward signs, even

from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human

character to what in nature are atmospheric changes. I might perhaps

have suspected this, since to myself at that time it frequently occurred

that I said things in which there was no vestige of truth, while I made

the real truth plain by all manner of involuntary confidences expressed

by my body and in my actions (which were at once interpreted by

Françoise); I ought perhaps to have suspected it, but to do so I should

first have had to be conscious that I myself was occasionally untruthful

and dishonest. Now untruthfulness and dishonesty were with me, as with

most people, called into being in so immediate, so contingent a fashion,

and in self-defence, by some particular interest, that my mind, fixed on

some lofty ideal, allowed my character, in the darkness below, to set

about those urgent, sordid tasks, and did not look down to observe them.

When Françoise, in the evening, was polite to me, and asked my

permission before sitting down in my room, it seemed as though her face

became transparent and I could see the goodness and honesty that lay

beneath. But Jupien, who had lapses into indiscretion of which I learned

only later, revealed afterwards that she had told him that I was not

worth the price of a rope to hang me, and that I had tried to insult her

in every possible way. These words of Jupien set up at once before my

eyes, in new and strange colours, a print of the picture of my relations

with Françoise so different from that on which I used to like letting my

eyes rest, and in which, without the least possibility of doubt,

Françoise adored me and lost no opportunity of singing my praises, that

I realised that it is not only the material world that is different from

the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally

dissimilar from what we think ourselves to be directly perceiving; that

the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if

they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted

from ours, or, better still, endowed for that purpose with organs other

than eyes which would furnish trees and sky and sun with equivalents,

though not visual. However that might be, this sudden outlet which

Jupien threw open for me upon the real world appalled me. So far it was

only Françoise that was revealed, and of her I barely thought. Was it

the same with all one’s social relations? And in what depths of despair

might this not some day plunge me, if it were the same with love? That

was the future’s secret. For the present only Françoise was concerned.

Did she sincerely believe what she had said to Jupien? Had she said it

to embroil Jupien with me, possibly so that we should not appoint

Jupien’s girl as her successor? At any rate I realised the impossibility

of obtaining any direct and certain knowledge of whether Françoise loved

or lothed me. And thus it was she who first gave me the idea that a

person does not (as I had imagined) stand motionless and clear before

our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with

regard to ourself exposed on his surface, like a garden at which, with

all its borders spread out before us, we gaze through a railing, but is

a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating, of which there can

be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form

countless beliefs, based upon his words and sometimes upon his actions,

though neither words nor actions can give us anything but inadequate and

as it proves contradictory information—a shadow behind which we can

alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the

flame of hatred and of love.

I was genuinely in love with Mme. de Guermantes. The greatest happiness

that I could have asked of God would have been that He should overwhelm

her under every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped

of all the privileges that divided her from me, having no longer any

home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she

should come to me for refuge. I imagined her doing so. And indeed on

those evenings when some change in the atmosphere or in my own condition

brought to the surface of my consciousness some forgotten scroll on

which were recorded impressions of other days, instead of profiting by

the refreshing strength that had been generated in me, instead of

employing it to decipher in my own mind thoughts which as a rule escaped

me, instead of setting myself at last to work, I preferred to relate

aloud, to plan out in the third person, with a flow of invention as

useless as was my declamation of it, a whole novel crammed with

adventure, in which the Duchess, fallen upon misfortune, came to implore

assistance from me—me who had become, by a converse change of

circumstances, rich and powerful. And when I had let myself thus for

hours on end imagine the circumstances, rehearse the sentences with

which I should welcome the Duchess beneath my roof, the situation

remained unaltered; I had, alas, in reality, chosen to love the very

woman who, in her own person, combined perhaps the greatest possible

number of different advantages; in whose eyes, accordingly, I could not

hope, myself, ever to cut any figure; for she was as rich as the richest

commoner—and noble also; without reckoning that personal charm which set

her at the pinnacle of fashion, made her among the rest a sort of queen.

I felt that I was annoying her by crossing her path in this way every

morning; but even if I had had the courage to refrain, for two or three

days consecutively, from doing so, perhaps that abstention, which would

have represented so great a sacrifice on my part, Mme. de Guermantes

would not have noticed, or would have set it down to some obstacle

beyond my control. And indeed I could not have succeeded in making

myself cease to track her down except by arranging that it should be

impossible for me to do so, for the need incessantly reviving in me to

meet her, to be for a moment the object of her attention, the person to

whom her bow was addressed, was stronger than my fear of arousing her

displeasure. I should have had to go away for some time; and for that I

had not the heart. I did think of it more than once. I would then tell

Françoise to pack my boxes, and immediately afterwards to unpack them.

And as the spirit of imitation, the desire not to appear behind the

times, alters the most natural and most positive form of oneself,

Françoise, borrowing the expression from her daughter’s vocabulary, used

to remark that I was “dippy”. She did not approve of this; she said that

I was always “balancing”, for she made use, when she was not aspiring to

rival the moderns, of the language of Saint-Simon. It is true that she

liked it still less when I spoke to her as master to servant. She knew

that this was not natural to me, and did not suit me, a condition which

she rendered in words as “where there isn’t a will”. I should never have

had the heart to leave Paris except in a direction that would bring me

closer to Mme. de Guermantes. This was by no means an impossibility.

Should I not indeed find myself nearer to her than I was in the morning,

in the street, solitary, abashed, feeling that not a single one of the

thoughts which I should have liked to convey to her ever reached her, in

that weary patrolling up and down of walks which might be continued, day

after day, for ever without the slightest advantage to myself, if I were

to go miles away from Mme. de Guermantes, but go to some one of her

acquaintance, some one whom she knew to be particular in the choice of

his friends and who would appreciate my good qualities, would be able to

speak to her about me, and if not to obtain it from her at least to make

her know what I wanted, some one by means of whom, in any event, simply

because I should discuss with him whether or not it would be possible

for him to convey this or that message to her, I should give to my

solitary and silent meditations a new form, spoken, active, which would

seem an advance, almost a realisation. What she did during the

mysterious daily life of the “Guermantes” that she was—this was the

constant object of my thoughts; and to break through the mystery, even

by indirect means, as with a lever, by employing the services of a

person to whom were not forbidden the town house of the Duchess, her

parties, unrestricted conversation with her, would not that be a contact

more distant but at the same time more effective than my contemplation

of her every morning in the street?

The friendship, the admiration that Saint-Loup felt for me seemed to me

undeserved and had hitherto left me unmoved. All at once I attached a

value to them, I would have liked him to disclose them to Mme. de

Guermantes, I was quite prepared even to ask him to do so. For when we

are in love, all the trifling little privileges that we enjoy we would

like to be able to divulge to the woman we love, as people who have been

disinherited and bores of other kinds do to us in every-day life. We are

distressed by her ignorance of them; we seek consolation in the thought

that just because they are never visible she has perhaps added to the

opinion which she already had of us this possibility of further

advantages that must remain unknown.

Saint-Loup had not for a long time been able to come to Paris, whether,

as he himself explained, on account of his military duties, or, as was

more likely, on account of the trouble that he was having with his

mistress, with whom he had twice now been on the point of breaking off

relations. He had often told me what a pleasure it would be to him if I

came to visit him at that garrison town, the name of which, a couple of

days after his leaving Balbec, had caused me so much joy when I had read

it on the envelope of the first letter I received from my friend. It was

(not so far from Balbec as its wholly inland surroundings might have led

one to think) one of those little fortified towns, aristocratic and

military, set in a broad expanse of country over which on fine days

there floats so often into the distance a sort of intermittent haze of

sound which—as a screen of poplars by its sinuosities outlines the

course of a river which one cannot see—indicates the movements of a

regiment on parade that the very atmosphere of its streets, avenues and

squares has been gradually tuned to a sort of perpetual vibration,

musical and martial, while the most ordinary note of cartwheel or

tramway is prolonged in vague trumpet calls, indefinitely repeated, to

the hallucinated ear, by the silence. It was not too far away from Paris

for me to be able, if I took the express, to return, join my mother and

grandmother and sleep in my own bed. As soon as I realised this,

troubled by a painful longing, I had too little will power to decide not

to return to Paris but rather to stay in this town; but also too little

to prevent a porter from carrying my luggage to a cab and not to adopt,

as I walked behind him, the unburdened mind of a traveller who is

looking after his luggage and for whom no grandmother is waiting

anywhere at home, to get into the carriage with the complete detachment

of a person who, having ceased to think of what it is that he wants, has

the air of knowing what he wants, and to give the driver the address of

the cavalry barracks. I thought that Saint-Loup might come to sleep that

night at the hotel at which I should be staying, so as to make less

painful for me the first shock of contact with this strange town. One of

the guard went to find him, and I waited at the barrack gate, before

that huge ship of stone, booming with the November wind, out of which,

every moment, for it was now six o’clock, men were emerging in pairs

into the street, staggering as if they were coming ashore in some

foreign port in which they found themselves temporarily anchored.

Saint-Loup appeared, moving like a whirlwind, his eyeglass spinning in

the air before him; I had not given my name, I was eager to enjoy his

surprise and delight. “Oh! What a bore!” he exclaimed, suddenly catching

sight of me, and blushing to the tips of his ears. “I have just had a

week’s leave, and I shan’t be off duty again for another week.”

And, preoccupied by the thought of my having to spend this first night

alone, for he knew better than anyone my bed-time agonies, which he had

often remarked and soothed at Balbec, he broke off his lamentation to

turn and look at me, coax me with little smiles, with tender though

unsymmetrical glances, half of them coming directly from his eye, the

other half through his eyeglass, but both sorts alike an allusion to the

emotion that he felt on seeing me again, an allusion also to that

important matter which I did not always understand but which concerned

me now vitally, our friendship.

“I say! Where are you going to sleep? Really, I can’t recommend the

hotel where we mess; it is next to the Exhibition ground, where there’s

a show just starting; you’ll find it beastly crowded. No, you’ld better

go to the Hôtel de Flandre; it is a little eighteenth-century palace

with old tapestries. It ‘makes’ quite an ‘old world residence’.”

Saint-Loup employed in every connexion the word “makes” for “has the air

of”, because the spoken language, like the written, feels from time to

time the need of these alterations in the meanings of words, these

refinements of expression. And just as journalists often have not the

least idea from what school of literature come the “turns of speech”

that they borrow, so the vocabulary, the very diction of Saint-Loup were

formed in imitation of three different aesthetes, none of whom he knew

personally but whose way of speaking had been indirectly instilled into

him. “Besides,” he concluded, “the hotel I mean is more or less adapted

to your supersensitiveness of hearing. You will have no neighbours. I

quite see that it is a slender advantage, and as, after all, another

visitor may arrive to-morrow, it would not be worth your while to choose

that particular hotel with so precarious an object in view. No, it is

for its appeal to the eye that I recommend it. The rooms are quite

attractive, all the furniture is old and comfortable; there is something

reassuring about that.” But to me, less of an artist than Saint-Loup,

the pleasure that an attractive house could give was superficial, almost

non-existent, and could not calm my growing anguish, as painful as that

which I used to feel long ago at Combray when my mother did not come

upstairs to say good night, or that which I felt on the evening of my

arrival at Balbec in the room with the unnaturally high ceiling, which

smelt of flowering grasses. Saint-Loup read all this in my fixed gaze.

“A lot you care, though, about this charming palace, my poor fellow;

you’re quite pale; and here am I like a great brute talking to you about

tapestries which you won’t have the heart to look at, even. I know the

room they’ll put you in; personally I find it most enlivening, but I can

quite understand that it won’t have the same effect on you with your

sensitive nature. You mustn’t think I don’t understand; I don’t feel the

same myself, but I can put myself in your place.”

At that moment a serjeant who was exercising a horse on the square,

entirely absorbed in making the animal jump, disregarding the salutes of

passing troopers, but hurling volleys of oaths at such as got in his

way, turned with a smile to Saint-Loup and, seeing that he had a friend

with him, saluted us. But his horse at once reared. Saint-Loup flung

himself at its head, caught it by the bridle, succeeded in quieting it

and returned to my side.

“Yes,” he resumed; “I assure you that I fully understand; I feel for you

as keenly as you do yourself. I am wretched,” he went on, laying his

hand lovingly on my shoulder, “when I think that if I could have stayed

with you to-night, I might have been able, if we talked till morning, to

relieve you of a little of your unhappiness. I can lend you any number

of books, but you won’t want to read if you’re feeling like that. And I

shan’t be able to get anyone else to take my duty here; I’ve been off

now twice running because my girl came down to see me.”

And he knitted his brows partly with vexation and also in the effort to

decide, like a doctor, what remedy he might best apply to my disease.

“Run along and light the fire in my quarters,” he called to a trooper

who passed us. “Hurry up; get a move on!”

After which he turned once more to me, and his eyeglass and his peering,

myopic gaze hinted an allusion to our great friendship.

“No! To see you here, in these barracks where I have spent so much time

thinking about you, I can scarcely believe my eyes. I must be dreaming.

And how are you? Better, I hope. You must tell me all about yourself

presently. We’ll go up to my room; we mustn’t hang about too long on the

square, there’s the devil of a draught; I don’t feel it now myself, but

you aren’t accustomed to it, I’m afraid of your catching cold. And what

about your work; have you started yet? No? You are a quaint fellow! If I

had your talent I’m sure I should be writing morning, noon and night. It

amuses you more to do nothing? What a pity it is that it’s the useless

fellows like me who are always ready to work, and the ones who could if

they wanted to, won’t. There, and I’ve clean forgotten to ask you how

your grandmother is. Her Proudhons are in safe keeping. I never part

from them.”

An officer, tall, handsome, majestic, emerged with slow and solemn gait

from the foot of a staircase. Saint-Loup saluted him and arrested the

perpetual instability of his body for the moment occupied in holding his

hand against the peak of his cap. But he had flung himself into the

action with so much force, straightening himself with so sharp a

movement, and, the salute ended, let his hand fall with so abrupt a

relaxation, altering all the positions of shoulder, leg, and eyeglass,

that this moment was one not so much of immobility as of a throbbing

tension in which were neutralised the excessive movements which he had

just made and those on which he was about to embark. Meanwhile the

officer, without coming any nearer us, calm, benevolent, dignified,

imperial, representing, in short, the direct opposite of Saint-Loup,

himself also, but without haste, raised his hand to the peak of his cap.

“I must just say a word to the Captain,” whispered Saint-Loup. “Be a

good fellow, and go and wait for me in my room. It’s the second on the

right, on the third floor; I’ll be with you in a minute.”

And setting off at the double, preceded by his eyeglass which fluttered

in every direction, he made straight for the slow and stately Captain

whose horse had just been brought round and who, before preparing to

mount, was giving orders with a studied nobility of gesture as in some

historical painting, and as though he were setting forth to take part in

some battle of the First Empire, whereas he was simply going to ride

home, to the house which he had taken for the period of his service at

Doncières, and which stood in a Square that was named, as though in an

ironical anticipation of the arrival of this Napoleonid, Place de la

République. I started to climb the staircase, nearly slipping on each of

its nail-studded steps, catching glimpses of barrack-rooms, their bare

walls edged with a double line of beds and kits. I was shewn

Saint-Loup’s room. I stood for a moment outside its closed door, for I

could hear some one stirring; he moved something, let fall something

else; I felt that the room was not empty, that there must be somebody

there. But it was only the freshly lighted fire beginning to burn. It

could not keep quiet, it kept shifting its faggots about, and very

clumsily. I entered the room; it let one roll into the fender and set

another smoking. And even when it was not moving, like an ill-bred

person it made noises all the time, which, from the moment I saw the

flames rising, revealed themselves to me as noises made by a fire,

although if I had been on the other side of a wall I should have thought

that they came from some one who was blowing his nose and walking about.

I sat down in the room and waited. Liberty hangings and old German

stuffs of the eighteenth century managed to rid it of the smell that was

exhaled by the rest of the building, a coarse, insipid, mouldy smell

like that of stale toast. It was here, in this charming room, that I

could have dined and slept with a calm and happy mind. Saint-Loup seemed

almost to be present by reason of the text-books which littered his

table, between his photographs, among which I could make out my own and

that of the Duchesse de Guermantes, by the light of the fire which had

at length grown accustomed to the grate, and, like an animal crouching

in an ardent, noiseless, faithful watchfulness, let fall only now and

then a smouldering log which crumbled into sparks, or licked with a

tongue of flame the sides of the chimney. I heard the tick of

Saint-Loup’s watch, which could not be far away. This tick changed its

place every moment, for I could not see the watch; it seemed to come

from behind, from in front of me, from my right, from my left, sometimes

to die away as though at a great distance. Suddenly I caught sight of

the watch on the table. Then I heard the tick in a fixed place from

which it did not move again. That is to say, I thought I heard it at

this place; I did not hear it there; I saw it there, for sounds have no

position in space. Or rather we associate them with movements, and in

that way they serve the purpose of warning us of those movements, of

appearing to make them necessary and natural. Certainly it happens

commonly enough that a sick man whose ears have been stopped with

cotton-wool ceases to hear the noise of a fire such as was crackling at

that moment in Saint-Loup’s fireplace, labouring at the formation of

brands and cinders, which it then lets fall into the fender, nor would

he hear the passage of the tramway-cars whose music took its flight, at

regular intervals, over the Grand’place of Doncières. Let the sick man

then read a book, and the pages will turn silently before him, as though

they were moved by the fingers of a god. The dull thunder of a bath

which is being filled becomes thin, faint and distant as the twittering

of birds in the sky. The withdrawal of sound, its dilution, take from it

all its power to hurt us; driven mad a moment ago by hammer-blows which

seemed to be shattering the ceiling above our head, it is with a quiet

delight that we now gather in their sound, light, caressing, distant,

like the murmur of leaves playing by the roadside with the passing

breeze. We play games of patience with cards which we do not hear, until

we imagine that we have not touched them, that they are moving of their

own accord, and, anticipating our desire to play with them, have begun

to play with us. And in this connexion we may ask ourselves whether, in

the case of love (to which indeed we may add the love of life and the

love of fame, since there are, it appears, persons who are acquainted

with these latter sentiments), we ought not to act like those who, when

a noise disturbs them, instead of praying that it may cease, stop their

ears; and, with them for our pattern, bring our attention, our defensive

strength to bear on ourselves, give ourselves as an objective to capture

not the “other person” with whom we are in love but our capacity for

suffering at that person’s hands.

To return to the problem of sounds, we have only to thicken the wads

which close the aural passages, and they confine to a pianissimo the

girl who has just been playing a boisterous tune overhead; if we go

farther, and steep the wad in grease, at once the whole household must

obey its despotic rule; its laws extend even beyond our portals.

Pianissimo is not enough; the wad instantly orders the piano to be shut,

and the music lesson is abruptly ended; the gentleman who was walking up

and down in the room above breaks off in the middle of his beat; the

movement of carriages and tramways is interrupted as though a Sovereign

were expected to pass. And indeed this attenuation of sounds sometimes

disturbs our slumbers instead of guarding them. Only yesterday the

incessant noise in our ears, by describing to us in a continuous

narrative all that was happening in the street and in the house,

succeeded at length in making us sleep, like a boring book; to-night,

through the sheet of silence that is spread over our sleep a shock,

louder than the rest, manages to make itself heard, gentle as a sigh,

unrelated to any other sound, mysterious; and the call for an

explanation which it emits is sufficient to awaken us. Take away for a

moment from the sick man the cotton-wool that has been stopping his ears

and in a flash the full daylight, the sun of sound dawns afresh,

dazzling him, is born again in his universe; in all haste returns the

multitude of exiled sounds; we are present, as though it were the

chanting of choirs of angels, at the resurrection of the voice. The

empty streets are filled for a moment with the whirr of the swift,

consecutive wings of the singing tramway-cars. In the bedroom itself,

the sick man has created, not, like Prometheus, fire, but the sound of

fire. And when we increase or reduce the wads of cotton-wool, it is as

though we were pressing alternately one and the other of the two pedals

with which we have extended the resonant compass of the outer world.

Only there are also suppressions of sound which are not temporary. The

man who has grown completely deaf cannot even heat a pan of milk by his

bedside, but he must keep an eye open to watch, on the tilted lid, for

the white, arctic reflexion, like that of a coming snow-storm, which is

the warning sign which he is wise to obey, by cutting off (as Our Lord

bade the waves be still) the electric current; for already the swelling,

jerkily climbing egg of boiling milk-film is reaching its climax in a

series of sidelong movements, has filled and set bellying the drooping

sails with which the cream has skimmed its surface, sends in a sudden

storm a scud of pearly substance flying overboard—sails which the

cutting off of the current, if the electric storm is hushed in time,

will fold back upon themselves and let fall with the ebbing tide,

changed now to magnolia petals. But if the sick man should not be quick

enough in taking the necessary precautions, presently, when his drowned

books and watch are seen barely emerging from the milky tide, he will be

obliged to call the old nurse who, though he be himself an eminent

statesman or a famous writer, will tell him that he has no more sense

than a child of five. At other times in the magic chamber, between us

and the closed door, a person who was not there a moment ago makes his

appearance; it is a visitor whom we did not hear coming in, and who

merely gesticulates, like a figure in one of those little puppet

theatres, so restful for those who have taken a dislike to the spoken

tongue. And for this totally deaf man, since the loss of a sense adds as

much beauty to the world as its acquisition, it is with ecstasy that he

walks now upon an earth grown almost an Eden, in which sound has not yet

been created. The highest waterfalls unfold for his eyes alone their

ribbons of crystal, stiller than the glassy sea, like the cascades of

Paradise. As sound was for him before his deafness the perceptible form

in which the cause of a movement was draped, objects moved without sound

seemed to be being moved also without cause; deprived of all resonant

quality, they shew a spontaneous activity, seem to be alive. They move,

halt, become alight of their own accord. Of their own accord they vanish

in the air like the winged monsters of prehistoric days. In the solitary

and unneighboured home of the deaf man the service which, before his

infirmity was complete, was already shewing an increased discretion, was

being carried on in silence, is now assured him with a sort of

surreptitious deftness, by mutes, as at the court of a fairy-tale king.

And, as upon the stage, the building on which the deaf man looks from

his window—be it barracks, church, or town hall—is only so much scenery.

If one day it should fall to the ground, it may emit a cloud of dust and

leave visible ruins; but, less material even than a palace on the stage,

though it has not the same exiguity, it will subside in the magic

universe without letting the fall of its heavy blocks of stone tarnish,

with anything so vulgar as sound, the chastity of the prevailing

silence.

The silence, though only relative, which reigned in the little

barrack-room where I sat waiting was now broken. The door opened and

Saint-Loup, dropping his eyeglass, dashed in.

“Ah, my dear Robert, you make yourself very comfortable here;” I said to

him; “how jolly it would be if one were allowed to dine and sleep here.”

And to be sure, had it not been against the regulations, what repose

untinged by sadness I could have tasted there, guarded by that

atmosphere of tranquillity, vigilance and gaiety which was maintained by

a thousand wills controlled and free from care, a thousand heedless

spirits, in that great community called a barracks where, time having

taken the form of action, the sad bell that tolled the hours outside was

replaced by the same joyous clarion of those martial calls, the ringing

memory of which was kept perpetually alive in the paved streets of the

town, like the dust that floats in a sunbeam;—a voice sure of being

heard, and musical because it was the command not only of authority to

obedience but of wisdom to happiness.

“So you’ld rather stay with me and sleep here, would you, than go to the

hotel by yourself?” Saint-Loup asked me, smiling.

“Oh, Robert, it is cruel of you to be sarcastic about it,” I pleaded;

“you know it’s not possible, and you know how wretched I shall be over

there.”

“Good! You flatter me!” he replied. “It occurred to me just now that you

would rather stay here to-night. And that is precisely what I stopped to

ask the Captain.”

“And he has given you leave?” I cried.

“He hadn’t the slightest objection.”

“Oh! I adore him!”

“No; that would be going too far. But now, let me just get hold of my

batman and tell him to see about our dinner,” he went on, while I turned

away so as to hide my tears.

We were several times interrupted by one or other of Saint-Loup’s

friends’ coming in. He drove them all out again.

“Get out of here. Buzz off!”

I begged him to let them stay.

“No, really; they would bore you stiff; they are absolutely uncultured;

all they can talk about is racing, or stables shop. Besides, I don’t

want them here either; they would spoil these precious moments I’ve been

looking forward to. But you mustn’t think, when I tell you that these

fellows are brainless, that everything military is devoid of

intellectuality. Far from it. We have a major here who is a splendid

chap. He’s given us a course in which military history is treated like a

demonstration, like a problem in algebra. Even from the aesthetic point

of view there is a curious beauty, alternately inductive and deductive,

about it which you couldn’t fail to appreciate.”

“That’s not the officer who’s given me leave to stay here to-night?”

“No; thank God! The man you ‘adore’ for so very trifling a service is

the biggest fool that ever walked the face of the earth. He is perfect

at looking after messing, and at kit inspections; he spends hours with

the serjeant major and the master tailor. There you have his mentality.

Apart from that he has a vast contempt, like everyone here, for the

excellent major I was telling you about. No one will speak to him

because he’s a free-mason and doesn’t go to confession. The Prince de

Borodino would never have an outsider like that in his house. Which is

pretty fair cheek, when all’s said and done, from a man whose

great-grandfather was a small farmer, and who would probably be a small

farmer himself if it hadn’t been for the Napoleonic wars. Not that he

hasn’t a lurking sense of his own rather ambiguous position in society,

where he’s neither flesh nor fowl. He hardly ever shews his face at the

Jockey, it makes him feel so deuced awkward, this so-called Prince,”

added Robert, who, having been led by the same spirit of imitation to

adopt the social theories of his teachers and the worldly prejudices of

his relatives, had unconsciously wedded the democratic love of humanity

to a contempt for the nobility of the Empire.

I was looking at the photograph of his aunt, and the thought that, since

Saint-Loup had this photograph in his possession, he might perhaps give

it to me, made me feel all the fonder of him and hope to do him a

thousand services, which seemed to me a very small exchange for it. For

this photograph was like one encounter more, added to all those that I

had already had, with Mme. de Guermantes; better still, a prolonged

encounter, as if, by some sudden stride forward in our relations, she

had stopped beside me, in a garden hat, and had allowed me for the first

time to gaze at my leisure at that plump cheek, that arched neck, that

tapering eyebrow (veiled from me hitherto by the swiftness of her

passage, the bewilderment of my impressions, the imperfection of

memory); and the contemplation of them, as well as of the bare bosom and

arms of a woman whom I had never seen save in a high-necked and

long-sleeved bodice, was to me a voluptuous discovery, a priceless

favour. Those lines, which had seemed to me almost a forbidden

spectacle, I could study there, as in a text-book of the only geometry

that had any value for me. Later on, when I looked at Robert, I noticed

that he too was a little like the photograph of his aunt, and by a

mysterious process which I found almost as moving, since, if his face

had not been directly created by hers, the two had nevertheless a common

origin. The features of the Duchesse de Guermantes, which were pinned to

my vision of Combray, the nose like a falcon’s beak, the piercing eyes,

seemed to have served also as a pattern for the cutting out—in another

copy analogous and slender, with too delicate a skin—of Robert’s face,

which might almost be superimposed upon his aunt’s. I saw in him, with a

keen longing, those features characteristic of the Guermantes, of that

race which had remained so individual in the midst of a world with which

it was not confounded, in which it remained isolated in the glory of an

ornithomorphic divinity, for it seemed to have been the issue, in the

age of mythology, of the union of a goddess with a bird.

Robert, without being aware of its cause, was touched by my evident

affection. This was moreover increased by the sense of comfort inspired

in me by the heat of the fire and by the champagne which bedewed at the

same time my brow with beads of sweat and my cheeks with tears; it

washed down the partridges; I ate mine with the dumb wonder of a profane

mortal of any sort when he finds in a form of life with which he is not

familiar what he has supposed that form of life to exclude—the wonder,

for instance, of an atheist who sits down to an exquisitely cooked

dinner in a presbytery. And next morning, when I awoke, I rose and went

to cast from Saint-Loup’s window, which being at a great height

overlooked the whole countryside, a curious scrutiny to make the

acquaintance of my new neighbour, the landscape which I had not been

able to distinguish the day before, having arrived too late, at an hour

when it was already sleeping beneath the outspread cloak of night. And

yet, early as it had awoken from its sleep, I could see the ground, when

I opened the window and looked out, only as one sees it from the window

of a country house, overlooking the lake, shrouded still in its soft

white morning gown of mist which scarcely allowed me to make out

anything at all. But I knew that, before the troopers who were busy with

their horses in the square had finished grooming them, it would have

cast its gown aside. In the meantime, I could see only a meagre hill,

rearing close up against the side of the barracks a back already swept

clear of darkness, rough and wrinkled. Through the transparent curtain

of frost I could not take my eyes from this stranger who, too, was

looking at me for the first time. But when I had formed the habit of

coming to the barracks, my consciousness that the hill was there, more

real, consequently, even when I did not see it, than the hotel at

Balbec, than our house in Paris, of which I thought as of absent—or

dead—friends, that is to say without any strong belief in their

existence, brought it about that, even although I was not aware of it

myself, its reflected shape outlined itself on the slightest impressions

that I formed at Doncières, and among them, to begin with this first

morning, on the pleasing impression of warmth given me by the cup of

chocolate prepared by Saint-Loup’s batman in this comfortable room,

which had the effect of being an optical centre from which to look out

at the hill—the idea of there being anything else to do but just gaze at

it, the idea of actually climbing it being rendered impossible by this

same mist. Imbibing the shape of the hill, associated with the taste of

hot chocolate and with the whole web of my fancies at that particular

time, this mist, without my having thought at all about it, succeeded in

moistening all my subsequent thoughts about that period, just as a

massive and unmelting lump of gold had remained allied to my impressions

of Balbec, or as the proximity of the outside stairs of blackish

sandstone gave a grey background to my impressions of Combray. It did

not, however, persist late into the day; the sun began by hurling at it,

in vain, a few darts which sprinkled it with brilliants before they

finally overcame it. The hill might expose its grizzled rump to the

sun’s rays, which, an hour later, when I went down to the town, gave to

the russet tints of the autumn leaves, to the reds and blues of the

election posters pasted on the walls an exaltation which raised my

spirits also and made me stamp, singing as I went, on the pavements from

which I could hardly keep myself from jumping in the air for joy.

But after that first night I had to sleep at the hotel. And I knew

beforehand that I was doomed to find there sorrow. It was like an

unbreathable aroma which all my life long had been exhaled for me by

every new bedroom, that is to say by every bedroom; in the one which I

usually occupied I was not present, my mind remained elsewhere, and in

its place sent only the sense of familiarity. But I could not employ

this servant, less sensitive than myself, to look after things for me in

a new place, where I preceded him, where I arrived by myself, where I

must bring into contact with its environment that “Self” which I

rediscovered only at year-long intervals, but always the same, having

not grown at all since Combray, since my first arrival at Balbec,

weeping, without any possibility of consolation, on the edge of an

unpacked trunk.

As it happened, I was mistaken. I had no time to be sad, for I was not

left alone for an instant. The fact of the matter was that there

remained of the old palace a superfluous refinement of structure and

decoration, out of place in a modern hotel, which, released from the

service of any practical purpose, had in its long spell of leisure

acquired a sort of life: passages winding about in all directions, which

one was continually crossing in their aimless wanderings, lobbies as

long as corridors and as ornate as drawing-rooms, which had the air

rather of being dwellers there themselves than of forming part of a

dwelling, which could not be induced to enter and settle down in any of

the rooms but wandered about outside mine and came up at once to offer

me their company—neighbours of a sort, idle but never noisy, menial

ghosts of the past who had been granted the privilege of staying,

provided they kept quiet, by the doors of the rooms which were let to

visitors; and who, every time that I came across them, greeted me with a

silent deference. In short, the idea of a lodging, of simply a case for

our existence from day to day which shields us only from the cold and

from being overlooked by other people, was absolutely inapplicable to

this house, an assembly of rooms as real as a colony of people, living,

it was true, in silence, but things which one was obliged to meet, to

avoid, to appreciate, as one came in. One tried not to disturb them, and

one could not look without respect at the great drawing-room which had

formed, far back in the eighteenth century, the habit of stretching

itself at its ease, among its hangings of old gold and beneath the

clouds of its painted ceiling. And one was seized with a more personal

curiosity as to the smaller rooms which, without any regard for

symmetry, ran all round it, innumerable, startled, fleeing in disorder

as far as the garden, to which they had so easy an access down three

broken steps.

If I wished to go out or to come in without taking the lift or being

seen from the main staircase, a smaller private staircase, no longer in

use, offered me its steps so skilfully arranged, one close above

another, that there seemed to exist in their gradation a perfect

proportion of the same kind as those which, in colours, scents, savours,

often arouse in us a peculiar, sensuous pleasure. But the pleasure to be

found in going up and downstairs I had had to come here to learn, as

once before to a health resort in the Alps to find that the act—as a

rule not noticed—of drawing breath could be a perpetual delight. I

received that dispensation from effort which is granted to us only by

the things to which long use has accustomed us, when I set my feet for

the first time on those steps, familiar before ever I knew them, as if

they possessed, deposited on them, perhaps, embodied in them by the

masters of long ago whom they used to welcome every day, the prospective

charm of habits which I had not yet contracted and which indeed could

only grow weaker once they had become my own. I looked into a room; the

double doors closed themselves behind me, the hangings let in a silence

in which I felt myself invested with a sort of exhilarating royalty; a

marble mantelpiece with ornaments of wrought brass—of which one would

have been wrong to think that its sole idea was to represent the art of

the Directory—offered me a fire, and a little easy chair on short legs

helped me to warm myself as comfortably as if I had been sitting on the

hearthrug. The walls held the room in a close embrace, separating it

from the rest of the world and, to let in, to enclose what made it

complete, parted to make way for the bookcase, reserved a place for the

bed, on either side of which a column airily upheld the raised ceiling

of the alcove. And the room was prolonged in depth by two closets as

large as itself, the latter of which had hanging from its wall, to scent

the occasion on which one had recourse to it, a voluptuous rosary of

orris-roots; the doors, if I left them open when I withdrew into this

innermost retreat, were not content with tripling its dimensions without

its ceasing to be well-proportioned, and not only allowed my eyes to

enjoy the delights of extension after those of concentration, but added

further to the pleasure of my solitude, which, while still inviolable,

was no longer shut in, the sense of liberty. This closet looked out upon

a courtyard, a fair solitary stranger whom I was glad to have for a

neighbour when next morning my eyes fell on her, a captive between her

high walls in which no other window opened, with nothing but two

yellowing trees which were enough, to give a pinkish softness to the

pure sky above.

Before going to bed I decided to leave the room in order to explore the

whole of my fairy kingdom. I walked down a long gallery which did me

homage successively with all that it had to offer me if I could not

sleep, an armchair placed waiting in a corner, a spinet, on a table

against the wall, a bowl of blue crockery filled with cinerarias, and,

in an old frame, the phantom of a lady of long ago whose powdered hair

was starred with blue flowers, holding in her hand a bunch of

carnations. When I came to the end, the bare wall in which no door

opened said to me simply: “Now you must turn and go back, but, you see,

you are at home here, the house is yours,” while the soft carpet, not to

be left out, added that if I did not sleep that night I could easily

come in barefoot, and the unshuttered windows, looking out over the open

country, assured me that they would hold a sleepless vigil and that, at

whatever hour I chose to come in, I need not be afraid of disturbing

anyone. And behind a hanging curtain I surprised only a little closet

which, stopped by the wall and unable to escape any farther, had hidden

itself there with a guilty conscience and gave me a frightened stare

from its little round window, glowing blue in the moonlight. I went to

bed, but the presence of the eiderdown quilt, of the pillars, of the

neat fireplace, by straining my attention to a pitch beyond that of

Paris, prevented me from letting myself go upon my habitual train of

fancies. And as it is this particular state of strained attention that

enfolds our slumbers, acts upon them, modifies them, brings them into

line with this or that series of past impressions, the images that

filled my dreams that first night were borrowed from a memory entirely

distinct from that on which I was in the habit of drawing. If I had been

tempted while asleep to let myself be swept back upon my ordinary

current of remembrance, the bed to which I was not accustomed, the

comfortable attention which I was obliged to pay to the position of my

various limbs when I turned over were sufficient to correct my error, to

disentangle and to keep running the new thread of my dreams. It is the

same with sleep as with our perception of the external world. It needs

only a modification in our habits to make it poetic, it is enough that

while undressing we should have dozed off unconsciously upon the bed,

for the dimensions of our dream-world to be altered and its beauty felt.

We awake, look at our watch, see “four o’clock”; it is only four o’clock

in the morning, but we imagine that the whole day has gone by, so

vividly does this nap of a few minutes, unsought by us, appear to have

come down to us from the skies, by virtue of some divine right,

full-bodied, vast, like an Emperor’s orb of gold. In the morning, while

worrying over the thought that my grandfather was ready, and was waiting

for me to start on our walk along the Méséglise way, I was awakened by

the blare of a regimental band which passed every day beneath my

windows. But on several occasions—and I mention these because one cannot

properly describe human life unless one shews it soaked in the sleep in

which it plunges, which, night after night, sweeps round it as a

promontory is encircled by the sea—the intervening layer of sleep was

strong enough to bear the shock of the music and I heard nothing. On the

other mornings it gave way for a moment; but, still velvety with the

refreshment of having slept, my consciousness (like those organs by

which, after a local anaesthetic, a cauterisation, not perceived at

first, is felt only at the very end and then as a faint burning smart)

was touched only gently by the shrill points of the fifes which caressed

it with a vague, cool, matutinal warbling; and after this brief

interruption in which the silence had turned to music it relapsed into

my slumber before even the dragoons had finished passing, depriving me

of the latest opening buds of the sparkling clangorous nosegay. And the

zone of my consciousness which its springing stems had brushed was so

narrow, so circumscribed with sleep that later on, when Saint-Loup asked

me whether I had heard the band, I was no longer certain that the sound

of its brasses had not been as imaginary as that which I heard during

the day echo, after the slightest noise, from the paved streets of the

town. Perhaps I had heard it only in a dream, prompted by my fear of

being awakened, or else of not being awakened and so not seeing the

regiment march past. For often, when I was still asleep at the moment

when, on the contrary, I had supposed that the noise would awaken me,

for the next hour I imagined that I was awake, while still drowsing, and

I enacted to myself with tenuous shadow-shapes on the screen of my

slumber the various scenes of which it deprived me but at which I had

the illusion of looking on.

What one has meant to do during the day, as it turns out, sleep

intervening, one accomplishes only in one’s dreams, that is to say after

it has been distorted by sleep into following another line than one

would have chosen when awake. The same story branches off and has a

different ending. When all is said, the world in which we live when we

are asleep is so different that people who have difficulty in going to

sleep seek first of all to escape from the waking world. After having

desperately, for hours on end, with shut eyes, revolved in their minds

thoughts similar to those which they would have had with their eyes

open, they take heart again on noticing that the last minute has been

crawling under the weight of an argument in formal contradiction of the

laws of thought, and their realisation of this, and the brief “absence”

to which it points, indicate that the door is now open through which

they will perhaps be able, presently, to escape from the perception of

the real, to advance to a resting-place more or less remote on the other

side, which will mean their having a more or less “good” night. But

already a great stride has been made when we turn our back on the real,

when we reach the cave in which “auto-suggestions” prepare—like

witches—the hell-broth of imaginary maladies or of the recurrence of

nervous disorders, and watch for the hour at which the storm that has

been gathering during our unconscious sleep will break with sufficient

force to make sleep cease.

Not far thence is the secret garden in which grow like strange flowers

the kinds of sleep, so different one from another, the sleep induced by

datura, by the multiple extracts of ether, the sleep of belladonna, of

opium, of valerian, flowers whose petals remain shut until the day when

the predestined visitor shall come and, touching them, bid them open,

and for long hours inhale the aroma of their peculiar dreams into a

marvelling and bewildered being. At the end of the garden stands the

convent with open windows through which we hear voices repeating the

lessons learned before we went to sleep, which we shall know only at the

moment of awakening; while, a presage of that moment, sounds the

resonant tick of that inward alarum which our preoccupation has so

effectively regulated that when our housekeeper comes in with the

warning: “It is seven o’clock,” she will find us awake and ready. On the

dim walls of that chamber which opens upon our dreams, within which

toils without ceasing that oblivion of the sorrows of love whose task,

interrupted and brought to nought at times by a nightmare big with

reminiscence, is ever speedily resumed, hang, even after we are awake,

the memories of our dreams, but so overshadowed that often we catch

sight of them for the first time only in the broad light of the

afternoon when the ray of a similar idea happens by chance to strike

them; some of them brilliant and harmonious while we slept, but already

so distorted that, having failed to recognise them, we can but hasten to

lay them in the earth like dead bodies too quickly decomposed or relics

so seriously damaged, so nearly crumbling into dust that the most

skilful restorer could not bring them back to their true form or make

anything of them. Near the gate is the quarry to which our heavier

slumbers repair in search of substances which coat the brain with so

unbreakable a glaze that, to awaken the sleeper, his own will is

obliged, even on a golden morning, to smite him with mighty blows, like

a young Siegfried. Beyond this, again, are the nightmares of which the

doctors foolishly assert that they tire us more than does insomnia,

whereas on the contrary they enable the thinker to escape from the

strain of thought; those nightmares with their fantastic picture-books

in which our relatives who are dead are shewn meeting with a serious

accident which at the same time does not preclude their speedy recovery.

Until then we keep them in a little rat-cage, in which they are smaller

than white mice and, covered with big red spots, out of each of which a

feather sprouts, engage us in Ciceronian dialogues. Next to this

picture-book is the revolving disc of awakening, by virtue of which we

submit for a moment to the tedium of having to return at once to a house

which was pulled down fifty years ago, the memory of which is gradually

effaced as sleep grows more distant by a number of others, until we

arrive at that memory which the disc presents only when it has ceased to

revolve and which coincides with what we shall see with opened eyes.

Sometimes I had heard nothing, being in one of those slumbers into which

we fall as into a pit from which we are heartily glad to be drawn up a

little later, heavy, overfed, digesting all that has been brought to us

(as by the nymphs who fed the infant Hercules) by those agile,

vegetative powers whose activity is doubled while we sleep.

That kind of sleep is called “sleeping like lead”, and it seems as

though one has become, oneself, and remains for a few moments after such

a sleep is ended, simply a leaden image. One is no longer a person. How

then, seeking for one’s mind, one’s personality, as one seeks for a

thing that is lost, does one recover one’s own self rather than any

other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not another

personality than yesterday’s that is incarnate in one? One fails to see

what can dictate the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings

any one of whom one might be, it is on him who one was overnight that

unerringly one lays one’s hand? What is it that guides us, when there

has been an actual interruption—whether it be that our unconsciousness

has been complete or our dreams entirely different from ourself? There

has indeed been death, as when the heart has ceased to beat and a

rhythmical friction of the tongue revives us. No doubt the room, even if

we have seen it only once before, awakens memories to which other, older

memories cling. Or were some memories also asleep in us of which we now

become conscious? The resurrection at our awakening—after that healing

attack of mental alienation which is sleep—must after all be similar to

what occurs when we recapture a name, a line, a refrain that we had

forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be

conceived as a phenomenon of memory.

When I had finished sleeping, tempted by the sunlit sky—but discouraged

by the chill—of those last autumn mornings, so luminous and so cold, in

which winter begins, to get up and look at the trees on which the leaves

were indicated now only by a few strokes, golden or rosy, which seemed

to have been left in the air, on an invisible web, I raised my head from

the pillow and stretched my neck, keeping my body still hidden beneath

the bedclothes; like a chrysalis in the process of change I was a dual

creature, with the different parts of which a single environment did not

agree; for my eyes colour was sufficient, without warmth; my chest on

the other hand was anxious for warmth and not for colour. I rose only

after my fire had been lighted, and studied the picture, so delicate and

transparent, of the pink and golden morning, to which I had now added by

artificial means the element of warmth that it lacked, poking my fire

which burned and smoked like a good pipe and gave me, as a pipe would

have given me, a pleasure at once coarse because it was based upon a

material comfort and delicate because beyond it was printed a pure

vision. The walls of my dressing-room were covered with a paper on which

a violent red background was patterned with black and white flowers, to

which it seemed that I should have some difficulty in growing

accustomed. But they succeeded only in striking me as novel, in forcing

me to enter not into conflict but into contact with them, in modulating

the gaiety, the songs of my morning toilet, they succeeded only in

imprisoning me in the heart of a sort of poppy, out of which to look at

a world which I saw quite differently from in Paris, from the gay screen

which was this new dwelling-place, of a different aspect from the house

of my parents, and into which flowed a purer air. On certain days, I was

agitated by the desire to see my grandmother again, or by the fear that

she might be ill, or else it was the memory of some undertaking which I

had left half-finished in Paris, and which seemed to have made no

progress; sometimes again it was some difficulty in which, even here, I

had managed to become involved. One or other of these anxieties had kept

me from sleeping, and I was without strength to face my sorrow which in

a moment grew to fill the whole of my existence. Then from the hotel I

sent a messenger to the barracks, with a line to Saint-Loup: I told him

that, should it be materially possible—I knew that it was extremely

difficult for him—I should be most grateful if he would look in for a

minute. An hour later he arrived; and on hearing his ring at the door I

felt myself liberated from my obsessions. I knew that, if they were

stronger than I, he was stronger than they, and my attention was

diverted from them and concentrated on him who would have to settle

them. He had come into the room, and already he had enveloped me in the

gust of fresh air in which from before dawn he had been displaying so

much activity, a vital atmosphere very different from that of my room,

to which I at once adapted myself by appropriate reactions.

“I hope you weren’t angry with me for bothering you; there is something

that is worrying me, as you probably guessed.”

“Not at all; I just supposed you wanted to see me, and I thought it very

nice of you. I was delighted that you should have sent for me. But what

is the trouble? Things not going well? What can I do to help?”

He listened to my explanations, and gave careful answers; but before he

had uttered a word he had transformed me to his own likeness; compared

with the important occupations which kept him so busy, so alert, so

happy, the worries which, a moment ago, I had been unable to endure for

another instant seemed to me as to him negligible; I was like a man who,

not having been able to open his eyes for some days, sends for a doctor,

who neatly and gently raises his eyelid, removes from beneath it and

shews him a grain of sand; the sufferer is healed and comforted. All my

cares resolved themselves into a telegram which Saint-Loup undertook to

dispatch. Life seemed to me so different, so delightful; I was flooded

with such a surfeit of strength that I longed for action.

“What are you doing now?” I asked him.

“I must leave you, I’m afraid; we’re going on a route march in three

quarters of an hour, and I have to be on parade.”

“Then it’s been a great bother to you, coming here?”

“No, no bother at all, the Captain was very good about it; he told me

that if it was for you I must go at once; but you understand, I don’t

like to seem to be abusing the privilege.”

“But if I got up and dressed quickly and went by myself to the place

where you’ll be training, it would interest me immensely, and I could

perhaps talk to you during the breaks.”

“I shouldn’t advise you to do that; you have been lying awake, racking

your brains over a thing which, I assure you, is not of the slightest

importance, but now that it has ceased to worry you, lay your head down

on the pillow and go to sleep, which you will find an excellent antidote

to the demineralisation of your nerve-cells; only you mustn’t go to

sleep too soon, because our band-boys will be coming along under your

windows; but as soon as they’ve passed I think you’ll be left in peace,

and we shall meet again this evening, at dinner.”

But soon I was constantly going to see the regiment being trained in

field operations, when I began to take an interest in the military

theories which Saint-Loup’s friends used to expound over the

dinner-table, and when it had become the chief desire of my life to see

at close quarters their various leaders, just as a person who makes

music his principal study and spends his life in the concert halls finds

pleasure in frequenting the cafés in which one mingles with the life of

the members of the orchestra. To reach the training ground I used to

have to take tremendously long walks. In the evening after dinner the

longing for sleep made my head drop every now and then as in a swoon.

Next morning I realised that I had no more heard the band than, at

Balbec, after the evenings on which Saint-Loup had taken me to dinner at

Rivebelle, I used to hear the concert on the beach. And at the moment

when I wished to rise I had a delicious feeling of incapacity; I felt

myself fastened to a deep, invisible ground by the articulations (of

which my tiredness made me conscious) of muscular and nutritious roots.

I felt myself full of strength; life seemed to extend more amply before

me; this was because I had reverted to the good tiredness of my

childhood at Combray on the mornings following days on which we had

taken the Guermantes walk. Poets make out that we recapture for a moment

the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in

which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous

pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. The

fixed places, contemporary with different years, it is in ourselves that

we should rather seek to find them. This is where the advantage comes

in, to a certain extent, of great exhaustion followed by a good night’s

rest. Good nights, to make us descend into the most subterranean

galleries of sleep, where no reflexion from overnight, no gleam of

memory comes to lighten the inward monologue (if so be that it cease not

also), turn so effectively the soil and break through the surface stone

of our body that we discover there, where our muscles dive down and

throw out their twisted roots and breathe the air of the new life, the

garden in which as a child we used to play. There is no need to travel

in order to see it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What

once covered the earth is no longer upon it but beneath; a mere

excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city, excavation is

necessary also. But we shall see how certain impressions, fugitive and

fortuitous, carry us back even more effectively to the past, with a more

delicate precision, with a flight more light-winged, more immaterial,

more headlong, more unerring, more immortal than these organic

dislocations.

Sometimes my exhaustion was greater still; I had, without any

opportunity of going to bed, been following the operations for several

days on end. How blessed then was my return to the hotel! As I got into

bed I seemed to have escaped at last from the hands of enchanters,

sorcerers like those who people the “romances” beloved of our forebears

in the seventeenth century. My sleep that night and the lazy morning

that followed it were no more than a charming fairy tale. Charming;

beneficent perhaps also. I reminded myself that the keenest sufferings

have their place of sanctuary, that one can always, when all else fails,

find repose. These thoughts carried me far.

On days when, although there was no parade, Saint-Loup had to stay in

barracks, I used often to go and visit him there. It was a long way; I

had to leave the town and cross the viaduct, from either side of which I

had an immense view. A strong breeze blew almost always over this high

ground, and filled all the buildings erected on three sides of the

barrack-square, which howled incessantly like a cave of the winds. While

I waited for Robert—he being engaged on some duty or other—outside the

door of his room or in the mess, talking to some of his friends to whom

he had introduced me (and whom later on I came now and then to see, even

when he was not to be there), looking down from the window three hundred

feet to the country below, bare now except where recently sown fields,

often still soaked with rain and glittering in the sun, shewed a few

stripes of green, of the brilliance and translucent limpidity of enamel,

I could hear him discussed by the others, and I soon learned what a

popular favourite he was. Among many of the volunteers, belonging to

other squadrons, sons of rich business or professional men who looked at

the higher aristocratic society only from outside and without

penetrating its enclosure, the attraction which they naturally felt

towards what they knew of Saint-Loup’s character was reinforced by the

distinction that attached in their eyes to the young man whom, on

Saturday evenings, when they went on pass to Paris, they had seen

supping in the Café de la Paix with the Duc d’Uzès and the Prince

d’Orléans. And on that account, into his handsome face, his casual way

of walking and saluting officers, the perpetual dance of his eyeglass,

the affectation shewn in the cut of his service dress—the caps always

too high, the breeches of too fine a cloth and too pink a shade—they had

introduced the idea of a “tone” which, they were positive, was lacking

in the best turned-out officers in the regiment, even the majestic

Captain to whom I had been indebted for the privilege of sleeping in

barracks, who seemed, in comparison, too pompous and almost common.

One of them said that the Captain had bought a new horse. “He can buy as

many horses as he likes. I passed Saint-Loup on Sunday morning in the

Allée des Acacias; now he’s got some style on a horse!” replied his

companion, and knew what he was talking about, for these young fellows

belonged to a class which, if it does not frequent the same houses and

know the same people, yet, thanks to money and leisure, does not differ

from the nobility in its experience of all those refinements of life

which money can procure. At any rate their refinement had, in the matter

of clothes, for instance, something about it more studied, more

impeccable than that free and easy negligence which had so delighted my

grandmother in Saint-Loup. It gave quite a thrill to these sons of big

stockbrokers or bankers, as they sat eating oysters after the theatre,

to see at an adjoining table Serjeant Saint-Loup. And what a tale there

was to tell in barracks on Monday night, after a week-end leave, by one

of them who was in Robert’s squadron, and to whom he had said how d’ye

do “most civilly”, while another, who was not in the same squadron, was

quite positive that, in spite of this, Saint-Loup had recognised him,

for two or three times he had put up his eyeglass and stared in the

speaker’s direction.

“Yes, my brother saw him at the Paix,” said another, who had been

spending the day with his mistress; “my brother says his dress coat was

cut too loose and didn’t fit him.”

“What was the waistcoat like?”

“He wasn’t wearing a white waistcoat; it was purple, with sort of palms

on it; stunning!”

To the “old soldiers” (sons of the soil who had never heard of the

Jockey Club and simply put Saint-Loup in the category of ultra-rich

non-commissioned officers, in which they included all those who, whether

bankrupt or not, lived in a certain style, whose income or debts ran

into several figures, and who were generous towards their men), the

gait, the eyeglass, the breeches, the caps of Saint-Loup, even if they

saw in them nothing particularly aristocratic, furnished nevertheless

just as much interest and meaning. They recognized in these

peculiarities the character, the style which they had assigned once and

for all time to this most popular of the “stripes” in the regiment,

manners like no one’s else, scornful indifference to what his superior

officers might think, which seemed to them the natural corollary of his

goodness to his subordinates. The morning cup of coffee in the canteen,

the afternoon “lay-down” in the barrack-room seemed pleasanter, somehow,

when some old soldier fed the hungering, lazy section with some savoury

tit-bit as to a cap in which Saint-Loup had appeared on parade.

“It was the height of my pack.”

“Come off it, old chap, you don’t expect us to believe that; it couldn’t

have been the height of your pack,” interrupted a young college graduate

who hoped by using these slang terms not to appear a “learned beggar”,

and by venturing on this contradiction to obtain confirmation of a fact

the thought of which enchanted him.

“Oh, so it wasn’t the height of my pack, wasn’t it? You measured it, I

suppose! I tell you this much, the C. O. glared at it as if he’ld have

liked to put him in clink. But you needn’t think the great Saint-Loup

felt squashed; no, he went and he came, and down with his head and up

with his head, and that blinking glass screwed in his eye all the time.

We’ll see what the ‘Capstan’ has to say when he hears. Oh, very likely

he’ll say nothing, but you may be sure he won’t be pleased. But there’s

nothing so wonderful about that cap. I hear he’s got thirty of ’em and

more at home, at his house in town.”

“Where did you hear that, old man? From our blasted corporal-dog?” asked

the young graduate, pedantically displaying the new forms of speech

which he had only recently acquired and with which he took a pride in

garnishing his conversation.

“Where did I hear it? From his batman; what d’you think?”

“Ah! Now you’re talking. That’s a chap who knows when he’s well off!”

“I should say so! He’s got more in his pocket than I have, certain sure!

And besides he gives him all his own things, and everything. He wasn’t

getting his grub properly, he says. Along comes de Saint-Loup, and gives

cooky hell: ‘I want him to be properly fed, d’you hear,’ he says, ‘and I

don’t care what it costs.’”

The old soldier made up for the triviality of the words quoted by the

emphasis of his tone, in a feeble imitation of the speaker which had an

immense success.

On leaving the barracks I would take a stroll, and then, to fill up the

time before I went, as I did every evening, to dine with Saint-Loup at

the hotel in which he and his friends had established their mess, I made

for my own, as soon as the sun had set, so as to have a couple of hours

in which to rest and read. In the square, the evening light bedecked the

pepper-pot turrets of the castle with little pink clouds which matched

the colour of the bricks, and completed the harmony by softening the

tone of the latter where it bathed them. So strong a current of vitality

coursed through my nerves that no amount of movement on my part could

exhaust it; each step I took, after touching a stone of the pavement,

rebounded off it. I seemed to have growing on my heels the wings of

Mercury. One of the fountains was filled with a ruddy glow, while in the

other the moonlight had already begun to turn the water opalescent.

Between them were children at play, uttering shrill cries, wheeling in

circles, obeying some necessity of the hour, like swifts or bats. Next

door to the hotel, the old National Courts and the Louis XVI orangery,

in which were installed now the savings-bank and the Army Corps

headquarters, were lighted from within by the palely gilded globes of

their gas-jets which, seen in the still clear daylight outside, suited

those vast, tall, eighteenth-century windows from which the last rays of

the setting sun had not yet departed, as would have suited a complexion

heightened with rouge a headdress of yellow tortoise-shell, and

persuaded me to seek out my fireside and the lamp which, alone in the

shadowy front of my hotel, was striving to resist the gathering

darkness, and for the sake of which I went indoors before it was quite

dark, for pleasure, as to an appetising meal. I kept, when I was in my

room, the same fulness of sensation that I had felt outside. It gave

such an apparent convexity of surface to things which as a rule seem

flat and empty, to the yellow flame of the fire, the coarse blue paper

on the ceiling, on which the setting sun had scribbled corkscrews and

whirligigs, like a schoolboy with a piece of red chalk, the curiously

patterned cloth on the round table, on which a ream of essay paper and

an inkpot lay in readiness for me, with one of Bergotte’s novels, that

ever since then these things have continued to seem to me to be enriched

with a whole form of existence which I feel that I should be able to

extract from them if it were granted me to set eyes on them again. I

thought with joy of the barracks that I had just left and of their

weather-cock turning with every wind that blew. Like a diver breathing

through a pipe which rises above the surface of the water, I felt that I

was in a sense maintaining contact with a healthy, open-air life when I

kept as a baiting-place those barracks, that towering observatory,

dominating a country-side furrowed with canals of green enamel, into

whose various buildings I esteemed as a priceless privilege, which I

hoped would last, my freedom to go whenever I chose, always certain of a

welcome.