Alas, this phantom was just what I did see when, entering the

drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found

her there, reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the

room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one

surprises at a piece of work which she will lay aside if anyone comes

in, she had abandoned herself to a train of thoughts which she had never

allowed to be visible by me. Of myself—thanks to that privilege which

does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return,

the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one’s own

absence,—there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat

and travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the

photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one

will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes

when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never

see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the

perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing

the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its

vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them,

makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead,

the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most

delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind; how, since every

casual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror

of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what in her had become

dulled and changed, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our

daily life, our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a

classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the

play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose

intelligible. But if, in place of our eye, it should be a purely

material object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then

what we shall see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, will

be, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is going to

hail a cab, his staggering gait, his precautions to avoid tumbling upon

his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk, or the

ground frozen over. So is it when some casual sport of chance prevents

our intelligent and pious affection from coming forward in time to hide

from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by

our eyes, and they, arising first in the field and having it to

themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and shew us, in place

of the loved friend who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our

affection has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person

whom a hundred times daily that affection has clothed with a dear and

cheating likeness. And, as a sick man who for long has not looked at his

own reflexion, and has kept his memory of the face that he never sees

refreshed from the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind,

recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the midst of an arid waste of

cheek, of the sloping red structure of a nose as huge as one of the

pyramids of Egypt, I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who

had never seen her save in my own soul, always at the same place in the

past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping

memories, suddenly in our drawing-room which formed part of a new world,

that of time, that in which dwell the strangers of whom we say “He’s

begun to age a good deal,” for the first time and for a moment only,

since she vanished at once, I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the

lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the

lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman

whom I did not know.

My request to be allowed to inspect the Elstirs in Mme. de Guermantes’s

collection had been met by Saint-Loup with: “I will answer for her.” And

indeed, as ill luck would have it, it was he and he alone who did

answer. We answer readily enough for other people when, setting our

mental stage with the little puppets that represent them, we manipulate

these to suit our fancy. No doubt even then we take into account the

difficulties due to another person’s nature being different from our

own, and we do not fail to have recourse to some plan of action likely

to influence that nature, an appeal to his material interest,

persuasion, the rousing of emotion, which will neutralise contrary

tendencies on his part. But these differences from our own nature, it is

still our own nature that is imagining them, these difficulties, it is

we that are raising them; these compelling motives, it is we that are

applying them. And so with the actions which before our mind’s eye we

have made the other person rehearse, and which make him act as we

choose; when we wish to see him perform them in real life, the case is

altered, we come up against unseen resistances which may prove

insuperable. One of the strongest is doubtless that which may be

developed in a woman who is not in love with him by the disgust inspired

in her, a fetid, insurmountable loathing, by the man who is in love with

her; during the long weeks in which Saint-Loup still did not come to

Paris, his aunt, to whom I had no doubt of his having written begging

her to do so, never once asked me to call at her house to see the

Elstirs.

I perceived signs of coldness on the part of another occupant of the

building. This was Jupien. Did he consider that I ought to have gone in

and said how d’ye do to him, on my return from Doncières, before even

going upstairs to our own flat? My mother said no, that there was

nothing unusual about it. Françoise had told her that he was like that,

subject to sudden fits of ill humour, without any cause. These

invariably passed off after a little time.

Meanwhile the winter was drawing to an end. One morning, after several

weeks of showers and storms, I heard in my chimney—instead of the wind,

formless, elastic, sombre, which convulsed me with a longing to go to

the sea—the cooing of the pigeons that were nesting in the wall outside;

shimmering, unexpected, like a first hyacinth, gently tearing open its

fostering heart that there might shoot forth, purple and satin-soft, its

flower of sound, letting in like an opened window into my bedroom still

shuttered and dark the heat, the dazzling brightness, the fatigue of a

first fine day. That morning, I was surprised to find myself humming a

music-hall tune which had never entered my head since the year in which

I had been going to Florence and Venice. So profoundly does the

atmosphere, as good days and bad recur, act on our organism and draw

from dim shelves where we had forgotten them, the melodies written there

which our memory could not decipher. Presently a more conscious dreamer

accompanied this musician to whom I was listening inside myself, without

having recognised at first what he was playing.

I quite realised that it was not for any reason peculiar to Balbec that

on my arrival there I had failed to find in its church the charm which

it had had for me before I knew it; that at Florence or Parma or Venice

my imagination could no more take the place of my eyes when I looked at

the sights there. I realised this. Similarly, one New Year’s afternoon,

as night fell, standing before a column of playbills, I had discovered

the illusion that lies in our thinking that certain solemn holidays

differ essentially from the other days in the calendar. And yet I could

not prevent my memory of the time during which I had looked forward to

spending Easter in Florence from continuing to make that festival the

atmosphere, so to speak, of the City of Flowers, to give at once to

Easter Day something Florentine and to Florence something Paschal.

Easter was still a long way off; but in the range of days that stretched

out before me the days of Holy Week stood out more clearly at the end of

those that merely came between. Touched by a far flung ray, like certain

houses in a village which one sees from a distance when the rest are in

shadow, they had caught and kept all the sun.

The weather had now become milder. And my parents themselves, by urging

me to take more exercise, gave me an excuse for resuming my morning

walks. I had meant to give them up, since they meant my meeting Mme. de

Guermantes. But it was for this very reason that I kept thinking all the

time of those walks, which led to my finding, every moment, a fresh

reason for taking them, a reason that had no connexion with Mme. de

Guermantes and no difficulty in convincing me that, had she never

existed, I should still have taken a walk, without fail, at that hour

every morning.

Alas, if to me meeting any person other than herself would not have

mattered, I felt that to her meeting anyone in the world except myself

would have been endurable. It happened that, in the course of her

morning walks, she received the salutations of plenty of fools whom she

regarded as such. But the appearance of these in her path seemed to her,

if not to hold out any promise of pleasure, to be at any rate the result

of mere accident. And she stopped them at times, for there are moments

in which one wants to escape from oneself, to accept the hospitality

offered by the soul of another person, provided always that the other,

however modest and plain it may be, is a different soul, whereas in my

heart she was exasperated to feel that what she would have found was

herself. And so, even when I had, for taking the same way as she,

another reason than my desire to see her, I trembled like a guilty man

as she came past; and sometimes, so as to neutralise anything

extravagant that there might seem to have been in my overtures, I would

barely acknowledge her bow, or would fasten my eyes on her face without

raising my hat, and succeed only in making her angrier than ever, and

begin to regard me as insolent and ill-bred besides.

She was now wearing lighter, or at any rate brighter clothes, and would

come strolling down the street in which already, as though it were

spring, in front of the narrow shops that were squeezed in between the

huge fronts of the old aristocratic mansions, over the booths of the

butter-woman and the fruit-woman and the vegetable-woman, awnings were

spread to protect them from the sun. I said to myself that the woman

whom I could see far off, walking, opening her sunshade, crossing the

street, was, in the opinion of those best qualified to judge, the

greatest living exponent of the art of performing those movements and of

making out of them something exquisitely lovely. Meanwhile she was

advancing towards me, unconscious of this widespread reputation, her

narrow, stubborn body, which had absorbed none of it, was bent stiffly

forward under a scarf of violet silk; her clear, sullen eyes looked

absently in front of her, and had perhaps caught sight of me; she was

biting her lip; I saw her straighten her muff, give alms to a beggar,

buy a bunch of violets from a flower-seller, with the same curiosity

that I should have felt in watching the strokes of a great painter’s

brush. And when, as she reached me, she gave me a bow that was

accompanied sometimes by a faint smile, it was as though she had

sketched in colour for me, adding a personal inscription to myself, a

drawing that was a masterpiece of art. Each of her gowns seemed to me

her natural, necessary surroundings, like the projection around her of a

particular aspect of her soul. On one of these Lenten mornings, when she

was on her way out to luncheon, I met her wearing a gown of bright red

velvet, cut slightly open at the throat. The face of Mme. de Guermantes

appeared to be dreaming, beneath its pile of fair hair. I was less sad

than usual because the melancholy of her expression, the sort of

claustration which the startling hue of her gown set between her and the

rest of the world, made her seem somehow lonely and unhappy, and this

comforted me. The gown struck me as being the materialisation round

about her of the scarlet rays of a heart which I did not recognise as

hers and might have been able, perhaps, to console; sheltered in the

mystical light of the garment with its gently flowing folds, she made me

think of some Saint of the early ages of Christianity. After which I

felt ashamed of afflicting with the sight of myself this holy martyr.

“But, after all, the streets are public.”

The streets are public, I reminded myself, giving a different meaning to

the words, and marvelling that indeed in the crowded thoroughfare often

soaked with rain, which made it beautiful and precious as a street

sometimes is in the old towns of Italy, the Duchesse de Guermantes

mingled with the public life of the world moments of her own secret

life, shewing herself thus to all and sundry, jostled by every

passer-by, with the splendid gratuitousness of the greatest works of

art. As I had been out in the morning, after staying awake all night, in

the afternoon my parents would tell me to lie down for a little and try

to sleep. There is no need, when one is trying to find sleep, to give

much thought to the quest, but habit is very useful, and even freedom

from thought. But in these afternoon hours both were lacking. Before

going to sleep, I devoted so much time to thinking that I should not be

able to sleep, that even after I was asleep a little of my thought

remained. It was no more than a glimmer in the almost total darkness,

but it was bright enough to cast a reflexion in my sleep, first of the

idea that I could not sleep, and then, a reflexion of this reflexion,

that it was in my sleep that I had had the idea that I was not asleep,

then, by a further refraction, my awakening ... to a fresh doze in which

I was trying to tell some friends who had come into my room that, a

moment earlier, when I was asleep, I had imagined that I was not asleep.

These shades were barely distinguishable; it would have required a

keen—and quite useless—delicacy of perception to seize them all.

Similarly, in later years, at Venice, long after the sun had set, when

it seemed to be quite dark, I have seen, thanks to the echo, itself

imperceptible, of a last note of light, held indefinitely on the surface

of the canals, as though some optical pedal were being pressed, the

reflexion of the palaces unfurled, as though for all time, in a darker

velvet, on the crepuscular greyness of the water. One of my dreams was

the synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in my

waking hours, of a certain seagirt place and its mediaeval past. In my

sleep I saw a gothic fortress rising from a sea whose waves were stilled

as in a painted window. An arm of the sea cut the town in two; the green

water stretched to my feet; it bathed on the opposite shore the

foundations of an oriental church, and beyond it houses which existed

already in the fourteenth century, so that to go across to them would

have been to ascend the stream of time. This dream in which nature had

learned from art, in which the sea had turned gothic, this dream in

which I longed to attain, in which I believed that I was attaining to

the impossible, it seemed to me that I had often dreamed it before. But

as it is the property of what we imagine in our sleep to multiply itself

in the past, and to appear, even when novel, familiar, I supposed that I

was mistaken. I noticed, however, that I did frequently have this dream.

The limitations, too, that are common to all sleep were reflected in

mine, but in a symbolical manner; I could not in the darkness make out

the faces of the friends who were in the room, for we sleep with our

eyes shut; I, who could carry on endless arguments with myself while I

dreamed, as soon as I tried to speak to these friends felt the words

stick in my throat, for we do not speak distinctly in our sleep; I

wanted to go to them, and I could not move my limbs, for we do not walk

when we are asleep either; and suddenly I was ashamed to be seen by

them, for we sleep without our clothes. So, my eyes blinded, my lips

sealed, my limbs fettered, my body naked, the figure of sleep which my

sleep itself projected had the appearance of those great allegorical

figures (in one of which Giotto has portrayed Envy with a serpent in her

mouth) of which Swann had given me photographs.

Saint-Loup came to Paris for a few hours only. He came with assurances

that he had had no opportunity of mentioning me to his cousin. “She’s

not being at all nice just now, Oriane isn’t,” he explained, with

innocent self-betrayal. “She’s not my old Oriane any longer, they’ve

gone and changed her. I assure you, it’s not worth while bothering your

head about her. You pay her far too great a compliment. You wouldn’t

care to meet my cousin Poictiers?” he went on, without stopping to

reflect that this could not possibly give me any pleasure. “Quite an

intelligent young woman, she is; you’ld like her. She’s married to my

cousin, the Duc de Poictiers, who is a good fellow, but a bit slow for

her. I’ve told her about you. She said I was to bring you to see her.

She’s much better looking than Oriane, and younger, too. Really a nice

person, don’t you know, really a good sort.” These were expressions

recently—and all the more ardently—taken up by Robert, which meant that

the person in question had a delicate nature. “I don’t go so far as to

say she’s a Dreyfusard, you must remember the sort of people she lives

among; still, she did say to me: ‘If he is innocent, how ghastly for him

to be shut up on the Devil’s Isle.’ You see what I mean, don’t you? And

then she’s the sort of woman who does a tremendous lot for her old

governesses; she’s given orders that they’re never to be sent in by the

servants’ stair, when they come to the house. She’s a very good sort, I

assure you. The real reason why Oriane doesn’t like her is that she

feels she’s the cleverer of the two.”

Although completely absorbed in the pity which she felt for one of the

Guermantes footmen—who had no chance of going to see his girl, even

when the Duchess was out, for it would immediately have been reported

to her from the lodge,—Françoise was heartbroken at not having been in

the house at the moment of Saint-Loup’s visit, but this was because

now she herself paid visits also. She never failed to go out on the

days when I most wanted her. It was always to see her brother, her

niece and, more particularly, her own daughter, who had recently come

to live in Paris. The intimate nature of these visits itself increased

the irritation that I felt at being deprived of her services, for I

had a foreboding that she would speak of them as being among those

duties from which there was no dispensation, according to the laws

laid down at Saint-André-des-Champs. And so I never listened to her

excuses without an ill humour which was highly unjust to her, and was

brought to a climax by the way Françoise had of saying not: “I have

been to see my brother,” or “I have been to see my niece,” but “I have

been to see the brother,” “I just looked in as I passed to bid good

day to the niece” (or “to my niece the butcheress”). As for her

daughter, Françoise would have been glad to see her return to Combray.

But this recent Parisian, making use, like a woman of fashion, of

abbreviations, though hers were of a vulgar kind, protested that the

week she was going shortly to spend at Combray would seem quite long

enough without so much as a sight of “the _Intran_”. She was still

less willing to go to Françoise’s sister, who lived in a mountainous

country, for “mountains,” said the daughter, giving to the adjective a

new and terrible meaning, “aren’t really interesting.” She could not

make up her mind to go back to Méséglise, where “the people are so

stupid,” where in the market the gossips at their stalls would call

cousins with her, and say “Why, it’s never poor Bazireau’s daughter?”

She would sooner die than go back and bury herself down there, now

that she had “tasted the life of Paris,” and Françoise, traditionalist

as she was, smiled complacently nevertheless at the spirit of

innovation that was incarnate in this new Parisian when she said:

“Very well, mother, if you don’t get your day out, you have only to

send me a pneu.”

The weather had turned chilly again. “Go out? What for? To catch your

death?” said Françoise, who preferred to remain in the house during the

week which her daughter and brother and the butcher-niece had gone to

spend at Combray. Being, moreover, the last surviving adherent of the

sect in whom persisted obscurely the doctrine of my aunt Léonie—a

natural philosopher—Françoise would add, speaking of this unseasonable

weather: “It is the remnant of the wrath of God!” But I responded to her

complaints only in a languid smile; all the more indifferent to these

predictions, in that whatever befell it would be fine for me; already I

could see the morning sun shine on the slope of Fiesole, I warmed myself

in its rays; their strength obliged me to half-open, half-shut my

eyelids, smiling the while, and my eyelids, like alabaster lamps, were

filled with a rosy glow. It was not only the bells that came from Italy,

Italy had come with them. My faithful hands would not lack flowers to

honour the anniversary of the pilgrimage which I ought to have made long

ago, for since, here in Paris, the weather had turned cold again as in

another year at the time of our preparations for departure at the end of

Lent, in the liquid, freezing air which bathed the chestnuts and planes

on the boulevards, the tree in the courtyard of our house, there were

already opening their petals, as in a bowl of pure water, the narcissi,

the jonquils, the anemones of the Ponte Vecchio.

My father had informed us that he now knew, from his friend A. J., where

M. de Norpois was going when he met him about the place.

“It’s to see Mme. de Villeparisis, they are great friends; I never knew

anything about it. It seems she’s a delightful person, a most superior

woman. You ought to go and call on her,” he told me. “Another thing that

surprised me very much. He spoke to me of M. de Guermantes as quite a

distinguished man; I had always taken him for a boor. It seems, he knows

an enormous amount, and has perfect taste, only he’s very proud of his

name and his connexions. But for that matter, according to Norpois, he

has a tremendous position, not only here but all over Europe. It

appears, the Austrian Emperor and the Tsar treat him just like one of

themselves. Old Norpois told me that Mme. de Villeparisis had taken

quite a fancy to you, and that you would meet all sorts of interesting

people in her house. He paid a great tribute to you; you will see him if

you go there, and he may have some good advice for you even if you are

going to be a writer. For you’re not likely to do anything else; I can

see that. It might turn out quite a good career; it’s not what I should

have chosen for you, myself; but you’ll be a man in no time now, we

shan’t always be here to look after you, and we mustn’t prevent you from

following your vocation.”

If only I had been able to start writing! But whatever the conditions in

which I approached the task (as, too, alas, the undertakings not to

touch alcohol, to go to bed early, to sleep, to keep fit), whether it

were with enthusiasm, with method, with pleasure, in depriving myself of

a walk, or postponing my walk and keeping it in reserve as a reward of

industry, taking advantage of an hour of good health, utilising the

inactivity forced on me by a day of illness, what always emerged in the

end from all my effort was a virgin page, undefiled by any writing,

ineluctable as that forced card which in certain tricks one invariably

is made to draw, however carefully one may first have shuffled the pack.

I was merely the instruments of habits of not working, of not going to

bed, of not sleeping, which must find expression somehow, cost what it

might; if I offered them no resistance, if I contented myself with the

pretext they seized from the first opportunity that the day afforded

them of acting as they chose, I escaped without serious injury, I slept

for a few hours after all, towards morning, I read a little, I did not

over-exert myself; but if I attempted to thwart them, if I pretended to

go to bed early, to drink only water, to work, they grew restive, they

adopted strong measures, they made me really ill, I was obliged to

double my dose of alcohol, did not lie down in bed for two days and

nights on end, could not even read, and I vowed that another time I

would be more reasonable, that is to say less wise, like the victim of

an assault who allows himself to be robbed for fear, should he offer

resistance, of being murdered.

My father, in the mean time, had met M. de Guermantes once or twice,

and, now that M. de Norpois had told him that the Duke was a remarkable

man, had begun to pay more attention to what he said. As it happened,

they met in the courtyard and discussed Mme. de Villeparisis. “He tells

me, she’s his aunt; ‘Viparisi,’ he pronounces it. He tells me, too,

she’s an extraordinarily able woman. In fact he said she kept a School

of Wit,” my father announced to us, impressed by the vagueness of this

expression, which he had indeed come across now and then in volumes of

memoirs, but without attaching to it any definite meaning. My mother, so

great was her respect for him, when she saw that he did not dismiss as

of no importance the fact that Mme. de Villeparisis kept a School of

Wit, decided that this must be of some consequence. Albeit from my

grandmother she had known all the time the exact amount of the

Marquise’s intellectual worth, it was immediately enhanced in her eyes.

My grandmother, who was not very well just then, was not in favour at

first of the suggested visit, and afterwards lost interest in the

matter. Since we had moved into our new flat, Mme. de Villeparisis had

several times asked my grandmother to call upon her. And invariably my

grandmother had replied that she was not going out just at present, in

one of those letters which, by a new habit of hers which we did not

understand, she no longer sealed herself, but employed Françoise to lick

the envelopes for her. As for myself, without any very clear picture in

my mind of this School of Wit, I should not have been greatly surprised

to find the old lady from Balbec installed behind a desk, as, for that

matter, I eventually did.

My father would have been glad to know, into the bargain, whether the

Ambassador’s support would be worth many votes to him at the Institute,

for which he had thoughts of standing as an independent candidate. To

tell the truth, while he did not venture to doubt that he would have M.

de Norpois’s support, he was by no means certain of it. He had thought

it merely malicious gossip when they assured him at the Ministry that M.

de Norpois, wishing to be himself the only representative there of the

Institute, would put every possible obstacle in the way of my father’s

candidature, which besides would be particularly awkward for him at that

moment, since he was supporting another candidate already. And yet, when

M. Leroy-Beaulieu had first advised him to stand, and had reckoned up

his chances, my father had been struck by the fact that, among the

colleagues upon whom he could count for support, the eminent economist

had not mentioned M. de Norpois. He dared not ask the Ambassador

point-blank, but hoped that I should return from my call on Mme. de

Villeparisis with his election as good as secured. This call was now

imminent. That M. de Norpois would carry on propaganda calculated to

assure my father the votes of at least two thirds of the Academy seemed

to him all the more probable since the Ambassador’s willingness to

oblige was proverbial, those who liked him least admitting that no one

else took such pleasure in being of service. And besides, at the

Ministry, his protective influence was extended over my father far more

markedly than over any other official.

My father had also another encounter about this time, but one at which

his extreme surprise ended in equal indignation. In the street one day

he ran into Mme. Sazerat, whose life in Paris her comparative poverty

restricted to occasional visits to a friend. There was no one who bored

my father quite so intensely as did Mme. Sazerat, so much so that Mamma

was obliged, once a year, to intercede with him in sweet and suppliant

tones: “My dear, I really must invite Mme. Sazerat to the house, just

once; she won’t stay long;” and even: “Listen, dear, I am going to ask

you to make a great sacrifice; do go and call upon Mme. Sazerat. You

know I hate bothering you, but it would be so nice of you.” He would

laugh, raise various objections, and go to pay the call. And so, for all

that Mme. Sazerat did not appeal to him, on catching sight of her in the

street my father went towards her, hat in hand; but to his profound

astonishment Mme. Sazerat confined her greeting to the frigid bow

enforced by politeness towards a person who is guilty of some

disgraceful action or has been condemned to live, for the future, in

another hemisphere. My father had come home speechless with rage. Next

day my mother met Mme. Sazerat in some one’s house. She did not offer my

mother her hand, but only smiled at her with a vague and melancholy air

as one smiles at a person with whom one used to play as a child, but

with whom one has since severed all one’s relations because she has led

an abandoned life, has married a convict or (what is worse still) a

co-respondent. Now, from all time my parents had accorded to Mme.

Sazerat, and inspired in her, the most profound respect. But (and of

this my mother was ignorant) Mme. Sazerat, alone of her kind at Combray,

was a Dreyfusard. My father, a friend of M. Méline, was convinced that

Dreyfus was guilty. He had flatly refused to listen to some of his

colleagues who had asked him to sign a petition demanding a fresh trial.

He never spoke to me for a week, after learning that I had chosen to

take a different line. His opinions were well known. He came near to

being looked upon as a Nationalist. As for my grandmother, in whom alone

of the family a generous doubt was likely to be kindled, whenever anyone

spoke to her of the possible innocence of Dreyfus, she gave a shake of

her head, the meaning of which we did not at the time understand, but

which was like the gesture of a person who has been interrupted while

thinking of more serious things. My mother, torn between her love for my

father and her hope that I might turn out to have brains, preserved an

impartiality which she expressed by silence. Finally my grandfather, who

adored the Army (albeit his duties with the National Guard had been the

bugbear of his riper years), could never, at Combray, see a regiment go

by the garden railings without baring his head as the colonel and the

colours passed. All this was quite enough to make Mme. Sazerat, who knew

every incident of the disinterested and honourable careers of my father

and grandfather, regard them as pillars of Injustice. We pardon the

crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective

crime. As soon as she knew my father to be an anti-Dreyfusard she set

between him and herself continents and centuries. Which explains why,

across such an interval of time and space, her bow had been

imperceptible to my father, and why it had not occurred to her to hold

out her hand, or to say a few words which would never have carried

across the worlds that lay between.

Saint-Loup, who was coming anyhow to Paris, had promised to take me to

Mme. de Villeparisis’s, where I hoped, though I had not said so to him,

that we might meet Mme. de Guermantes. He invited me to luncheon in a

restaurant with his mistress, whom we were afterwards to accompany to a

rehearsal. We were to go out in the morning and call for her at her home

on the outskirts of Paris.

I had asked Saint-Loup that the restaurant to which we went for luncheon

(in the lives of young noblemen with money to spend the restaurant plays

as important a part as do bales of merchandise in Arabian stories),

might, if possible, be that to which Aimé had told me that he would be

going as head waiter until the Balbec season started. It was a great

attraction to me who dreamed of so many expeditions and made so few to

see again some one who formed part not merely of my memories of Balbec

but of Balbec itself, who went there year after year, who when ill

health or my studies compelled me to stay in Paris would be watching,

just the same, through the long July afternoons while he waited for the

guests to come in to dinner, the sun creep down the sky and set in the

sea, through the glass panels of the great dining-room, behind which, at

the hour when the light died, the motionless wings of vessels, smoky

blue in the distance, looked like exotic and nocturnal moths in a

show-case. Himself magnetised by his contact with the strong lodestone

of Balbec, this head waiter became in turn a magnet attracting me. I

hoped by talking to him to get at once into communication with Balbec,

to have realised here in Paris something of the delights of travel.

I left the house early, with Françoise complaining bitterly because the

footman who was engaged to be married had once again been prevented, the

evening before, from going to see his girl. Françoise had found him in

tears; he had been itching to go and strike the porter, but had

restrained himself, for he valued his place.

Before reaching Saint-Loup’s, where he was to be waiting for me at the

door, I ran into Legrandin, of whom we had lost sight since our Combray

days, and who, though now grown quite grey, had preserved his air of

youthful candour. Seeing me, he stopped:

“Ah! So it’s you,” he exclaimed, “a man of fashion, and in a frock coat

too! That is a livery in which my independent spirit would be ill at

ease. It is true that you are a man of the world, I suppose, and go out

paying calls! To go and dream, as I do, before some half ruined tomb, my

flowing tie and jacket are not out of place. You know how I admire the

charming quality of your soul; that is why I tell you how deeply I

regret that you should go forth and deny it among the Gentiles. By being

capable of remaining for a moment in the nauseating atmosphere—which I

am unable to breathe—of a drawing-room, you pronounce on your own future

the condemnation, the damnation of the Prophet. I can see it all, you

frequent the ‘light hearts’, the houses of the great, that is the vice

of our middle class to-day. Ah! Those aristocrats! The Terror was

greatly to blame for not cutting the heads off every one of them. They

are all sinister debauchees, when they are not simply dreary idiots.

Still, my poor boy, if that sort of thing amuses you! While you are on

your way to your tea-party your old friend will be more fortunate than

you, for alone in an outlying suburb he will be watching the pink moon

rise in a violet sky. The truth is that I scarcely belong to this Earth

upon which I feel myself such an exile; it takes all the force of the

law of gravity to hold me here, to keep me from escaping into another

sphere. I belong to a different planet. Good-bye; do not take amiss the

old-time frankness of the peasant of the Vivonne, who has also remained

a peasant of the Danube. To prove to you that I am your sincere

well-wisher, I am going to send you my last novel. But you will not care

for it; it is not deliquescent enough, not _fin de siècle_ enough for

you; it is too frank, too honest; what you want is Bergotte, you have

confessed it, high game for the jaded palates of pleasure-seeking

epicures. I suppose I am looked upon, in your set, as an old campaigner;

I do wrong to put my heart into what I write, that is no longer done;

besides, the life of the people is not distinguished enough to interest

your little snobbicules. Go, get you gone, try to recall at times the

words of Christ: ‘Do this and ye shall live.’ Farewell, Friend.”

It was not with any particular resentment against Legrandin that I

parted from him. Certain memories are like friends in common, they can

bring about reconciliations; set down amid fields starred with

buttercups, upon which were piled the ruins of feudal greatness, the

little wooden bridge still joined us, Legrandin and me, as it joined the

two banks of the Vivonne.

After coming out of a Paris in which, although spring had begun, the

trees on the boulevards had hardly put on their first leaves, it was a

marvel to Saint-Loup and myself, when the circle train had set us down

at the suburban village in which his mistress was living, to see every

cottage garden gay with huge festal altars of fruit trees in blossom. It

was like one of those peculiar, poetical, ephemeral, local festivals

which people travel long distances to attend on certain fixed occasions,

only this one was held by Nature. The bloom of the cherry tree is stuck

so close to its branches, like a white sheath, that from a distance,

among the other trees that shewed as yet scarcely a flower or leaf, one

might have taken it, on this day of sunshine that was still so cold, for

snow, melted everywhere else, which still clung to the bushes. But the

tall pear trees enveloped each house, each modest courtyard in a

whiteness more vast, more uniform, more dazzling, as if all the

dwellings, all the enclosed spaces in the village were on their way to

make, on one solemn date, their first communion.

It had been a country village, and had kept its old mayor’s office

sunburned and brown, in front of which, in the place of maypoles and

streamers, three tall pear trees were, as though for some civic and

local festival, gallantly beflagged with white satin. These villages in

the environs of Paris still have at their gates parks of the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries which were the “follies” of the stewards and

favourites of the great. A fruit-grower had utilised one of these which

was sunk below the road for his trees, or had simply, perhaps, preserved

the plan of an immense orchard of former days. Laid out in quincunxes,

these pear trees, less crowded and not so far on as those that I had

seen, formed great quadrilaterals—separated by low walls—of snowy

blossom, on each side of which the light fell differently, so that all

these airy roofless chambers seemed to belong to a Palace of the Sun,

such as one might unearth in Crete or somewhere; and made one think also

of the different ponds of a reservoir, or of those parts of the sea

which man, for some fishery, or to plant oyster-beds has subdivided,

when one saw, varying with the orientation of the boughs, the light fall

and play upon their trained arms as upon water warm with spring, and

coax into unfolding here and there, gleaming amid the open,

azure-panelled trellis of the branches, the foaming whiteness of a

creamy, sunlit flower.

Never had Robert spoken to me so tenderly of his friend as he did during

this walk. She alone had taken root in his heart; his future career in

the Army, his position in society, his family, he was not, of course,

indifferent altogether to these, but they were of no account compared

with the veriest trifle that concerned his mistress. That alone had any

importance in his eyes, infinitely more importance than the Guermantes

and all the kings of the earth put together. I do not know whether he

had formulated the doctrine that she was of a superior quality to anyone

else, but I do know that he considered, took trouble only about what

affected her. Through her and for her he was capable of suffering, of

being happy, perhaps of doing murder. There was really nothing that

interested, that could excite him except what his mistress wished, was

going to do, what was going on, discernible at most in fleeting changes

of expression, in the narrow expanse of her face and behind her

privileged brow. So nice-minded in all else, he looked forward to the

prospect of a brilliant marriage, solely in order to be able to continue

to maintain her, to keep her always. If one had asked oneself what was

the value that he set on her, I doubt whether one could ever have

imagined a figure high enough. If he did not marry her, it was because a

practical instinct warned him that as soon as she had nothing more to

expect from him she would leave him, or would at least live as she

chose, and that he must retain his hold on her by keeping her in

suspense from day to day. For he admitted the possibility that she did

not love him. No doubt the general affection called love must have

forced him—as it forces all men—to believe at times that she did. But in

his heart of hearts he felt that this love which she felt for him did

not exhaust the possibility of her remaining with him only on account of

his money, and that on the day when she had nothing more to expect from

him she would make haste (the dupe of her friends and their literary

theories, and loving him all the time, really—he thought) to leave him.

“If she is nice to me to-day,” he confided to me, “I am going to give

her something that she’ll like. It’s a necklace she saw at Boucheron’s.

It’s rather too much for me just at present—thirty thousand francs. But,

poor puss, she gets so little pleasure out of life. She will be jolly

pleased with it, I know. She mentioned it to me and told me she knew

somebody who would perhaps give it to her. I don’t believe that is true,

really, but I wasn’t taking any risks, so I’ve arranged with Boucheron,

who is our family jeweller, to keep it for me. I am glad to think that

you’re going to meet her; she’s nothing so very wonderful to look at,

you know,” (I could see that he thought just the opposite and had said

this only so as to make me, when I did see her, admire her all the more)

“what she has got is a marvellous judgment; she’ll perhaps be afraid to

talk much before you, but, by Jove! the things she’ll say to me about

you afterwards, you know she says things one can go on thinking about

for hours; there’s really something about her that’s quite Pythian.”

On our way to her house we passed by a row of little gardens, and I was

obliged to stop, for they were all aflower with pear and cherry blossom;

as empty, no doubt, and lifeless only yesterday as a house that no

tenant has taken, they were suddenly peopled and adorned by these

newcomers, arrived during the night, whose lovely white garments we

could see through the railings along the garden paths.

“Listen; I can see you’ld rather stop and look at that stuff, and grow

poetical about it,” said Robert, “so just wait for me here, will you; my

friend’s house is quite close, I will go and fetch her.”

While I waited I strolled up and down the road, past these modest

gardens. If I raised my head I could see, now and then, girls sitting in

the windows, but outside, in the open air, and at the height of a

half-landing, here and there, light and pliant, in their fresh pink

gowns, hanging among the leaves, young lilac-clusters were letting

themselves be swung by the breeze without heeding the passer-by who was

turning his eyes towards their green mansions. I recognised in them the

platoons in violet uniform posted at the entrance to M. Swann’s park,

past the little white fence, in the warm afternoons of spring, like an

enchanting rustic tapestry. I took a path which led me into a meadow. A

cold wind blew keenly along it, as at Combray, but from the midst of the

rich, moist, country soil, which might have been on the bank of the

Vivonne, there had nevertheless arisen, punctual at the trysting place

like all its band of brothers, a great white pear tree which waved

smilingly in the sun’s face, like a curtain of light materialised and

made palpable, its flowers shaken by the breeze but polished and frosted

with silver by the sun’s rays.

Suddenly Saint-Loup appeared, accompanied by his mistress, and then, in

this woman who was for him all the love, every possible delight in life,

whose personality, mysteriously enshrined in a body as in a Tabernacle,

was the object that still occupied incessantly the toiling imagination

of my friend, whom he felt that he would never really know, as to whom

he was perpetually asking himself what could be her secret self, behind

the veil of eyes and flesh, in this woman I recognised at once “Rachel

when from the Lord”, her who, but a few years since—women change their

position so rapidly in that world, when they do change—used to say to

the procuress: “To-morrow evening, then, if you want me for anyone, you

will send round, won’t you?”

And when they had “come round” for her, and she found herself alone in

the room with the “anyone”, she had known so well what was required of

her that after locking the door, as a prudent woman’s precaution or a

ritual gesture, she would begin to take off all her things, as one does

before the doctor who is going to sound one’s chest, never stopping in

the process unless the “some one”, not caring for nudity, told her that

she might keep on her shift, as specialists do sometimes who, having an

extremely fine ear and being afraid of their patient’s catching a chill,

are satisfied with listening to his breathing and the beating of his

heart through his shirt. On this woman whose whole life, all her

thoughts, all her past, all the men who at one time or another had had

her were to me so utterly unimportant that if she had begun to tell me

about them I should have listened to her only out of politeness, and

should barely have heard what she said, I felt that the anxiety, the

torment, the love of Saint-Loup had been concentrated in such a way as

to make—out of what was for me a mechanical toy, nothing more—the cause

of endless suffering, the very object and reward of existence. Seeing

these two elements separately (because I had known “Rachel when from the

Lord” in a house of ill fame), I realised that many women for the sake

of whom men live, suffer, take their lives, may be in themselves or for

other people what Rachel was for me. The idea that any one could be

tormented by curiosity with regard to her life stupefied me. I could

have told Robert of any number of her unchastities, which seemed to me

the most uninteresting things in the world. And how they would have

pained him! And what had he not given to learn them, without avail!

I realised also then all that the human imagination can put behind a

little scrap of face, such as this girl’s face was, if it is the

imagination that was the first to know it; and conversely into what

wretched elements, crudely material and utterly without value, might be

decomposed what had been the inspiration of countless dreams if, on the

contrary, it should be so to speak controverted by the slightest actual

acquaintance. I saw that what had appeared to me to be not worth twenty

francs when it had been offered to me for twenty francs in the house of

ill fame, where it was then for me simply a woman desirous of earning

twenty francs, might be worth more than a million, more than one’s

family, more than all the most coveted positions in life if one had

begun by imagining her to embody a strange creature, interesting to

know, difficult to seize and to hold. No doubt it was the same thin and

narrow face that we saw, Robert and I. But we had arrived at it by two

opposite ways, between which there was no communication, and we should

never both see it from the same side. That face, with its stares, its

smiles, the movements of its lips, I had known from outside as being

simply that of a woman of the sort who for twenty francs would do

anything that I asked. And so her stares, her smiles, the movements of

her lips had seemed to me significant merely of the general actions of a

class without any distinctive quality. And beneath them I should not

have had the curiosity to look for a person. But what to me had in a

sense been offered at the start, that consenting face, had been for

Robert an ultimate goal towards which he had made his way through

endless hopes and doubts, suspicions, dreams. He gave more than a

million francs in order to have for himself, in order that there might

not be offered to others what had been offered to me, as to all and

sundry, for a score. That he too should not have enjoyed it at the lower

price may have been due to the chance of a moment, the instant in which

she who seemed ready to yield herself makes off, having perhaps an

assignation elsewhere, some reason which makes her more difficult of

access that day. Should the man be a sentimentalist, then, even if she

has not observed it, but infinitely more if she has, the direst game

begins. Unable to swallow his disappointment, to make himself forget

about the woman, he starts afresh in pursuit, she flies him, until a

mere smile for which he no longer ventured to hope is bought at a

thousand times what should have been the price of the last, the most

intimate favours. It happens even at times in such a case, when one has

been led by a mixture of simplicity in one’s judgment and cowardice in

the face of suffering to commit the crowning folly of making an

inaccessible idol of a girl, that these last favours, or even the first

kiss one is fated never to obtain, one no longer even ventures to ask

for them for fear of destroying one’s chances of Platonic love. And it

is then a bitter anguish to leave the world without having ever known

what were the embraces of the woman one has most passionately loved. As

for Rachel’s favours, however, Saint-Loup had by mere accident succeeded

in winning them all. Certainly if he had now learned that they had been

offered to all the world for a louis, he would have suffered, of course,

acutely, but would still have given a million francs for the right to

keep them, for nothing that he might have learned could have made him

emerge—since that is beyond human control and can be brought to pass

only in spite of it by the action of some great natural law—from the

path he was treading, from which that face could appear to him only

through the web of the dreams that he had already spun. The immobility

of that thin face, like that of a sheet of paper subjected to the

colossal pressure of two atmospheres, seemed to me to be being

maintained by two infinities which abutted on her without meeting, for

she held them apart. And indeed, when Robert and I were both looking at

her we did not both see her from the same side of the mystery.

It was not “Rachel when from the Lord”—who seemed to me a small

matter—it was the power of the human imagination, the illusion on which

were based the pains of love; these I felt to be vast. Robert noticed

that I appeared moved. I turned my eyes to the pear and cherry trees of

the garden opposite, so that he might think that it was their beauty

that had touched me. And it did touch me in somewhat the same way; it

also brought close to me things of the kind which we not only see with

our eyes but feel also in our hearts. These trees that I had seen in the

garden, likening them in my mind to strange deities, had not my mistake

been like the Magdalene’s when, in another garden, she saw a human form

and “thought it was the gardener”. Treasurers of our memories of the age

of gold, keepers of the promise that reality is not what we suppose,

that the splendour of poetry, the wonderful radiance of innocence may

shine in it and may be the recompense which we strive to earn, these

great white creatures, bowed in a marvellous fashion above the shade

propitious for rest, for angling or for reading, were they not rather

angels? I exchanged a few words with Saint-Loup’s mistress. We cut

across the village. Its houses were sordid. But by each of the most

wretched, of those that looked as though they had been scorched and

branded by a rain of brimstone, a mysterious traveller, halting for a

day in the accursed city, a resplendent angel stood erect, extending

broadly over it the dazzling protection of the wings of flowering

innocence: it was a pear tree. Saint-Loup drew me a little way in front

to explain:

“I should have liked if you and I could have been alone together, in

fact I would much rather have had luncheon just with you, and stayed

with you until it was time to go to my aunt’s. But this poor girl of

mine here, it is such a pleasure to her, and she is so decent to me,

don’t you know, I hadn’t the heart to refuse her. You’ll like her,

however, she’s literary, you know, a most sensitive nature, and besides

it’s such a pleasure to be with her in a restaurant, she is so charming,

so simple, always delighted with everything.”

I fancy nevertheless that, on this same morning, and then probably for

the first and last time, Robert did detach himself for a moment from the

woman whom out of successive layers of affection he had gradually

created, and beheld suddenly at some distance from himself another

Rachel, outwardly the double of his but entirely different, who was

nothing more or less than a little light of love. We had left the

blossoming orchard and were making for the train which was to take us to

Paris when, at the station, Rachel, who was walking by herself, was

recognised and accosted by a pair of common little “tarts” like herself,

who first of all, thinking that she was alone, called out: “Hello,

Rachel, you come with us; Lucienne and Germaine are in the train, and

there’s room for one more. Come on. We’re all going to the rink,” and

were just going to introduce to her two counter-jumpers, their lovers,

who were escorting them, when, noticing that she seemed a little uneasy,

they looked up and beyond her, caught sight of us, and with apologies

bade her a good-bye to which she responded in a somewhat embarrassed,

but still friendly tone. They were two poor little “tarts” with collars

of sham otter skin, looking more or less as Rachel must have looked when

Saint-Loup first met her. He did not know them, or their names even, and

seeing that they appeared to be extremely intimate with his mistress he

could not help wondering whether she too might not once have had, had

not still perhaps her place in a life of which he had never dreamed,

utterly different from the life she led with him, a life in which one

had women for a louis apiece, whereas he was giving more than a hundred

thousand francs a year to Rachel. He caught only a fleeting glimpse of

that life, but saw also in the thick of it a Rachel other than her whom

he knew, a Rachel like the two little “tarts” in the train, a

twenty-franc Rachel. In short, Rachel had for the moment duplicated

herself in his eyes, he had seen, at some distance from his own Rachel,

the little “tart” Rachel, the real Rachel, assuming that Rachel the

“tart” was more real than the other. It may then have occurred to Robert

that from the hell in which he was living, with the prospect of a rich

marriage, of the sale of his name, to enable him to go on giving Rachel

a hundred thousand francs every year, he might easily perhaps have

escaped, and have enjoyed the favours of his mistress, as the two

counter-jumpers enjoyed those of their girls, for next to nothing. But

how was it to be done? She had done nothing to forfeit his regard. Less

generously rewarded she would be less kind to him, would stop saying and

writing the things that so deeply moved him, things which he would

quote, with a touch of ostentation, to his friends, taking care to point

out how nice it was of her to say them, but omitting to mention that he

was maintaining her in the most lavish fashion, or even that he ever

gave her anything at all, that these inscriptions on photographs, or

greetings at the end of telegrams were but the conversion into the most

exiguous, the most precious of currencies of a hundred thousand francs.

If he took care not to admit that these rare kindnesses on Rachel’s part

were handsomely paid for by himself, it would be wrong to say—and yet,

by a crude piece of reasoning, we do say it, absurdly, of every lover

who pays in cash for his pleasure, and of a great many husbands—that

this was from self-esteem or vanity. Saint-Loup had enough sense to

perceive that all the pleasures which appeal to vanity he could have

found easily and without cost to himself in society, on the strength of

his historic name and handsome face, and that his connexion with Rachel

had rather, if anything, tended to ostracise him, led to his being less

sought after. No; this self-esteem which seeks to appear to be receiving

gratuitously the outward signs of the affection of her whom one loves is

simply a consequence of love, the need to figure in one’s own eyes and

in other people’s as loved in return by the person whom one loves so

well. Rachel rejoined us, leaving the two “tarts” to get into their

compartment; but, no less than their sham otter skins and the

self-conscious appearance of their young men, the names Lucienne and

Germaine kept the new Rachel alive for a moment longer. For a moment

Robert imagined a Place Pigalle existence with unknown associates,

sordid love affairs, afternoons spent in simple amusements, excursions

or pleasure-parties, in that Paris in which the sunny brightness of the

streets from the Boulevard de Clichy onwards did not seem the same as

the solar radiance in which he himself strolled with his mistress, but

must be something different, for love, and suffering which is one with

love have, like intoxication, the power to alter for us inanimate

things. It was almost an unknown Paris in the heart of Paris itself that

he suspected, his connexion appeared to him like the exploration of a

strange form of life, for if when with him Rachel was somewhat similar

to himself, it was nevertheless a part of her real life that she lived

with him, indeed the most precious part, in view of his reckless

expenditure on her, the part that made her so greatly envied by her

friends and would enable her one day to retire to the country or to

establish herself in the leading theatres, when she had made her pile.

Robert longed to ask her who Lucienne and Germaine were, what they would

have said to her if she had joined them in their compartment, how they

would all have spent a day which would have perhaps ended, as a supreme

diversion, after the pleasures of the rink, at the Olympia Tavern, if

Robert and I had not been there. For a moment the purlieus of the

Olympia, which until then had seemed to him merely deadly dull, aroused

curiosity in him and pain, and the sunshine of this spring day beating

upon the Rue Caumartin where, possibly, if she had not known Robert,

Rachel might have gone in the course of the evening and have earned a

louis, filled him with a vague longing. But what use was it to ply

Rachel with questions when he already knew that her answer would be

merely silence, or a lie, or something extremely painful for him to

hear, which would yet explain nothing. The porters were shutting the

doors; we jumped into a first-class carriage; Rachel’s magnificent

pearls reminded Robert that she was a woman of great price, he caressed

her, restored her to her place in his heart where he could contemplate

her, internalised, as he had always done hitherto—save during this brief

instant in which he had seen her in the Place Pigalle of an

impressionist painter—and the train began to move.

It was, by the way, quite true that she was “literary”. She never

stopped talking to me about books, new art and Tolstoyism except to

rebuke Saint-Loup for drinking so much wine:

“Ah! If you could live with me for a year, we’ld see a fine change. I

should keep you on water and you’ld be ever so much better.”

“Right you are. Let’s begin now.”

“But you know quite well I have to work all day!” For she took her art

very seriously. “Besides, what would your people say?”

And she began to abuse his family to me in terms which for that matter

seemed to me highly reasonable, and with which Saint-Loup, while

disobeying her orders in the matter of champagne, entirely concurred. I,

who was so much afraid of the effect of wine on him, and felt the good

influence of his mistress, was quite prepared to advise him to let his

family go hang. Tears sprang to the young woman’s eyes; I had been rash

enough to refer to Dreyfus.

“The poor martyr!” she almost sobbed; “it will be the death of him in

that dreadful place.”

“Don’t upset yourself, Zézette, he will come back, he will be acquitted

all right, they will admit they’ve made a mistake.”

“But long before then he’ll be dead! Oh, well at any rate his children

will bear a stainless name. But just think of the agony he must be going

through; that’s what makes my heart bleed. And would you believe that

Robert’s mother, a pious woman, says that he ought to be left on the

Devil’s Isle, even if he is innocent; isn’t it appalling?”

“Yes, it’s absolutely true, she does say that,” Robert assured me.

“She’s my mother, I’ve no fault to find with her, but it’s quite clear

she hasn’t got a sensitive nature, like Zézette.”

As a matter of fact these luncheons which were said to be “such a

pleasure” always ended in trouble. For as soon as Saint-Loup found

himself in a public place with his mistress, he would imagine that she

was looking at every other man in the room, and his brow would darken;

she would remark his ill-humour, which she may have thought it amusing

to encourage, or, as was more probable, by a foolish piece of conceit

preferred, feeling wounded by his tone, not to appear to be seeking to

disarm; and would make a show of being unable to take her eyes off some

man or other, not that this was always a mere pretence. In fact, the

gentleman who, in theatre or café, happened to sit next to them, or, to

go no farther, the driver of the cab they had engaged need only have

something attractive about him, no matter what, and Robert, his

perception quickened by jealousy, would have noticed it before his

mistress; he would see in him immediately one of those foul creatures

whom he had denounced to me at Balbec, who corrupted and dishonoured

women for their own amusement, would beg his mistress to take her eyes

off the man, thereby drawing her attention to him. And sometimes she

found that Robert had shewn such good judgment in his suspicion that

after a little she even left off teasing him in order that he might calm

down and consent to go off by himself on some errand which would give

her time to begin conversation with the stranger, often to make an

assignation, sometimes even to bring matters quickly to a head. I could

see as soon as we entered the restaurant that Robert was looking

troubled. The fact of the matter was that he had at once remarked, what

had escaped our notice at Balbec, namely that, standing among his

coarser colleagues, Aimé, with a modest brilliance, emitted, quite

unconsciously of course, that air of romance which emanates until a

certain period in life from fine hair and a grecian nose, features

thanks to which he was distinguishable among the crowd of waiters. The

others, almost all of them well on in years, presented a series of

types, extraordinarily ugly and criminal, of hypocritical priests,

sanctimonious confessors, more numerously of comic actors of the old

school, whose sugar-loaf foreheads are scarcely to be seen nowadays

outside the collections of portraits that hang in the humbly historic

green-rooms of little, out of date theatres, where they are represented

in the parts of servants or high priests, though this restaurant seemed,

thanks to a selective method of recruiting and perhaps to some system of

hereditary nomination, to have preserved their solemn type in a sort of

College of Augurs. As ill luck would have it, Aimé having recognised us,

it was he who came to take our order, while the procession of operatic

high priests swept past us to other tables. Aimé inquired after my

grandmother’s health; I asked for news of his wife and children. He gave

it with emotion, being a family man. He had an intelligent, vigorous,

but respectful air. Robert’s mistress began to gaze at him with a

strange attentiveness. But Aimé’s sunken eyes, in which a slight

short-sightedness gave one the impression of veiled depths, shewed no

sign of consciousness in his still face. In the provincial hotel in

which he had served for many years before coming to Balbec, the charming

sketch, now a trifle discoloured and faded, which was his face, and

which, for all those years, like some engraved portrait of Prince

Eugène, had been visible always at the same place, at the far end of a

dining-room that was almost always empty, could not have attracted any

very curious gaze. He had thus for long remained, doubtless for want of

sympathetic admirers, in ignorance of the artistic value of his face,

and but little inclined for that matter to draw attention to it, for he

was temperamentally cold. At the most, some passing Parisian, stopping

for some reason in the town, had raised her eyes to his, had asked him

perhaps to bring something to her in her room before she left for the

station, and in the pellucid, monotonous, deep void of this existence of

a faithful husband and servant in a country town had hidden the secret

of a caprice without sequel which no one would ever bring to light. And

yet Aimé must have been conscious of the insistent emphasis with which

the eyes of the young actress were fastened upon him now. Anyhow, it did

not escape Robert beneath whose skin I saw gathering a flush, not vivid

like that which burned his cheeks when he felt any sudden emotion, but

faint, diffused.

“Anything specially interesting about that waiter, Zézette?” he

inquired, after sharply dismissing Aimé. “One would think you were

studying the part.”

“There you are, beginning again; I knew it was coming.”

“Beginning what again, my dear girl? I may have been mistaken; I haven’t

said anything, I’m sure. But I have at least the right to warn you

against the fellow, seeing that I knew him at Balbec (otherwise I

shouldn’t give a damn), and a bigger scoundrel doesn’t walk the face of

the earth.”

She seemed anxious to pacify Robert and began to engage me in a literary

conversation in which he joined. I found that it did not bore me to talk

to her, for she had a thorough knowledge of the books that I most

admired, and her opinion of them agreed more or less with my own; but as

I had heard Mme. de Villeparisis declare that she had no talent, I

attached but little importance to this evidence of culture. She

discoursed wittily on all manner of topics, and would have been

genuinely entertaining had she not affected to an irritating extent the

jargon of the sets and studios. She applied this, moreover, to

everything under the sun; for instance, having acquired the habit of

saying of a picture, if it were impressionist, or an opera, if

Wagnerian, “Ah! That is _good_!” one day when a young man had kissed her

on the ear, and, touched by her pretence of being thrilled, had affected

modesty, she said: “Yes, as a sensation I call it distinctly _good_.”

But what most surprised me was that the expressions peculiar to Robert

(which, moreover, had come to him, perhaps, from literary men whom she

knew) were used by her to him and by him to her as though they had been

a necessary form of speech, and without any conception of the

pointlessness of an originality that is universal.

In eating, she managed her hands so clumsily that one assumed that she

must appear extremely awkward upon the stage. She recovered her

dexterity only when making love, with that touching prescience latent in

women who love the male body so intensely that they immediately guess

what will give most pleasure to that body, which is yet so different

from their own.

I ceased to take part in the conversation when it turned upon the

theatre, for on that topic Rachel was too malicious for my liking. She

did, it was true, take up in a tone of commiseration—against Saint-Loup,

which proved that he was accustomed to hearing Rachel attack her—the

defence of Berma, saying: “Oh, no, she’s a wonderful person, really. Of

course, the things she does no longer appeal to us, they don’t

correspond quite to what we are looking for, but one must think of her

at the period to which she belongs; we owe her a great deal. She has

done good work, you know. And besides she’s such a fine woman, she has

such a good heart; naturally she doesn’t care about the things that

interest us, but she has had in her time, with a rather impressive face,

a charming quality of mind.” (Our fingers, by the way, do not play the

same accompaniment to all our aesthetic judgments. If it is a picture

that is under discussion, to shew that it is a fine work with plenty of

paint, it is enough to stick out one’s thumb. But the “charming quality

of mind” is more exacting. It requires two fingers, or rather two

finger-nails, as though one were trying to flick off a particle of

dust.) But, with this single exception, Saint-Loup’s mistress referred

to the best-known actresses in a tone of ironical superiority which

annoyed me because I believed—quite mistakenly, as it happened—that it

was she who was inferior to them. She was clearly aware that I must

regard her as an indifferent actress, and on the other hand have a great

regard for those she despised. But she shewed no resentment, because

there is in all great talent while it is still, as hers was then,

unrecognised, however sure it may be of itself, a vein of humility, and

because we make the consideration that we expect from others

proportionate not to our latent powers but to the position to which we

have attained. (I was, an hour or so later, at the theatre, to see

Saint-Loup’s mistress shew great deference towards those very artists

against whom she was now bringing so harsh a judgment to bear.) And so,

in however little doubt my silence may have left her, she insisted

nevertheless on our dining together that evening, assuring me that never

had anyone’s conversation delighted her so much as mine. If we were not

yet in the theatre, to which we were to go after luncheon, we had the

sense of being in a green-room hung with portraits of old members of the

company, so markedly were the waiters’ faces those which, one thought,

had perished with a whole generation of obscure actors of the

Palais-Royal; they had a look, also, of Academicians; stopping before a

side table one of them was examining a dish of pears with the expression

of detached curiosity that M. de Jussieu might have worn. Others, on

either side of him, were casting about the room that gaze instinct with

curiosity and coldness which Members of the Institute, who have arrived

early, throw at the public, while they exchange a few murmured words

which one fails to catch. They were faces well known to all the regular

guests. One of them, however, was being pointed out, a newcomer with

distended nostrils and a smug upper lip, who looked like a cleric; he

was entering upon his duties there for the first time, and everyone

gazed with interest at this newly elected candidate. But presently,

perhaps to drive Robert away so that she might be alone with Aimé,

Rachel began to make eyes at a young student, who was feeding with

another man at a neighbouring table.

“Zézette, let me beg you not to look at that young man like that,” said

Saint-Loup, on whose face the hesitating flush of a moment ago had been

gathered now into a scarlet tide which dilated and darkened his swollen

features, “if you must make a scene here, I shall simply finish eating

by myself and join you at the theatre afterwards.”

At this point a messenger came up to tell Aimé that he was wanted to

speak to a gentleman in a carriage outside. Saint-Loup, ever uneasy, and

afraid now that it might be some message of an amorous nature that was

to be conveyed to his mistress, looked out of the window and saw there,

sitting up in his brougham, his hands tightly buttoned in white gloves

with black seams, a flower in his buttonhole, M. de Charlus.

“There; you see!” he said to me in a low voice, “my family hunt me down

even here. Will you, please—I can’t very well do it myself, but you can,

as you know the head waiter so well and he’s certain to give us away—ask

him not to go to the carriage. He can always send some other waiter who

doesn’t know me. I know my uncle; if they tell him that I’m not known

here, he’ll never come inside to look for me, he loathes this sort of

place. Really, it’s pretty disgusting that an old petticoat-chaser like

him, who is still at it, too, should be perpetually lecturing me and

coming to spy on me!”

Aimé on receiving my instructions sent one of his underlings to explain

that he was busy and could not come out at the moment, and (should the

gentleman ask for the Marquis de Saint-Loup) that they did not know any

such person. But Saint-Loup’s mistress, who had failed to catch our

whispered conversation and thought that it was still about the young man

at whom Robert had been finding fault with her for making eyes, broke

out in a torrent of rage.

“Oh, indeed! So it’s the young man over there, now, is it? Thank you for

telling me; it’s a real pleasure to have this sort of thing with one’s

meals! Don’t listen to him, please; he’s rather cross to-day, and, you

know,” she went on, turning to me, “he just says it because he thinks it

smart, that it’s the gentlemanly thing to appear jealous always.”

And she began with feet and fingers to shew signs of nervous irritation.

“But, Zézette, it is I who find it unpleasant. You are making us all

ridiculous before that gentleman, who will begin to imagine you’re

making overtures to him, and an impossible bounder he looks, too.”

“Oh, no, I think he’s charming; for one thing, he’s got the most

adorable eyes, and a way of looking at women—you can feel he must love

them.”

“You can at least keep quiet until I’ve left the room, if you have lost

your senses,” cried Robert. “Waiter, my things.”

I did not know whether I was expected to follow him.

“No, I want to be alone,” he told me in the same tone in which he had

just been addressing his mistress, and as if he were quite furious with

me. His anger was like a single musical phrase to which in an opera

several lines are sung which are entirely different from one another, if

one studies the words, in meaning and character, but which the music

assimilates by a common sentiment. When Robert had gone, his mistress

called Aimé and asked him various questions. She then wanted to know

what I thought of him.

“An amusing expression, hasn’t he? Do you know what I should like; it

would be to know what he really thinks about things, to have him wait on

me often, to take him travelling. But that would be all. If we were

expected to love all the people who attract us, life would be pretty

ghastly, wouldn’t it? It’s silly of Robert to get ideas like that. All

that sort of thing, it’s only just what comes into my head, that’s all;

Robert has nothing to worry about.” She was still gazing at Aimé. “Do

look, what dark eyes he has. I should love to know what there is behind

them.”

Presently came a message that Robert was waiting for her in a private

room, to which he had gone to finish his luncheon, by another door,

without having to pass through the restaurant again. I thus found myself

alone, until I too was summoned by Robert. I found his mistress

stretched out on a sofa laughing under the kisses and caresses that he

was showering on her. They were drinking champagne. “Hallo, you!” she

cried to him, having recently picked up this formula which seemed to her

the last word in playfulness and wit. I had fed badly, I was extremely

uncomfortable, and albeit Legrandin’s words had had no effect on me I

was sorry to think that I was beginning in a back room of a restaurant

and should be finishing in the wings of a theatre this first afternoon

of spring. Looking first at the time to see that she was not making

herself late, she offered me a glass of champagne, handed me one of her

Turkish cigarettes and unpinned a rose for me from her bodice. Whereupon

I said to myself: “I have nothing much to regret, after all; these hours

spent in this young woman’s company are not wasted, since I have had

from her, charming gifts which could not be bought too dear, a rose, a

scented cigarette and a glass of champagne.” I told myself this because

I felt that it endowed with an aesthetic character and thereby

justified, saved these hours of boredom. I ought perhaps to have

reflected that the very need which I felt of a reason that would console

me for my boredom was sufficient to prove that I was experiencing no

aesthetic sensation. As for Robert and his mistress, they appeared to

have no recollection of the quarrel which had been raging between them a

few minutes earlier, or of my having been a witness of it. They made no

allusion to it, sought no excuse for it any more than for the contrast

with it which their present conduct formed. By dint of drinking

champagne with them, I began to feel a little of the intoxication that

used to come over me at Rivebelle, though probably not quite the same.

Not only every kind of intoxication, from that which the sun or

travelling gives us to that which we get from exhaustion or wine, but

every degree of intoxication—and each must have a different figure, like

the numbers of fathoms on a chart—lays bare in us exactly at the depth

to which it reaches a different kind of man. The room which Saint-Loup

had taken was small, but the mirror which was its sole ornament was of

such a kind that it seemed to reflect thirty others in an endless vista;

and the electric bulb placed at the top of the frame must at night, when

the light was on, followed by the procession of thirty flashes similar

to its own, give to the drinker, even when alone, the idea that the

surrounding space was multiplying itself simultaneously with his

sensations heightened by intoxication, and that, shut up by himself in

this little cell, he was reigning nevertheless over something far more

extensive in its indefinite luminous curve than a passage in the Jardin

de Paris. Being then myself at this moment the said drinker, suddenly,

looking for him in the glass, I caught sight of him, hideous, a

stranger, who was staring at me. The joy of intoxication was stronger

than my disgust; from gaiety or bravado I smiled at him, and

simultaneously he smiled back at me. And I felt myself so much under the

ephemeral and potent sway of the minute in which our sensations are so

strong, that I am not sure whether my sole regret was not at the thought

that this hideous self of whom I had just caught sight in the glass was

perhaps there for the last time on earth, and that I should never meet

the stranger again in the whole course of my life.

Robert was annoyed only because I was not being more brilliant before

his mistress.

“What about that fellow you met this morning, who combines snobbery with

astronomy; tell her about him, I’ve forgotten the story,” and he watched

her furtively.

“But, my dear boy, there’s nothing more than what you’ve just said.”

“What a bore you are. Then tell her about Françoise in the

Champs-Elysées. She’ll enjoy that.”

“Oh, do! Bobby is always talking about Françoise.” And taking Saint-Loup

by the chin, she repeated, for want of anything more original, drawing

the said chin nearer to the light: “Hallo, you!”

Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the depositaries, in

their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had begun to

interest me in themselves; I amused myself, pretending that what I saw

before me were the characters in some old humorous novel, by watching,

struck by the fresh face of the young man who had just come into the

stalls, the heroine listen distractedly to the declaration of love which

the juvenile lead in the piece was addressing to her, while he, through

the fiery torrent of his impassioned speech, still kept a burning gaze

fixed on an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had

caught his eye; and thus, thanks especially to the information that

Saint-Loup gave me as to the private lives of the players, I saw another

drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the words of the spoken

drama which in itself, although of no merit, interested me also; for I

could feel in it that there were budding and opening for an hour in the

glare of the footlights, created out of the agglutination on the face of

an actor of another face of grease paint and pasteboard, on his own

human soul the words of a part.

These ephemeral vivid personalities which the characters are in a play

that is entertaining also, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one

would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by that

time are already disintegrated into a comedian who is no longer in the

position which he occupied in the play, a text which no longer shews one

the comedian’s face, a coloured powder which a handkerchief wipes off,

who have returned in short to elements that contain nothing of them,

since their dissolution, effected so soon after the end of the show,

make us—like the dissolution of a dear friend—begin to doubt the reality

of our ego and meditate on the mystery of death.

One number in the programme I found extremely trying. A young woman whom

Rachel and some of her friends disliked was, with a set of old songs, to

make a first appearance on which she had based all her hopes for the

future of herself and her family. This young woman was blessed with

unduly, almost grotesquely prominent hips and a pretty but too slight

voice, weakened still farther by her excitement and in marked contrast

to her muscular development. Rachel had posted among the audience a

certain number of friends, male and female, whose business it was by

their sarcastic comments to put the novice, who was known to be timid,

out of countenance, to make her lose her head so that her turn should

prove a complete failure, after which the manager would refuse to give

her a contract. At the first notes uttered by the wretched woman,

several of the male audience, recruited for that purpose, began pointing

to her backward profile with jocular comments, several of the women,

also in the plot, laughed out loud, each flute-like note from the stage

increased the deliberate hilarity, which grew to a public scandal. The

unhappy woman, sweating with anguish through her grease-paint, tried for

a little longer to hold out, then stopped and looked round the audience

with an appealing gaze of misery and anger which succeeded only in

increasing the uproar. The instinct to imitate others, the desire to

shew their own wit and daring added to the party several pretty

actresses who had not been forewarned but now threw at the others

glances charged with malicious connivance, and sat convulsed with

laughter which rang out in such violent peals that at the end of the

second song, although there were still five more on the programme, the

stage manager rang down the curtain. I tried to make myself pay no more

heed to the incident than I had paid to my grandmother’s sufferings when

my great-aunt, to tease her, used to give my grandfather brandy, the

idea of deliberate wickedness being too painful for me to bear. And yet,

just as our pity for misfortune is perhaps not very exact since in our

imagination we recreate a whole world of grief by which the unfortunate

who has to struggle against it has no time to think of being moved to

self-pity, so wickedness has probably not in the mind of the wicked man

that pure and voluptuous cruelty which it so pains us to imagine. Hatred

inspires him, anger gives him an ardour, an activity in which there is

no great joy; he must be a sadist to extract any pleasure from it;

ordinarily, the wicked man supposes himself to be punishing the

wickedness of his victim; Rachel imagined certainly that the actress

whom she was making suffer was far from being of interest to any one,

and that anyhow, in having her hissed off the stage, she was herself

avenging an outrage on good taste and teaching an unworthy comrade a

lesson. Nevertheless, I preferred not to speak of this incident since I

had had neither the courage nor the power to prevent it, and it would

have been too painful for me, by saying any good of their victim, to

approximate to a gratification of the lust for cruelty the sentiments

which animated the tormentors who had strangled this career in its

infancy.

But the opening scene of this afternoon’s performance interested me in

quite another way. It made me realise in part the nature of the illusion

of which Saint-Loup was a victim with regard to Rachel, and which had

set a gulf between the images that he and I respectively had in mind of

his mistress, when we beheld her that morning among the blossoming pear

trees. Rachel was playing a part which involved barely more than her

walking on in the little play. But seen thus, she was another woman. She

had one of those faces to which distance—and not necessarily that

between stalls and stage, the world being in this respect only a larger

theatre—gives form and outline and which, seen close at hand, dissolve

back into dust. Standing beside her one saw only a nebula, a milky way

of freckles, of tiny spots, nothing more. At a proper distance, all this

ceased to be visible and, from cheeks that withdrew, were reabsorbed

into her face, rose like a crescent moon a nose so fine, so pure that

one would have liked to be the object of Rachel’s attention, to see her

again as often as one chose, to keep her close to one, provided that one

had not already seen her differently and at close range. This was not my

case but it had been Saint-Loup’s when he first saw her on the stage.

Then he had asked himself how he might approach her, how come to know

her, there had opened in him a whole fairy realm—that in which she

lived—from which emanated an exquisite radiance but into which he might

not penetrate. He had left the theatre telling himself that it would be

madness to write to her, that she would not answer his letter, quite

prepared to give his fortune and his name for the creature who was

living in him in a world so vastly superior to those too familiar

realities, a world made beautiful by desire and dreams of happiness,

when at the back of the theatre, a little old building which had itself

the air of being a piece of scenery, from the stage door he saw debouch

the gay and daintily hatted band of actresses who had just been playing.

Young men who knew them were waiting for them outside. The number of

pawns on the human chessboard being less than the number of combinations

that they are capable of forming, in a theatre from which are absent all

the people we know and might have expected to find, there turns up one

whom we never imagined that we should see again and who appears so

opportunely that the coincidence seems to us providential, although no

doubt some other coincidence would have occurred in its stead had we

been not in that place but in some other, where other desires would have

been aroused and we should have met some other old acquaintance to help

us to satisfy them. The golden portals of the world of dreams had closed

again upon Rachel before Saint-Loup saw her emerge from the theatre, so

that the freckles and spots were of little importance. They vexed him

nevertheless, especially as, being no longer alone, he had not now the

same opportunity to dream as in the theatre. But she, for all that he

could no longer see her, continued to dictate his actions, like those

stars which govern us by their attraction even during the hours in which

they are not visible to our eyes. And so his desire for the actress with

the fine features which had no place now even in Robert’s memory had the

result that, dashing towards the old friend whom chance had brought to

the spot, he insisted upon an introduction to the person with no

features and with freckles, since she was the same person, telling

himself that later on he would take care to find out which of the two

this same person really was. She was in a hurry, she did not on this

occasion say a single word to Saint-Loup, and it was only some days

later that he finally contrived, by inducing her to leave her

companions, to escort her home. He loved her already. The need for

dreams, the desire to be made happy by her of whom one has dreamed,

bring it about that not much time is required before one entrusts all

one’s chances of happiness to her who a few days since was but a

fortuitous apparition, unknown, unmeaning, upon the boards of the

theatre.

When, the curtain having fallen, we moved on to the stage, alarmed at

finding myself there for the first time, I felt the need to begin a

spirited conversation with Saint-Loup. In this way my attitude, as I did

not know what one ought to adopt in a setting that was strange to me,

would be entirely dominated by our talk, and people would think that I

was so absorbed in it, so unobservant of my surroundings, that it was

quite natural that I should not shew the facial expressions proper to a

place in which, to judge by what I appeared to be saying, I was barely

conscious of standing; and seizing, to make a beginning, upon the first

topic that came to my mind:

“You know,” I said, “I did come to say good-bye to you the day I left

Doncières; I’ve not had an opportunity to mention it. I waved to you in

the street.”

“Don’t speak about it,” he replied, “I was so sorry. I passed you just

outside the barracks, but I couldn’t stop because I was late already. I

assure you, I felt quite wretched about it.”

So he had recognised me! I saw again in my mind the wholly impersonal

salute which he had given me, raising his hand to his cap, without a

glance to indicate that he knew me, without a gesture to shew that he

was sorry he could not stop. Evidently this fiction, which he had

adopted at that moment, of not knowing me must have simplified matters

for him greatly. But I was amazed to find that he had been able to

compose himself to it so swiftly and without any instinctive movement to

betray his original impression. I had already observed at Balbec that,

side by side with that childlike sincerity of his face, the skin of

which by its transparence rendered visible the sudden tide of certain

emotions, his body had been admirably trained to perform a certain

number of well-bred dissimulations, and that, like a consummate actor,

he could, in his regimental and in his social life, play alternately

quite different parts. In one of his parts he loved me tenderly, he

acted towards me almost as if he had been my brother; my brother he had

been, he was now again, but for a moment that day he had been another

person who did not know me and who, holding the reins, his glass screwed

to his eye, without a look or a smile had lifted his disengaged hand to

the peak of his cap to give me correctly the military salute.

The stage scenery, still in its place, among which I was passing, seen

thus at close range and without the advantage of any of those effects of

lighting and distance on which the eminent artist whose brush had

painted it had calculated, was a depressing sight, and Rachel, when I

came near her, was subjected to a no less destructive force. The curves

of her charming nose had stood out in perspective, between stalls and

stage, like the relief of the scenery. It was no longer herself, I

recognised her only thanks to her eyes, in which her identity had taken

refuge. The form, the radiance of this young star, so brilliant a moment

ago, had vanished. On the other hand—as though we came close to the moon

and it ceased to present the appearance of a disk of rosy gold—on this

face, so smooth a surface until now, I could distinguish only

protuberances, discolourations, cavities. Despite the incoherence into

which were resolved at close range not only the feminine features but

the painted canvas, I was glad to be there to wander among the scenery,

all that setting which at one time my love of nature had prompted me to

dismiss as tedious and artificial until the description of it by Goethe

in _Wilhelm Meister_ had given it a sort of beauty in my eyes; and I had

already observed with delight, in the thick of a crowd of journalists or

men of fashion, friends of the actresses, who were greeting one another,

talking, smoking, as though in a public thoroughfare, a young man in a

black velvet cap and hortensia coloured skirt, his cheeks chalked in red

like a page from a Watteau album, who with his smiling lips, his eyes

raised to the ceiling, as he sprang lightly into the air, seemed so

entirely of another species than the rational folk in every day clothes,

in the midst of whom he was pursuing like a madman the course of his

ecstatic dream, so alien to the preoccupations of their life, so

anterior to the habits of their civilisation, so enfranchised from all

the laws of nature, that it was as restful and as fresh a spectacle as

watching a butterfly straying along a crowded street to follow with

one’s eyes, between the strips of canvas, the natural arabesques traced

by his winged capricious painted oscillations. But at that moment

Saint-Loup conceived the idea that his mistress was paying undue

attention to this dancer, who was engaged now in practising for the last

time the figure of fun with which he was going to take the stage, and

his face darkened.

“You might look the other way,” he warned her gloomily. “You know that

none of those dancer-fellows is worth the rope they can at least fall

off and break their necks, and they’re the sort of people who go about

afterwards boasting that you’ve taken notice of them. Besides, you know

very well you’ve been told to go to your dressing-room and change.

You’ll be missing your call again.”

A group of men—journalists—noticing the look of fury on Saint-Loup’s

face, came nearer, amused, to listen to what we were saying. And as the

stage-hands had just set up some scenery on our other side we were

forced into close contact with them.

“Oh, but I know him; he’s a friend of mine,” cried Saint-Loup’s

mistress, her eyes still fixed on the dancer. “Look how well made he is,

do watch those little hands of his dancing away by themselves like his

whole body!”

The dancer turned his head towards her, and his human person appeared

beneath the sylph that he was endeavouring to be, the clear grey jelly

of his eyes trembled and sparkled between eyelids stiff with paint, and

a smile extended the corners of his mouth into cheeks plastered with

rouge; then, to amuse the girl, like a singer who hums to oblige us the

air of the song in which we have told her that we admired her singing,

he began to repeat the movement of his hands, counterfeiting himself

with the fineness of a parodist and the good humour of a child.

“Oh, that’s too lovely, the way he copies himself,” she cried, clapping

her hands.

“I implore you, my dearest girl,” Saint-Loup broke in, in a tone of

utter misery, “do not make a scene here, I can’t stand it; I swear, if

you say another word I won’t go with you to your room, I shall walk

straight out; come, don’t be so naughty.... You oughtn’t to stand about

in the cigar smoke like that, it’ll make you ill,” he went on, to me,

with the solicitude he had shewn for me in our Balbec days.

“Oh! What a good thing it would be if you did go.”

“I warn you, if I do I shan’t come back.”

“That’s more than I should venture to hope.”

“Listen; you know, I promised you the necklace if you behaved nicely to

me, but the moment you treat me like this....”

“Ah! Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. You gave me your

promise; I ought to have known you’ld never keep it. You want the whole

world to know you’re made of money, but I’m not a money-grubber like

you. You can keep your blasted necklace; I know some one else who’ll

give it to me.”

“No one else can possibly give it to you; I’ve told Boucheron he’s to

keep it for me, and I have his promise not to let anyone else have it.”

“There you are, trying to blackmail me, you’ve arranged everything I

see. That’s what they mean by Marsantes, _Mater Semita_, it smells of

the race,” retorted Rachel, quoting an etymology which was founded on a

wild misinterpretation, for _Semita_ means “path” and not “Semite”, but

one which the Nationalists applied to Saint-Loup on account of the

Dreyfusard views for which, so far as that went, he was indebted to the

actress. She was less entitled than anyone to apply the word “Jew” to

Mme. de Marsantes, in whom the ethnologists of society could succeed in

finding no trace of Judaism apart from her connexion with the

Lévy-Mirepoix family. “But this isn’t the last of it, I can tell you. An

agreement like that isn’t binding. You have acted treacherously towards

me. Boucheron shall be told of it and he’ll be paid twice as much for

his necklace. You’ll hear from me before long; don’t you worry.”

Robert was in the right a hundred times over. But circumstances are

always so entangled that the man who is in the right a hundred times may

have been once in the wrong. And I could not help recalling that

unpleasant and yet quite innocent expression which he had used at

Balbec: “In that way I keep a hold over her.”

“You don’t understand what I mean about the necklace. I made no formal

promise: once you start doing everything you possibly can to make me

leave you, it’s only natural, surely, that I shouldn’t give it to you; I

fail to understand what treachery you can see in that, or what my

ulterior motive is supposed to be. You can’t seriously maintain that I

brag about my money, I’m always telling you that I’m only a poor devil

without a cent to my name. It’s foolish of you to take it in that way,

my dear. What possible interest can I have in hurting you? You know very

well that my one interest in life is yourself.”

“Oh, yes, yes, please go on,” she retorted ironically, with the sweeping

gesture of a barber wielding his razor. And turning to watch the dancer:

“Isn’t he too wonderful with his hands. A woman like me couldn’t do the

things he’s doing now.” She went closer to him and, pointing to Robert’s

furious face: “Look, he’s hurt,” she murmured, in the momentary elation

of a sadic impulse to cruelty totally out of keeping with her genuine

feelings of affection for Saint-Loup.

“Listen, for the last time, I swear to you it doesn’t matter what you

do—in a week you’ll be giving anything to get me back—I shan’t come;

it’s a clean cut, do you hear, it’s irrevocable; you will be sorry one

day, when it’s too late.”

Perhaps he was sincere in saying this, and the torture of leaving his

mistress may have seemed to him less cruel than that of remaining with

her in certain circumstances.

“But, my dear boy,” he went on, to me, “you oughtn’t to stand about

here, I tell you, it will make you cough.”

I pointed to the scenery which barred my way. He touched his hat and

said to one of the journalists:

“Would you mind, sir, throwing away your cigar; the smoke is bad for my

friend.”

His mistress had not waited for him to accompany her; on her way to her

dressing-room she turned round and:

“Do they do those tricks with women too, those nice little hands?” she

flung to the dancer from the back of the stage, in an artificially

melodious tone of girlish innocence. “You look just like one yourself,

I’m sure I could have a wonderful time with you and a girl I know.”

“There’s no rule against smoking that I know of; if people aren’t well,

they have only to stay at home,” said the journalist.

The dancer smiled mysteriously back at the actress.

“Oh! Do stop! You’ll make me quite mad,” she cried to him. “Then there

will be trouble.”

“In any case, sir, you are not very civil,” observed Saint-Loup to the

journalist, still with a courteous suavity, in the deliberate manner of

a man judging retrospectively the rights and wrongs of an incident that

is already closed.

At that moment I saw Saint-Loup raise his arm vertically above his head

as if he had been making a signal to some one whom I could not see, or

like the conductor of an orchestra, and indeed—without any greater

transition than when, at a simple wave of the baton, in a symphony or a

ballet, violent rhythms succeed a graceful andante—after the courteous

words that he had just uttered he brought down his hand with a

resounding smack upon the journalist’s cheek.

Now that to the measured conversations of the diplomats, to the smiling

arts of peace had succeeded the furious onthrust of war, since blows

lead to blows, I should not have been surprised to see the combatants

swimming in one another’s blood. But what I could not understand (like

people who feel that it is not according to the rules when a war breaks

out between two countries after some question merely of the

rectification of a frontier, or when a sick man dies after nothing more

serious than a swelling of the liver) was how Saint-Loup had contrived

to follow up those words, which implied a distinct shade of

friendliness, with an action which in no way arose out of them, which

they had not, so to speak, announced, that action of an arm raised in

defiance not only of the rights of man but of the law of cause and

effect, that action created _ex nihilo_. Fortunately the journalist who,

staggering back from the violence of the blow, had turned pale and

hesitated for a moment, did not retaliate. As for his friends, one of

them had promptly turned away his head and was looking fixedly into the

wings for some one who evidently was not there; the second pretended

that a speck of dust had got into his eye, and began rubbing and

squeezing his eyelid with every sign of being in pain; while the third

had rushed off, exclaiming: “Good heavens, I believe the curtain’s going

up; we shan’t get into our seats.”

I wanted to speak to Saint-Loup, but he was so full of his indignation

with the dancer that it adhered exactly to the surface of his eyeballs;

like a subcutaneous structure it distended his cheeks with the result

that, his internal agitation expressing itself externally in an entire

immobility, he had not even the power of relaxation, the “play”

necessary to take in a word from me and to answer it. The journalist’s

friends, seeing that the incident was at an end, gathered round him

again, still trembling. But, ashamed of having deserted him, they were

absolutely determined that he should be made to suppose that they had

noticed nothing. And so they dilated, one upon the speck of dust in his

eye, one upon his false alarm when he had thought that the curtain was

going up, the third upon the astonishing resemblance between a man who

had just gone by and the speaker’s brother. Indeed they seemed quite to

resent their friend’s not having shared their several emotions.

“What, didn’t it strike you? You must be going blind.”

“What I say is that you’re a pack of curs,” growled the journalist whom

Saint-Loup had punished.

Forgetting the poses they had adopted, to be consistent with which they

ought—but they did not think of it—to have pretended not to understand

what he meant, they fell back on certain expressions traditional in the

circumstances: “What’s all the excitement? Keep your hair on, old chap.

Don’t take the bit in your teeth.”

I had realised that morning beneath the pear blossom how illusory were

the grounds upon which Robert’s love for “Rachel when from the Lord” was

based; I was bound now to admit how very real were the sufferings to

which that love gave rise. Gradually the feeling that had obsessed him

for the last hour, without a break, began to diminish, receded into him,

an unoccupied pliable zone appeared in his eyes. I had stopped for a

moment at a corner of the Avenue Gabriel from which I had often in the

past seen Gilberte appear. I tried for a few seconds to recall those

distant impressions, and was hurrying at a “gymnastic” pace to overtake

Saint-Loup when I saw that a gentleman, somewhat shabbily attired,

appeared to be talking to him confidentially. I concluded that this was

a personal friend of Robert; at the same time they seemed to be drawing

even closer to one another; suddenly, as a meteor flashes through the

sky, I saw a number of ovoid bodies assume with a giddy swiftness all

the positions necessary for them to form, before Saint-Loup’s face and

body, a flickering constellation. Flung out like stones from a catapult,

they seemed to me to be at the very least seven in number. They were

merely, however, Saint-Loup’s pair of fists, multiplied by the speed

with which they were changing their places in this—to all appearance

ideal and decorative—arrangement. But this elaborate display was nothing

more than a pummelling which Saint-Loup was administering, the true

character of which, aggressive rather than aesthetic, was first revealed

to me by the aspect of the shabbily dressed gentleman who appeared to be

losing at once his self-possession, his lower jaw and a quantity of

blood. He gave fictitious explanations to the people who came up to

question him, turned his head and, seeing that Saint-Loup had made off

and was hastening to rejoin me, stood gazing after him with an offended,

crushed, but by no means furious expression on his face. Saint-Loup, on

the other hand, was furious, although he himself had received no blow,

and his eyes were still blazing with anger when he reached me. The

incident was in no way connected (as I had supposed) with the assault in

the theatre. It was an impassioned loiterer who, seeing the fine looking

young soldier that Saint-Loup was, had made overtures to him. My friend

could not get over the audacity of this “clique” who no longer even

waited for the shades of night to cover their operations, and spoke of

the suggestion that had been made to him with the same indignation as

the newspapers use in reporting an armed assault and robbery, in broad

daylight, in the centre of Paris. And yet the recipient of his blow was

excusable in one respect, for the trend of the downward slope brings

desire so rapidly to the point of enjoyment that beauty by itself

appears to imply consent. Now, that Saint-Loup was beautiful was beyond

dispute. Castigation such as he had just administered has this value,

for men of the type that had accosted him, that it makes them think

seriously of their conduct, though never for long enough to enable them

to amend their ways and thus escape correction at the hands of the law.

And so, although Saint-Loup’s arm had shot out instinctively, without

any preliminary thought, all such punishments, even when they reinforce

the law, are powerless to bring about any uniformity in morals.

These incidents, particularly the one that was weighing most on his

mind, seemed to have prompted in Robert a desire to be left alone for a

while. After a moment’s silence he asked me to leave him, and to go by

myself to call on Mme. de Villeparisis. He would join me there, but

preferred that we should not enter the room together, so that he might

appear to have only just arrived in Paris, instead of having spent half

the day already with me.