PART II

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_CHAPTER ONE_

We made our way back along the Avenue Gabriel, through the strolling

crowd. I left my grandmother to rest on a seat and went in search of a

cab. She, in whose heart I always placed myself when I had to form an

opinion of the most unimportant person, she was now closed to me, had

become part of the world outside, and, more than from any casual

passer-by, I was obliged to keep from her what I thought of her

condition, to say no word of my uneasiness. I could not have spoken of

it to her in greater confidence than to a stranger. She had suddenly

handed back to me the thoughts, the griefs which, from the days of my

infancy, I had entrusted for all time to her keeping. She was not yet

dead. I was already alone. And even those allusions which she had made

to the Guermantes, to Mme. de Sévigné, to our conversations about the

little clan, assumed an air of being without point or occasion,

fantastic, because they sprang from the nullity of this very being who

to-morrow possibly would have ceased to exist, for whom they would no

longer have any meaning, from that nullity, incapable of conceiving

them, which my grandmother would shortly be.

“Well, sir, I don’t like to say no, but you have not made an

appointment, you have no time fixed. Besides, this is not my day for

seeing patients. You surely have a doctor of your own. I cannot

interfere with his practice, unless he were to call me in for a

consultation. It’s a question of professional etiquette....”

Just as I was signalling to a cabman, I had caught sight of the famous

Professor E——, almost a friend of my father and grandfather, acquainted

at any rate with them both, who lived in the Avenue Gabriel, and, with a

sudden inspiration, had stopped him just as he was entering his house,

thinking that he would perhaps be the very person to advise my

grandmother. But he was evidently in a hurry and, after calling for his

letters, seemed anxious to get rid of me, so that my only chance of

speaking to him lay in going up with him in the lift, of which he begged

me to allow him to work the switches himself, this being a mania with

him.

“But, sir, I am not asking you to see my grandmother here; you will

realise from what I am trying to tell you that she is not in a fit state

to come; what I am asking is that you should call at our house in half

an hour’s time, when I have taken her home.”

“Call at your house! Really, sir, you must not expect me to do that. I

am dining with the Minister of Commerce. I have a call to pay first. I

must change at once, and to make matters worse I have torn my coat and

my other one has no buttonholes for my decorations. I beg you, please,

to oblige me by not touching the switches. You don’t know how the lift

works; one can’t be too careful. Getting that buttonhole made means more

delay. Well, as I am a friend of your people, if your grandmother comes

here at once I will see her. But I warn you that I shall be able to give

her exactly a quarter of an hour, not a moment more.”

I had started off at once, without even getting out of the lift which

Professor E—— had himself set in motion to take me down again, casting a

suspicious glance at me as he did so.

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say

so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote

expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion

with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death—or its

first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never

leave hold of us again—may occur this very afternoon, so far from

uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted

to some occupation. You make a point of taking your drive every day so

that in a month’s time you will have had the full benefit of the fresh

air; you have hesitated over which cloak you will take, which cabman to

call, you are in the cab, the whole day lies before you, short because

you have to be at home early, as a friend is coming to see you; you hope

that it will be as fine again to-morrow; and you have no suspicion that

death, which has been making its way towards you along another plane,

shrouded in an impenetrable darkness, has chosen precisely this day of

all days to make its appearance, in a few minutes’ time, more or less,

at the moment when the carriage has reached the Champs-Elysées. Perhaps

those who are haunted as a rule by the fear of the utter strangeness of

death will find something reassuring in this kind of death—in this kind

of first contact with death—because death thus assumes a known, familiar

guise of everyday life. A good luncheon has preceded it, and the same

outing that people take who are in perfect health. A drive home in an

open carriage comes on top of its first onslaught; ill as my grandmother

was, there were, after all, several people who could testify that at six

o’clock, as we came home from the Champs-Elysées, they had bowed to her

as she drove past in an open carriage, in perfect weather. Legrandin,

making his way towards the Place de la Concorde, raised his hat to us,

stopping to look after us with an air of surprise. I, who was not yet

detached from life, asked my grandmother if she had acknowledged his

greeting, reminding her of his readiness to take offence. My

grandmother, thinking me no doubt very frivolous, raised her hand in the

air as though to say: “What does it matter? It is not of the least

importance.”

Yes, one might have said that, a few minutes earlier, when I was looking

for a cab, my grandmother was resting on a seat in the Avenue Gabriel,

and that a little later she had driven past in an open carriage. But

would that have been really true? The seat, for instance, to maintain

its position at the side of an avenue—for all that it may be subjected

also to certain conditions of equilibrium—has no need of energy. But in

order that a living person may be stable, even when supported by a seat

or in a carriage, there is required a tension of forces which we do not

ordinarily perceive, any more than we perceive (because its action is

universal) atmospheric pressure. Possibly if we were to be hollowed out

and then left to support the pressure of the air we might feel, in the

moment that preceded our extinction, that terrible weight which there

was nothing left in us to neutralise. Similarly when the abyss of

sickness and death opens within us, and we have no longer any resistance

to offer to the tumult with which the world and our own body rush upon

us, then to endure even the tension of our own muscles, the shudder that

freezes us to the marrow, then even to keep ourself motionless in what

we ordinarily regard as nothing but the simple negative position of a

lifeless thing requires, if we wish our head to remain erect and our

eyes calm, an expense of vital energy and becomes the object of an

exhausting struggle.

And if Legrandin had looked back at us with that astonished air, it was

because to him, as to the other people who passed us then, in the cab in

which my grandmother was apparently seated she had seemed to De

foundering, sliding into the abyss, clinging desperately to the cushions

which could barely arrest the downward plunge of her body, her hair in

disorder, her eye wild, unable any longer to face the assault of the

images which its pupil was not strong enough now to bear. She had

appeared to them, although I was still by her side, submerged in that

unknown world somewhere in which she had already received the blows,

traces of which she still bore when I looked up at her a few minutes

earlier in the Champs-Elysées, her hat, her face, her cloak left in

disorder by the hand of the invisible angel with whom she had wrestled.

I have thought, since, that this moment of her stroke cannot have

altogether surprised my grandmother, that indeed she had perhaps

foreseen it a long time back, had lived in expectation of it. She had

not known, naturally, when this fatal moment would come, had never been

certain, any more than those lovers whom a similar doubt leads

alternately to found unreasonable hopes and unjustified suspicions on

the fidelity of their mistresses. But it is rarely that these grave

maladies, like that which now at last had struck her full in the face,

do not take up their abode in the sick man for a long time before

killing him, during which time they make haste, like a “sociable”

neighbour or tenant, to introduce themselves to him. A terrible

acquaintance, not so much from the sufferings that it causes as from the

strange novelty of the definite restriction which it imposes upon life.

A woman sees herself dying, in these cases not at the actual moment of

death but months, sometimes years before, when death has hideously come

to dwell in her. The sufferer makes the acquaintance of the stranger

whom she hears coming and going in her brain. She does not know him by

sight, it is true, but from the sounds which she hears him regularly

make she can form an idea of his habits. Is he a criminal? One morning,

she can no longer hear him. He has gone. Ah! If it were only for ever!

In the evening he has returned. What are his plans? Her specialist, put

to the question, like an adored mistress, replies with avowals that one

day are believed, another day fail to convince her. Or rather it is not

the mistress’s part but that of the servants one interrogates that the

doctor plays. They are only third parties. The person whom we press for

an answer, whom we suspect of being about to play us false, is life

itself, and although we feel her to be no longer the same we believe in

her still or at least remain undecided until the day on which she

finally abandons us.

I helped my grandmother into Professor E——’s lift and a moment later he

came to us and took us into his consulting room. But there, busy as he

was, his bombastic manner changed, such is the force of habit; for his

habit was to be friendly, that is to say lively with his patients. Since

he knew that my grandmother was a great reader, and was himself one

also, he devoted the first few minutes to quoting various favourite

passages of poetry appropriate to the glorious summer weather. He had

placed her in an armchair and himself with his back to the light so as

to have a good view of her. His examination was minute and thorough,

even obliging me at one moment to leave the room. He continued it after

my return, then, having finished, went on, although the quarter of an

hour was almost at an end, repeating various quotations to my

grandmother. He even made a few jokes, which were witty enough, though I

should have preferred to hear them on some other occasion, but which

completely reassured me by the tone of amusement in which he uttered

them. I then remembered that M. Fallières, the President of the Senate,

had, many years earlier, had a false seizure, and that to the

consternation of his political rivals he had returned a few days later

to his duties and had begun, it was said, his preparations for a more or

less remote succession to the Presidency of the Republic. My confidence

in my grandmother’s prompt recovery was all the more complete in that,

just as I was recalling the example of M. Fallières, I was distracted

from following up the similarity by a shout of laughter, which served as

conclusion to one of the Professor’s jokes. After which he took out his

watch, wrinkled his brows petulantly on seeing that he was five minutes

late, and while he bade us good-bye rang for his other coat to be

brought to him at once. I waited until my grandmother had left the room,

closed the door and asked him to tell me the truth.

“There is not the slightest hope,” he informed me. “It is a stroke

brought on by uraemia. In itself, uraemia is not necessarily fatal, but

this case seems to me desperate. I need not tell you that I hope I am

mistaken. Anyhow, you have Cottard, you’re in excellent hands. Excuse

me,” he broke off as a maid came into the room with his coat over her

arm. “I told you, I’m dining with the Minister of Commerce, and I have a

call to pay first. Ah! Life is not all a bed of roses, as one is apt to

think at your age.”

And he graciously offered me his hand. I had shut the door behind me,

and a footman was shewing us into the hall when we heard a loud shout of

rage. The maid had forgotten to cut and hem the buttonhole for the

decorations. This would take another ten minutes. The Professor

continued to storm while I stood on the landing gazing at a grandmother

for whom there was not the slightest hope. Each of us is indeed alone.

We started for home.

The sun was sinking, it burnished an interminable wall along which our

cab had to pass before reaching the street in which we lived, a wall

against which the shadow cast by the setting sun of horse and carriage

stood out in black on a ruddy background, like a funeral car on some

Pompeian terra-cotta. At length we arrived at the house. I made the

invalid sit at the foot of the staircase in the hall, and went up to

warn my mother. I told her that my grandmother had come home feeling

slightly unwell, after an attack of giddiness. As soon as I began to

speak, my mother’s face was convulsed by the paroxysm of a despair which

was yet already so resigned that I realised that for many years she had

been holding herself quietly in readiness for an uncalendared but final

day. She asked me no question; it seemed that, just as malevolence likes

to exaggerate the sufferings of other people, so in her devotion she

would not admit that her mother was seriously ill, especially with a

disease which might affect the brain. Mamma shuddered, her eyes wept

without tears, she ran to give orders for the doctor to be fetched at

once; but when Françoise asked who was ill she could not reply, her

voice stuck in her throat. She came running downstairs with me,

struggling to banish from her face the sob that contracted it. My

grandmother was waiting below on the sofa in the hall, but, as soon as

she heard us coming, drew herself together, stood up, and waved her hand

cheerfully at Mamma. I had partially wrapped her head in a white lace

shawl, telling her that it was so that she should not catch cold on the

stairs. I had hoped that my mother would not notice the change in her

face, the distortion of her mouth; my precaution proved unnecessary; my

mother went up to my grandmother, kissed her hand as though it were that

of her God, raised her up, carried her to the lift with infinite

precautions in which there was, with the fear of hurting her by any

clumsy movement, the humility of one who felt herself unworthy to touch

the most precious thing, to her, in the world, but never once did she

raise her eyes, nor look at the sufferer’s face. Perhaps this was in

order that my grandmother might not be saddened by the thought that the

sight of her could alarm her daughter. Perhaps from fear of a grief so

piercing that she dared not face it. Perhaps from reverence, because she

did not feel it permissible to herself, without impiety, to remark the

trace of any mental weakening on those venerated features. Perhaps to be

better able to preserve intact in her memory the image of the true face

of my grandmother, radiant with wisdom and goodness. So they went up

side by side, my grandmother half hidden by her shawl, my mother turning

away her eyes.

Meanwhile there was one person who never took hers from what could be

made out of my grandmother’s altered features, at which her daughter

dared not look, a person who fastened on them a gaze wondering,

indiscreet and of evil omen: this was Françoise. Not that she was not

sincerely attached to my grandmother (indeed she had been disappointed

and almost scandalised by the coldness shewn by Mamma, whom she would

have liked to see fling herself weeping into her mother’s arms), but she

had a certain tendency always to look at the worse side of things, she

had retained from her childhood two peculiarities which would seem to be

mutually exclusive, but which when combined strengthened one another:

the want of restraint common among people of humble origin who make no

attempt to conceal the impression, in other words the painful alarm

aroused in them by the sight of a physical change which it would be in

better taste to appear not to notice, and the unfeeling coarseness of

the peasant who begins by tearing the wings off dragonflies until she is

allowed to wring the necks of chickens, and lacks that modesty which

would make her conceal the interest that she feels in the sight of

suffering flesh.

When, thanks to the faultless ministrations of Françoise, my grandmother

had been put to bed, she discovered that she could speak much more

easily, the little rupture or obstruction of a blood-vessel which had

produced the uraemia having apparently been quite slight. And at once

she was anxious not to fail Mamma in her hour of need, to assist her in

the most cruel moments through which she had yet had to pass.

“Well, my child,” she began, taking my mother’s hand in one of her own,

and keeping the other in front of her lips, so as to account for the

slight difficulty which she still found in uttering certain words. “So

this is all the pity you shew your mother! You look as if you thought

that indigestion was quite a pleasant thing!”

Then for the first time my mother’s eyes gazed passionately into those

of my grandmother, not wishing to see the rest of her face, and she

replied, beginning the list of those false promises which we swear but

are unable to fulfil:

“Mamma, you will soon be quite well again, your daughter will see to

that.”

And embodying all her dearest love, all her determination that her

mother should recover, in a kiss to which she entrusted them, and which

she followed with her mind, with her whole being until it flowered upon

her lips, she bent down to lay it humbly, reverently upon the precious

brow. My grandmother complained of a sort of alluvial deposit of

bedclothes which kept gathering all the time in the same place, over her

left leg, and from which she could never manage to free herself. But she

did not realise that she was herself the cause of this (so that day

after day she accused Françoise unjustly of not “doing” her bed

properly). By a convulsive movement she kept flinging to that side the

whole flood of those billowing blankets of fine wool, which gathered

there like the sand in a bay which is very soon transformed into a beach

(unless the inhabitants construct a breakwater) by the successive

deposits of the tide.

My mother and I (whose falsehood was exposed before we spoke by the

obnoxious perspicacity of Françoise) would not even admit that my

grandmother was seriously ill, as though such an admission might give

pleasure to her enemies (not that she had any) and it was more loving to

feel that she was not so bad as all that, in short from the same

instinctive sentiment which had led me to suppose that Andrée was too

sorry for Albertine to be really fond of her. The same individual

phenomena are reproduced in the mass, in great crises. In a war, the man

who does not love his country says nothing against it, but regards it as

lost, commiserates it, sees everything in the darkest colours.

Françoise was of infinite value to us owing to her faculty of doing

without sleep, of performing the most arduous tasks. And if, when she

had gone to bed after several nights spent in the sickroom, we were

obliged to call her a quarter of an hour after she had fallen asleep,

she was so happy to be able to do the most tiring duties as if they had

been the simplest things in the world that, so far from looking cross,

her face would light up with a satisfaction tinged with modesty. Only

when the time came for mass, or for breakfast, then, had my grandmother

been in her death agony, still Françoise would have quietly slipped away

so as not to make herself late. She neither could nor would let her

place be taken by her young footman. It was true that she had brought

from Combray an extremely exalted idea of everyone’s duty towards

ourselves; she would not have tolerated that any of our servants should

“fail” us. This doctrine had made her so noble, so imperious, so

efficient an instructor that there had never come to our house any

servants, however corrupted, who had not speedily modified, purified

their conception of life so far as to refuse to touch the usual

commissions from tradesmen and to come rushing—however little they might

previously have sought to oblige—to take from my hands and not let me

tire myself by carrying the smallest package. But at Combray Françoise

had contracted also—and had brought with her to Paris—the habit of not

being able to put up with any assistance in her work. The sight of

anyone coming to help her seemed to her like receiving a deadly insult,

and servants had remained for weeks in the house without receiving from

her any response to their morning greeting, had even gone off on their

holidays without her bidding them good-bye or their guessing her reason,

which was simply and solely that they had offered to do a share of her

work on some day when she had not been well. And at this moment when my

grandmother was so ill Françoise’s duties seemed to her peculiarly her

own. She would not allow herself, she, the official incumbent, to be

done out of her part in the ritual of these festal days. And so her

young footman, sent packing by her, did not know what to do with

himself, and not content with having copied the butler’s example and

supplied himself with note-paper from my desk had begun as well to

borrow volumes of poetry from my bookshelves. He sat reading them for a

good half of the day, out of admiration for the poets who had written

them, but also so as, during the rest of his time, to begem with

quotations the letters which he wrote to his friends in his native

village. Naturally he expected these to dazzle them. But as there was

little sequence in his ideas he had formed the notion that these poems,

picked out at random from my shelves, were matters of common knowledge,

to which it was customary to refer. So much so that in writing to these

peasants, whose stupefaction he discounted, he interspersed his own

reflexions with lines from Lamartine, just as he might have said “Who

laughs last, laughs longest!” or merely “How are you keeping?”

To ease her pain my grandmother was given morphine. Unfortunately, if

this relieved her in other ways, it increased the quantity of albumen.

The blows which we aimed at the wicked ogre who had taken up his abode

in my grandmother were always wide of the mark, and it was she, her poor

interposed body that had to bear them, without her ever uttering more

than a faint groan by way of complaint. And the pain that we caused her

found no compensation in a benefit which we were unable to give her. The

savage ogre whom we were anxious to exterminate we barely succeeded in

touching, and all we did was to enrage him still further, and possibly

hasten the moment at which he would devour his luckless captive. On

certain days when the discharge of albumen had been excessive Cottard,

after some hesitation, stopped the morphine. In this man, so

insignificant, so common, there was, in these brief moments in which he

deliberated, in which the relative dangers of one and another course of

treatment presented themselves alternately to his mind until he arrived

at a decision, the same sort of greatness as in a general who, vulgar in

all the rest of his life, is a great strategist, and in an hour of

peril, after a moment’s reflexion, decides upon what is from the

military point of view the wisest course, and gives the order: “Advance

eastwards.” Medically, however little hope there might be of setting any

limit to this attack of uraemia, it did not do to tire the kidneys. But,

on the other hand, when my grandmother did not have morphine, her pain

became unbearable; she perpetually attempted a certain movement which it

was difficult for her to perform without groaning. To a great extent,

suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar

with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to

that state. We can discern this origin of pain in the case of certain

inconveniences which are not such for everyone. Into a room filled with

a pungent smoke two men of a coarse fibre will come and attend to their

business; a third, more highly strung, will betray an incessant

discomfort. His nostrils will continue to sniff anxiously the odour he

ought, one would say, to try not to notice but will keep on attempting

to attach, by a more exact apprehension of it, to his troubled sense of

smell. One consequence of which may well be that his intense

preoccupation will prevent him from complaining of a toothache. When my

grandmother was in pain the sweat trickled over the pink expanse of her

brow, glueing to it her white locks, and if she thought that none of us

was in the room she would cry out: “Oh, it’s dreadful!” but if she

caught sight of my mother, at once she employed all her energy in

banishing from her face every sign of pain, or—an alternative

stratagem—repeated the same plaints, accompanying them with explanations

which gave a different sense, retrospectively, to those which my mother

might have overheard:

“Oh! My dear, it’s dreadful to have to stay in bed on a beautiful sunny

day like this when one wants to be out in the air; I am crying with rage

at your orders.”

But she could not get rid of the look of anguish in her eyes, the sweat

on her brow, the convulsive start, checked at once, of her limbs.

“There is nothing wrong. I’m complaining because I’m not lying very

comfortably. I feel my hair is untidy, my heart is bad, I knocked myself

against the wall.”

And my mother, at the foot of the bed, rivetted to that suffering form,

as though, by dint of piercing with her gaze that pain-bedewed brow,

that body which hid the evil thing within it, she could have succeeded

in reaching that evil thing and carrying it away, my mother said:

“No, no, Mamma dear, we won’t let you suffer like that, we will find

something to take it away, have patience just for a moment; let me give

you a kiss, darling—no, you’re not to move.”

And stooping over the bed, with bended knees, almost kneeling on the

ground, as though by an exercise of humility she would have a better

chance of making acceptable the impassioned gift of herself, she lowered

towards my grandmother her whole life contained in her face as in a

ciborium which she extended over her, adorned in relief with dimples and

folds so passionate, so sorrowful, so sweet that one knew not whether

they had been carved by the chisel of a kiss, a sob or a smile. My

grandmother, also, tried to lift up her face to Mamma’s. It was so

altered that probably, had she been strong enough to go out, she would

have been recognised only by the feather in her hat. Her features, like

the clay in a sculptor’s hands, seemed to be straining, with an effort

which distracted her from everything else, to conform to some particular

model which we failed to identify. This business of modelling was now

almost finished, and if my grandmother’s face had shrunk in the process

it had at the same time hardened. The veins that ran beneath its surface

seemed those not of a piece of marble but of some more rugged stone.

Constantly thrust forwards by the difficulty that she found in breathing

and as constantly forced back on to her pillow by exhaustion, her face,

worn, diminished, terribly expressive, seemed like, in a primitive,

almost prehistoric carving, the rude, flushed, purplish, desperate face

of some savage guardian of a tomb. But the whole task was not yet

accomplished. Next, her resistance must be overcome, and that tomb, the

entrance to which she had so painfully guarded, with that tense

contraction, entered.

In one of those moments in which, as the saying goes, one does not know

what saint to invoke, as my grandmother was coughing and sneezing a good

deal, we took the advice of a relative who assured us that if we sent

for the specialist X—— he would get rid of all that in a couple of days.

People say that sort of thing about their own doctors, and their friends

believe them just as Françoise always believed the advertisements in the

newspapers. The specialist came with his bag packed with all the colds

and coughs of his other patients, like Aeolus’s bottle. My grandmother

refused point-blank to let herself be examined. And we, out of

consideration for the doctor, who had had his trouble for nothing,

deferred to the desire that he expressed to inspect each of our noses in

turn, albeit there was nothing the matter with any of them. According to

him, however, there was; everything, whether headache or colic,

heart-disease or diabetes, was a disease of the nose that had been

wrongly diagnosed. To each of us he said: “I should like to have another

look at that little cornea. Don’t put it off too long. I can soon get

rid of it for you with a hot needle.” We were, of course, thinking of

something quite different. And yet we asked ourselves: “Get rid of

what?” In a word, every one of our noses was diseased; his mistake lay

only in his use of the present tense. For by the following day his

examination and provisional treatment had taken effect. Each of us had

his or her catarrh. And when in the street he ran into my father doubled

up with a cough, he smiled to think that an ignorant layman might

suppose the attack to be due to his intervention. He had examined us at

a moment when we were already ill.

My grandmother’s illness gave occasion to various people to manifest an

excess or deficiency of sympathy which surprised us quite as much as the

sort of chance which led one or another of them to reveal to us

connecting links of circumstances, or of friendship for that matter,

which we had never suspected. And the signs of interest shewn by the

people who called incessantly at the house to inquire revealed to us the

gravity of an illness which, until then, we had not sufficiently

detached from the countless painful impressions that we received in my

grandmother’s room. Summoned by telegram, her sisters declined to leave

Combray. They had discovered a musician there who gave them excellent

chamber concerts, in listening to which they thought that they could

find, better than by the invalid’s bedside, food for thought, a

melancholy exaltation the form of which was, to say the least of it,

unusual. Mme. Sazerat wrote to Mamma, but in the tone of a person whom

the sudden breaking off of a betrothal (the cause of the rupture being

her Dreyfusism) has parted from one for ever. Bergotte, on the other

hand, came every day and spent several hours with me.

He had always made a habit of going regularly for some time to the same

house, where, accordingly, he need not stand on ceremony. But formerly

it had been in order that he might talk without being interrupted; now

it was so that he might sit for as long as he chose in silence, without

being expected to talk. For he was very ill, some people said with

albuminuria, like my grandmother. According to another version, he had a

tumour. He grew steadily weaker; it was with difficulty that he came up

our staircase, with greater difficulty still that he went down it. Even

though he held on to the banisters he often stumbled, and he would, I

believe, have stayed at home had he not been afraid of losing altogether

the habit of going out, the capacity to go out, he, the “man with the

little beard” whom I had seen so alert, not very long since. He was now

quite blind and even his speech was frequently obstructed.

But at the same time, by a directly opposite process, the body of his

work, known only to a few literary people at the period when Mme. Swann

used to patronise their timid efforts to disseminate it, now grown in

stature and strength before the eyes of all, had acquired an

extraordinary power of expansion among the general public. The general

rule is, no doubt, that only after his death does a writer become

famous. But it was while he still lived, and during his slow progress

towards a death that he had not yet reached that this writer was able to

watch the progress of his works towards Renown. A dead writer can at

least be illustrious without any strain on himself. The effulgence of

his name is stopped short by the stone upon his grave. In the deafness

of the eternal sleep he is not importuned by Glory. But for Bergotte the

antithesis was still incomplete. He existed still sufficiently to suffer

from the tumult. He was moving still, though with difficulty, while his

books, bounding about him, like daughters whom one loves but whose

impetuous youthfulness and noisy pleasures tire one, brought day after

day, to his very bedside, a crowd of fresh admirers.

The visits which he now began to pay us came for me several years too

late, for I had no longer the same admiration for him as of old. Which

is not in any sense incompatible with the growth of his reputation. A

man’s work seldom becomes completely understood and successful before

that of another writer, still obscure, has begun in the minds of certain

people more difficult to please to substitute a fresh cult for one that

has almost ceased to command observance. In the books of Bergotte which

I constantly re-read, his sentences stood out as clearly before my eyes

as my own thoughts, the furniture in my room and the carriages in the

street. All the details were quite easily seen, not perhaps precisely as

one had always seen them, but at any rate as one was accustomed to see

them now. But a new writer had recently begun to publish work in which

the relations between things were so different from those that connected

them for me that I could understand hardly anything of what he wrote. He

would say, for instance: “The hose-pipes admired the smart upkeep of the

roads” (and so far it was simple, I followed him smoothly along those

roads) “which started every five minutes from Briand and Claudel.” At

that point I ceased to understand, because I had expected the name of a

place and was given that of a person instead. Only I felt that it was

not the sentence that was badly constructed but I myself that lacked the

strength and ability necessary to reach the end. I would start afresh

striving tooth and nail to climb to the pinnacle from which I would see

things in their novel relations. And each time, after I had got about

half way through the sentence, I would fall back again, as later on,

when I joined the Army, in my attempts at the exercise known as the

“bridge-ladder”. I felt nevertheless for the new writer the admiration

which an awkward boy who never receives any marks for gymnastics feels

when he watches another more nimble. And from then onwards I felt less

admiration for Bergotte, whose limpidity began to strike me as

insufficient. There was a time at which people recognised things quite

easily in pictures when it was Fromentin who had painted them, and could

not recognise them at all when it was Renoir.

People of taste and refinement tell us nowadays that Renoir is one of

the great painters of the last century. But in so saying they forget the

element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, well into the

present century, before Renoir was hailed as a great artist. To succeed

thus in gaining recognition, the original painter, the original writer

proceeds on the lines adopted by oculists. The course of treatment they

give us by their painting or by their prose is not always agreeable to

us. When it is at an end the operator says to us: “Now look!” And, lo

and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all,

but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to

us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women

pass in the street, different from what they used to be, because they

are Renoirs, those Renoir types which we persistently refused to see as

women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we

feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which reminds us of that

other which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world

except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable shades but

lacking precisely the shades proper to forests. Such is the new and

perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the

next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer

of original talent.

This writer who had taken Bergotte’s place in my affections wearied me

not by the incoherence but by the novelty of associations—perfectly

coherent—which my mind was not trained to follow. The fact that it was

always at the same point that I felt myself relinquish my grasp pointed

to a common character in the efforts that I had always to make.

Moreover, when once in a thousand times I did succeed in following the

writer to the end of his sentence, what I saw there was always of a

humour, a truth, a charm similar to those which I had found long ago in

reading Bergotte, only more delightful. I reflected that it was not so

many years since a similar reconstruction of the world, like that which

I was waiting now for his successor to produce, had been wrought for me

by Bergotte himself. Until I was led to ask myself whether there was

indeed any truth in the distinction which we are always making between

art, which is no more advanced now than in Homer’s day, and science with

its continuous progress. Perhaps, on the contrary, art was in this

respect like science; each new writer seemed to me to have advanced

beyond the stage of his immediate predecessor; and how was I to know

that in twenty years’ time, when I should be able to accompany without

strain or effort the newcomer of to-day, another might not appear at

whose approach he in turn would be packed off to the limbo to which his

own coming would have consigned Bergotte?

I spoke to the latter of the new writer. He gave me a distaste for him

not so much when he said that his art was uncouth, easy and vacuous, as

when he told me that he had seen him, and had almost mistaken him (so

strong was the likeness) for Bloch. From that moment my friend’s

features outlined themselves on the printed pages, and I no longer felt

any obligation to make the effort necessary to understand them. If

Bergotte had decried him to me it was less, I fancy, out of jealousy for

a success that was yet to come than out of ignorance of his work. He

read scarcely anything. The bulk of his thought had long since passed

from his brain into his books. He had grown thin, as though they had

been extracted from him by surgical operations. His reproductive

instinct no longer impelled him to any activity, now that he had given

an independent existence to almost all his thoughts. He led the

vegetative life of a convalescent, of a woman after childbirth; his fine

eyes remained motionless, vaguely dazed, like the eyes of a man who lies

on the sea shore and in a vague day-dream sees only each little breaking

wave. However, if it was less interesting to talk to him now than I

should once have found it, I felt no compunction for that. He was so far

a creature of habit that the simplest habits, like the most elaborate,

once he had formed them, became indispensable to him for a certain

length of time. I do not know what made him come to our house first of

all, but after that every day it was simply because he had been there

the day before. He would come to the house as he might have gone to a

café, so that no one should talk to him, so that he might—very

rarely—talk himself; one might in short have found in his conduct a sign

that he was moved to sympathise with us in our anxiety, or that he

enjoyed my company, had one sought to draw any conclusion from such an

assiduity in calling. It did not fail to impress my mother, sensitive to

everything that might be regarded as an act of homage to her invalid.

And every day she reminded me: “See that you don’t forget to thank him

nicely.”

We had also—a discreet feminine attention like the refreshments that are

brought to us in the studio, between sittings, by a painter’s mistress—a

courteous supplement to those which her husband paid us professionally,

a visit from Mme. Cottard. She came to offer us her “waiting-woman”, or,

if we preferred the services of a man, she would “scour the country” for

one, and, best of all, on our declining, said that she did hope this was

not just a “put-off” on our part, a word which in her world signifies a

false pretext for not accepting an invitation. She assured us that the

Professor, who never referred to his patients when he was at home, was

as sad about it as if it had been she herself who was ill. We shall see

in due course that even if this had been true it would have been at once

a very small and a considerable admission on the part of the most

faithless and the most attentive of husbands.

Offers as helpful and infinitely more touching owing to the form in

which they were couched (which was a blend of the highest intelligence,

the warmest sympathy, and a rare felicity of expression) were addressed

to me by the Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg. I had met him at

Balbec where he had come on a visit to one of his aunts, the Princesse

de Luxembourg, being himself at that time merely Comte de Nassau. He had

married, some months later, the charming daughter of another Luxembourg

Princess, extremely rich, because she was the only daughter of a Prince

who was the proprietor of an immense flour-mill. Whereupon the Grand

Duke of Luxembourg, who had no children of his own and was devoted to

his nephew Nassau, had obtained the approval of his Chamber to his

declaring the young man his heir. As with all marriages of this nature,

the origin of the bride’s fortune was the obstacle as it was also the

deciding factor. I remembered this Comte de Nassau as one of the most

striking young men I had ever met, already devoured, at that time, by a

dark and blazing passion for his betrothed. I was deeply touched by the

letters which he wrote me, day after day, during my grandmother’s

illness, and Mamma herself, in her emotion, quoted sadly one of her

mother’s expressions: “Sévigné would not have put it better.”

On the sixth day Mamma, yielding to my grandmother’s entreaties, left

her for a little and pretended to go and lie down. I should have liked

(so that my grandmother might go to sleep) Françoise to sit quite still

and not disturb her by moving. In spite of my supplications, she got up

and left the room; she was genuinely devoted to my grandmother; with her

uncanny insight and her natural pessimism she regarded her as doomed.

She would therefore have liked to pay her every possible attention. But

word had just come that an electrician was in the house, one of the

oldest servants of his firm, the head of which was his brother-in-law,

highly esteemed throughout the building, where he had worked for many

years, and especially by Jupien. This man had been ordered to come

before my grandmother’s illness. It seemed to me that he might have been

sent away again, or told to wait. But Françoise’s code of manners would

not permit of this; it would have been a want of courtesy towards this

worthy man; my grandmother’s condition ceased at once to matter. When,

after waiting a quarter of an hour, I lost my patience and went to look

for her in the kitchen, I found her talking to him on the landing of the

back staircase, the door of which stood open, a device which had the

advantage, should any of us come on the scene, of letting it be thought

that they were just saying good-bye, but had also the drawback of

sending a terrible draught through the house. Françoise tore herself

from the workman, not without turning to shout down after him various

greetings, forgotten in her haste, to his wife and brother-in-law. A

typical Combray scruple, not to be found wanting in politeness, which

Françoise extended even to foreign politics. People foolishly imagine

that the vast dimensions of social phenomena afford them an excellent

opportunity to penetrate farther into the human soul; they ought, on the

contrary, to realise that it is by plumbing the depths of a single

personality that they might have a chance of understanding those

phenomena. A thousand times over had Françoise told the gardener at

Combray that war was the most senseless of crimes, that life was the

only thing that mattered. Yet, when the Russo-Japanese war broke out,

she was quite ashamed, when she thought of the Tsar, that we had not

gone to war also to help the “poor Russians”, “since,” she reminded us,

“we’re allianced to them.” She felt this abstention to be not quite

polite to Nicholas II, who had always “said such nice things about us”;

it was a corollary of the same code which would have prevented her from

refusing a glass of brandy from Jupien, knowing that it would “upset”

her digestion, and which brought it about that now, with my grandmother

lying at death’s door, the same meanness of which she considered France

guilty in remaining neutral with regard to Japan she would have had to

admit in herself, had she not gone in person to make her apologies to

this good electrician who had been put to so much trouble.

Luckily for ourselves, we were soon rid of Françoise’s daughter, who was

obliged to be away for some weeks. To the regular stock of advice which

people at Combray gave to the family of an invalid: “You haven’t tried

taking him away for a little ... the change of air, you know ... pick up

an appetite ... etc?” she had added the almost unique idea, which she

had specially created in her own imagination, and repeated accordingly

whenever we saw her, without fail, as though hoping by dint of

reiteration to force it through the thickness of people’s heads: “She

ought to have taken herself in hand _radically_ from the first.” She did

not recommend any one cure rather than another, provided that it were

“radical”. As for Françoise herself, she noticed that we were not giving

my grandmother many medicines. Since, according to her, they only

destroyed the stomach, she was quite glad of this, but at the same time

even more humiliated. She had, in the South of France, some

cousins—relatively well-to-do—whose daughter, after falling ill just as

she was growing up, had died at twenty-three; for several years the

father and mother had ruined themselves on drugs, on different doctors,

on pilgrimages from one watering-place to another, until her decease.

Now all this seemed to Françoise, for the parents in question, a kind of

luxury, as though they had owned racehorses, or a place in the country.

They themselves, in the midst of their affliction, derived a certain

gratification from the thought of such lavish expenditure. They had now

nothing left, least of all their most precious possession, their child,

but they did enjoy telling people how they had done as much for her and

more than the richest in the land. The ultra-violet rays to the action

of which, several times a day for months on end, the poor girl had been

subjected, delighted them more than anything. The father, elated in his

grief by the glory of it all, was led to speak of his daughter at times

as of an operatic star for whose sake he had ruined himself. Françoise

was not unmoved by this wealth of scenic effect; that which framed my

grandmother’s sickbed seemed to her a trifle meagre, suited rather to an

illness on the stage of a small provincial theatre.

There came a time when her uraemic trouble affected my grandmother’s

eyes. For some days she could not see at all. Her eyes were not at all

like those of a blind person, but remained just the same as before. And

I gathered that she could see nothing only from the strangeness of a

certain smile of welcome which she assumed the moment one opened the

door, until one had come up to her and taken her hand, a smile which

began too soon and remained stereotyped on her lips, fixed, but always

full-faced, and endeavouring to be visible from all points, because she

could no longer rely upon her sight to regulate it, to indicate the

right moment, the proper direction, to bring it to the point, to make it

vary according to the change of position or of facial expression of the

person who had come in; because it was left isolated, without the

accompanying smile in her eyes which would have distracted a little from

it the attention of the visitor, it assumed in its awkwardness an undue

importance, giving one the impression of an exaggerated friendliness.

Then her sight was completely restored; from her eyes the wandering

affliction passed to her ears. For several days my grandmother was deaf.

And as she was afraid of being taken by surprise by the sudden entry of

some one whom she would not have heard come in, all day long, albeit she

was lying with her face to the wall, she kept turning her head sharply

towards the door. But the movement of her neck was clumsy, for one

cannot adapt oneself in a few days to this transposition of faculties,

so as, if not actually to see sounds, to listen with one’s eyes. Finally

her pain grew less, but the impediment of her speech increased. We were

obliged to ask her to repeat almost everything that she said.

And now my grandmother, realising that we could no longer understand

her, gave up altogether the attempt to speak and lay perfectly still.

When she caught sight of me she gave a sort of convulsive start like a

person who suddenly finds himself unable to breathe, but could make no

intelligible sound. Then, overcome by her sheer powerlessness, she let

her head drop on to the pillows, stretched herself out flat in her bed,

her face grave, like a face of marble, her hands motionless on the sheet

or occupied in some purely physical action such as that of wiping her

fingers with her handkerchief. She made no effort to think. Then came a

state of perpetual agitation. She was incessantly trying to get up. But

we restrained her so far as we could from doing so, for fear of her

discovering how paralysed she was. One day when she had been left alone

for a moment I found her standing on the floor in her nightgown trying

to open the window.

At Balbec, once, when a widow who had jumped into the sea had been

rescued against her will, my grandmother had told me (moved perhaps by

one of those presentiments which we discern at times in the mystery—so

obscure, for all that—of the organic life around us, in which

nevertheless it seems that our own future is foreshadowed) that she

could think of nothing so cruel as to tear a poor wretch from the death

that she had deliberately sought and restore her to her living

martyrdom.

We were just in time to catch my grandmother, she put up an almost

violent resistance to my mother, then, overpowered, seated forcibly in

an armchair, she ceased to wish for death, to regret being alive, her

face resumed its impassivity and she began laboriously to pick off the

hairs that had been left on her nightgown by a fur cloak which somebody

had thrown over her shoulders.

The look in her eyes changed completely; often uneasy, plaintive,

haggard, it was no longer the look we knew, it was the sullen expression

of a doddering old woman....

By dint of repeatedly asking her whether she would not like her hair

done, Françoise managed to persuade herself that the request had come

from my grandmother. She armed herself with brushes, combs, eau de

Cologne, a wrapper. “It can’t hurt Madame Amédée,” she said to herself,

“if I just comb her; nobody’s ever too ill for a good combing.” In other

words, one was never too weak for another person to be able, for her own

satisfaction, to comb one. But when I came into the room I saw between

the cruel hands of Françoise, as blissfully happy as though she were in

the act of restoring my grandmother to health, beneath a thin rain of

aged tresses which had not the strength to resist the action of the

comb, a head which, incapable of maintaining the position into which it

had been forced, was rolling to and fro with a ceaseless swirling motion

in which sheer debility alternated with spasms of pain. I felt that the

moment at which Françoise would have finished her task was approaching,

and I dared not hasten it by suggesting to her: “That is enough,” for

fear of her disobeying me. But I did forcibly intervene when, in order

that my grandmother might see whether her hair had been done to her

liking, Françoise, with innocent savagery, brought her a glass. I was

glad for the moment that I had managed to snatch it from her in time,

before my grandmother, whom we had carefully kept without a mirror,

could catch even a stray glimpse of a face unlike anything she could

have imagined. But, alas, when, a moment later, I leaned over her to

kiss that dear forehead which had been so harshly treated, she looked up

at me with a puzzled, distrustful, shocked expression: she did not know

me.

According to our doctor, this was a symptom that the congestion of her

brain was increasing. It must be relieved in some way.

Cottard was in two minds. Françoise hoped at first that they were going

to apply “clarified cups”. She looked for the effects of this treatment

in my dictionary, but could find no reference to it. Even if she had

said “scarified” instead of “clarified” she still would not have found

any reference to this adjective, since she did not look any more for it

under ‘S’ than under ‘C’, she did indeed say “clarified” but she wrote

(and consequently assumed that the printed word was) “esclarified”.

Cottard, to her disappointment, gave the preference, though without much

hope, to leeches. When, a few hours later, I went into my grandmother’s

room, fastened to her neck, her temples, her ears, the tiny black

serpents were writhing among her bloodstained locks, as on the head of

Medusa. But in her pale and peaceful, entirely motionless face I saw

wide open, luminous and calm, her own beautiful eyes, as in days gone by

(perhaps even more charged with the light of intelligence than they had

been before her illness, since, as she could not speak and must not

move, it was to her eyes alone that she entrusted her thought, that

thought which at one time occupies an immense place in us, offering us

undreamed-of treasures, at another time seems reduced to nothing, then

may be reborn, as though by spontaneous generation, by the withdrawal of

a few drops of blood), her eyes, soft and liquid like two pools of oil

in which the rekindled fire that was now burning lighted before the face

of the invalid a reconquered universe. Her calm was no longer the wisdom

of despair, but that of hope. She realised that she was better, wished

to be careful, not to move, and made me the present only of a charming

smile so that I should know that she was feeling better, as she gently

pressed my hand.

I knew the disgust that my grandmother felt at the sight of certain

animals, let alone being touched by them. I knew that it was in

consideration of a higher utility that she was enduring the leeches. And

so it infuriated me to hear Françoise repeating to her with that laugh

which people use to a baby, to make it crow: “Oh, look at the little

beasties running about on Madame.” This was, moreover, treating our

patient with a want of respect, as though she were in her second

childhood. But my grandmother, whose face had assumed the calm fortitude

of a stoic, did not seem even to hear her.

Alas! No sooner had the leeches been taken off than the congestion

returned and grew steadily worse. I was surprised to find that at this

stage, when my grandmother was so ill, Françoise was constantly

disappearing. The fact was that she had ordered herself a mourning

dress, and did not wish to keep her dressmaker waiting. In the lives of

most women, everything, even the greatest sorrow, resolves itself into a

question of “trying-on”.

A few days later, when I was in bed and sleeping, my mother came to call

me in the early hours of the morning. With that tender consideration

which, in great crises, people who are crushed by grief shew even for

the slightest discomfort of others:

“Forgive me for disturbing your sleep,” she said to me.

“I was not asleep,” I answered as I awoke.

I said this in good faith. The great modification which the act of

awakening effects in us is not so much that of introducing us to the

clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of

that other, rather more diffused light in which our mind has been

resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought, half

veiled from our perception, over which we were drifting still a moment

ago, kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to

refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakenings

produce an interruption of memory. A little later we describe these

states as sleep because we no longer remember them. And when shines that

bright star which at the moment of waking illuminates behind the sleeper

the whole expanse of his sleep, it makes him imagine for a few moments

that this was not a sleeping but a waking state; a shooting star, it

must be added, which blots out with the fading of its light not only the

false existence but the very appearance of our dream, and merely enables

him who has awoken to say to himself: “I was asleep.”

In a voice so gentle that she seemed to be afraid of hurting me, my

mother asked whether it would tire me too much to get out of bed, and,

stroking my hands, went on:

“My poor boy, you have only your Papa and Mamma to help you now.”

We went into the sickroom. Bent in a semi-circle on the bed a creature

other than my grandmother, a sort of wild beast which was coated with

her hair and couched amid her bedclothes lay panting, groaning, making

the blankets heave with its convulsions. The eyelids were closed, and it

was because the one nearer me did not shut properly, rather than because

it opened at all that it left visible a chink of eye, misty, filmed,

reflecting the dimness both of an organic sense of vision and of a

hidden, internal pain. All this agitation was not addressed to us, whom

she neither saw nor knew. But if this was only a beast that was stirring

there, where could my grandmother be? Yes, I could recognise the shape

of her nose, which bore no relation now to the rest of her face, but to

the corner of which a beauty spot still adhered, and the hand that kept

thrusting the blankets aside with a gesture which formerly would have

meant that those blankets were pressing upon her, but now meant nothing.

Mamma asked me to go for a little vinegar and water with which to sponge

my grandmother’s forehead. It was the only thing that refreshed her,

thought Mamma, who saw that she was trying to push back her hair. But

now one of the servants was signalling to me from the doorway. The news

that my grandmother was in the last throes had spread like wildfire

through the house. One of those “extra helps” whom people engage at

exceptional times to relieve the strain on their servants (a practice

which gives deathbeds an air of being social functions) had just opened

the front door to the Duc de Guermantes, who was now waiting in the hall

and had asked for me: I could not escape him.

“I have just, my dear Sir, heard your tragic news. I should like, as a

mark of sympathy, to shake hands with your father.” I made the excuse

that I could not very well disturb him at the moment. M. de Guermantes

was like a caller who turns up just as one is about to start on a

journey. But he felt so intensely the importance of the courtesy he was

shewing us that it blinded him to all else, and he insisted upon being

taken into the drawing-room. As a general rule, he made a point of going

resolutely through the formalities with which he had decided to honour

anyone, and took little heed that the trunks were packed or the coffin

ready.

“Have you sent for Dieulafoy? No? That was a great mistake. And if you

had only asked me, I would have got him to come, he never refuses me

anything, although he has refused the Duchesse de Chartres before now.

You see, I set myself above a Princess of the Blood. However, in the

presence of death we are all equal,” he added, not that he meant to

suggest that my grandmother was becoming his equal, but probably because

he felt that a prolonged discussion of his power over Dieulafoy and his

pre-eminence over the Duchesse de Chartres would not be in very good

taste.

This advice did not in the least surprise me. I knew that, in the

Guermantes set, the name of Dieulafoy was regularly quoted (only with

slightly more respect) among those of other tradesmen who were “quite

the best” in their respective lines. And the old Duchesse de Mortemart

_née_ Guermantes (I never could understand, by the way, why, the moment

one speaks of a Duchess, one almost invariably says: “The old Duchess of

So-and-so,” or, alternatively, in a delicate Watteau tone, if she is

still young: “The little Duchess of So-and-so,”) would prescribe almost

automatically, with a droop of the eyelid, in serious cases: “Dieulafoy,

Dieulafoy!” as, if one wanted a place for ices, she would advise: “Poiré

Blanche,” or for small pastry “Rebattet, Rebattet.” But I was not aware

that my father had, as a matter of fact, just sent for Dieulafoy.

At this point my mother, who was waiting impatiently for some cylinders

of oxygen which would help my grandmother to breathe more easily, came

out herself to the hall where she little expected to find M. de

Guermantes. I should have liked to conceal him, had that been possible.

But convinced in his own mind that nothing was more essential, could be

more gratifying to her or more indispensable to the maintenance of his

reputation as a perfect gentleman, he seized me violently by the arm

and, although I defended myself as against an assault with repeated

protestations of “Sir, Sir, Sir,” dragged me across to Mamma, saying:

“Will you do me the great honour of presenting me to your mother?”

letting go a little as he came to the last word. And it was so plain to

him that the honour was hers that he could not help smiling at her even

while he was composing a grave face. There was nothing for it but to

mention his name, the sound of which at once started him bowing and

scraping, and he was just going to begin the complete ritual of

salutation. He apparently proposed to enter into conversation, but my

mother, overwhelmed by her grief, told me to come at once and did not

reply to the speeches of M. de Guermantes who, expecting to be received

as a visitor and finding himself instead left alone in the hall, would

have been obliged to retire had he not at that moment caught sight of

Saint-Loup who had arrived in Paris that morning and had come to us in

haste to inquire for news. “I say, this is a piece of luck!” cried the

Duke joyfully, catching his nephew by the sleeve, which he nearly tore

off, regardless of the presence of my mother who was again crossing the

hall. Saint-Loup was not sorry, I fancy, despite his genuine sympathy,

at having missed seeing me, considering his attitude towards myself. He

left the house, carried off by his uncle who, having had something very

important to say to him and having very nearly gone down to Doncières on

purpose to say it, was beside himself with joy at being able to save

himself so much exertion. “Upon my soul, if anybody had told me I had

only to cross the courtyard and I should find you here, I should have

thought it a huge joke; as your friend M. Bloch would say, it’s a

regular farce.” And as he disappeared down the stairs with Robert whom

he held by the shoulder: “All the same,” he went on, “it’s quite clear I

must have touched the hangman’s rope or something; I do have the most

astounding luck.” Not that the Duc de Guermantes was ill-bred; far from

it. But he was one of those men who are incapable of putting themselves

in the place of other people, who resemble in that respect undertakers

and the majority of doctors, and who, after composing their faces and

saying: “This is a very painful occasion,” after, if need be, embracing

you and advising you to rest, cease to regard a deathbed or a funeral as

anything but a social gathering of a more or less restricted kind at

which, with a joviality that has been checked for a moment only, they

scan the room in search of the person whom they can tell about their own

little affairs, or ask to introduce them to some one else, or offer a

“lift” in their carriage when it is time to go home. The Duc de

Guermantes, while congratulating himself on the “good wind” that had

blown him into the arms of his nephew, was still so surprised at the

reception—natural as it was—that had been given him by my mother, that

he declared later on that she was as disagreeable as my father was

civil, that she had “absent fits” during which she seemed literally not

to hear a word you said to her, and that in his opinion she had no

self-possession and perhaps even was not quite “all there”. At the same

time he had been quite prepared (according to what I was told) to put

this state of mind down, in part at any rate, to the circumstances, and

declared that my mother had seemed to him greatly “affected” by the sad

event. But he had still stored up in his limbs all the residue of bows

and reverences which he had been prevented from using up, and had so

little idea of the real nature of Mamma’s sorrow that he asked me, the

day before the funeral, if I was not doing anything to distract her.

A half-brother of my grandmother, who was in religion, and whom I had

never seen, had telegraphed to Austria, where the head of his Order was,

and having as a special privilege obtained leave, arrived that day.

Bowed down with grief, he sat by the bedside reading prayers and

meditations from a book, without, however, taking his gimlet eyes from

the invalid’s face. At one point, when my grandmother was unconscious,

the sight of this cleric’s grief began to upset me, and I looked at him

tenderly. He appeared surprised by my pity, and then an odd thing

happened. He joined his hands in front of his face, like a man absorbed

in painful meditation, but, on the assumption that I would then cease to

watch him, left, as I observed, a tiny chink between his fingers. And at

the moment when my gaze left his face, I saw his sharp eye, which had

been making use of its vantage-point behind his hands to observe whether

my sympathy were sincere. He was hidden there as in the darkness of a

confessional. He saw that I was still looking and at once shut tight the

lattice which he had left ajar. I have met him again since then, but

never has any reference been made by either of us to that minute. It was

tacitly agreed that I had not noticed that he was spying on me. In the

priest as in the alienist, there is always an element of the examining

magistrate. Besides, what friend is there, however cherished, in whose

and our common past there has not been some such episode which we find

it convenient to believe that he must have forgotten?

The doctor gave my grandmother an injection of morphine, and to make her

breathing less troublesome ordered cylinders of oxygen. My mother, the

doctor, the nursing sister held these in their hands; as soon as one was

exhausted another was put in its place. I had left the room for a few

minutes. When I returned I found myself face to face with a miracle.

Accompanied on a muted instrument by an incessant murmur, my grandmother

seemed to be greeting us with a long and blissful chant, which filled

the room, rapid and musical. I soon realized that this was scarcely less

unconscious, that it was as purely mechanical as the hoarse rattle that

I had heard before leaving the room. Perhaps to a slight extent it

reflected some improvement brought about by the morphine. Principally it

was the result (the air not passing quite in the same way through the

bronchial tubes) of a change in the register of her breathing. Released

by the twofold action of the oxygen and the morphine, my grandmother’s

breath no longer laboured, panted, groaned, but, swift and light, shot

like a skater along the delicious stream. Perhaps with her breath,

unconscious like that of the wind in the hollow stem of a reed, there

were blended in this chant some of those more human sighs which,

liberated at the approach of death, make us imagine impressions of

suffering or happiness in minds which already have ceased to feel, and

these sighs came now to add a more melodious accent, but without

changing its rhythm, to that long phrase which rose, mounted still

higher, then declined, to start forth afresh, from her unburdened bosom

in quest of the oxygen. Then, having risen to so high a pitch, having

been sustained with so much vigour, the chant, mingled with a murmur of

supplication from the midst of her ecstasy, seemed at times to stop

altogether like a spring that has ceased to flow.

Françoise, in any great sorrow, felt the need but did not possess the

art—as simple as that need was futile—of giving it expression. Regarding

my grandmother’s case as quite hopeless, it was her own personal

impressions that she was impelled to communicate to us. And all that she

could do was to repeat: “It makes me feel all queer,” in the same tone

in which she would say, when she had taken too large a plateful of

cabbage broth: “It’s like a load on my stomach,” sensations both of

which were more natural than she seemed to think. Though so feebly

expressed, her grief was nevertheless very great, and was aggravated

moreover by her annoyance that her daughter, detained at Combray (to

which this young Parisian now referred as “the Cambrousse” and where she

felt herself growing “_pétrousse_”, in other words fossilised), would

not, presumably, be able to return in time for the funeral ceremony,

which was certain, Françoise felt, to be a superb spectacle. Knowing

that we were not inclined to be expansive, she made Jupien promise at

all costs to keep every evening in the week free. She knew that he would

be engaged elsewhere at the hour of the funeral. She was determined at

least to “go over it all” with him on his return.

For several nights now my father, my grandfather and one of our cousins

had been sitting up, and never left the house during the day. Their

continuous devotion ended by assuming a mask of indifference, and their

interminable leisure round the deathbed made them indulge in that small

talk which is an inseparable accompaniment of prolonged confinement in a

railway carriage. Anyhow this cousin (a nephew of my great-aunt) aroused

in me an antipathy as strong as the esteem which he deserved and

generally enjoyed. He was always “sent for” in times of great trouble,

and was so assiduous in his attentions to the dying that their mourning

families, on the pretext that he was in delicate health, despite his

robust appearance, his bass voice and bristling beard, invariably

besought him, with the customary euphemisms, not to come to the

cemetery. I could tell already that Mamma, who thought of others in the

midst of the most crushing grief, would soon be saying to him, in a very

different form of words, what he was in the habit of hearing said on all

such occasions:

“Promise me that you won’t come ‘to-morrow’. Please for ‘her sake’. At

any rate, you won’t go ‘all the way’. It’s what she would have wished.”

But there was nothing for it; he was always the first to arrive “at the

house”, by reason of which he had been given, among another set, the

nickname (unknown to us) of “No flowers by request.” And before

attending everything he had always “attended to everything”, which

entitled him to the formula: “We don’t know how to thank you.”

“What’s that?” came in a loud voice from my grandfather, who had grown

rather deaf and had failed to catch something which our cousin had just

said to my father.

“Nothing,” answered the cousin. “I was just saying that I’d heard from

Combray this morning. The weather is appalling down there, and here

we’ve got too much sun.”

“Yet the barometer is very low,” put in my father.

“Where did you say the weather was bad?” asked my grandfather.

“At Combray.”

“Ah! I’m not surprised; whenever it’s bad here it’s fine at Combray, and

vice versa. Good gracious! Talking of Combray, has anyone remembered to

tell Legrandin?”

“Yes, don’t worry about that, it’s been done,” said my cousin, whose

cheeks, bronzed by an irrepressible growth of beard, dimpled faintly

with the satisfaction of having “remembered” it.

At this point my father hurried from the room. I supposed that a sudden

change, for better or worse, had occurred. It was simply that Dr.

Dieulafoy had just arrived. My father went to receive him in the

drawing-room, like the actor who is to come next on the stage. We had

sent for him not to cure but to certify, in almost a legal capacity. Dr.

Dieulafoy might indeed be a great physician, a marvellous professor; to

these several parts, in which he excelled, he added a third, in which he

remained for forty years without a rival, a part as original as that of

the arguer, the scaramouch or the noble father, which consisted in

coming to certify an agony or a death. The mere sound of his name

foreshadowed the dignity with which he would sustain the part, and when

the servant announced: “M. Dieulafoy,” one imagined oneself at a play by

Molière. To the dignity of his attitude was added, without being

conspicuous, the suppleness of a perfect figure. A face in itself too

good-looking was toned down by the convention due to distressing

circumstances. In the sable majesty of his frock coat the Professor

entered the room, melancholy without affectation, uttered not the least

word of condolence, which might have been thought insincere, nor was he

guilty of the slightest infringement of the rules of tact. At the foot

of a deathbed it was he and not the Duc de Guermantes who was the great

gentleman. Having examined my grandmother, but not so as to tire her,

and with an excess of reserve which was an act of courtesy to the doctor

who was treating the case, he murmured a few words to my father, bowed

respectfully to my mother to whom I felt that my father had positively

to restrain himself from saying: “Professor Dieulafoy.” But already our

visitor had turned away, not wishing to seem to be soliciting an

introduction, and left the room in the most polished manner conceivable,

simply taking with him the sealed envelope that was slipped into his

hand. He had not appeared to see it, and we ourselves were left

wondering for a moment whether we had really given it to him, such a

conjurer’s nimbleness had he put into the act of making it vanish

without thereby losing anything of the gravity—which was increased

rather—of the great consultant in his long frock coat with its silken

lapels, and his handsome head full of a noble commiseration. The

slowness and vivacity of his movements shewed that, even if he had a

hundred other visits to pay and patients waiting, he refused to appear

hurried. For he was the embodiment of tact, intelligence and kindness.

That eminent man is no longer with us. Other physicians, other

professors may have rivalled, may indeed have surpassed him. But the

“capacity” in which his knowledge, his physical endowments, his

distinguished manners made him triumph exists no longer for want of any

successor capable of taking his place. Mamma had not even noticed M.

Dieulafoy, everything that was not my grandmother having no existence

for her. I remember (and here I anticipate) that at the cemetery, where

we saw her, like a supernatural apparition, go up timidly to the grave

and seem to be gazing in the wake of a flying form that was already far

away, my father having remarked to her: “Old Norpois came to the house

and to the church and on here; he gave up a most important committee

meeting to come; you ought really to say a word to him, he’ll be so

gratified if you do,” my mother, when the Ambassador stood before her

and bowed, could do no more than gently incline a face that shewed no

tears. A couple of days earlier—to anticipate once again before

returning to where we were just now by the bed on which my grandmother

lay dying—while they were watching by the body, Françoise, who, not

disbelieving entirely in ghosts, was terrified by the least sound, had

said: “I believe that’s her.” But in place of fear it was an ineffable

sweetness that her words aroused in my mother, who would have been so

glad that the dead should return, to have her mother with her sometimes

still.

To return now to those last hours, “You heard about the telegram her

sisters sent us?” my grandfather asked the cousin.

“Yes, Beethoven, they told me about it, it’s worth framing; still, I’m

not surprised.”

“My poor wife, who was so fond of them, too,” said my grandfather,

wiping away a tear. “We mustn’t blame them. They’re stark mad, both of

them, as I’ve always said. What’s the matter now; aren’t you going on

with the oxygen?”

My mother spoke: “Oh, but then Mamma will be having more trouble with

her breathing.”

The doctor reassured her: “Oh, no! The effect of the oxygen will last a

good while yet; we can begin it again presently.”

It seemed to me that he would not have said this of a dying woman, that

if this good effect were to last it meant that we could still do

something to keep her alive. The hiss of the oxygen ceased for a few

moments. But the happy plaint of her breathing poured out steadily,

light, troubled, unfinished, without end, beginning afresh. Now and then

it seemed that all was over, her breath stopped, whether owing to one of

those transpositions to another octave that occur in the breathing of a

sleeper, or else from a natural interruption, an effect of

unconsciousness, the progress of asphyxia, some failure of the heart.

The doctor stooped to feel my grandmother’s pulse, but already, as if a

tributary were pouring its current into the dried river-bed, a fresh

chant broke out from the interrupted measure. And the first was resumed

in another pitch with the same inexhaustible force. Who knows whether,

without indeed my grandmother’s being conscious of them, a countless

throng of happy and tender memories compressed by suffering were not

escaping from her now, like those lighter gases which had long been

compressed in the cylinders? One would have said that everything that

she had to tell us was pouring out, that it was to us that she was

addressing herself with this prolixity, this earnestness, this effusion.

At the foot of the bed, convulsed by every gasp of this agony, not

weeping but now and then drenched with tears, my mother presented the

unreasoning desolation of a leaf which the rain lashes and the wind

twirls on its stem. They made me dry my eyes before I went up to kiss my

grandmother.

“But I thought she couldn’t see anything now?” said my father.

“One can never be sure,” replied the doctor.

When my lips touched her face, my grandmother’s hands quivered, a long

shudder ran through her whole body, reflex perhaps, perhaps because

certain affections have their hyperaesthesia which recognises through

the veil of unconsciousness what they barely need senses to enable them

to love. Suddenly my grandmother half rose, made a violent effort, as

though struggling to resist an attempt on her life. Françoise could not

endure this sight and burst out sobbing. Remembering what the doctor had

just said I tried to make her leave the room. At that moment my

grandmother opened her eyes. I thrust myself hurriedly in front of

Françoise to hide her tears, while my parents were speaking to the

sufferer. The sound of the oxygen had ceased; the doctor moved away from

the bedside. My grandmother was dead.

An hour or two later Françoise was able for the last time, and without

causing them any pain, to comb those beautiful tresses which had only

begun to turn grey and hitherto had seemed not so old as my grandmother

herself. But now on the contrary it was they alone that set the crown of

age on a face grown young again, from which had vanished the wrinkles,

the contractions, the swellings, the strains, the hollows which in the

long course of years had been carved on it by suffering. As at the

far-off time when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had

the features delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks

glowing with a chaste expectation, with a vision of happiness, with an

innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in

withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A

smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral

couch, death, like a sculptor of the middle ages, had laid her in the

form of a young maiden.

_CHAPTER TWO_

Albeit it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had been born again, life lay

intact before me, for that morning, after a succession of mild days,

there had been a cold mist which had not cleared until nearly midday. A

change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and oneself

anew. Formerly, when the wind howled in my chimney, I would listen to

the blows which it struck on the iron trap with as keen an emotion as

if, like the famous bow-taps with which the C Minor Symphony opens, they

had been the irresistible appeal of a mysterious destiny. Every change

in the aspect of nature offers us a similar transformation by adapting

our desires so as to harmonise with the new form of things. The mist,

from the moment of my awakening, had made of me, instead of the

centrifugal being which one is on fine days, a self-centred man, longing

for the chimney corner and the nuptial couch, a shivering Adam in quest

of a sedentary Eve, in this different world.

Between the soft grey tint of a morning landscape and the taste of a cup

of chocolate I tried to account for all the originality of the physical,

intellectual and moral life which I had taken with me, about a year

earlier, to Doncières, and which, blazoned with the oblong form of a

bare hillside—always present even when it was invisible—formed in me a

series of pleasures entirely distinct from all others, incommunicable to

my friends, in the sense that the impressions, richly interwoven with

one another, which gave them their orchestral accompaniment were a great

deal more characteristic of them, to my subconscious mind, than any

facts that I might have related. From this point of view the new world

in which the mist of this morning had immersed me was a world already

known to me (which only made it more real) and forgotten for some time

(which restored all its novelty). And I was able to look at several of

the pictures of misty landscapes which my memory had acquired, notably a

series of “Mornings at Doncières”, including my first morning there in

barracks and another, in a neighbouring country house, where I had gone

with Saint-Loup to spend the night: in which from the windows, whose

curtains I had drawn back at daybreak, before getting into bed again, in

the first a trooper, in the second (on the thin margin of a pond and a

wood all the rest of which was engulfed in the uniform and liquid

softness of the mist) a coachman busy polishing a strap had appeared to

me like those rare figures, scarcely visible to the eye obliged to adapt

itself to the mysterious vagueness of their half-lights, which emerge

from an obliterated fresco.

It was from my bed that I was looking this afternoon at these pictorial

memories, for I had gone back to bed to wait until the hour came at

which, taking advantage of the absence of my parents, who had gone for a

few days to Combray, I proposed to get up and go to a little play which

was being given that evening in Mme. de Villeparisis’s drawing-room. Had

they been at home I should perhaps not have ventured to go out; my

mother, in the delicacy of her respect for my grandmother’s memory,

wished the tokens of regret that were paid to it to be freely and

sincerely given; she would not have forbidden me this outing, she would

have disapproved of it. From Combray, on the other hand, had I consulted

her wishes, she would not have replied in a melancholy: “Do just as you

like; you are old enough now to know what is right or wrong,” but,

reproaching herself for having left me alone in Paris, and measuring my

grief by her own would have wished for it distractions of a sort which

she would have refused to herself, and which she persuaded herself that

my grandmother, solicitous above all things for my health and the

preservation of my nervous balance, would have advised me to take.

That morning the furnace of the new steam heater had for the first time

been lighted. Its disagreeable sound—an intermittent hiccough—had no

part whatsoever in my memories of Doncières. But its prolonged

encounter, in me this afternoon, with them was to give it so lasting an

affinity with them that whenever, after succeeding more or less in

forgetting it, I heard the central heater hiccough again it reminded me

of them.

There was no one else in the house but Françoise. The grey light,

falling like a fine rain on the earth, wove without ceasing a

transparent web through which the Sunday holiday-makers appeared in a

silvery sheen. I had flung to the foot of my bed the _Figaro_, for which

I had been sending out religiously every morning, ever since I had sent

in an article which it had not yet printed; despite the absence of the

sun, the intensity of the daylight was an indication that we were still

only half-way through the afternoon. The tulle window-curtains, vaporous

and friable as they would not have been on a fine day, had that same

blend of beauty and fragility that dragon-flies’ wings have, and

Venetian glass. It depressed me all the more that I should be spending

this Sunday by myself because I had sent a note that morning to Mlle. de

Stermaria. Robert de Saint-Loup, whom his mother had at length succeeded

in parting—after painful and abortive attempts—from his mistress, and

who immediately afterwards had been sent to Morocco in the hope of his

there forgetting one whom he had already for some little time ceased to

love, had sent me a line, which had reached me the day before,

announcing his arrival, presently, in France for a short spell of leave.

As he would only be passing through Paris (where his family were

doubtless afraid of seeing him renew relations with Rachel), he informed

me, to shew me that he had been thinking of me, that he had met at

Tangier Mlle. or rather Mme. (for she had divorced her husband three

months after their marriage) de Stermaria. And Robert, remembering what

I had told him at Balbec, had asked her, on my behalf, to arrange a

meeting. She would be delighted to dine with me, she had told him, on

one of the evenings which, before her return to Brittany, she would be

spending in Paris. He warned me to lose no time in writing to Mme. de

Stermaria, for she would certainly have arrived before I got his letter.

This had come as no surprise to me, even although I had had no news of

him since, at the time of my grandmother’s last illness, he had accused

me of perfidy and treachery. It had then been quite easy to see what

must have happened. Rachel, who liked to provoke his jealousy—she had

other reasons also for wishing me harm—had persuaded her lover that I

had made a dastardly attempt to have relations with her in his absence.

It is probable that he continued to believe in the truth of this

allegation, but he had ceased to be in love with her, which meant that

its truth or falsehood had become a matter of complete indifference to

him, and our friendship alone remained. When, on meeting him again, I

attempted to speak to him about his attack on me his sole answer was a

cordial and friendly smile, which gave him the air of begging my pardon;

then he turned the conversation to something else. All this was not to

say that he did not, a little later, see Rachel occasionally when he was

in Paris. The fellow-creatures who have played a leading part in one’s

life very rarely disappear from it suddenly with any finality. They

return to take their old place in it at odd moments (so much so as to

lead people to believe in a renewal of old love) before leaving it for

ever. Saint-Loup’s breach with Rachel had very soon become less painful

to him, thanks to the soothing pleasure that was given him by her

incessant demands for money. Jealousy, which prolongs the course of

love, is not capable of containing many more ingredients than are the

other forms of imagination. If one takes with one, when one starts on a

journey, three or four images which incidentally one is sure to lose on

the way (such as the lilies and anemones heaped on the Ponte Vecchio, or

the Persian church shrouded in mist), one’s trunk is already pretty

full. When one parts from a mistress one would be just as glad, until

one has begun to forget her, that she should not become the property of

three or four potential protectors whom one has in one’s mind’s eye, of

whom, that is to say, one is jealous: all those whom one does not so

picture count for nothing. Now frequent demands for money from a

cast-off mistress no more give one a complete idea of her life than

charts shewing a high temperature would of her illness. But the latter

would at any rate be an indication that she was ill, and the former

furnish a presumption, vague enough, it is true, that the forsaken one,

or forsaker (whichever she be) cannot have found anything very

remarkable in the way of rich protectors. And so each demand is welcomed

with the joy which a lull produces in the jealous one’s sufferings,

while he responds to it at once by dispatching money, for naturally he

does not like to think of her being in want of anything, except lovers

(one of the three lovers he has in his mind’s eye), until time has

enabled him to regain his composure and he can learn without the

slightest emotion the name of his successor. Sometimes Rachel came in so

late at night that she could ask her former lover’s permission to lie

down beside him until the morning. This was a great comfort to Robert,

for it refreshed his memory of how they had, after all, lived in

intimacy together merely to see that even if he took the greater part of

the bed for himself it did not in the least interfere with her sleep. He

realised that she was more comfortable, lying close to his body, than

she would have been elsewhere, that she felt herself, by his side—even

in an hotel—to be in a bedroom known of old, in which the force of habit

prevails and one sleeps better. He felt that his shoulders, his limbs,

all of him were for her, even when he was unduly restless, from

sleeplessness or from having to get up in the night, things so entirely

usual that they could not disturb her, and that the perception of them

added still further to her sense of repose.

To revert to where we were, I had been all the more disquieted by

Robert’s letter in that I could read between the lines what he had not

ventured to write more explicitly. “You can most certainly ask her to

dine in a private room,” he told me. “She is a charming young person, a

delightful nature, you will get on splendidly with her, and I am sure

you will have a capital evening together.” As my parents were returning

at the end of the week, on Saturday or Sunday, and as after that I

should be forced to dine every evening at home, I had written at once to

Mme. de Stermaria, proposing any evening that might suit her, up to

Friday. A message was brought back that I should hear from her in

writing the same evening, about eight o’clock. The time would have

passed quickly enough if I had had, during the afternoon that separated

me from her letter, the help of a visit from anyone else. When the hours

pass wrapped in conversation one ceases to count, or indeed to notice

them, they vanish, and suddenly it is a long way beyond the point at

which it escaped you that there reappears the nimble truant time. But if

we are alone, our preoccupation, by bringing before us the still distant

and incessantly awaited moment with the frequency and uniformity of a

ticking pendulum, divides, or rather multiplies the hours by all the

minutes which, had we been with friends, we should not have counted. And

confronted, by the incessant return of my desire, with the ardent

pleasure which I was going to taste—not for some days though, alas!—in

Mme. de Stermaria’s company, this afternoon, which I should have to

spend by myself, seemed to me very empty and very melancholy.

Every now and then I heard the sound of the lift coming up, but it was

followed by a second sound, not that for which I was hoping, namely the

sound of its coming to a halt at our landing, but another very different

sound which the lift made in continuing its progress to the floors above

and which, because it so often meant the desertion of my floor when I

was expecting a visitor, remained for me at other times, even when I had

no wish to see anyone, a sound lugubrious in itself, in which there

echoed, as it were, a sentence of solitary confinement. Weary, resigned,

busy for several hours still over its immemorial task, the grey day

stitched its shimmering needlework of light and shade, and it saddened

me to think that I was to be left alone with a thing that knew me no

more than would a seamstress who, installed by the window so as to see

better while she finished her work, paid no attention to the person

present with her in the room. Suddenly, although I had heard no bell,

Françoise opened the door to let in Albertine, who came forward smiling,

silent, plump, containing in the fulness of her body, made ready so that

I might continue living them, come in search of me, the days we had

spent together at that Balbec to which I had never since returned. No

doubt, whenever we see again a person with whom our relations—however

trivial they may have been—are altered, it is like a juxtaposition of

two different periods. For this, we do not require that a former

mistress should come to call upon us as a friend, all that we need is

the visit to Paris of a person whom we had known in the daily round of

some particular kind of life, and that this life should have ceased for

us, were it no more than a week ago. On each of Albertine’s smiling,

questioning, blushing features I could read the questions: “And Madame

de Villeparisis? And the dancing-master? And the pastry-cook?” When she

sat down her back seemed to be saying: “Gracious! There’s no cliff here;

you don’t mind if I sit down beside you, all the same, as I used to do

at Balbec?” She was like an enchantress handing me a mirror that

reflected time. In this she was like all the people whom we seldom see

now but with whom at one time we lived on more intimate terms. With

Albertine, however, there was something more than this. Certainly, even

at Balbec, in our daily encounters, I had always been surprised when she

came in sight, so variable was her appearance from day to day. But now

it was difficult to recognise her. Cleared of the pink vapour that used

to bathe them, her features had emerged like those of a statue. She had

another face, or rather she had a face at last; her body too had grown.

There remained scarcely anything now of the shell in which she had been

enclosed and on the surface of which, at Balbec, her future outline had

been barely visible.

This time, Albertine had returned to Paris earlier than usual. As a rule

she came only in the spring, which meant that, already disturbed for

some weeks past by the storms that were beating down the first flowers,

I did not distinguish, in the elements of the pleasure that I felt, the

return of Albertine from that of the fine weather. It was enough that I

should be told that she was in Paris and that she had called at the

house, for me to see her again like a rose flowering by the sea. I

cannot say whether it was the desire for Balbec or for herself that

overcame me at such moments; possibly my desire for her was itself a

lazy, cowardly, and incomplete method of possessing Balbec, as if to

possess a thing materially, to take up one’s abode in a town, were

equivalent to possessing it spiritually. Besides, even materially, when

she was no longer posed by my imagination before a horizon of sea, but

sitting still in a room with me, she seemed to me often a very poor

specimen of a rose, so poor, indeed, that I would gladly have shut my

eyes in order not to observe this or that blemish of its petals, and to

imagine instead that I was inhaling the salt air on the beach.

I must say it at this point, albeit I was not then aware of what was to

happen only later on. Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one’s

life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to

pictures or statues. Only the example of other collectors should be a

warning to us to make changes, to have not one woman only but several.

Those charming suggestions in which a girl abounds of a sea-beach, of

the braided hair of a statue in church, of an old print, of everything

that makes one see and admire in her, whenever she appears, a charming

composition, those suggestions are not very stable. Live with a woman

altogether and you will soon cease to see any of the things that made

you love her; though I must add that these two sundered elements can be

reunited by jealousy. If, after a long period of life in common, I was

to end by seeing nothing more in Albertine than an ordinary woman, an

intrigue between her and some person whom she had loved at Balbec would

still suffice, perhaps, to reincorporate in her, to amalgamate the beach

and the unrolling of the tide. Only, as these secondary suggestions no

longer captivate our eyes, it is to the heart that they are perceptible

and fatal. We cannot, under so dangerous a form, regard the repetition

of the miracle as a thing to be desired. But I am anticipating the

course of years. And here I need only state my regret that I did not

have the sense simply to have kept my collection of women as people keep

their collections of old quizzing glasses, never so complete, in their

cabinet, that there is not room always for another and rarer still.

Departing from the customary order of her holiday movements, this year

she had come straight from Balbec, where furthermore she had not stayed

nearly so late as usual. It was a long time since I had seen her, and as

I did not know even by name the people with whom she was in the habit of

mixing in Paris, I could form no impression of her during the periods in

which she abstained from coming to see me. These lasted often for quite

a time. Then, one fine day, in would burst Albertine whose rosy

apparitions and silent visits left me little if any better informed as

to what she might have been doing in an interval which remained plunged

in that darkness of her hidden life which my eyes felt little anxiety to

pierce.

This time, however, certain signs seemed to indicate that some new

experience must have entered into that life. And yet, perhaps, all that

one was entitled to conclude from them was that girls change very

rapidly at the age which Albertine had now reached. For instance, her

intellect was now more in evidence, and on my reminding her of the day

when she had insisted with so much ardour on the superiority of her idea

of making Sophocles write: “My dear Racine,” she was the first to laugh,

quite whole-heartedly, at her own stupidity. “Andrée was quite right; it

was stupid of me,” she admitted. “Sophocles ought to have begun: ‘Sir.’”

I replied that the “Sir,” and “Dear Sir,” of Andrée were no less comic

than her own “My dear Racine,” or Gisèle’s “My dear Friend,” but that

after all the really stupid people were the Professors who still went on

making Sophocles write letters to Racine. Here, however, Albertine was

unable to follow me. She could not see in what the silliness consisted;

her intelligence was dawning, but had not fully developed. There were

other more attractive novelties in her; I felt, in this same pretty girl

who had just sat down by my bed, something that was different; and in

those lines which, in one’s eyes and other features, express one’s

general attitude towards life, a change of front, a partial conversion,

as though there had now been shattered those resistances against which I

had hurled my strength in vain at Balbec, one evening, now remote in

time, on which we formed a couple symmetrical with but the converse of

our present arrangement, since then it had been she who was lying down

and I who sat by her bedside. Wishing and not venturing to make certain

whether now she would let herself be kissed, every time that she rose to

go I asked her to stay beside me a little longer. This was a concession

not very easy to obtain, for albeit she had nothing to do (otherwise she

would have rushed from the house) she was a person methodical in her

habits and moreover not very gracious towards me, seeming scarcely to be

at ease in my company, and yet each time, after looking at her watch,

she sat down again at my request until finally she had spent several

hours with me without my having asked her for anything; the things I was

saying to her followed logically those that I had said during the hours

before, and bore no relation to what I was thinking about, what I

desired from her, remained indefinitely parallel. There is nothing like

desire for preventing the thing one says from bearing any resemblance to

what one has in one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as though we

were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects absolutely alien to

that by which we are obsessed. We then arrange that the sentence which

we should like to utter shall be accompanied, or rather preluded by a

gesture, supposing that is to say that we have not to give ourself the

pleasure of an immediate demonstration and to gratify the curiosity we

feel as to the reactions which will follow it, without a word said,

without even a “By your leave,” already made this gesture. Certainly I

was not in the least in love with Albertine; child of the mists outside,

she could merely content the imaginative desire which the change of

weather had awakened in me and which was midway between the desires that

are satisfied by the arts of the kitchen and of monumental sculpture

respectively, for it made me dream simultaneously of mingling with my

flesh a substance different and warm, and of attaching at some point to

my outstretched body a body divergent, as the body of Eve barely holds

by the feet to the side of Adam, to whose body hers is almost

perpendicular, in those romanesque bas-reliefs on the church at Balbec

which represent in so noble and so reposeful a fashion, still almost

like a classical frieze, the Creation of Woman; God in them is

everywhere followed, as by two ministers, by two little angels in whom

the visitor recognises—like winged, swarming summer creatures which

winter has surprised and spared—cupids from Herculaneum, still surviving

well into the thirteenth century, and winging their last slow flight,

weary but never failing in the grace that might be expected of them,

over the whole front of the porch.

As for this pleasure which by accomplishing my desire would have set me

free from these meditations and which I should have sought quite as

readily from any other pretty woman, had I been asked upon what—in the

course of this endless flow of talk throughout which I took care to keep

from Albertine the one thing that was in my mind—was based my optimistic

hypothesis with regard to her possible complaisances, I should perhaps

have answered that this hypothesis was due (while the forgotten outlines

of Albertine’s voice retraced for me the contour of her personality) to

the apparition of certain words which did not form part of her

vocabulary, or at least not in the acceptation which she now gave them.

Thus she said to me that Elstir was stupid, and, on my protesting:

“You don’t understand,” she replied, smiling, “I mean that it was stupid

of him to behave like that; of course I know he’s quite a distinguished

person, really.”

Similarly, wishing to say of the Fontainebleau golf club that it was

smart, she declared: “They are quite a selection.”

Speaking of a duel that I had fought, she said of my seconds: “What very

choice seconds,” and looking at my face confessed that she would like to

see me “wear a moustache”. She even went so far (and my chances appeared

then enormous) as to announce, in a phrase of which I would have sworn

that she was ignorant a year earlier, that since she had last seen

Gisèle there had passed a certain “lapse of time”. This was not to say

that Albertine had not already possessed, when I was at Balbec, a quite

adequate assortment of those expressions which reveal at once that one’s

people are in easy circumstances, and which, year by year, a mother

passes on to her daughter just as she bestows on her, gradually, as the

girl grows up, on important occasions, her own jewels. It was evident

that Albertine had ceased to be a little girl when one day, to express

her thanks for a present which a strange lady had given her, she had

said: “I am quite confused.” Mme. Bontemps could not help looking across

at her husband, whose comment was:

“Gad, she’s old for fourteen.”

The approach of nubility had been more strongly marked still when

Albertine, speaking of another girl whose tone was bad, said: “One can’t

even tell whether she’s pretty, she paints her face a foot thick.”

Finally, though still a schoolgirl, she already displayed the manner of

a grown woman of her upbringing and station when she said, of some one

whose face twitched: “I can’t look at him, because it makes me want to

do the same,” or, if some one else were being imitated: “The absurd

thing about it is that when you imitate her voice you look exactly like

her.” All these are drawn from the social treasury. But it did not seem

to me possible that Albertine’s natural environment could have supplied

her with “distinguished”, used in the sense in which my father would say

of a colleague whom he had not actually met, but whose intellectual

attainments he had heard praised: “It appears he’s quite a distinguished

person.” “Selection”, even when used of a golf club, seemed to me as

incompatible with the Simonet family as it would be, if preceded by the

adjective “Natural”, with a text published centuries before the

researches of Darwin. “Lapse of time” struck me as being of better

augury still. Finally there appeared the evidence of certain upheavals,

the nature of which was unknown to me, but sufficient to justify me in

all my hopes when Albertine announced, with the satisfaction of a person

whose opinion is by no means to be despised:

“To my mind, that is the best thing that could possibly happen. I regard

it as the best solution, the stylish way out.”

This was so novel, so manifestly an alluvial deposit giving one to

suspect such capricious wanderings over soil hitherto unknown to her,

that on hearing the words “to my mind” I drew Albertine towards me, and

at “I regard” made her sit on the side of my bed.

No doubt it does happen that women of moderate culture, on marrying

well-read men, receive such expressions as part of their paraphernalia.

And shortly after the metamorphosis which follows the wedding night,

when they begin to pay calls, and talk shyly to the friends of their

girlhood, one notices with surprise that they have turned into matrons

if, in deciding that some person is intelligent, they sound both ‘l’s in

the word; but that is precisely the sign of a change of state, and I

could see a difference when I thought of the vocabulary of the Albertine

I had known of old—a vocabulary in which the most daring flights were to

say of any unusual person: “He’s a type,” or, if you suggested a game of

cards to her: “I’ve no money to lose,” or again, if any of her friends

were to reproach her, in terms which she felt to be undeserved: “That

really is magnificent!” an expression dictated in such cases by a sort

of middle-class tradition almost as old as the _Magnificat_ itself, and

one which a girl slightly out of temper and confident that she is in the

right employs, as the saying is, “quite naturally”, that is to say

because she has learned the words from her mother, just as she has

learned to say her prayers or to greet a friend. All these expressions

Mme. Bontemps had imparted to her at the same time as her hatred of the

Jews and her feeling for black, which was always suitable and becoming,

indeed without any formal instruction, but as the piping of the parent

goldfinches serves as a model for that of the young ones, recently

hatched, so that they in turn grow into true goldfinches also. But when

all was said, “selection” appeared to me of alien growth and “I regard”

encouraging. Albertine was no longer the same; which meant that she

would not perhaps act, would not react in the same way.

Not only did I no longer feel any love for her, but I had no longer to

consider, as I should have had at Balbec, the risk of shattering in her

an affection for myself, which no longer existed. There could be no

doubt that she had long since become quite indifferent to me. I was well

aware that to her I was in no sense a member now of the “little band”

into which I had at one time so anxiously sought and had then been so

happy to have secured admission. Besides, as she had no longer even, as

in Balbec days, an air of frank good nature, I felt no serious scruples:

still I believe that what made me finally decide was another

philological discovery. As, continuing to add fresh links to the

external chain of talk behind which I hid my intimate desire, I spoke,

having Albertine secure now on the corner of my bed, of one of the girls

of the little band, one smaller than the rest, whom, nevertheless, I had

thought quite pretty, “Yes,” answered Albertine, “she reminds me of a

little _mousmé_.” There had been nothing in the world to shew, when I

first knew Albertine, that she had ever heard the word _mousmé_. It was

probable that, had things followed their normal course, she would never

have learned it, and for my part I should have seen no cause for regret

in that, for there is no more horrible word in the language. The mere

sound of it makes one’s teeth ache as they do when one has put too large

a spoonful of ice in one’s mouth. But coming from Albertine, as she sat

there looking so pretty, not even “_mousmé_” could strike me as

unpleasant. On the contrary, I felt it to be a revelation, if not of an

outward initiation, at any rate of an inward evolution. Unfortunately it

was now time for me to bid her good-bye if I wished her to reach home in

time for her dinner, and myself to be out of bed and dressed in time for

my own. It was Françoise who was getting it ready; she did not like

having to keep it back, and must already have found it an infringement

of one of the articles of her code that Albertine, in the absence of my

parents, should be paying me so prolonged a visit, and one which was

going to make everything late. But before “_mousmé_” all these arguments

fell to the ground and I hastened to say:

“Just fancy; I’m not in the least ticklish; you can go on tickling me

for an hour on end and I won’t even feel it.”

“Really?”

“I assure you.”

She understood, doubtless, that this was the awkward expression of a

desire on my part, for, like a person who offers to give you an

introduction for which you have not ventured to ask him, though what you

have said has shewn him that it would be of great service to you:

“Would you like me to try?” she inquired, with womanly meekness.

“Just as you like, but you would be more comfortable if you lay down

properly on the bed.”

“Like that?”

“No; get right on top.”

“You’re sure I’m not too heavy?”