As she uttered these words the door opened and Françoise, carrying a

lamp, came in. Albertine had just time to fling herself back upon her

chair. Perhaps Françoise had chosen this moment to confound us, having

been listening at the door or even peeping through the keyhole. But

there was no need to suppose anything of the sort; she might have

scorned to assure herself, by the use of her eyes, of what her instinct

must plainly enough have detected, for by dint of living with me and my

parents her fears, her prudence, her alertness, her cunning had ended by

giving her that instinctive and almost prophetic knowledge of us all

that the mariner has of the sea, the quarry of the hunter, and, of the

malady, if not the physician, often at any rate the patient. The amount

of knowledge that she managed to acquire would have astounded a

stranger, and with as good reason as does the advanced state of certain

arts and sciences among the ancients, seeing that there was practically

no source of information open to them. (Her sources were no larger. They

were a few casual remarks forming barely a twentieth part of our

conversation at dinner, caught on the wing by the butler and

inaccurately transmitted to the kitchen.) Again, her mistakes were due,

like theirs, like the fables in which Plato believed, rather to a false

conception of the world and to preconceived ideas than to the

insufficiency of the materials at her disposal. Only the other day, has

it not been possible for the most important discoveries as to the habits

of insects to be made by a scientist who had access to no laboratory and

used no instruments of any sort? But if the drawbacks arising from her

menial position had not prevented her from acquiring a stock of learning

indispensable to the art which was its ultimate goal—and which consisted

in putting us to confusion by communicating to us the results of her

discoveries—the limitations under which she worked had done more; in

this case the impediment, not content with merely not paralysing the

flight of her imagination, had greatly strengthened it. Of course

Françoise never let slip any artificial device, those for example of

diction and attitude. Since (if she never believed what we said to her,

hoping that she would believe it) she admitted without any shadow of

doubt the truth of anything that any person of her own condition in life

might tell her, however absurd, which might at the same time prove

shocking to our ideas, just as her way of listening to our assertions

bore witness to her incredulity, so the accents in which she reported

(the use of indirect speech enabling her to hurl the most deadly insults

at us with impunity) the narrative of a cook who had told her how she

had threatened her employers, and won from them, by treating them before

all the world like dirt, any number of privileges and concessions,

shewed that the story was to her as gospel. Françoise went so far as to

add: “I’m sure, if I had been the mistress I should have been quite

vexed.” In vain might we, despite our scant sympathy at first with the

lady on the fourth floor, shrug our shoulders, as though at an unlikely

fable, at this report of so shocking an example; in making it the teller

was able to speak with the crushing, the lacerating force of the most

unquestionable, most irritating affirmation.

But above all, just as great writers often attain to a power of

concentration from which they would have been dispensed under a system

of political liberty or literary anarchy, when they are bound by the

tyranny of a monarch or of a school of poetry, by the severity of

prosodic laws or of a state religion, so Françoise, not being able to

reply to us in an explicit fashion, spoke like Tiresias and would have

written like Tacitus. She managed to embody everything that she could

not express directly in a sentence for which we could not find fault

with her without accusing ourselves, indeed in less than a sentence, in

a silence, in the way in which she placed a thing in a room.

Thus when I happened to leave, by accident, on my table, among a pile of

other letters, one which it was imperative that she should not see,

because, let us say, it referred to her with a dislike which afforded a

presumption of the same feeling towards her in the recipient as in the

writer, that evening, if I came home with a troubled conscience and went

straight to my room, there on top of my letters, neatly arranged in a

symmetrical pile, the compromising document caught my eye as it could

not possibly have failed to catch the eye of Françoise, placed by her

right at the top, almost separated from the rest, in a prominence that

was a form of speech, that had an eloquence all its own, and, as I stood

in the doorway, made me shudder like a cry. She excelled in the

preparation of these scenic effects, intended so to enlighten the

spectator, in her absence, that he already knew that she knew everything

when in due course she made her appearance. She possessed, for thus

making an inanimate object speak, the art, at once inspired and

painstaking, of Irving or Frédéric Lemaître. On this occasion, holding

over Albertine and myself the lighted lamp whose searching beams missed

none of the still visible depressions which the girl’s body had hollowed

in the counterpane, Françoise made one think of a picture of “Justice

throwing light upon Crime.” Albertine’s face did not suffer by this

illumination. It revealed on her cheeks the same sunny burnish that had

charmed me at Balbec. This face of Albertine, the general effect of

which sometimes was, out of doors, a sort of milky pallor, now shewed,

according as the lamp shone on them, surfaces so dazzlingly, so

uniformly coloured, so firm, so glowing that one might have compared

them to the sustained flesh tints of certain flowers. Taken aback

meanwhile by the unexpected entry of Françoise, I exclaimed:

“What? The lamp already? I say, the light is strong!”

My object, as may be imagined, was by the second of these ejaculations

to account for my confusion, by the first to excuse my lateness in

rising. Françoise replied with a cruel ambiguity:

“Do you want me to extinglish it?”

“—guish!” Albertine slipped into my ear, leaving me charmed by the

familiar vivacity with which, taking me at once for teacher and for

accomplice, she insinuated this psychological affirmation as though

asking a grammatical question.

When Françoise had left the room and Albertine was seated once again on

my bed:

“Do you know what I’m afraid of?” I asked her. “It is that if we go on

like this I may not be able to resist the temptation to kiss you.”

“That would be a fine pity.”

I did not respond at once to this invitation, which another man might

even have found superfluous, for Albertine’s way of pronouncing her

words was so carnal, so seductive that merely in speaking to you she

seemed to be caressing you. A word from her was a favour, and her

conversation covered you with kisses. And yet it was highly attractive

to me, this invitation. It would have been so, indeed, coming from any

pretty girl of Albertine’s age; but that Albertine should be now so

accessible to me gave me more than pleasure, brought before my eyes a

series of images that bore the stamp of beauty. I recalled the original

Albertine standing between me and the beach, almost painted upon a

background of sea, having for me no more real existence than those

figures seen on the stage, when one knows not whether one is looking at

the actress herself who is supposed to appear, at an understudy who for

the moment is taking her principal’s part, or at a mere projection from

a lantern. Then the real woman had detached herself from the luminous

mass, had come towards me, with the sole result that I had been able to

see that she had nothing in real life of that amorous facility which one

supposed to be stamped upon her in the magic pictures. I had learned

that it was not possible to touch her, to embrace her, that one might

only talk to her, that for me she was no more a woman than the jade

grapes, an inedible decoration at one time in fashion on dinner tables,

are really fruit. And now she was appearing to me in a third plane, real

as in the second experience that I had had of her but facile as in the

first; facile, and all the more deliciously so in that I had so long

imagined that she was not. My surplus knowledge of life (of a life less

uniform, less simple than I had at first supposed it to be) inclined me

provisionally towards agnosticism. What can one positively affirm, when

the thing that one thought probable at first has then shewn itself to be

false and in the third instance turns out true? And alas, I was not yet

at the end of my discoveries with regard to Albertine. In any case, even

if there had not been the romantic attraction of this disclosure of a

greater wealth of planes revealed one after another by life (an

attraction the opposite of that which Saint-Loup had felt during our

dinners at Rivebelle on recognising beneath the mask with which the

course of existence had overlaid them, in a calm face, features to which

his lips had once been pressed), the knowledge that to kiss Albertine’s

cheeks was a possible thing was a pleasure perhaps greater even than

that of kissing them. What a difference between possessing a woman to

whom one applies one’s body alone, because she is no more than a piece

of flesh, and possessing the girl whom one used to see on the beach with

her friends on certain days without even knowing why one saw her on

those days and not on others, which made one tremble to think that one

might not see her again. Life had obligingly revealed to one in its

whole extent the romance of this little girl, had lent one, for the

study of her, first one optical instrument, then another, and had added

to one’s carnal desire an accompaniment which multiplied it an

hundredfold and diversified it with those other desires, more spiritual

and less easily assuaged, which do not emerge from their torpor, leaving

carnal desire to move by itself, when it aims only at the conquest of a

piece of flesh, but which to gain possession of a whole tract of

memories, whence they have felt the wretchedness of exile, rise in a

tempest round about it, enlarge, extend it, are unable to follow it to

the accomplishment, the assimilation, impossible in the form in which it

is looked for, of an immaterial reality, but wait for this desire half

way and at the moment of recollection, of return furnish it afresh with

their escort; to kiss, instead of the cheeks of the first comer, however

cool and fresh they might be, but anonymous, with no secret, with no

distinction, those of which I had so long been dreaming, would be to

know the taste, the savour of a colour on which I had endlessly gazed.

One has seen a woman, a mere image in the decorative setting of life,

like Albertine, outlined against the sea, and then one has been able to

take that image, to detach it, to bring it close to oneself, gradually

to discern its solidity, its colours, as though one had placed it behind

the glasses of a stereoscope. It is for this reason that the women who

are a little difficult, whose resistance one does not at once overcome,

of whom one does not indeed know at first whether one ever will overcome

it, are alone interesting. For to know them, to approach them, to

conquer them is to make fluctuate in form, in dimensions, in relief the

human image, is an example of relativity in the appreciation of an image

which it is delightful to see afresh when it has resumed the slender

proportions of a silhouette in the setting of one’s life. The women one

meets first of all in a brothel are of no interest because they remain

invariable.

In addition, Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to her, all my

impressions of a series of seascapes of which I was particularly fond. I

felt that it was possible for me, on the girl’s two cheeks, to kiss the

whole of the beach at Balbec.

“If you really don’t mind my kissing you, I would rather put it off for

a little and choose a good moment. Only you mustn’t forget that you’ve

said I may. I shall want a voucher: ‘Valid for one kiss.’”

“Shall I have to sign it?”

“But if I took it now, should I be entitled to another later on?”

“You do make me laugh with your vouchers; I shall issue a new one every

now and then.”

“Tell me; just one thing more. You know, at Balbec, before I had been

introduced to you, you used often to have a hard, calculating look; you

can’t tell me what you were thinking about when you looked like that?”

“No; I don’t remember at all.”

“Wait; this may remind you: one day your friend Gisèle put her feet

together and jumped over the chair an old gentleman was sitting in. Try

to remember what was in your mind at that moment.”

“Gisèle was the one we saw least of; she did belong to the band, I

suppose, but not properly. I expect I thought that she was very ill-bred

and common.”

“Oh, is that all?”

I should certainly have liked, before kissing her, to be able to fill

her afresh with the mystery which she had had for me on the beach before

I knew her, to find latent in her the place in which she had lived

earlier still; for that, at any rate, if I knew nothing of it, I could

substitute all my memories of our life at Balbec, the sound of the waves

rolling up and breaking beneath my window, the shouts of the children.

But when I let my eyes glide over the charming pink globe of her cheeks,

the gently curving surfaces of which ran up to expire beneath the first

foothills of her piled black tresses which ran in undulating mountain

chains, thrust out escarped ramparts and moulded the hollows of deep

valleys, I could not help saying to myself: “Now at last, after failing

at Balbec, I am going to learn the fragrance of the secret rose that

blooms in Albertine’s cheeks, and since the cycles through which we are

able to make things and people pass in the course of our existence are

comparatively few, perhaps I ought now to regard mine as nearing its end

when, having made to emerge from its remoteness the flowering face that

I had chosen from among all others, I shall have brought it into this

new plane in which I shall at last acquire a tactual experience of it

with my lips.” I told myself this because I believed that there was such

a thing as knowledge acquired by the lips; I told myself that I was

going to know the taste of this fleshly rose, because I had never

stopped to think that man, a creature obviously less rudimentary in

structure than the sea-urchin or even the whale, is nevertheless still

unprovided with a certain number of essential organs, and notably

possesses none that will serve for kissing. The place of this absent

organ he supplies with his lips, and thereby arrives perhaps at a

slightly more satisfying result than if he were reduced to caressing the

beloved with a horny tusk. But a pair of lips, designed to convey to the

palate the taste of whatever whets the appetite, must be content,

without ever realising their mistake or admitting their disappointment,

with roaming over the surface and with coming to a halt at the barrier

of the impenetrable but irresistible cheek. Besides, at such moments at

the actual contact between flesh and flesh, the lips, even supposing

them to become more expert and better endowed, could taste no better

probably the savour which nature prevents their ever actually grasping,

for in that desolate zone in which they are unable to find their proper

nourishment, they are alone; the sense of sight, then that of smell have

long since deserted them. To begin with, as my mouth began gradually to

approach the cheeks which my eyes had suggested to it that it should

kiss, my eyes, changing their position, saw a different pair of cheeks;

the throat, studied at closer range and as though through a magnifying

glass shewed in its coarse grain a robustness which modified the

character of the face.

Apart from the most recent applications of the art of photography—which

set crouching at the foot of a cathedral all the houses which, time and

again, when we stood near them, have appeared to us to reach almost to

the height of the towers, drill and deploy like a regiment, in file, in

open order, in mass, the same famous and familiar structures, bring into

actual contact the two columns on the Piazzetta which a moment ago were

so far apart, thrust away the adjoining dome of the Salute, and in a

pale and toneless background manage to include a whole immense horizon

within the span of a bridge, in the embrasure of a window, among the

leaves of a tree that stands in the foreground and is portrayed in a

more vigorous tone, give successively as setting to the same church the

arched walls of all the others—I can think of nothing that can so

effectively as a kiss evoke from what we believe to be a thing with one

definite aspect, the hundred other things which it may equally well be

since each is related to a view of it no less legitimate. In short, just

as at Balbec Albertine had often appeared to me different, so now, as

if, wildly accelerating the speed of the changes of aspect and changes

of colouring which a person presents to us in the course of our various

encounters, I had sought to contain them all in the space of a few

seconds so as to reproduce experimentally the phenomenon which

diversifies the individuality of a fellow creature, and to draw out one

from another, like a nest of boxes, all the possibilities that it

contains, in this brief passage of my lips towards her cheek it was ten

Albertines that I saw; this single girl being like a goddess with

several heads, that which I had last seen, if I tried to approach it,

gave place to another. At least so long as I had not touched it, that

head, I could still see it, a faint perfume reached me from it. But

alas—for in this matter of kissing our nostrils and eyes are as ill

placed as our lips are shaped—suddenly my eyes ceased to see; next, my

nose, crushed by the collision, no longer perceived any fragrance, and,

without thereby gaining any clearer idea of the taste of the rose of my

desire, I learned, from these unpleasant signs, that at last I was in

the act of kissing Albertine’s cheek.

Was it because we were enacting—as may be illustrated by the rotation of

a solid body—the converse of our scene together at Balbec, because it

was I, now, who was lying in bed and she who sat beside me, capable of

evading any brutal attack and of dictating her pleasure to me, that she

allowed me to take so easily now what she had refused me on the former

occasion with so forbidding a frown? (No doubt from that same frown the

voluptuous expression which her face assumed now at the approach of my

lips differed only by a deviation of its lines immeasurably minute but

one in which may be contained all the disparity that there is between

the gesture of “finishing off” a wounded man and that of bringing him

relief, between a sublime and a hideous portrait.) Not knowing whether I

had to give the credit, and to feel grateful for this change of attitude

to some unwitting benefactor who in these last months, in Paris or at

Balbec, had been working on my behalf, I supposed that the respective

positions in which we were now placed might account for it. It was quite

another explanation, however, that Albertine offered me; this, in short:

“Oh, well, you see, that time at Balbec I didn’t know you properly. For

all I knew, you might have meant mischief.” This argument left me in

perplexity. Albertine was no doubt sincere in advancing it. So difficult

is it for a woman to recognise in the movements of her limbs, in the

sensations felt by her body in the course of an intimate conversation

with a friend, the unknown sin into which she would tremble to think

that a stranger was planning her fall.

In any case, whatever the modifications that had occurred at some recent

time in her life, which might perhaps have explained why it was that she

now readily accorded to my momentary and purely physical desire what at

Balbec she had with horror refused to allow to my love, another far more

surprising manifested itself in Albertine that same evening as soon as

her caresses had procured in me the satisfaction which she could not

have failed to notice, which, indeed, I had been afraid might provoke in

her the instinctive movement of revulsion and offended modesty which

Gilberte had given at a corresponding moment behind the laurel shrubbery

in the Champs-Elysées.

The exact opposite happened. Already, when I had first made her lie on

my bed and had begun to fondle her, Albertine had assumed an air which I

did not remember in her, of docile good will, of an almost childish

simplicity. Obliterating every trace of her customary anxieties and

interests, the moment preceding pleasure, similar in this respect to the

moment after death, had restored to her rejuvenated features what seemed

like the innocence of earliest childhood. And no doubt everyone whose

special talent is suddenly brought into play becomes modest, devoted,

charming; especially if by this talent he knows that he is giving us a

great pleasure, he is himself happy in the display of it, anxious to

present it to us in as complete a form as possible. But in this new

expression on Albertine’s face there was more than a mere profession of

disinterestedness, conscience, generosity, a sort of conventional and

unexpected devotion; and it was farther than to her own childhood, it

was to the infancy of the race that she had reverted. Very different

from myself who had looked for nothing more than a physical alleviation,

which I had finally secured, Albertine seemed to feel that it would

indicate a certain coarseness on her part were she to seem to believe

that this material pleasure could be unaccompanied by a moral sentiment

or was to be regarded as terminating anything. She, who had been in so

great a hurry a moment ago, now, presumably because she felt that kisses

implied love and that love took precedence of all other duties, said

when I reminded her of her dinner:

“Oh, but that doesn’t matter in the least; I have plenty of time.”

She seemed embarrassed by the idea of getting up and going immediately

after what had happened, embarrassed by good manners, just as Françoise

when, without feeling thirsty, she had felt herself bound to accept with

a seemly gaiety the glass of wine which Jupien offered her, would never

have dared to leave him as soon as the last drops were drained, however

urgent the call of duty. Albertine—and this was perhaps, with another

which the reader will learn in due course, one of the reasons which had

made me unconsciously desire her—was one of the incarnations of the

little French peasant whose type may be seen in stone at

Saint-André-des-Champs. As in Françoise, who presently nevertheless was

to become her deadly enemy, I recognised in her a courtesy towards

friend and stranger, a sense of decency, of respect for the bedside.

Françoise who, after the death of my aunt, felt obliged to speak only in

a plaintive tone, would, in the months that preceded her daughter’s

marriage, have been quite shocked if, when the young couple walked out

together, the girl had not taken her lover’s arm. Albertine lying

motionless beside me said:

“What nice hair you have; what nice eyes; you are a dear boy.”

When, after pointing out to her that it was getting late, I added: “You

don’t believe me?” she replied, what was perhaps true but could be so

only since the minute before and for the next few hours:

“I always believe you.”

She spoke to me of myself, my family, my social position. She said: “Oh,

I know your parents know some very nice people. You are a friend of

Robert Forestier and Suzanne Delage.” For the moment these names

conveyed absolutely nothing to me. But suddenly I remembered that I had

indeed played as a child in the Champs-Elysées with Robert Forestier,

whom I had never seen since then. As for Suzanne Delage, she was the

great-niece of Mme. Blatin, and I had once been going to a dancing

lesson, and had even promised to take a small part in a play that was

being acted in her mother’s drawing-room. But the fear of being sent

into fits of laughter, and of a bleeding nose, had made me decline, so

that I had never set eyes on her. I had at the most a vague idea that I

had once heard that the Swanns’ governess with the feather in her hat

had at one time been with the Delages, but perhaps it was only a sister

of this governess, or a friend. I protested to Albertine that Robert

Forestier and Suzanne Delage occupied a very small place in my life.

“That may be; but your mothers are friends, I can place you by that. I

often pass Suzanne Delage in the Avenue de Messine, I admire her style.”

Our mothers were acquainted only in the imagination of Mme. Bontemps,

who having heard that I had at one time played with Robert Forestier, to

whom, it appeared, I used to recite poetry, had concluded from that that

we were bound by family ties. She could never, I gathered, hear my

mother’s name mentioned without observing: “Oh yes, she is in the Delage

Forestier set,” giving my parents a good mark which they had done

nothing to deserve.

Apart from this, Albertine’s social ideas were fatuous in the extreme.

She regarded the Simonnets with a double ‘n’ as inferior not only to the

Simonets with a single ‘n’ but to everyone in the world. That some one

else should bear the same name as yourself without belonging to your

family is an excellent reason for despising him. Of course there are

exceptions. It may happen that two Simonnets (introduced to one another

at one of those gatherings where one feels the need to converse, no

matter on what subject, and where moreover one is instinctively well

disposed towards strangers, for instance in a funeral procession on its

way to the cemetery), finding that they have the same name, will seek

with a mutual friendliness though without success to discover a possible

connexion. But that is only an exception. Plenty of people are of

dubious character, but we either know nothing or care nothing about

them. If, however, a similarity of names brings to our door letters

addressed to them, or vice versa, we at once feel a mistrust, often

justified, as to their moral worth. We are afraid of being confused with

them, we forestall the mistake by a grimace of disgust when anyone

refers to them in our hearing. When we read our own name, as borne by

them, in the newspaper, they seem to have usurped it. The transgressions

of other members of the social organism leave us cold. We lay the burden

of them more heavily upon our namesakes. The hatred which we bear

towards the other Simonnets is all the stronger in that it is not a

personal feeling but has been transmitted by heredity. After the second

generation we remember only the expression of disgust with which our

grandparents used to refer to the other Simonnets, we know nothing of

the reason, we should not be surprised to learn that it had begun with a

murder. Until, as is not uncommon, the time comes when a male and female

Simonnet, who are not related in any way, are joined together in

matrimony and so repair the breach.

Not only did Albertine speak to me of Robert Forestier and Suzanne

Delage, but spontaneously, with that impulse to confide which the

approximation of two human bodies creates, that is to say at first,

before it has engendered a special duplicity and reticence in one person

towards the other, she told me a story about her own family and one of

Andrée’s uncles, as to which, at Balbec, she had refused to utter a

word; thinking that now she ought not to appear to have any secrets in

which I might not share. From this moment, had her dearest friend said

anything to her against me, she would have made it her duty to inform

me. I insisted upon her going home, and finally she did go, but so

ashamed on my account at my discourtesy that she laughed almost as

though to apologise for me, as a hostess to whose party you have gone

without dressing makes the best of you but is offended nevertheless.

“Are you laughing at me?” I inquired.

“I am not laughing, I am smiling at you,” she replied lovingly. “When am

I going to see you again?” she went on, as though declining to admit

that what had just happened between us, since it is generally the

crowning consummation, might not be at least the prelude to a great

friendship, a friendship already existing which we should have to

discover, to confess, and which alone could account for the surrender we

had made of ourselves.

“Since you give me leave, I shall send for you when I can.” I dared not

let her know that I was subordinating everything else to the chance of

seeing Mme. de Stermaria. “It will have to be at short notice,

unfortunately,” I went on, “I never know beforehand. Would it be

possible for me to send round for you in the evenings, when I am free?”

“It will be quite possible in a little while, I am going to have a

latch-key of my own. But just at present it can’t be done. Anyhow I

shall come round to-morrow or next day in the afternoon. You needn’t see

me if you’re busy.”

On reaching the door, surprised that I had not anticipated her, she

offered me her cheek, feeling that there was no need now for any coarse

physical desire to prompt us to kiss one another. The brief relations in

which we had just indulged being of the sort to which an absolute

intimacy and a heartfelt choice often tend, Albertine had felt it

incumbent upon her to improvise and add provisionally to the kisses

which we had exchanged on my bed the sentiment of which those kisses

would have been the symbol for a knight and his lady such as they might

have been conceived in the mind of a gothic minstrel.

When she had left me, this young Picard, who might have been carved on

his porch by the image-maker of Saint-André-des-Champs, Françoise

brought me a letter which filled me with joy, for it was from Mme. de

Stermaria, who accepted my invitation to dinner. From Mme. de Stermaria,

that was to say for me not so much from the real Mme. de Stermaria as

from her of whom I had been thinking all day before Albertine’s arrival.

It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in

play not with a woman of the external world but with a puppet fashioned

and kept in our brain, the only form of her moreover that we have always

at our disposal, the only one that we shall ever possess, one which the

arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of imagination,

may have made as different from the real woman as had been from the real

Balbec the Balbec of my dreams; an artificial creation to which by

degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman into

resemblance.

Albertine had made me so late that the play had just finished when I

entered Mme. de Villeparisis’s drawing-room; and having little desire to

be caught in the stream of guests who were pouring out, discussing the

great piece of news, the separation, said to be already effected, of the

Duc de Guermantes from his wife, I had, until I should have an

opportunity of shaking hands with my hostess, taken my seat on an empty

sofa in the outer room, when from the other, in which she had no doubt

had her chair in the very front row of all, I saw emerging, majestic,

ample and tall in a flowing gown of yellow satin upon which stood out in

relief huge black poppies, the Duchess herself. The sight of her no

longer disturbed me in the least. There had been a day when, laying her

hands on my forehead (as was her habit when she was afraid of hurting my

feelings) and saying: “You really must stop hanging about trying to meet

Mme. de Guermantes. All the neighbours are talking about you. Besides,

look how ill your grandmother is, you really have something more serious

to think about than waylaying a woman who only laughs at you,” in a

moment, like a hypnotist who brings one back from the distant country in

which one imagined oneself to be, and opens one’s eyes for one, or like

the doctor who, by recalling one to a sense of duty and reality, cures

one of an imaginary disease in which one has been indulging one’s fancy,

my mother had awakened me from an unduly protracted dream. The rest of

the day had been consecrated to a last farewell to this malady which I

was renouncing; I had sung, for hours on end and weeping as I sang, the

sad words of Schubert’s _Adieu_:

Farewell, strange voices call thee

Away from me, dear sister of the angels.

And then it had finished. I had given up my morning walks, and with so

little difficulty that I thought myself justified in the prophecy (which

we shall see was to prove false later on) that I should easily grow

accustomed in the course of my life to ceasing to see a woman. And when,

shortly afterwards, Françoise had reported to me that Jupien, anxious to

enlarge his business, was looking for a shop in the neighbourhood,

wishing to find one for him (quite happy, moreover, when strolling along

a street which already from my bed I had heard luminously vociferous

like a peopled beach, to see behind the raised iron shutters of the

dairies the young milk-girls with their white sleeves), I had been able

to begin these excursions again. Nor did I feel the slightest

constraint; for I was conscious that I was no longer going out with the

object of seeing Mme. de Guermantes; much as a married woman who takes

endless precautions so long as she has a lover, from the day on which

she has broken with him leaves his letters lying about, at the risk of

disclosing to her husband an infidelity which ceased to alarm her the

moment she ceased to be guilty of it. What troubled me now was the

discovery that almost every house sheltered some unhappy person. In one

the wife was always in tears because her husband was unfaithful to her.

In the next it was the other way about. In another a hardworking mother,

beaten black and blue by a drunkard son, was endeavouring to conceal her

sufferings from the eyes of the neighbours. Quite half of the human race

was in tears. And when I came to know the people who composed it I saw

that they were so exasperating that I asked myself whether it might not

be the adulterous husband and wife (who were so simply because their

lawful happiness had been withheld from them, and shewed themselves

charming and faithful to everyone but their respective wife and husband)

who were in the right. Presently I ceased to have even the excuse of

being useful to Jupien for continuing my morning wanderings. For we

learned that the cabinet-maker in our courtyard, whose workrooms were

separated from Jupien’s shop only by the flimsiest of partitions, was

shortly to be “given notice” by the Duke’s agent because his hammering

made too much noise. Jupien could have hoped for nothing better; the

workrooms had a basement for storing timber, which communicated with our

cellars. He could keep his coal in this, he could knock down the

partition, and would then have a huge shop all in one room. But even

without the amusement of house-hunting on his behalf I had continued to

go out every day before luncheon, just as Jupien himself, finding the

rent that M. de Guermantes was asking him exorbitant, was allowing the

premises to be inspected in the hope that, discouraged by his failure to

find a tenant, the Duke would resign himself to accepting a lower offer.

Françoise, noticing that, even at an hour when no prospective tenant was

likely to call, the porter left the door of the empty shop on the latch,

scented a trap laid by him to entice the young woman who was engaged to

the Guermantes footman (they would find a lovers’ retreat there) and to

catch them red-handed.

However that might be, and for all that I had no longer to find Jupien a

new shop, I still went out before luncheon. Often, on these excursions,

I met M. de Norpois. It would happen that, conversing as he walked with

a colleague, he cast at me a glance which after making a thorough

scrutiny of my person returned to his companion without his having

smiled at me or given me any more sign of recognition than if he had

never set eyes on me before. For, with these eminent diplomats, looking

at you in a certain way is intended to let you know not that they have

seen you but that they have not seen you and that they have some serious

question to discuss with the colleague who is accompanying them. A tall

woman whom I frequently encountered near the house was less discreet

with me. For in spite of the fact that I did not know her, she would

turn round to look at me, would wait for me, unavailingly, before shop

windows, smile at me as though she were going to kiss me, make gestures

indicative of a complete surrender. She resumed an icy coldness towards

me if anyone appeared whom she knew. For a long time now in these

morning walks, thinking only of what I had to do, were it but the most

trivial purchase of a newspaper, I had chosen the shortest way, with no

regret were it outside the ordinary course which the Duchess followed in

her walks, and if on the other hand it lay along that course, without

either compunction or concealment, because it no longer appeared to me

the forbidden way on which I should snatch from an ungrateful woman the

favour of setting eyes on her against her will. But it had never

occurred to me that my recovery, when it restored me to a normal

attitude towards Mme. de Guermantes, would have a corresponding effect

on her, and so render possible a friendliness, even a friendship in

which I no longer felt any interest. Until then, the efforts of the

entire world banded together to bring me into touch with her would have

been powerless to counteract the evil spell that is cast by an

ill-starred love. Fairies more powerful than mankind have decreed that

in such cases nothing can avail us until the day on which we have

uttered sincerely and from our hearts the formula: “I am no longer in

love.” I had been vexed with Saint-Loup for not having taken me to see

his aunt. But he was no more capable than anyone else of breaking an

enchantment. So long as I was in love with Mme. de Guermantes, the marks

of politeness that I received from others, their compliments actually

distressed me, not only because they did not come from her but because

she would never hear of them. And yet even if she had known of them it

would not have been of the slightest use to me. Indeed, among the lesser

auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an

invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of

more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world. There

would be plenty of social success, were people taught upon these lines

the art of succeeding.

As she swept through the room in which I was sitting, her mind filled

with thoughts of friends whom I did not know and whom she would perhaps

be meeting presently at some other party, Mme. de Guermantes caught

sight of me on my sofa, genuinely indifferent and seeking only to be

polite whereas while I was in love I had tried so desperately, without

ever succeeding, to assume an air of indifference; she swerved aside,

came towards me and, reproducing the smile she had worn that evening at

the Opéra-Comique, which the unpleasant feeling of being cared for by

some one for whom she did not care was no longer there to obliterate:

“No, don’t move; you don’t mind if I sit down beside you for a moment?”

she asked, gracefully gathering in her immense skirt which otherwise

would have covered the entire sofa.

Of less stature than she, who was further expanded by the volume of her

gown, I was almost brushed by her exquisite bare arm round which a

faint, innumerable down rose in perpetual smoke like a golden mist, and

by the fringe of her fair tresses which wafted their fragrance over me.

Having barely room to sit down, she could not turn easily to face me,

and so, obliged to look straight before her rather than in my direction,

assumed the sort of dreamy, sweet expression one sees in a portrait.

“Have you any news of Robert?” she inquired.

At that moment Mme. de Villeparisis entered the room.

“Well, sir, you arrive at a fine time, when we do see you here for once

in a way!” And noticing that I was talking to her niece, concluding,

perhaps, that we were more intimate than she had supposed: “But don’t

let me interrupt your conversation with Oriane,” she went on, and (for

these good offices as pander are part of the duties of the perfect

hostess): “You wouldn’t care to dine with her here on Thursday?”

It was the day on which I was to entertain Mme. de Stermaria, so I

declined.

“Saturday, then?”

As my mother was returning on Saturday or Sunday, it would never do for

me not to stay at home every evening to dine with her; I therefore

declined this invitation also.

“Ah, you’re not an easy person to get hold of.”

“Why do you never come to see me?” inquired Mme. de Guermantes when Mme.

de Villeparisis had left us to go and congratulate the performers and

present the leading lady with a bunch of roses upon which the hand that

offered it conferred all its value, for it had cost no more than twenty

francs. (This, incidentally, was as high as she ever went when an artist

had performed only once. Those who gave their services at all her

afternoons and evenings throughout the season received roses painted by

the Marquise.)

“It’s such a bore that we never see each other except in other people’s

houses. Since you won’t meet me at dinner at my aunt’s, why not come and

dine with me?” Various people who had stayed to the last possible

moment, upon one pretext or another, but were at length preparing to

leave, seeing that the Duchess had sat down to talk to a young man on a

seat so narrow as just to contain them both, thought that they must have

been misinformed, that it was the Duchess, and not the Duke, who was

seeking a separation, and on my account. Whereupon they hastened to

spread abroad this intelligence. I had better grounds than anyone to be

aware of its falsehood. But I was myself surprised that at one of those

difficult periods in which a separation that is not yet completed is

beginning to take effect, the Duchess, instead of withdrawing from

society should go out of her way to invite a person whom she knew so

slightly. The suspicion crossed my mind that it had been the Duke alone

who had been opposed to her having me in the house, and that now that he

was leaving her she saw no further obstacle to her surrounding herself

with the people that she liked.

A minute earlier I should have been stupefied had anyone told me that

Mme. de Guermantes was going to ask me to call on her, let alone to dine

with her. I might be perfectly aware that the Guermantes drawing-room

could not furnish those particular refinements which I had extracted

from the name of its occupants, the fact that it had been forbidden

ground to me, by obliging me to give it the same kind of existence that

we give to the drawing-rooms of which we have read the description in a

novel, or seen the image in a dream, made me, even when I was certain

that it was just like any other, imagine it as quite different. Between

myself and it was the barrier at which reality ends. To dine with the

Guermantes was like travelling to a place I had long wished to see,

making a desire emerge from my brain and take shape before my eyes,

forming acquaintance with a dream. At the most, I might have supposed

that it would be one of those dinners to which one’s hosts invite one

with: “Do come; there’ll be _absolutely_ nobody but ourselves,”

pretending to attribute to the pariah the alarm which they themselves

feel at the thought of his mixing with their other friends, seeking

indeed to convert into an enviable privilege, reserved for their

intimates alone, the quarantine of the outsider, hopelessly uncouth,

whom they are befriending. I felt on the contrary that Mme. de

Guermantes was anxious for me to enjoy the most delightful society that

she had to offer me when she went on, projecting as she spoke before my

eyes as it were the violet-hued loveliness of a visit to Fabrice’s aunt

with the miracle of an introduction to Count Mosca:

“On Friday, now, couldn’t you? There are just a few people coming; the

Princesse de Parme, who is charming, not that I’ld ask you to meet

anyone who wasn’t nice.”

Discarded in the intermediate social grades which are engaged in a

perpetual upward movement, the family still plays an important part in

certain stationary grades, such as the lower middle class and the

semi-royal aristocracy, which latter cannot seek to raise itself since

above it, from its own special point of view, there exists nothing

higher. The friendship shewn me by her “aunt Villeparisis” and Robert

had perhaps made me, for Mme. de Guermantes and her friends, living

always upon themselves and in the same little circle, the object of a

curious interest of which I had no suspicion.

She had of those two relatives a familiar, everyday, homely knowledge,

of a sort, utterly different from what we imagine, in which if we happen

to be comprised in it, so far from our actions being at once ejected,

like the grain of dust from the eye or the drop of water from the

windpipe, they are capable of remaining engraved, and will still be

related and discussed years after we ourselves have forgotten them, in

the palace in which we are astonished to find them preserved, like a

letter in our own handwriting among a priceless collection of

autographs.

People who are merely fashionable may set a guard upon doors which are

too freely invaded. But the Guermantes door was not that. Hardly ever

did a stranger have occasion to pass by it. If, for once in a way, the

Duchess had one pointed out to her, she never dreamed of troubling

herself about the social increment that he would bring, since this was a

thing that she conferred and could not receive. She thought only of his

real merits. Both Mme. de Villeparisis and Saint-Loup had testified to

mine. Doubtless she might not have believed them if she had not at the

same time observed that they could never manage to secure me when they

wanted me, and therefore that I attached no importance to worldly

things, which seemed to the Duchess a sign that the stranger was to be

numbered among what she called “nice people”.

It was worth seeing, when one spoke to her of women for whom she did not

care, how her face changed as soon as one named, in connexion with one

of these, let us say, her sister-in-law. “Oh, she is charming!” the

Duchess would exclaim in a judicious, confident tone. The only reason

that she gave was that this lady had declined to be introduced to the

Marquise de Chaussegros and the Princesse de Silistrie. She did not add

that the lady had declined also an introduction to herself, the Duchesse

de Guermantes. This had, nevertheless, been the case, and ever since the

mind of the Duchess had been at work trying to unravel the motives of a

woman who was so hard to know, she was dying to be invited to call on

her. People in society are so accustomed to be sought after that the

person who shuns them seems to them a phoenix and at once monopolises

their attention.

Was the true motive in the mind of Mme. de Guermantes for thus inviting

me (now that I was no longer in love with her) that I did not run after

her relatives, although apparently run after myself by them? I cannot

say. In any case, having made up her mind to invite me, she was anxious

to do me the honours of the best company at her disposal and to keep

away those of her friends whose presence might have dissuaded me from

coming again, those whom she knew to be boring. I had not known to what

to attribute her change of direction, when I had seen her deviate from

her stellar path, come to sit down beside me and had heard her invite me

to dinner, the effect of causes unknown for want of a special sense to

enlighten us in this respect. We picture to ourselves the people who

know us but slightly—such as, in my case, the Duchesse de Guermantes—as

thinking of us only at the rare moments at which they set eyes on us. As

a matter of fact this ideal oblivion in which we picture them as holding

us is a purely arbitrary conception on our part. So that while, in our

solitary silence, like that of a cloudless night, we imagine the various

queens of society pursuing their course in the heavens at an infinite

distance, we cannot help an involuntary start of dismay or pleasure if

there falls upon us from that starry height, like a meteorite engraved

with our name which we supposed to be unknown on Venus or Cassiopeia, an

invitation to dinner or a piece of malicious gossip.

Perhaps now and then when, following the example of the Persian princes

who, according to the Book of Esther, made their scribes read out to

them the registers in which were enrolled the names of those of their

subjects who had shewn zeal in their service, Mme. de Guermantes

consulted her list of the well-disposed, she had said to herself, on

coming to my name: “A man we must ask to dine some day.” But other

thoughts had distracted her

(Beset by surging cares, a Prince’s mind

Towards fresh matters ever is inclined)

until the moment when she had caught sight of me sitting alone like

Mordecai at the palace gate; and, the sight of me having refreshed her

memory, sought, like Ahasuerus, to lavish her gifts upon me.

I must at the same time add that a surprise of a totally different sort

was to follow that which I had felt on hearing Mme. de Guermantes ask me

to dine with her. Since I had decided that it would shew greater

modesty, on my part, and gratitude also not to conceal this initial

surprise, but rather to exaggerate my expression of the delight that it

gave me, Mme. de Guermantes, who was getting ready to go on to another,

final party, had said to me, almost as a justification and for fear of

my not being quite certain who she was, since I appeared so astonished

at being invited to dine with her: “You know I’m the aunt of Robert de

Saint-Loup, who is such a friend of yours; besides we have met before.”

In replying that I was aware of this I added that I knew also M. de

Charlus, “who had been very good to me at Balbec and in Paris.” Mme. de

Guermantes appeared dumbfoundered, and her eyes seemed to turn, as

though for a verification of this statement, to some page, already

filled and turned, of her internal register of events. “What, so you

know Palamède, do you?” This name assumed on the lips of Mme. de

Guermantes a great charm, due to the instinctive simplicity with which

she spoke of a man who was socially so brilliant a figure, but for her

was no more than her brother-in-law and the cousin with whom she had

grown up. And on the confused greyness which the life of the Duchesse de

Guermantes was for me this name, Palamède, shed as it were the radiance

of long summer days on which she had played with him as a girl, at

Guermantes, in the garden. Moreover, in this long outgrown period in

their lives, Oriane de Guermantes and her cousin Palamède had been very

different from what they had since become; M. de Charlus in particular,

entirely absorbed in the artistic pursuits from which he had so

effectively restrained himself in later life that I was stupefied to

learn that it was he who had painted the huge fan with black and yellow

irises which the Duchess was at this moment unfurling. She could also

have shewn me a little sonatina which he had once composed for her. I

was completely unaware that the Baron possessed all these talents, of

which he never spoke. Let me remark in passing that M. de Charlus did

not at all relish being called “Palamède” by his family. That the form

“Mémé” might not please him one could easily understand. These stupid

abbreviations are a sign of the utter inability of the aristocracy to

appreciate its own poetic beauty (in Jewry, too, we may see the same

defect, since a nephew of Lady Israels, whose name was Moses, was

commonly known as “Momo”) concurrently with its anxiety not to appear to

attach any importance to what is aristocratic. Now M. de Charlus had, in

this connexion, a greater wealth of poetic imagination and a more

blatant pride. But the reason for his distaste for “Mémé” could not be

this, since it extended also to the fine name Palamède. The truth was

that, considering, knowing himself to come of a princely stock, he would

have liked his brother and sister-in-law to refer to him as “Charlus”,

just as Queen Marie-Amélie and Duc d’Orléans might have spoken of their

sons and grandsons, brothers and nephews as “Joinville, Nemours,

Chartres, Paris.”

“What a humbug Mémé is!” she exclaimed. “We talked to him about you for

hours; he told us that he would be delighted to make your acquaintance,

just as if he had never set eyes on you. You must admit he’s odd,

and—though it’s not very nice of me to say such a thing about a

brother-in-law I’m devoted to, and really do admire immensely—a trifle

mad at times.”

I was struck by the application of this last epithet to M. de Charlus,

and said to myself that this half-madness might perhaps account for

certain things, such as his having appeared so delighted by his own

proposal that I should ask Bloch to castigate his mother. I decided

that, by reason not only of the things he said but of the way in which

he said them, M. de Charlus must be a little mad. The first time that

one listens to a barrister or an actor, one is surprised by his tone, so

different from the conversational. But, observing that everyone else

seems to find this quite natural, one says nothing about it to other

people, one says nothing in fact to oneself, one is content with

appreciating the degree of talent shewn. At the most, one may think, of

an actor at the Théâtre-Français: “Why, instead of letting his raised

arm fall naturally, did he make it drop in a series of little jerks

broken by pauses for at least ten minutes?” or of a Labori: “Why,

whenever he opened his mouth, did he utter those tragic, unexpected

sounds to express the simplest things?” But as everybody admits these

actions to be necessary and obvious one is not shocked by them. So, upon

thinking it over, one said to oneself that M. de Charlus spoke of

himself with undue emphasis in a tone which was not in the least that of

ordinary speech. It seemed as though one might have at any moment

interrupted him with: “But why do you shout so? Why are you so

offensive?” only everyone seemed to have tacitly agreed that it was all

right. And one took one’s place in the circle which applauded his

outbursts. But certainly, at certain moments, a stranger might have

thought that he was listening to the ravings of a maniac.

“But are you sure you’re not thinking of some one else? Do you really

mean my brother-in-law Palamède?” went on the Duchess, a trace of

impertinence grafted upon her natural simplicity.

I replied that I was absolutely sure, and that M. de Charlus must have

failed to catch my name.

“Oh well! I shall leave you now,” said Mme. de Guermantes, as though she

regretted the parting. “I must look in for a moment at the Princesse de

Ligne’s. You aren’t going on there? No? You don’t care for parties?

You’re very wise, they are too boring for words. If only I hadn’t got to

go. But she’s my cousin; it wouldn’t be polite. I am sorry, selfishly,

for my own sake, because I could have taken you there, and brought you

back afterwards, too. So I shall say good-bye now, and look forward to

Friday.”

That M. de Charlus should have blushed to be seen with me by M.

d’Argencourt was all very well. But that to his own sister-in-law, who

had so high an opinion of him besides, he should deny all knowledge of

me, knowledge which was perfectly natural seeing that I was a friend of

both his aunt and his nephew, was a thing that I could not understand.

I shall end my account of this incident with the remark that from one

point of view there was in Mme. de Guermantes a true greatness which

consisted in her entirely obliterating from her memory what other people

would have only partially forgotten. Had she never seen me waylaying

her, following her, tracking her down as she took her morning walks, had

she never responded to my daily salute with an angry impatience, had she

never refused Saint-Loup when he begged her to invite me to her house,

she could not have greeted me now in a nobler or more gracious manner.

Not only did she waste no time in retrospective explanations, in hints,

allusions or ambiguous smiles, not only was there in her present

affability, without any harking back to the past, without any reticence,

something as proudly rectilinear as her majestic stature, but the

resentment which she might have felt against anyone in the past was so

entirely reduced to ashes, the ashes were themselves cast so utterly

from her memory, or at least from her manner, that on studying her face

whenever she had occasion to treat with the most exquisite

simplification what in so many other people would have been a pretext

for reviving stale antipathies and recriminations one had the impression

of an intense purity of mind.

But if I was surprised by the modification that had occurred in her

opinion of me, how much more did it surprise me to find a similar but

ever so much greater change in my feeling for her. Had there not been a

time during which I could regain life and strength only if—always

building new castles in the air!—I had found some one who would obtain

for me an invitation to her house and, after this initial boon, would

procure many others for my increasingly exacting heart? It was the

impossibility of finding any avenue there that had made me leave Paris

for Doncières to visit Robert de Saint-Loup. And now it was indeed by

the consequence of a letter from him that I was agitated, but on account

this time of Mme. de Stermaria, not of Mme. de Guermantes.

Let me add further, to conclude my account of this party, that there

occurred at it an incident, contradicted a few days later, which

continued to puzzle me, interrupted for some time my friendship with

Bloch, and constitutes in itself one of those curious paradoxes the

explanation of which will be found in the next part of this work. At

this party at Mme. de Villeparisis’s, Bloch kept on boasting to me about

the friendly attentions shewn him by M. de Charlus, who, when he passed

him in the street, looked him straight in the face as though he

recognised him, was anxious to know him personally, knew quite well who

he was. I smiled at first, Bloch having expressed so vehemently at

Balbec his contempt for the said M. de Charlus. And I supposed merely

that Bloch, like his father in the case of Bergotte, knew the Baron

“without actually knowing him”, and that what he took for a friendly

glance was due to absent-mindedness. But finally Bloch became so precise

and appeared so confident that on two or three occasions M. de Charlus

had wished to address him that, remembering that I had spoken of my

friend to the Baron, who had, as we walked away together from this very

house, as it happened, asked me various questions about him, I came to

the conclusion that Bloch was not lying, that M. de Charlus had heard

his name, realised that he was my friend, and so forth. And so, a little

later, at the theatre one evening, I asked M. de Charlus if I might

introduce Bloch to him, and, on his assenting, went in search of my

friend. But as soon as M. de Charlus caught sight of him an expression

of astonishment, instantly repressed, appeared on his face, where it

gave way to a blazing fury. Not only did he not offer Bloch his hand but

whenever Bloch spoke to him he replied in the most insolent manner, in

an angry and wounding tone. So that Bloch, who, according to his

version, had received nothing until then from the Baron but smiles,

assumed that I had not indeed commended but disparaged him in the short

speech in which, knowing M. de Charlus’s liking for formal procedure, I

had told him about my friend before bringing him up to be introduced.

Bloch left us, his spirit broken, like a man who has been trying to

mount a horse which is always ready to take the bit in its teeth, or to

swim against waves which continually dash him back on the shingle, and

did not speak to me again for six months.

The days that preceded my dinner with Mme. de Stermaria were for me by

no means delightful, in fact it was all I could do to live through them.

For as a general rule, the shorter the interval is that separates us

from our planned objective, the longer it seems to us, because we apply

to it a more minute scale of measurement, or simply because it occurs to

us to measure it at all. The Papacy, we are told, reckons by centuries,

and indeed may not think perhaps of reckoning time at all, since its

goal is in eternity. Mine was no more than three days off; I counted by

seconds, I gave myself up to those imaginings which are the first

movements of caresses, of caresses which it maddens us not to be able to

make the woman herself reciprocate and complete—those identical

caresses, to the exclusion of all others. And, as a matter of fact, it

is true that, generally speaking, the difficulty of attaining to the

object of a desire enhances that desire (the difficulty, not the

impossibility, for that suppresses it altogether), yet in the case of a

desire that is wholly physical the certainty that it will be realised,

at a fixed and not distant point in time, is scarcely less exciting than

uncertainty; almost as much as an anxious doubt, the absence of doubt

makes intolerable the period of waiting for the pleasure that is bound

to come, because it makes of that suspense an innumerably rehearsed

accomplishment and by the frequency of our proleptic representations

divides time into sections as minute as could be carved by agony. What I

required was to possess Mme. de Stermaria, for during the last few days,

with an incessant activity, my desires had been preparing this pleasure,

in my imagination, and this pleasure alone, for any other kind

(pleasure, that is, taken with another woman) would not have been ready,

pleasure being but the realisation of a previous wish, and of one which

is not always the same, but changes according to the endless

combinations of one’s fancies, the accidents of one’s memory, the state

of one’s temperament, the variability of one’s desires, the most

recently granted of which lie dormant until the disappointment of their

satisfaction has been to some extent forgotten; I should not have been

prepared, I had already turned from the main road of general desires and

had ventured along the bridle-path of a particular desire; I should have

had—in order to wish for a different assignation—to retrace my steps too

far before rejoining the main road and taking another path. To take

possession of Mme. de Stermaria on the island in the Bois de Boulogne

where I had asked her to dine with me, this was the pleasure that I

imagined to myself afresh every moment. It would have automatically

perished if I had dined on that island without Mme. de Stermaria; but

perhaps as greatly diminished had I dined, even with her, somewhere

else. Besides, the attitudes in which one pictures a pleasure to oneself

exist previously to the woman, to the type of woman required to give one

that pleasure. They dictate the pleasure, and the place as well, and on

that account bring to the fore alternatively, in our capricious fancy,

this or that woman, this or that scene, this or that room, which in

other weeks we should have dismissed with contempt. Child of the

attitude that produced her, one woman will not appeal to us without the

large bed in which we find peace by her side, while others, to be

caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the wind,

water rippling in the night, are as frail and fleeting as they.

No doubt in the past, long before I received Saint-Loup’s letter and

when there was as yet no question of Mme. de Stermaria, the island in

the Bois had seemed to me to be specially designed for pleasure, because

I had found myself going there to taste the bitterness of having no

pleasure to enjoy in its shelter. It is to the shores of the lake from

which one goes to that island, and along which, in the last weeks of

summer, those ladies of Paris who have not yet left for the country take

the air, that, not knowing where to look for her, or if indeed she has

not already left Paris, one wanders in the hope of seeing the girl go by

with whom one fell in love at the last ball of the season, whom one will

not have a chance of meeting again in any drawing-room until the

following spring. Feeling it to be at least the eve, if not the morrow,

of the beloved’s departure, one follows along the brink of the shivering

water those attractive paths by which already a first red leaf is

blooming like a last rose, one scans that horizon where, by a device the

opposite of that employed in those panoramas beneath whose domed roofs

the wax figures in the foreground impart to the painted canvas beyond

them the illusory appearance of depth and mass, our eyes, passing

without any transition from the cultivated park to the natural heights

of Meudon and the Mont Valérien, do not know where to set the boundary,

and make the natural country trespass upon the handiwork of the

gardener, of which they project far beyond its own limits the artificial

charm; like those rare birds reared in the open in a botanical garden

which every day in the liberty of their winged excursions sally forth to

strike, among the surrounding woods, an exotic note. Between the last

festivity of summer and one’s winter exile, one ranges anxiously that

romantic world of chance encounters and lover’s melancholy, and one

would be no more surprised to learn that it was situated outside the

mapped universe than if, at Versailles, looking down from the terrace,

an observatory round which the clouds are massed against a blue sky in

the manner of Van der Meulen, after having thus risen above the bounds

of nature, one were informed that, there where nature begins again at

the end of the great canal, the villages which one just could not make

out, on a horizon as dazzling as the sea, were called Fleurus or

Nimègue.

And then, the last carriage having rolled by, when one feels with a

throb of pain that she will not come now, one goes to dine on the

island; above the shivering poplars which suggest endless mysteries of

evening though without response, a pink cloud paints a last touch of

life in the tranquil sky. A few drops of rain fall without noise on the

water, ancient but still in its divine infancy coloured always by the

weather and continually forgetting the reflexions of clouds and flowers.

And after the geraniums have vainly striven, by intensifying the

brilliance of their scarlet, to resist the gathering darkness, a mist

rises to envelop the now slumbering island; one walks in the moist

dimness along the water’s edge, where at the most the silent passage of

a swan startles one like, in a bed, at night, the eyes, for a moment

wide open, and the swift smile of a child whom one did not suppose to be

awake. Then one would like to have with one a loving companion, all the

more as one feels oneself to be alone and can imagine oneself to be far

away from the world.

But to this island, where even in summer there was often a mist, how

much more gladly would I have brought Mme. de Stermaria now that the

cold season, the back end of autumn had come. If the weather that had

prevailed since Sunday had not by itself rendered grey and maritime the

scenes in which my imagination was living—as other seasons made them

balmy, luminous, Italian—the hope of, in a few days’ time, making Mme.

de Stermaria mine would have been quite enough to raise, twenty times in

an hour, a curtain of mist in my monotonously love-sick imagination. In

any event the mist, which since yesterday had risen even in Paris, not

only made me think incessantly of the native place of the young woman

whom I had invited to dine with me, but, since it was probable that, far

more thickly than in the streets of the town, it must after sunset be

invading the Bois, especially the shores of the lake, I thought that it

would make the Swans’ Island, for me, something like that Breton island

the marine and misty atmosphere of which had always enwrapped in my mind

like a garment the pale outline of Mme. de Stermaria. Of course when we

are young, at the age I had reached at the period of my walks along the

Méséglise way, our desires, our faith bestow on a woman’s clothing an

individual personality, an ultimate quintessence. We pursue reality. But

by dint of allowing it to escape we end by noticing that, after all

those vain endeavours which have led to nothing, something solid

subsists, which is what we have been seeking. We begin to separate, to

recognise what we love, we try to procure it for ourselves, be it only

by a stratagem. Then, in the absence of our vanished faith, costume

fills the gap, by means of a deliberate illusion. I knew quite well that

within half an hour of home I should not find myself in Brittany. But in

walking arm in arm with Mme. de Stermaria in the dusk of the island, by

the water’s edge, I should be acting like other men who, unable to

penetrate the walls of a convent, do at least, before enjoying a woman,

clothe her in the habit of a nun.

I could even look forward to hearing, as I sat with the lady, the

lapping of waves, for, on the day before our dinner, a storm broke over

Paris. I was beginning to shave myself before going to the island to

engage the room (albeit at this time of year the island was empty and

the restaurant deserted) and order the food for our dinner next day when

Françoise came in to tell me that Albertine had called. I made her come

in at once, indifferent to her finding me disfigured by a bristling

chin, her for whom at Balbec I had never felt smart enough and who had

cost me then as much agitation and distress as Mme. de Stermaria was

costing me now. The latter, I was determined, must go away with the best

possible impression from our evening together. Accordingly I asked

Albertine to come with me there and then to the island to order the

food. She to whom one gives everything is so quickly replaced by another

that one is surprised to find oneself giving all that one has, afresh,

at every moment, without any hope of future reward. At my suggestion the

smiling rosy face beneath Albertine’s flat cap, which came down very

low, to her eyebrows, seemed to hesitate. She had probably other plans;

if so she sacrificed them willingly, to my great satisfaction, for I

attached the utmost importance to my having with me a young housewife

who would know a great deal more than myself about ordering dinner.

It is quite true that she had represented something utterly different

for me at Balbec. But our intimacy, even when we do not consider it

close enough at the time, with a woman with whom we are in love creates

between her and us, in spite of the shortcomings that pain us while our

love lasts, social ties which outlast our love and even the memory of

our love. Then, in her who is nothing more for us than a means of

approach, an avenue towards others, we are just as astonished and amused

to learn from our memory what her name meant originally to that other

creature which we then were as if, after giving a cabman an address in

the Boulevard des Capucines or the Rue du Bac, thinking only of the

person whom we are going to see there, we remind ourself that the names

were once those of, respectively, the Capuchin nuns whose convent stood

on the site and the ferry across the Seine.

At the same time, my Balbec desires had so generously ripened

Albertine’s body, had gathered and stored in it savours so fresh and

sweet that, as we drove through the Bois, while the wind like a careful

gardener shook the trees, brought down the fruit, swept up the fallen

leaves, I said to myself that had there been any risk of Saint-Loup’s

being mistaken, or of my having misunderstood his letter, so that my

dinner with Mme. de Stermaria might lead to no satisfactory result, I

should have made an appointment for the same evening, later on, with

Albertine, so as to forget, for a purely voluptuous hour, as I held in

my arms a body of which my curiosity had long since computed, weighed up

all the possible charms in which now it abounded, the emotions and

perhaps the regrets of this first phase of love for Mme. de Stermaria.

And certainly if I could have supposed that Mme. de Stermaria would not

grant me any of her favours at our first meeting, I should have formed a

slightly depressing picture of my evening with her. I knew too well from

experience how the two stages which occur in us in the first phase of

our love for a woman whom we have desired without knowing her, loving in

her rather the particular kind of existence in which she is steeped than

her still unfamiliar self—how distorted is the reflexion of those two

stages in the world of facts, that is to say not in ourself any longer

but in our meetings with her. We have, without ever having talked to

her, hesitated, tempted as we were by the poetic charm which she

represented for us. Shall it be this woman or another? And lo, our

dreams become fixed round about her, cease to have any separate

existence from her. The first meeting with her which will shortly follow

should reflect this dawning love. Nothing of the sort. As if it were

necessary that our material life should have its first period also, in

love with her already, we talk to her in the most trivial fashion: “I

asked you to dine on this island because I thought the surroundings

would amuse you. I’ve nothing particular to say to you, don’t you know.

But it’s rather damp, I’m afraid, and you may find it cold——” “Oh, no,

not at all!” “You just say that out of politeness. Very well, Madame, I

shall allow you to battle against the cold for another quarter of an

hour, as I don’t want to bother you, but in fifteen minutes I shall

carry you off by force. I don’t want to have you catching a chill.” And

without another word said we take her home, remembering nothing about

her, at the most a certain look in her eyes, but thinking only of seeing

her again. Well, at our second meeting (when we do not find even that

look, our sole memory of her, but nevertheless have been thinking only

of seeing her again), the first stage is passed. Nothing has happened in

the interval. And yet, instead of talking about the comfort or want of

comfort of the restaurant, we say, without our words’ appearing to

surprise the new person, who seems to us positively plain but to whom we

should like to think that people were talking about us at every moment

in her life: “We are going to have our work cut out to overcome all the

obstacles in our way. Do you think we shall be successful? Do you

suppose that we can triumph over our enemies—live happily ever

afterwards, and all that sort of thing?” But these conversational

openings, trivial to begin with, then hinting at love, would not be

required; I could trust Saint-Loup’s letter for that. Mme. de Stermaria

would yield herself to me from the first, I should have no need

therefore to engage Albertine to come to me, as a makeshift, later in

the evening. It would be superfluous; Robert never exaggerated, and his

letter was explicit.

Albertine spoke hardly at all, conscious that my thoughts were

elsewhere. We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost

submarine grotto of a dense mass of trees, on the domed tops of which we

heard the wind sweep and the rain pelt. I trod underfoot dead leaves

which, like shells, were trampled into the soil, and poked with my stick

at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea-urchins.

On the boughs the last clinging leaves, shaken by the wind, followed it

only as far as their stems would allow, but sometimes these broke, and

they fell to the ground, along which they coursed to overtake it. I

thought with joy how much more remote still, if this weather lasted, the

island would be on the morrow—and in any case quite deserted. We

returned to our carriage and, as the storm had passed off, Albertine

asked me to take her on to Saint-Cloud. As on the ground the drifting

leaves so up above the clouds were chasing the wind. And a stream of

migrant evenings, of which a sort of conic section cut through the sky

made visible the successive layers, pink, blue and green, were gathered

in readiness for departure to warmer climes. To obtain a closer view of

a marble goddess who had been carved in the act of leaping from her

pedestal and, alone in a great wood which seemed to be consecrated to

her, filled it with the mythological terror, half animal, half divine,

of her frenzied bounding, Albertine climbed a grassy slope while I

waited for her in the road. She herself, seen thus from below, no longer

coarse and plump as, a few days earlier, on my bed when the grain of her

throat became apparent in the lens of my eye as it approached her

person, but chiselled and delicate, seemed a little statue on which our

happy hours together at Balbec had left their patina. When I found

myself alone again at home, and remembered that I had taken a drive that

afternoon with Albertine, that I was to dine in two days’ time with Mme.

de Guermantes and that I had to answer a letter from Gilberte, three

women each of whom I had once loved, I said to myself that our social

existence is, like an artist’s studio, filled with abandoned sketches in

which we have fancied for a moment that we could set down in permanent

form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that

sometimes, if the sketch be not too old, it may happen that we return to

it and make of it a work wholly different, and possibly more important

than what we had originally planned.

The next day was cold and fine; winter was in the air—indeed the season

was so far advanced that it had seemed miraculous that we should find in

the already pillaged Bois a few domes of gilded green. When I awoke I

saw, as from the window of the barracks at Doncières, a uniform, dead

white mist which hung gaily in the sunlight, consistent and sweet as a

web of spun sugar. Then the sun withdrew, and the mist thickened still

further in the afternoon. Night fell early, I made ready for dinner, but

it was still too soon to start; I decided to send a carriage for Mme. de

Stermaria. I did not like to go for her in it myself, not wishing to

force my company on her, but I gave the driver a note for her in which I

asked whether she would mind my coming to call for her. While I waited

for her answer I lay down on my bed, shut my eyes for a moment, then

opened them again. Over the top of the curtains there was nothing now

but a thin strip of daylight which grew steadily fainter. I recognised

that wasted hour, the large ante-room of pleasure, the dark, delicious

emptiness of which I had learned at Balbec to know and to enjoy when,

alone in my room as I was now, while all the rest were at dinner, I saw

without regret the daylight fade from above my curtains, knowing that,

presently, after a night of arctic brevity, it was to be resuscitated in

a more dazzling brightness in the lighted rooms of Rivebelle. I sprang

from my bed, tied my black necktie, passed a brush over my hair, final

gestures of a belated tidying carried out at Balbec with my mind not on

myself but on the women whom I should see at Rivebelle, while I smiled

at them in anticipation in the mirror that stood across a corner of my

room, gestures which, on that account, had continued to herald a form of

entertainment in which music and lights would be mingled. Like magic

signs they summoned, nay rather presented this entertainment already;

thanks to them I had, of its intoxicating frivolous charm, as complete

an enjoyment as I had had at Combray, in the month of July, when I heard

the hammer-blows ring on the packing cases and enjoyed, in the coolness

of my darkened room, a sense of warmth and sunshine.

Also, it was no longer exactly Mme. de Stermaria that I should have

wished most to see. Forced now to spend my evening with her, I should

have preferred, as it was almost the last before the return of my

parents, that it should remain free and myself try instead to find some

of the women from Rivebelle. I gave my hands one more final wash and, my

sense of pleasure keeping me on the move, dried them as I walked through

the shuttered dining-room. It appeared to have a door open on to the

lighted hall, but what I had taken for the bright chink of the door,

which as a matter of fact was closed, was only the gleaming reflexion of

my towel in a mirror that had been laid against the wall in readiness to

be fixed in its place before Mamma’s return. I thought of all the other

illusions of the sort which I had discovered in different parts of the

house, and which were not optical only, for when we first came there I

had supposed that our next door neighbour kept a dog on account of the

continuous, almost human yapping which came from a certain pipe in the

kitchen whenever the tap was turned on. And the door on to the outer

landing never closed by itself, very gently, caught by a draught on the

staircase, without rendering those broken, voluptuous, whimpering

passages which sound over the chant of the pilgrims towards the end of

the Overture to _Tannhäuser_. I had, moreover, just as I had put my

towel back on its rail, an opportunity of hearing a fresh rendering of

this brilliant symphonic fragment, for at a peal of the bell I hurried

out to open the door to the driver who had come with Mme. de Stermaria’s

answer. I thought that his message would be: “The lady is downstairs,”

or “The lady is waiting.” But he had a letter in his hand. I hesitated

for a moment before looking to see what Mme. de Stermaria had written,

who, while she held the pen in her hand, might have been anything but

was now, detached from herself, an engine of fate, pursuing a course

alone, which she was utterly powerless to alter. I asked the driver to

wait downstairs for a moment, although he was cursing the fog. As soon

as he had gone I opened the envelope. On her card, inscribed _Vicomtesse

Alix de Stermaria_, my guest had written: “Am so sorry—am unfortunately

prevented from dining with you this evening on the island in the Bois.

Had been so looking forward to it. Will write you a proper letter from

Stermaria. Very sorry. Kindest regards.” I stood motionless, stunned by

the shock that I had received. At my feet lay the card and envelope,

fallen like the spent cartridge from a gun when the shot has been fired.

I picked them up, tried to analyse her message. “She says that she

cannot dine with me on the island in the Bois. One might gather from

that that she would dine with me somewhere else. I shall not be so

indiscreet as to go and fetch her, but, after all, that is quite a

reasonable interpretation.” And from that island in the Bois, as for the

last few days my thoughts had been installed there beforehand with Mme.

de Stermaria, I could not succeed in bringing them back to where I was.

My desire responded automatically to the gravitational force which had

been pulling it now for so many hours on end, and in spite of this

message, too recent to counteract that force, I went on instinctively

getting ready to start, just as a student, although ploughed by the

examiners, tries to answer one question more. At last I decided to tell

Françoise to go down and pay the driver. I went along the passage

without finding her, I passed through the dining-room, where suddenly my

feet ceased to sound on the bare boards as they had been doing and were

hushed to a silence which, even before I had realised the explanation of

it, gave me a feeling of suffocation and confinement. It was the carpets

which, in view of my parents’ return, the servants had begun to put down

again, those carpets which look so well on bright mornings when amid

their disorder the sun stays and waits for you like a friend come to

take you out to luncheon in the country, and casts over them the dappled

light and shade of the forest, but which now on the contrary were the

first installation of the wintry prison from which, obliged as I should

be to live, to take my meals at home, I should no longer be free now to

escape when I chose.

“Take care you don’t slip, Sir; they’re not tacked yet,” Françoise

called to me. “I ought to have lighted up. Oh, dear, it’s the end of

‘Sectember’ already, the fine days are over.” In no time, winter; at the

corner of a window, as in a Gallé glass, a vein of crusted snow; and

even in the Champs-Élysées, instead of the girls one waits to see,

nothing but solitary sparrows.

What added to my distress at not seeing Mme. de Stermaria was that her

answer led me to suppose that whereas, hour by hour, since Sunday, I had

been living for this dinner alone, she had presumably never given it a

second thought. Later on I learned of an absurd love match that she had

suddenly made with a young man whom she must already have been seeing at

this time, and who had presumably made her forget my invitation. For if

she had remembered it she would surely never have waited for the

carriage which I was not, for that matter, supposed to be sending for

her, to inform me that she was otherwise engaged. My dreams of a young

feudal maiden on a misty island had cleared the way to a still

non-existent love. Now my disappointment, my rage, my desperate desire

to recapture her who had just refused me were able, by bringing my

sensibility into play, to make definite the possible love which until

then my imagination alone had—and that more loosely—offered me.

How many are there in our memories, how many more have we forgotten, of

these faces of girls and young women, all different, to which we have

added a certain charm and a frenzied desire to see them again only

because at the last moment they eluded us? In the case of Mme. de

Stermaria there was a good deal more than this, and it was enough now to

make me love her for me to see her again so that I might refresh those

impressions, so vivid but all too brief, which my memory would not,

without such refreshment, have the strength to keep alive when we were

apart. Circumstances decided against me; I did not see her again. It was

not she that I loved, but it might well have been. And one of the things

that made most cruel, perhaps, the great love which was presently to

come to me was that when I thought of this evening I used to say to

myself that my love might, given a slight modification of very ordinary

circumstances, have been directed elsewhere, to Mme. de Stermaria; its

application to her who inspired it in me so soon afterwards was not

therefore—as I so longed, so needed to believe—absolutely necessary and

predestined.

Françoise had left me by myself in the dining-room with the remark that

it was foolish of me to stay there before she had lighted the fire. She

went to get me some dinner, for even before the return of my parents,

from this very evening, my seclusion was to begin. I caught sight of a

huge bundle of carpets, still rolled up, and leaning against one end of

the sideboard, and burying my head in it, swallowing its dust with my

own tears, as the Jews used to cover their heads with ashes in times of

mourning, I began to sob. I shuddered not only because the room was

cold, but because a distinct lowering of temperature (against the danger

and—I should add, perhaps—the by no means disagreeable sensation of

which we make no attempt to react) is brought about by a certain kind of

tears which fall from our eyes, drop by drop, like a fine, penetrating,

icy rain, and seem as though never would they cease to flow. Suddenly I

heard a voice:

“May I come in? Françoise told me you would be in the dining-room. I

looked in to see whether you would care to come out and dine somewhere,

if it isn’t bad for your throat—there’s a fog outside you could cut with

a knife.”

It was—arrived in Paris that morning, when I imagined him to be still in

Morocco or on the sea—Robert de Saint-Loup.

I have already said (as a matter of fact, it was Robert himself who, at

Balbec, had helped me, quite without meaning it, to arrive at this

conclusion) what I think about friendship: to wit that it is so small a

thing that I find it hard to understand how men with some claim to

genius—Nietzsche, for instance—can have been such simpletons as to

ascribe to it a certain intellectual value, and consequently to deny

themselves friendships in which intellectual esteem would have no part.

Yes, it has always been a surprise to me to find a man who carried

sincerity towards himself to so high a pitch as to cut himself off, by a

scruple of conscience, from Wagner’s music imagining that the truth

could ever be attained by the mode of expression, naturally vague and

inadequate, which our actions in general and acts of friendship in

particular furnish, or that there could be any kind of significance in

the fact of one’s leaving one’s work to go and see a friend and shed

tears with him on hearing the false report that the Louvre was burned. I

had got so far, at Balbec, as to find that the pleasure of playing with

a troop of girls is less destructive of the spiritual life, to which at

least it remains alien, than friendship, the whole effort of which is

directed towards making us sacrifice the one real and (save by the

channel of art) incommunicable part of ourself to a superficial self

which finds—not, like the other, any joy in itself, but rather a vague,

sentimental attraction in the feeling that it is being supported by

external props, hospitably entertained by a strange personality, through

which, happy in the protection that is afforded it there, it makes its

own comfort radiate in warm approval, and marvels at qualities which it

would denounce as faults and seek to correct in itself. Moreover the

scorners of friendship can, without illusion and not without remorse, be

the finest friends in the world, just as an artist carrying in his brain

a masterpiece and feeling that his duty is rather to live and carry on

his work, nevertheless, so as not to be thought or to run the risk of

actually being selfish, gives his life for a vain cause, and gives it

all the more gallantly in that the reasons for which he would have

preferred not to give it were disinterested. But whatever might be my

opinion of friendship, to mention only the pleasure that it procured me,

of a quality so mediocre as to be like something half-way between

physical exhaustion and mental boredom, there is no brew so deadly that

it cannot at certain moments become precious and invigorating by giving

us just the stimulus that was necessary, the warmth that we cannot

generate in ourself.

The thought of course never entered my mind now of asking Saint-Loup to

take me (as, an hour earlier, I had been longing to go) to see some of

the Rivebelle women; the scar left by my disappointment with Mme. de

Stermaria was too recent still to be so easily healed, but at the moment

when I had ceased to feel in my heart any reason for happiness

Saint-Loup’s bursting in upon me was like a sudden apparition of

kindness, mirth, life, which were external to me, no doubt, but offered

themselves to me, asked only to be made mine. He did not himself

understand my shout of gratitude, my tears of affection. And yet is

there anything more unaccountably affecting than one of those friends,

be he diplomat, explorer, airman or soldier like Saint-Loup, who, having

to start next day for the country, from where they will go on heaven

knows where, seem to form for themselves, in the evening which they

devote to us, an impression which we are astonished both to find, so

rare and fleeting is it, can be so pleasant to them, and, since it does

so delight them, not to see them prolong farther or repeat more often. A

meal with us, an event so natural in itself, affords these travellers

the same strange and exquisite pleasure as our boulevards give to an

Asiatic. We set off together to dine, and as I went downstairs I thought

of Doncières where every evening I used to meet Robert at his

restaurant, and the little dining-rooms there that I had forgotten. I

remembered one of these to which I had never given a thought, and which

was not in the hotel where Saint-Loup dined but in another, far humbler,

a cross between an inn and a boarding-house, where the waiting was done

by the landlady and one of her servants. I had been forced to take

shelter there once from a snowstorm. Besides, Robert was not to be

dining at the hotel that evening and I had not cared to go any farther.

My food was brought to me, upstairs, in a little room with bare wooden

walls. The lamp went out during dinner and the servant lighted a couple

of candles. I, pretending that I could not see very well as I held out

my plate, while she helped me to potatoes, took her bare fore-arm in my

hand, as though to guide her. Seeing that she did not withdraw it, I

began to fondle it, then, without saying a word, pulled her bodily to

me, blew out the candles and told her to feel in my pocket for some

money. For the next few days physical pleasure seemed to me to require,

to be properly enjoyed, not only this servant but the timbered

dining-room, so remote and lonely. And yet it was to the other, in which

Saint-Loup and his friends dined, that I returned every evening, from

force of habit and in friendship for them, until I left Doncières. But

even of this hotel, where he took his meals with his friends, I had long

ceased to think; we make little use of our experience, we leave

unconsumed in the summer dusk or precocious nights of winter the hours

in which it had seemed to us that there might nevertheless be contained

some element of tranquillity or pleasure. But those hours are not

altogether wasted. When, in their turn, come and sing to us fresh

moments of pleasure, which by themselves would pass by equally bare in

outline, the others recur, bringing them the groundwork, the solid

consistency of a rich orchestration. They are in this way prolonged into

one of those types of happiness which we recapture only now and again

but which continue to exist; in the present instance the type was that

of forsaking everything else to dine in comfortable surroundings, which

by the help of memory embody in a scene from nature suggestions of the

rewards of travel, with a friend who is going to stir our dormant life

with all his energy, his affection, to communicate to us an emotional

pleasure, very different from anything that we could derive from our own

efforts or from social distractions; we are going to exist solely for

him, to utter vows of friendship which, born within the confines of the

hour, remaining imprisoned in it, will perhaps not be kept on the morrow

but which I need have no scruple in taking before Saint-Loup since, with

a courage into which there entered a great deal of common sense and the

presentiment that friendship cannot explore its own depths, on the

morrow he would be gone.

If as I came downstairs I lived over again the evenings at Doncières,

when we reached the street, in a moment the darkness, now almost total,

in which the fog seemed to have put out the lamps, which one could make

out, glimmering very faintly, only when close at hand, took me back to I

could not say what arrival, by night, at Combray, when the streets there

were still lighted only at long intervals and one felt one’s way through

a darkness moist, warm, consecrated, like that of a Christmas manger,

just visibly starred here and there by a wick that burned no brightlier

than a candle. Between that year—to which I could ascribe no precise

date—of my Combray life and the evenings at Rivebelle which had, an hour

earlier, been reflected above my drawn curtains, what a world of

differences! I felt on perceiving them an enthusiasm which might have

borne fruit had I been left alone and would then have saved me the

unnecessary round of many wasted years through which I was yet to pass

before there was revealed to me that invisible vocation of which these

volumes are the history. Had the revelation come to me this evening, the

carriage in which I sat would have deserved to rank as more memorable

with me than Dr. Percepied’s, on the box seat of which I had composed

that little sketch—on which, as it happened, I had recently laid my

hands, altered it and sent it in vain to the _Figaro_—of the spires of

Martinville. Is it because we live over our past years not in their

continuous sequence, day by day, but in a memory that fastens upon the

coolness or sun-parched heat of some morning or afternoon, receives the

shadow of some solitary place, is enclosed, immovable, arrested, lost,

remote from all others, because, therefore, the changes gradually

wrought not only in the world outside but in our dreams and our evolving

character, (changes which have imperceptibly carried us through life

from one to another, wholly different time) are of necessity eliminated,

that, if we revive another memory taken from a different year, we find

between the two, thanks to lacunae, to vast stretches of oblivion, as it

were the gulf of a difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two

divers qualities, that of the air we breathe and the colour of the scene

before our eyes? But between one and another of the memories that had

now come to me in turn of Combray, of Doncières and of Rivebelle, I was

conscious at the moment of more than a distance in time, of the distance

that there would be between two separate universes the material elements

in which were not the same. If I had sought to reproduce the element in

which appeared carven my most trivial memories of Rivebelle, I should

have had to streak with rosy veins, to render at once translucent,

compact, refreshing, resonant a substance hitherto analogous to the

coarse dark sandstone walls of Combray. But Robert having finished

giving his instructions to the driver joined me now in the carriage. The

ideas that had appeared before me took flight. Ideas are goddesses who

deign at times to make themselves visible to a solitary mortal, at a

turning in the road, even in his bedroom while he sleeps, when they,

standing framed in the doorway, bring him the annunciation of their

tidings. But as soon as a companion joins him they vanish, in the

society of his fellows no man has ever beheld them. And I found myself

cast back upon friendship. When he first appeared Robert had indeed

warned me that there was a good deal of fog outside, but while we were

indoors, talking, it had grown steadily thicker. It was no longer merely

the light mist which I had looked forward to seeing rise from the island

and envelop Mme. de Stermaria and myself. A few feet away from us the

street lamps were blotted out and then it was night, as dark as in the

open fields, in a forest, or rather on a mild Breton island whither I

would fain have gone; I lost myself, as on the stark coast of some

Northern sea where one risks one’s life twenty times over before coming

to the solitary inn; ceasing to be a mirage for which one seeks, the fog

became one of those dangers against which one has to fight, so that we

had, in finding our way and reaching a safe haven, the difficulties, the

anxiety and finally the joy which safety, so little perceived by him who

is not threatened with the loss of it, gives to the perplexed and

benighted traveller. One thing only came near to destroying my pleasure

during our adventurous ride, owing to the angry astonishment into which

it flung me for a moment. “You know, I told Bloch,” Saint-Loup suddenly

informed me, “that you didn’t really think all that of him, that you

found him rather vulgar at times. I’m like that, you see, I want people

to know where they stand,” he wound up with a satisfied air and in a

tone which brooked no reply. I was astounded. Not only had I the most

absolute confidence in Saint-Loup, in the loyalty of his friendship, and

he had betrayed it by what he had said to Bloch, but it seemed to me

that he of all men ought to have been restrained from doing so, by his

defects as well as by his good qualities, by that astonishing veneer of

breeding which was capable of carrying politeness to what was positively

a want of frankness. His triumphant air, was it what we assume to cloak

a certain embarrassment in admitting a thing which we know that we ought

not to have done, or did it mean complete unconsciousness; stupidity

making a virtue out of a defect which I had not associated with him; a

passing fit of ill humour towards me, prompting him to make an end of

our friendship, or the notation in words of a passing fit of ill humour

in the company of Bloch to whom he had felt that he must say something

disagreeable, even although I should be compromised by it? However that

might be, his face was seared, while he uttered this vulgar speech, by a

frightful sinuosity which I saw on it once or twice only in all the time

I knew him, and which, beginning by running more or less down the middle

of his face, when it came to his lips twisted them, gave them a hideous

expression of baseness, almost of bestiality, quite transitory and no

doubt inherited. There must have been at such moments, which recurred

probably not more than once every other year, a partial eclipse of his

true self by the passage across it of the personality of some ancestor

whose shadow fell on him. Fully as much as his satisfied air, the words:

“I want people to know where they stand,” encouraged the same doubt and

should have incurred a similar condemnation. I felt inclined to say to

him that if one wants people to know where they stand one ought to

confine these outbursts of frankness to one’s own affairs and not to

acquire a too easy merit at the expense of others. But by this time the

carriage had stopped outside the restaurant, the huge front of which,

glazed and streaming with light, alone succeeded in piercing the

darkness. The fog itself, beside the comfortable brightness of the

lighted interior, seemed to be waiting outside on the pavement to shew

one the way in with the joy of servants whose faces reflect the

hospitable instincts of their master; shot with the most delicate shades

of light, it pointed the way like the pillar of fire which guided the

Children of Israel. Many of whom, as it happened, were to be found

inside. For this was the place to which Bloch and his friends had long

been in the habit, maddened by a hunger as famishing as the Ritual Fast,

which at least occurs only once a year, for coffee and the satisfaction

of political curiosity, of repairing in the evenings. Every mental

excitement creating a value that overrides others, a quality superior to

the rest of one’s habits, there is no taste at all keenly developed that

does not thus gather round it a society which it unites and in which the

esteem of his fellows is what each of its members seeks before anything

else from life. Here, in their café, be it in a little provincial town,

you will find impassioned music-lovers; the greater part of their time,

all their spare cash is spent in chamber-concerts, in meetings for

musical discussion, in cafés where one finds oneself among musical

people and rubs shoulders with the members of the orchestra. Others,

keen upon flying, seek to stand well with the old waiter in the glazed

bar perched on top of the aerodrome; sheltered from the wind as in the

glass cage of a lighthouse, they can follow in the company of an airman

who is not going up that day the evolutions of a pilot practising loops,

while another, invisible a moment ago, comes suddenly swooping down to

land with the great winged roar of an Arabian roc. The little group

which met to try to perpetuate, to explore the fugitive emotions aroused

by the Zola trial attached a similar importance to this particular café.

But they were not viewed with favour by the young nobles who composed

the rest of its patrons and had taken possession of a second room,

separated from the other only by a flimsy parapet topped with a row of

plants. These looked upon Dreyfus and his supporters as traitors, albeit

twenty-five years later, ideas having had time to classify themselves

and Dreyfusism to acquire, in the light of history, a certain

distinction, the sons, dance-mad Bolshevists, of these same young nobles

were to declare to the “intellectuals” who questioned them that

undoubtedly, had they been alive at the time, they would have stood up

for Dreyfus, without having any clearer idea of what the great Case had

been about than Comtesse Edmond de Pourtalès or the Marquise de

Galliffet, other luminaries already extinct at the date of their birth.

For on the night of the fog the noblemen of the café, who were in due

course to become the fathers of these young intellectuals, Dreyfusards

in retrospect, were still bachelors. Naturally the idea of a rich

marriage was present in the minds of all their families, but none of

them had yet brought such a marriage off. While still potential, the

only effect of this rich marriage, the simultaneous ambition of several

of them (there were indeed several heiresses in view, but after all the

number of big dowries was considerably below that of the aspirants to

them), was to create among these young men a certain amount of rivalry.

As ill luck would have it, Saint-Loup remaining outside for a minute to

explain to the driver that he was to call for us again after dinner, I

had to make my way in by myself. In the first place, once I had involved

myself in the spinning door, to which I was not accustomed, I began to

fear that I should never succeed in escaping from it. (Let me note here

for the benefit of lovers of verbal accuracy that the contrivance in

question, despite its peaceful appearance, is known as a “revolver”,

from the English “revolving door”.) This evening the proprietor, not

venturing either to brave the elements outside or to desert his

customers, remained standing near the entrance so as to have the

pleasure of listening to the joyful complaints of the new arrivals, all

aglow with the satisfaction of people who have had difficulty in

reaching a place and have been afraid of losing their way. The smiling

cordiality of his welcome was, however, dissipated by the sight of a

stranger incapable of disengaging himself from the rotating sheets of

glass. This flagrant sign of social ignorance made him knit his brows

like an examiner who has a good mind not to utter the formula: _Dignus

est intrare_. As a crowning error I went to look for a seat in the room

set apart for the nobility, from which he at once expelled me,

indicating to me, with a rudeness to which all the waiters at once

conformed, a place in the other room. This was all the less to my liking

because the seat was in the middle of a crowded row and I had opposite

me the door reserved for the Hebrews which, as it did not revolve,

opening and shutting at every moment kept me in a horrible draught. But

the proprietor declined to move me, saying: “No, sir, I cannot have the

whole place upset for you.” Presently, however, he forgot this belated

and troublesome guest, captivated as he was by the arrival of each

newcomer who, before calling for his beer, his wing of cold chicken or

his hot grog (it was by now long past dinner-time), must first, as in

the old romances, pay his scot by relating his adventure at the moment

of his entry into this asylum of warmth and security where the contrast

with the perils just escaped made that gaiety and sense of comradeship

prevail which create a cheerful harmony round the camp fire.

One reported that his carriage, thinking it had got to the Pont de la

Concorde had circled three times round the Invalides, another that his,

in trying to make its way down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, had driven

into a clump of trees at the Rond Point, from which it had taken him

three quarters of an hour to get clear. Then followed lamentations upon

the fog, the cold, the deathly stillness of the streets, uttered and

received with the same exceptionally jovial air, which was accounted for

by the pleasant atmosphere of the room which, except where I sat, was

warm, the dazzling light which set blinking eyes already accustomed to

not seeing, and the buzz of talk which restored their activity to

deafened ears.

It was all the newcomers could do to keep silence The singularity of the

mishaps which each of them thought unique burned their tongues, and

their eyes roved in search of some one to engage in conversation. The

proprietor himself lost all sense of social distinction. “M. le Prince

de Foix lost his way three times coming from the Porte Saint-Martin,” he

was not afraid to say with a laugh, actually pointing out, as though

introducing one to the other, the illustrious nobleman to an Israelite

barrister, who, on any evening but this, would have been divided from

him by a barrier far harder to surmount than the ledge of greenery.

“Three times—fancy that!” said the barrister, touching his hat. This

note of personal interest was not at all to the Prince’s liking. He

formed one of an aristocratic group for whom the practice of

impertinence, even at the expense of their fellow-nobles when these were

not of the very highest rank, seemed the sole possible occupation. Not

to acknowledge a bow, and, if the polite stranger repeated the offence,

to titter with sneering contempt or fling back one’s head with a look of

fury, to pretend not to know some elderly man who might have done them a

service, to reserve their handclasp for dukes and the really intimate

friends of dukes whom the latter introduced to them, such was the

attitude of these young men, and especially of the Prince de Foix. Such

an attitude was encouraged by the ill-balanced mentality of early

manhood (a period in which, even in the middle class, one appears

ungrateful and behaves like a cad because, having forgotten for months

to write to a benefactor after he has lost his wife, one then ceases to

nod to him in the street so as to simplify matters), but it was inspired

above all by an over-acute caste snobbishness. It is true that, after

the fashion of certain nervous affections the symptoms of which grow

less pronounced in later life, this snobbishness was on the whole to

cease to express itself in so offensive a form in these men who had been

so intolerable when young. Once youth is outgrown, it is seldom that

anyone remains hidebound by insolence. He had supposed it to be the only

thing in the world; suddenly he discovers, for all the Prince that he

is, that there also are such things as music, literature, even standing

for parliament. The scale of human values is correspondingly altered and

he joins in conversation with people whom at one time he would have

slain with a glare of lightning. Which is fortunate for those of the

latter who have had the patience to wait, and whose character is

sufficiently formed—if one may so put it—for them to feel pleasure in

receiving in their forties the civility and welcome that had been coldly

withheld from them at twenty.

As I have mentioned the Prince de Foix, it may not be inconsequent here

to add that he belonged to a set of a dozen or fifteen young men and to

an inner group of four. The dozen or fifteen shared this characteristic

(which the Prince lacked, I fancy) that each of them faced the world in

a dual aspect. Up to their own eyes in debt, they were of no account in

those of their tradesmen, notwithstanding the pleasure these took in

addressing them as “Monsieur le Comte,” “Monsieur le Marquis,” “Monsieur

le Duc.” They hoped to retrieve their fortunes by means of the famous

rich marriage (“money-bags” as the expression still was) and, as the fat

dowries which they coveted numbered at the most four or five, several of

them would be silently training their batteries on the same damsel. And

the secret would be so well kept that when one of them, on arriving at

the café, announced: “My dear fellows, I am too fond of you all not to

tell you of my engagement to Mlle. d’Ambresac,” there was a general

outburst, more than one of the others imagining that the marriage was as

good as settled already between Mlle. d’Ambresac and himself, and not

having enough self-control to stifle a spontaneous cry of stupefaction

and rage. “So you like the idea of marriage, do you, Bibi?” the Prince

de Châtellerault could not help exclaiming, letting his fork drop in his

surprise and despair, for he had been fully expecting the engagement of

this identical Mlle. d’Ambresac to be announced, but with himself,

Châtellerault, as her bridegroom. And heaven only knew all that his

father had cunningly hinted to the Ambresacs against Bibi’s mother. “So

you think it’ll be fun, being married, do you?” he was impelled to

repeat his question to Bibi, who, better prepared to meet it, for he had

had plenty of time to decide on the right attitude to adopt since the

engagement had reached the semi-official stage, replied with a smile:

“What pleases me is not the idea of marriage, which never appealed much

to me, but marrying Daisy d’Ambresac, whom I think charming.” In the

time taken up by this response M. de Châtellerault had recovered his

composure, but he was thinking that he must at the earliest possible

moment execute a change of front in the direction of Mlle. de la

Canourque or Miss Foster, numbers two and three on the list of

heiresses, pacify somehow the creditors who were expecting the Ambresac

marriage and finally explain to the people to whom he too had declared

that Mlle. d’Ambresac was charming that this marriage was all very well

for Bibi, but that he himself would have had all his family down on him

like a ton of bricks if he had married her. Mme. Soléon (he decided to

say) had actually announced that she would not have them in her house.

But if in the eyes of tradesmen, proprietors of restaurants and the like

they seemed of little account, conversely, being creatures of dual

personality, the moment they appeared in society they ceased to be

judged by the decay of their fortunes and the sordid occupations by

which they sought to repair them. They became once more M. le Prince

this, M. le Duc that, and were reckoned only in terms of their

quarterings. A duke who was practically a multi-millionaire and seemed

to combine in his own person every possible distinction gave precedence

to them because, the heads of their various houses, they were by descent

sovereign princes of minute territories in which they were entitled to

coin money and so forth. Often in this café one of them lowered his eyes

when another came in so as not to oblige the newcomer to greet him. This

was because in his imaginative pursuit of riches he had invited a banker

to dine. Every time that a man about town enters into relations, on this

footing, with a banker, the latter leaves him the poorer by a hundred

thousand francs, which does not prevent the man about town from at once

repeating the process with another. We continue to burn candles in

churches and to consult doctors.

But the Prince de Foix, who was rich already, belonged not only to this

fashionable set of fifteen or so young men, but to a more exclusive and

inseparable group of four which included Saint-Loup. These were never

asked anywhere separately, they were known as the four _gigolos_, they

were always to be seen riding together, in country houses their

hostesses gave them communicating bedrooms, with the result that,

especially as they were all four extremely good looking, rumours were

current as to the extent of their intimacy. I was in a position to give

these the lie direct so far as Saint-Loup was concerned. But the curious

thing is that if, later on, one was to learn that these rumours were

true of all four, each of the quartet had been entirely in the dark as

to the other three. And yet each of them had done his utmost to find out

about the others, to gratify a desire or (more probably) a resentment,

to prevent a marriage or to secure a hold over the friend whose secret

he discovered. A fifth (for in these groups of four there are never four

only) had joined this Platonic party who was more so than any of the

others. But religious scruples restrained him until long after the group

had broken up, and he himself was a married man, the father of a family,

fervently praying at Lourdes that the next baby might be a boy or a

girl, and spending the intervals of procreation in the pursuit of

soldiers.

Despite the Prince’s code of manners, the fact that the barrister’s

comment, though uttered in his hearing, had not been directly addressed

to him made him less angry than he would otherwise have been. Besides,

this evening was somewhat exceptional. Finally, the barrister had no

more prospect of coming to know the Prince de Foix than the cabman who

had driven that noble lord to the restaurant. The Prince felt,

accordingly, that he might allow himself to reply, in an arrogant tone,

as though speaking to some one “off stage”, to this stranger who, thanks

to the fog, was in the position of a travelling companion whom one meets

at some seaside place at the ends of the earth, scoured by all the winds

of heaven or shrouded in mist: “Losing your way’s nothing; the trouble

is, you can’t find it again.” The wisdom of this aphorism impressed the

proprietor, for he had already heard it several times in the course of

the evening.