Besides, what good would it have done if I had spoken to Gilberte; she

would not have understood me. We imagine always when we speak that it is

our own ears, our own mind that are listening. My words would have come

to her only in a distorted form, as though they had had to pass through

the moving curtain of a waterfall before they reached my friend,

unrecognisable, giving a foolish sound, having no longer any kind of

meaning. The truth which one puts into one's words does not make a

direct path for itself, is not supported by irresistible evidence. A

considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take

shape in the words themselves. Then the political opponent who, despite

all argument, every proof that he has advanced to damn the votary of the

rival doctrine as a traitor, will himself have come to share the hated

conviction by which he who once sought in vain to disseminate it is no

longer bound. Then the masterpiece of literature which for the admirers

who read it aloud seemed to make self-evident the proofs of its

excellence, while to those who listened it presented only a senseless or

common-place image, will by these too be proclaimed a masterpiece, but

too late for the author to learn of their discovery. Similarly in love

the barriers, do what one may, cannot be broken down from without by him

whom they maddeningly exclude; it is when he is no longer concerned with

them that suddenly, as the result of an effort directed from elsewhere,

accomplished within the heart of her who did not love him, those

barriers which he has charged without success will fall to no advantage.

If I had come to Gilberte to tell her of my future indifference and the

means of preventing it, she would have assumed from my action that my

love for her, the need that I had of her, were even greater than I had

supposed, and her distaste for the sight of me would thereby have been

increased. And incidentally it is quite true that it was that love for

her which helped me, by means of the incongruous states of mind which it

successively produced in me, to foresee, more clearly than she herself

could, the end of that love. And yet some such warning I might perhaps

have addressed, by letter or with my own lips, to Gilberte, after a long

enough interval, which would render her, it is true, less indispensable

to me, but would also have proved to her that she was not so

indispensable. Unfortunately certain persons--of good or evil

intent--spoke of me to her in a fashion which must have led her to think

that they were doing so at my request. Whenever I thus learned that

Cottard, my own mother, even M. de Norpois had by a few ill-chosen words

rendered useless all the sacrifice that I had just been making, wasted

all the advantage of my reserve by giving me, wrongly, the appearance of

having emerged from it, I was doubly angry. In the first place I could

no longer reckon from any date but the present my laborious and fruitful

abstention which these tiresome people had, unknown to me, interrupted

and so brought to nothing. And not only that; I should have less

pleasure in seeing Gilberte, who would think of me now no longer as

containing myself in dignified resignation, but as plotting in the dark

for an interview which she had scorned to grant me. I cursed all the

idle chatter of people who so often, without any intention of hurting us

or of doing us a service, for no reason, for talking's sake, often

because we ourselves have not been able to refrain from talking in their

presence, and because they are indiscreet (as we ourselves are), do us,

at a crucial moment, so much harm. It is true that in the grim operation

performed for the eradication of our love they are far from playing a

part equal to that played by two persons who are in the habit, from

excess of good nature in one and of malice in the other, of undoing

everything at the moment when everything is on the point of being

settled. But against these two persons we bear no such grudge as against

the inopportune Cottards of this world, for the latter of them is the

person whom we love and the former is ourself.

Meanwhile, since on almost every occasion of my going to see her Mme.

Swann would invite me to come to tea another day, with her daughter, and

tell me to reply directly to her, I was constantly writing to Gilberte,

and in this correspondence I did not choose the expressions which might,

I felt, have won her over, sought only to carve out the easiest channel

for the torrent of my tears. For, like desire, regret seeks not to be

analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one's

time, not in getting to know what one's love really is, but in making it

possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know

one's grief but to offer to her who is causing it that expression of it

which seems to one the most moving. One says the things which one feels

the need of saying, and which the other will not understand, one speaks

for oneself alone. I wrote; "I had thought that it would not be

possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult." I said also: "I

shall probably not see you again;" I said it while I continued to avoid

shewing a coldness which she might think affected, and the words, as I

wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I

should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen. For

at the next request for a meeting which she would convey to me I should

have again, as I had now, the courage not to yield, and, what with one

refusal and another, I should gradually come to the moment when, by

virtue of not having seen her again, I should not wish to see her. I

wept, but I found courage enough to sacrifice, I tasted the sweets of

sacrificing the happiness of being with her to the probability of

seeming attractive to her one day, a day when, alas, my seeming

attractive to her would be immaterial to me. Even the supposition,

albeit so far from likely, that at this moment, as she had pretended

during the last visit that I had paid her, she loved me, that what I

took for the boredom which one feels in the company of a person of whom

one has grown tired had been due only to a jealous susceptibility, to a

feint of indifference analogous to my own, only rendered my decision

less painful. It seemed to me that in years to come, when we had

forgotten one another, when I should be able to look back and tell her

that this letter which I was now in course of writing had not been for

one moment sincere, she would answer, "What, you really did love me, did

you? If you had only known how I waited for that letter, how I hoped

that you were coming to see me, how I cried when I read it." The

thought, while I was writing it, immediately on my return from her

mother's house, that I was perhaps helping to bring about that very

misunderstanding, that thought, by the sadness in which it plunged me,

by the pleasure of imagining that I was loved by Gilberte, gave me the

impulse to continue my letter.

If, at the moment of leaving Mme. Swann, when her tea-party ended, I was

thinking of what I was going to write to her daughter, Mme. Cottard, as

she departed, had been filled with thoughts of a wholly different order.

On her little "tour of inspection" she had not failed to congratulate

Mme. Swann on the new "pieces", the recent "acquisitions" which caught

the eye in her drawing-room. She could see among them some, though only

a very few of the things that Odette had had in the old days in the Rue

La Pérouse, for instance her animals carved in precious stones, her

fetishes.

For since Mme. Swann had picked up from a friend whose opinion she

valued the word "dowdy"--which had opened to her a new horizon because

it denoted precisely those things which a few years earlier she had

considered "smart"--all those things had, one after another, followed

into retirement the gilded trellis that had served as background to her

chrysanthemums, innumerable boxes of sweets from Giroux's, and the

coroneted note-paper (not to mention the coins of gilt pasteboard

littered about on the mantelpieces, which, even before she had come to

know Swann, a man of taste had advised her to sacrifice). Moreover in

the artistic disorder, the studio-like confusion of the rooms, whose

walls were still painted in sombre colours which made them as different

as possible from the white-enamelled drawing-rooms in which, a little

later, you were to find Mme. Swann installed, the Far East recoiled more

and more before the invading forces of the eighteenth-century; and the

cushions which, to make me "comfortable", Mme. Swann heaped up and

buffeted into position behind my back were sprinkled with Louis XV

garlands and not, as of old, with Chinese dragons. In the room in which

she was usually to be found, and of which she would say, "Yes, I like

this room; I use it a great deal. I couldn't live with a lot of horrid

vulgar things swearing at me all the time; this is where I do my

work----" though she never stated precisely at what she was working. Was

it a picture? A book, perhaps, for the hobby of writing was beginning to

become common among women who liked to "do something", not to be quite

useless. She was surrounded by Dresden pieces (having a fancy for that

sort of porcelain, which she would name with an English accent, saying

in any connexion: "How pretty that is; it reminds me of Dresden

flowers,"), and dreaded for them even more than in the old days for her

grotesque figures and her flower-pots the ignorant handling of her

servants who must expiate, every now and then, the anxiety that they had

caused her by submitting to outbursts of rage at which Swann, the most

courteous and considerate of masters, looked on without being shocked.

Not that the clear perception of certain weaknesses in those whom we

love in any way diminishes our affection for them; rather that affection

makes us find those weaknesses charming. Rarely nowadays was it in one

of those Japanese wrappers that Odette received her familiars, but

rather in the bright and billowing silk of a Watteau gown whose

flowering foam she made as though to caress where it covered her bosom,

and in which she immersed herself, looked solemn, splashed and sported,

with such an air of comfort, of a cool skin and long-drawn breath, that

she seemed to look on these garments not as something decorative, a mere

setting for herself, but as necessary, in the same way as her "tub" or

her daily "outing", to satisfy the requirements of her style of beauty

and the niceties of hygiene. She used often to say that she would go

without bread rather than give up "art" and "having nice things about

her", and that the burning of the "Gioconda" would distress her

infinitely more than the destruction, by the same element, of "millions"

of the people she knew. Theories which seemed paradoxical to her

friends, but made her pass among them as a superior woman, and qualified

her to receive a visit once a week from the Belgian Minister, so that in

the little world whose sun she was everyone would have been greatly

astonished to learn that elsewhere--at the Verdurins', for instance--she

was reckoned a fool. It was this vivacity of expression that made Mme.

Swann prefer men's society to women's. But when she criticised the

latter it was always from the courtesan's standpoint, singling out the

blemishes that might lower them in the esteem of men, a lumpy figure, a

bad complexion, inability to spell, hairy legs, foul breath, pencilled

eyebrows. But towards a woman who had shewn her kindness or indulgence

in the past she was more lenient, especially if this woman were now in

trouble. She would defend her warmly, saying: "People are not fair to

her. I assure you, she's quite a nice woman really."

It was not only the furniture of Odette's drawing-room, it was Odette

herself that Mme. Cottard and all those who had frequented the society

of Mme. de Crécy would have found it difficult, if they had not seen

her for some little time, to recognise. She seemed to be so much

younger. No doubt this was partly because she had grown stouter, was in

better condition, seemed at once calmer, more cool, more restful, and

also because the new way in which she braided her hair gave more breadth

to a face which was animated by an application of pink powder, and into

which her eyes and profile, formerly too prominent, seemed now to have

been reabsorbed. But another reason for this change lay in the fact

that, having reached the turning-point of life, Odette had at length

discovered, or invented, a physiognomy of her own, an unalterable

"character", a "style of beauty", and on her incoherent features--which

for so long, exposed to every hazard, every weakness of the flesh,

borrowing for a moment, at the slightest fatigue, from the years to

come, a sort of flickering shadow of anility, had furnished her, well

or ill, according to how she was feeling, how she was looking, with a

countenance dishevelled, inconstant, formless and attractive--had now

set this fixed type, as it were an immortal youthfulness.

Swann had in his room, instead of the handsome photographs that were now

taken of his wife, in all of which the same cryptic, victorious

expression enabled one to recognise, in whatever dress and hat, her

triumphant face and figure, a little old daguerreotype of her, quite

plain, taken long before the appearance of this new type, so that the

youth and beauty of Odette, which she had not yet discovered when it was

taken, appeared to be missing from it. But it is probable that Swann,

having remained constant, or having reverted to a different conception

of her, enjoyed in the slender young woman with pensive eyes and tired

features, caught in a pose between rest and motion, a more Botticellian

charm. For he still liked to recognise in his wife one of Botticelli's

figures. Odette, who on the other hand sought not to bring out but to

make up for, to cover and conceal the points in herself that did not

please her, what might perhaps to an artist express her "character" but

in her woman's eyes were merely blemishes, would not have that painter

mentioned in her presence. Swann had a wonderful scarf of oriental silk,

blue and pink, which he had bought because it was exactly that worn by

Our Lady in the _Magnificat._ But Mme. Swann refused to wear it. Once

only she allowed her husband to order her a dress covered all over with

daisies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots and campanulas, like that of the

Primavera. And sometimes in the evening, when she was tired, he would

quietly draw my attention to the way in which she was giving, quite

unconsciously, to her pensive hands the uncontrolled, almost distraught

movement of the Virgin who dips her pen into the inkpot that the angel

holds out to her, before writing upon the sacred page on which is

already traced the word "_Magnificat_". But he added, "Whatever you do,

don't say anything about it to her; if she knew she was doing it, she

would change her pose at once."

Save at these moments of involuntary relaxation, in which Swann essayed

to recapture the melancholy cadence of Botticelli, Odette seemed now to

be cut out in a single figure, wholly confined within a line which,

following the contours of the woman, had abandoned the winding paths,

the capricious re-entrants and salients, the radial points, the

elaborate dispersions of the fashions of former days, but also, where it

was her anatomy that went wrong by making unnecessary digressions within

or without the ideal circumference traced for it, was able to rectify,

by a bold stroke, the errors of nature, to make up, along a whole

section of its course, for the failure as well of the human as of the

textile element. The pads, the preposterous "bustle" had disappeared, as

well as those tailed corsets which, projecting under the skirt and

stiffened by rods of whalebone, had so long amplified Odette with an

artificial stomach and had given her the appearance of being composed of

several incongruous pieces which there was no individuality to bind

together. The vertical fall of fringes, the curve of trimmings had made

way for the inflexion of a body which made silk palpitate as a siren

stirs the waves, gave to cambric a human expression now that it had been

liberated, like a creature that had taken shape and drawn breath, from

the long chaos and nebulous envelopment of fashions at length dethroned.

But Mme. Swann had chosen, had contrived to preserve some vestiges of

certain of these, in the very thick of the more recent fashions that had

supplanted them. When in the evening, finding myself unable to work and

feeling certain that Gilberte had gone to the theatre with friends, I

paid a surprise visit to her parents, I used often to find Mme. Swann in

an elegant dishabille the skirt of which, of one of those rich dark

colours, blood-red or orange, which seemed always as though they meant

something very special, because they were no longer the fashion, was

crossed diagonally, though not concealed, by a broad band of black lace

which recalled the flounces of an earlier day. When on a still chilly

afternoon in Spring she had taken me (before my rupture with her

daughter) to the Jardin d'Acclimatation, under her coat, which she

opened or buttoned up according as the exercise made her feel warm, the

dog-toothed border of her blouse suggested a glimpse of the lapel of

some non-existent waistcoat such as she had been accustomed to wear,

some years earlier, when she had liked their edges to have the same

slight indentations; and her scarf--of that same "Scotch tartan" to

which she had remained faithful, but whose tones she had so far

softened, red becoming pink and blue lilac, that one might almost have

taken it for one of those pigeon's-breast taffetas which were the latest

novelty--was knotted in such a way under her chin, without one's being

able to make out where it was fastened, that one could not help being

reminded of those bonnet-strings which were now no longer worn. She need

only "hold out" like this for a little longer and young men attempting

to understand her theory of dress would say: "Mme. Swann is quite a

period in herself, isn't she?" As in a fine literary style which

overlays with its different forms and so strengthens a tradition which

lies concealed among them, so in Mme. Swann's attire those half-hinted

memories of waistcoats or of ringlets, sometimes a tendency, at once

repressed, towards the "all aboard", or even a distant and vague

allusion to the "chase me" kept alive beneath the concrete form the

unfinished likeness of other, older forms which you would not have

succeeded, now, in making a tailor or a dressmaker reproduce, but about

which your thoughts incessantly hovered, and enwrapped Mme. Swann in a

cloak of nobility--perhaps because the sheer uselessness of these

fripperies made them seem meant to serve some more than utilitarian

purpose, perhaps because of the traces they preserved of vanished years,

or else because there was a sort of personality permeating this lady's

wardrobe, which gave to the most dissimilar of her costumes a distinct

family likeness. One felt that she did not dress simply for the comfort

or the adornment of her body; she was surrounded by her garments as by

the delicate and spiritualised machinery of a whole form of

civilisation.

When Gilberte, who, as a rule, gave her tea-parties on the days when her

mother was "at home", had for some reason to go out, and I was therefore

free to attend Mme. Swann's "kettledrum", I would find her dressed in

one of her lovely gowns, some of which were of taffeta, others of

grosgrain, or of velvet, or of _crêpe-de-Chine_, or satin or silk,

gowns which, not being loose like those that she generally wore in the

house but buttoned up tight as though she were just going out in them,

gave to her stay-at-home laziness on those afternoons something alert

and energetic. And no doubt the daring simplicity of their cut was

singularly appropriate to her figure and to her movements, which her

sleeves appeared to be symbolising in colours that varied from day to

day: one would have said that there was a sudden determination in the

blue velvet, an easy-going good-humour in the white taffeta, and that a

sort of supreme discretion full of dignity in her way of holding out her

arm had, in order to become visible, put on the appearance, dazzling

with the smile of one who had made great sacrifices, of the black

_crêpe-de-Chine._ But at the same time these animated gowns took from

the complication of their trimmings, none of which had any practical

value or served any conceivable purpose, something detached, pensive,

secret, in harmony with the melancholy which Mme. Swann never failed to

shew, at least in the shadows under her eyes and the drooping arches of

her hands. Beneath the profusion of sapphire charms, enamelled four-leaf

clovers, silver medals, gold medallions, turquoise amulets, ruby chains

and topaz chestnuts there would be, on the dress itself, some design

carried out in colour which pursued across the surface of an inserted

panel a preconceived existence of its own, some row of little satin

buttons, which buttoned nothing and could not be unbuttoned, a strip of

braid that sought to please the eye with the minuteness, the discretion

of a delicate reminder; and these, as well as the trinkets, had the

effect--for otherwise there would have been no possible justification of

their presence--of disclosing a secret intention, being a pledge of

affection, keeping a secret, ministering to a superstition,

commemorating a recovery from sickness, a granted wish, a love affair or

a "philippine". And now and then in the blue velvet of the bodice a hint

of "slashes", in the Henri II style, in the gown of black satin a slight

swelling which, if it was in the sleeves, just below the shoulders, made

one think of the "leg of mutton" sleeves of 1830, or if, on the other

hand, it was beneath the skirt, with its Louis XV paniers, gave the

dress a just perceptible air of being "fancy dress" and at all events,

by insinuating beneath the life of the present day a vague reminiscence

of the past, blended with the person of Mme. Swann the charm of certain

heroines of history or romance. And if I were to draw her attention to

this: "I don't play golf," she would answer, "like so many of my

friends. So I should have no excuse for going about, as they do, in

sweaters."

In the confusion of her drawing-room, on her way from shewing out one

visitor, or with a plateful of cakes to "tempt" another, Mme. Swann as

she passed by me would take me aside for a moment: "I have special

instructions from Gilberte that you are to come to luncheon the day

after to-morrow. As I wasn't sure of seeing you here, I was going to

write to you if you hadn't come." I continued to resist. And this

resistance was costing me steadily less and less, because, however much

one may love the poison that is destroying one, when one has

compulsorily to do without it, and has had to do without it for some

time past, one cannot help attaching a certain value to the peace of

mind which one had ceased to know, to the absence of emotion and

suffering. If one is not altogether sincere in assuring oneself that one

does not wish ever to see again her whom one loves, one would not be a

whit more sincere in saying that one would like to see her. For no doubt

one can endure her absence only when one promises oneself that it shall

not be for long, and thinks of the day on which one shall see her again,

but at the same time one feels how much less painful are those daily

recurring dreams of a meeting immediate and incessantly postponed than

would be an interview which might be followed by a spasm of jealousy,

with the result that the news that one is shortly to see her whom one

loves would cause a disturbance which would be none too pleasant. What

one procrastinates now from day to day is no longer the end of the

intolerable anxiety caused by separation, it is the dreaded renewal of

emotions which can lead to nothing. How infinitely one prefers to any

such interview the docile memory which one can supplement at one's

pleasure with dreams, in which she who in reality does not love one

seems, far from that, to be making protestations of her love for one,

when one is by oneself; that memory which one can contrive, by blending

gradually with it a portion of what one desires, to render as pleasing

as one may choose, how infinitely one prefers it to the avoided

interview in which one would have to deal with a creature to whom one

could no longer dictate at one's pleasure the words that one would like

to hear on her lips, but from whom one would meet with fresh coldness,

unlooked-for violence. We know, all of us, when we no longer love, that

forgetfulness, that even a vague memory do not cause us so much

suffering as an ill-starred love. It was of such forgetfulness that in

anticipation I preferred, without acknowledging it to myself, the

reposeful tranquillity.

Moreover, whatever discomfort there may be in such a course of psychical

detachment and isolation grows steadily less for another reason, namely

that it weakens while it is in process of healing that fixed obsession

which is a state of love. Mine was still strong enough for me to be able

to count upon recapturing my old position in Gilberte's estimation,

which in view of my deliberate abstention must, it seemed to me, be

steadily increasing; in other words each of those calm and melancholy

days on which I did not see her, coming one after the other without

interruption, continuing too without prescription (unless some busy-body

were to meddle in my affairs), was a day not lost but gained. Gained to

no purpose, it might be, for presently they would be able to pronounce

that I was healed. Resignation, modulating our habits, allows certain

elements of our strength to be indefinitely increased. Those--so

wretchedly inadequate--that I had had to support my grief, on the first

evening of my rupture with Gilberte, had since multiplied to an

incalculable power. Only, the tendency which everything that exists has

to prolong its own existence is sometimes interrupted by sudden impulses

to which we give way with all the fewer scruples over letting ourselves

go since we know for how many days, for how many months even we have

been able, and might still be able to abstain. And often it is when the

purse in which we hoard our savings is nearly full that we undo and

empty it, it is without waiting for the result of our medical treatment

and when we have succeeded in growing accustomed to it that we abandon

it. So, one day, when Mme. Swann was repeating her familiar statement of

what a pleasure it would be to Gilberte to see me, thus putting the

happiness of which I had now for so long been depriving myself, as it

were within arm's length, I was stupefied by the realisation that it was

still possible for me to enjoy that pleasure, and I could hardly wait

until next day; when I had made up my mind to take Gilberte by surprise,

in the evening, before dinner.

What helped me to remain patient throughout the long day that followed

was another plan that I had made. From the moment in which everything

was forgotten, in which I was reconciled to Gilberte, I no longer wished

to visit her save as a lover. Every day she should receive from me the

finest flowers that grew. And if Mme. Swann, albeit she had no right to

be too severe a mother, should forbid my making a daily offering of

flowers, I should find other gifts, more precious and less frequent. My

parents did not give me enough money for me to be able to buy expensive

things. I thought of a big bowl of old Chinese porcelain which had been

left to me by aunt Léonie, and of which Mamma prophesied daily that

Françoise would come running to her with an "Oh, it's all come to

pieces!" and that that would be the end of it. Would it not be wiser, in

that case, to part with it, to sell it so as to be able to give Gilberte

all the pleasure I could. I felt sure that I could easily get a thousand

francs for it. I had it tied up in paper; I had grown so used to it that

I had ceased altogether to notice it; parting with it had at least the

advantage of making me realise what it was like. I took it with me as I

started for the Swanns', and, giving the driver their address, told him

to go by the Champs-Elysées, at one end of which was the shop of a big

dealer in oriental things, who knew my father. Greatly to my surprise he

offered me there and then not one thousand but ten thousand francs for

the bowl. I took the notes with rapture. Every day, for a whole year, I

could smother Gilberte in roses and lilac. When I left the shop and got

into my cab again the driver (naturally enough, since the Swanns lived

out by the Bois) instead of taking the ordinary way began to drive me

along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. He had just passed the end of the

Rue de Berri when, in the failing light, I thought I saw, close to the

Swanns' house but going in the other direction, going away from it,

Gilberte, who was walking slowly, though with a firm step, by the side

of a young man with whom she was conversing, but whose face I could not

distinguish. I stood up in the cab, meaning to tell the driver to stop;

then hesitated. The strolling couple were already some way away, and the

parallel lines which their leisurely progress was quietly drawing were

on the verge of disappearing in the Elysian gloom. A moment later, I had

reached Gilberte's door. I was received by Mme. Swann. "Oh! she will be

sorry!" was my greeting, "I can't think why she isn't in. She came home

just now from a lesson, complaining of the heat, and said she was going

out for a little fresh air with another girl." "I fancy I passed her in

the Avenue des Champs-Elysées." "Oh, I don't think it can have been.

Anyhow, don't mention it to her father; he doesn't approve of her going

out at this time of night. Must you go? Good-bye." I left her, told my

driver to go home the same way, but found no trace of the two walking

figures. Where had they been? What were they saying to one another in

the darkness so confidentially?

I returned home, desperately clutching my windfall of ten thousand

francs, which would have enabled me to arrange so many pleasant

surprises for that Gilberte whom now I had made up my mind never to see

again. No doubt my call at the dealer's had brought me happiness by

allowing me to expect that in future, whenever I saw my friend, she

would be pleased with me and grateful. But if I had not called there, if

my cabman had not taken the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, I should not

have seen Gilberte with that young man. Thus a single action may have

two contradictory effects, and the misfortune that it engenders cancel

the good fortune that it has already brought one. There had befallen me

the opposite of what so frequently happens. We desire some pleasure, and

the material means of obtaining it are lacking. "It is a mistake,"

Labruyère tells us, "to be in love without an ample fortune." There is

nothing for it but to attempt a gradual elimination of our desire for

that pleasure. In my case, however, the material means had been

forthcoming, but at the same moment, if not by a logical effect, at any

rate as a fortuitous consequence of that initial success, my pleasure

had been snatched from me. As, for that matter, it seems as though it

must always be. As a rule, however, not on the same evening on which we

have acquired what makes it possible. Usually, we continue to struggle

and to hope for a little longer. But the pleasure can never be realised.

If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once

shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a

gradual change in our heart until it desires something other than what

it is going to obtain. And if this transposition has been so rapid that

our heart has not had time to change, nature does not, on that account,

despair of conquering us, in a manner more gradual, it is true, more

subtle, but no less efficacious. It is then, at the last moment, that

the possession of our happiness is wrested from us, or rather it is that

very possession which nature, with diabolical cleverness, uses to

destroy our happiness. After failure in every quarter of the domain of

life and action, it is a final incapacity, the mental incapacity for

happiness that nature creates in us. The phenomenon of happiness either

fails to appear, or at once gives way to the bitterest of reactions.

I put my ten thousand francs in a drawer. But they were no longer of any

use to me. I ran through them, as it happened, even sooner than if I had

sent flowers every day to Gilberte, for when evening came I was always

too wretched to stay in the house and used to go and pour out my sorrows

upon the bosoms of women whom I did not love. As for seeking to give any

sort of pleasure to Gilberte, I no longer thought of that; to visit her

house again now could only have added to my sufferings. Even the sight

of Gilberte, which would have been so exquisite a pleasure only

yesterday, would no longer have sufficed me. For I should have been

miserable all the time that I was not actually with her. That is how a

woman, by every fresh torture that she inflicts on us, increases, often

quite unconsciously, her power over us and at the same time our demands

upon her. With each injury that she does us, she encircles us more and

more completely, doubles our chains--but halves the strength of those

which hitherto we had thought adequate to bind her in order that we

might retain our own peace of mind. Only yesterday, had I not been

afraid of annoying Gilberte, I should have been content to ask for no

more than occasional meetings, which now would no longer have contented

me and for which I should now have substituted quite different terms.

For in this respect love is not like war; after the battle is ended we

renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify

the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still

in a position to give battle. This was not my position with regard to

Gilberte. Also I preferred, at first, not to see her mother again. I

continued, it is true, to assure myself that Gilberte did not love me,

that I had known this for ever so long, that I could see her again if I

chose, and, if I did not choose, forget her in course of time. But these

ideas, like a remedy which has no effect upon certain complaints, had no

power whatsoever to obliterate those two parallel lines which I kept on

seeing, traced by Gilberte and the young man as they slowly disappeared

along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. This was a fresh misfortune, which

like the rest would gradually lose its force, a fresh image which would

one day present itself to my mind's eye completely purged of every

noxious element that it now contained, like those deadly poisons which

one can handle without danger, or like a crumb of dynamite which one can

use to light one's cigarette without fear of an explosion. Meanwhile

there was in me another force which was striving with all its might to

overpower that unwholesome force which still shewed me, without

alteration, the figure of Gilberte walking in the dusk: to meet and to

break the shock of the renewed assaults of memory, I had, toiling

effectively on the other side, imagination. The former force did indeed

continue to shew me that couple walking in the Champs-Elysées, and

offered me other disagreeable pictures drawn from the past, as for

instance Gilberte shrugging her shoulders when her mother asked her to

stay and entertain me. But the other force, working upon the canvas of

my hopes, outlined a future far more attractively developed than this

poor past which, after all, was so restricted. For one minute in which I

saw Gilberte's sullen face, how many were there in which I planned to my

own satisfaction all the steps that she was to take towards our

reconciliation, perhaps even towards our betrothal. It is true that this

force, which my imagination was concentrating upon the future, it was

drawing, for all that, from the past. I was still in love with her whom,

it is true, I believed that I detested. But whenever anyone told me that

I was looking well, or was nicely dressed, I wished that she could have

been there to see me. I was irritated by the desire that many people

shewed about this time to ask me to their houses, and refused all their

invitations. There was a scene at home because I did not accompany my

father to an official dinner at which the Bontemps were to be present

with their niece Albertine, a young girl still hardly more than a child.

So it is that the different periods of our life overlap one another. We

scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be

of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with

whom we shall be in love to-morrow, with whom we might, perhaps, had we

consented to see her now, have fallen in love a little earlier and who

would thus have put a term to our present sufferings, bringing others,

it is true, in their place. Mine were steadily growing less. I had the

surprise of discovering in my own heart one sentiment one day, another

the next, generally inspired by some hope or some fear relative to

Gilberte. To the Gilberte whom I kept within me. I ought to have

reminded myself that the other, the real Gilberte was perhaps entirely

different from mine, knew nothing of the regrets that I ascribed to her,

was thinking probably less about me, not merely than I was thinking

about her but than I made her be thinking about me when I was closeted

alone with my fictitious Gilberte, wondering what really were her

feelings with regard to me and so imagining her attention as constantly

directed towards myself.

During those periods in which our bitterness of spirit, though steadily

diminishing, still persists, a distinction must be drawn between the

bitterness which comes to us from our constantly thinking of the person

herself and that which is revived by certain memories, some cutting

speech, some word in a letter that we have had from her. The various

forms which that bitterness can assume we shall examine when we come to

deal with another and later love affair; for the present it must suffice

to say that, of these two kinds, the former is infinitely the less

cruel. That is because our conception of the person, since it dwells

always within ourselves, is there adorned with the halo with which we

are bound before long to invest her, and bears the marks if not of the

frequent solace of hope, at any rate of the tranquillity of a permanent

sorrow. (It must also be observed that the image of a person who makes

us suffer counts for little if anything in those complications which

aggravate the unhappiness of love, prolong it and prevent our recovery,

just as in certain maladies the cause is insignificant beyond comparison

with the fever which follows it and the time that must elapse before our

convalescence.) But if the idea of the person whom we love catches and

reflects a ray of light from a mind which is on the whole optimistic, it

is not so with those special memories, those cutting words, that

inimical letter (I received only one that could be so described from

Gilberte); you would say that the person herself dwelt in those

fragments, few and scattered as they were, and dwelt there multiplied to

a power of which she falls ever so far short in the idea which we are

accustomed to form of her as a whole. Because the letter has not--as the

image of the beloved creature has--been contemplated by us in the

melancholy calm of regret; we have read it, devoured it in the fearful

anguish with which we were wrung by an unforeseen misfortune. Sorrows of

this sort come to us in another way; from without; and it is along the

road of the most cruel suffering that they have penetrated to our heart.

The picture of our friend in our mind, which we believe to be old,

original, authentic, has in reality been refashioned by her many times

over. The cruel memory is not itself contemporary with the restored

picture, it is of another age, it is one of the rare witnesses to a

monstrous past. But inasmuch as this past continues to exist, save in

ourself, who have been pleased to substitute for it a miraculous age of

gold, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled, those

memories, those letters carry us back to reality, and cannot but make us

feel, by the sudden pang they give us, what a long way we have been

borne from that reality by the baseless hopes engendered daily while we

waited for something to happen. Not that the said reality is bound

always to remain the same, though that does indeed happen at times.

There are in our life any number of women whom we have never wished to

see again, and who have quite naturally responded to our in no way

calculated silence with a silence as profound. Only in their case as we

never loved them, we have never counted the years spent apart from them,

and this instance, which would invalidate our whole argument, we are

inclined to forget when we are considering the healing effect of

isolation, just as people who believe in presentiments forget all the

occasions on which their own have not "come true".

But, after a time, absence may prove efficacious. The desire, the

appetite for seeing us again may after all be reborn in the heart which

at present contemns us. Only, we must allow time. Now the demands which

we ourselves make upon time are no less exorbitant than those of a heart

in process of changing. For one thing, time is the very thing that we

are least willing to allow, for our own suffering is keen and we are

anxious to see it brought to an end. And then, too, the interval of time

which the other heart needs to effect its change our own heart will have

spent in changing itself also, so that when the goal which we had

ourselves becomes attainable it will have ceased to count as a goal, or

to seem worth attaining. This idea, however, that it will be attainable,

that what, when it no longer spells any good fortune to us, we shall

ultimately secure is not good fortune, this idea embodies a part, but a

part only of the truth. Our good fortune accrues to us when we have

grown indifferent to it. But the very fact of our indifference will have

made us less exacting, and allow us in retrospect to feel convinced that

we should have been in raptures over our good fortune had it come at a

time when, very probably, it would have seemed to us miserably

inadequate. People are not very hard to satisfy nor are they very good

judges of matters in which they take no interest. The friendly overtures

of a person whom we no longer love, overtures which strike us, in our

indifference to her, as excessive, would perhaps have fallen a long way

short of satisfying our love. Those tender speeches, that invitation or

acceptance, we think only of the pleasure which they would have given

us, and not of all those other speeches and meetings by which we should

have wished to see them immediately followed, which we should, as likely

as not, simply by our avidity for them, have precluded from ever

happening. So that we can never be certain that the good fortune which

comes to us too late, when we are no longer in love, is altogether the

same as that good fortune the want of which made us, at one time, so

unhappy. There is only one person who could decide that; our ego of

those days; he is no longer with us, and were he to reappear, no doubt

that would be quite enough to make our good fortune--whether identical

or not--vanish.

Pending these posthumous fulfilments of a dream in which I should not,

when the time came, be greatly interested, by dint of my having to

invent, as in the days when I still hardly knew Gilberte, speeches,

letters in which she implored my forgiveness, swore that she had never

loved anyone but myself and besought me to marry her, a series of

pleasant images incessantly renewed came by degrees to hold a larger

place in my mind than the vision of Gilberte and the young man, which

had nothing now to feed upon. At this point I should perhaps have

resumed my visits to Mme. Swann but for a dream that came to me, in

which one of my friends, who was not, however, one that I could

identify, behaved with the utmost treachery towards me and appeared to

believe that I had been treacherous to him. Abruptly awakened by the

pain which this dream had given me, and finding that it persisted after

I was awake, I turned my thoughts back to the dream, racked my brains to

discover who could have been the friend whom I had seen in my sleep, the

sound of whose name--a Spanish name--was no longer distinct in my ears.

Combining Joseph's part with Pharaoh's, I set to work to interpret my

dream. I knew that, when one is interpreting a dream, it is often a

mistake to pay too much attention to the appearance of the people one

saw in it, who may perhaps have been disguised or have exchanged faces,

like those mutilated saints on the walls of cathedrals which ignorant

archaeologists have restored, fitting the body of one to the head of

another and confusing all their attributes and names. Those that people

bear in a dream are apt to mislead us. The person with whom we are in

love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we

suffer. From mine I learned that, though transformed while I was asleep

into a young man, the person whose recent betrayal still hurt me was

Gilberte. I remembered then that, the last time I had seen her, on the

day when her mother had forbidden her to go out to a dancing lesson, she

had, whether in sincerity or in make-believe, declined, laughing in a

strange manner, to believe in the genuineness of my feeling for her. And

by association this memory brought back to me another. Long before that,

it had been Swann who would not believe in my sincerity, nor that I was

a suitable friend for Gilberte. In vain had I written to him, Gilberte

had brought back my letter and had returned it to me with the same

incomprehensible laugh. She had not returned it to me at once: I

remembered now the whole of that scene behind the clump of laurels. As

soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral. Gilberte's recent antipathy

for me seemed to me a judgment delivered on me by life for my conduct

that afternoon. Such judgments one imagines one can escape because one

looks out for carriages when one is crossing the street, and avoids

obvious dangers. But there are others that take effect within us. The

accident comes from the side to which one has not been looking, from

inside, from the heart. Gilberte's words: "If you like, we might go on

wrestling," made me shudder. I imagined her behaving like that, at home

perhaps, in the linen-room, with the young man whom I had seen escorting

her along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. And so, just as when, a little

time back, I had believed myself to be calmly established in a state of

happiness, it had been fatuous in me, now that I had abandoned all

thought of happiness, to take for granted that at least I had grown and

was going to remain calm. For, so long as our heart keeps enshrined with

any permanence the image of another person, it is not only our happiness

that may at any moment be destroyed; when that happiness has vanished,

when we have suffered, and, later, when we have succeeded in lulling our

sufferings to sleep, the thing then that is as elusive, as precarious as

ever our happiness was is our calm. Mine returned to me in the end, for

the cloud which, lowering our resistance, tempering our desires, has

penetrated, in the train of a dream, the enclosure of our mind, is

bound, in course of time, to dissolve, permanence and stability being

assured to nothing in this world, not even to grief. Besides, those

whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their

own physicians. As consolation can come to them only from the person who

is the cause of their grief, and as their grief is an emanation from

that person, it is there, in their grief itself, that they must in the

end find a remedy: which it will disclose to them at a given moment, for

the longer they turn it over in their minds this grief will continue to

shew them fresh aspects of the loved, the regretted creature, at one

moment so intensely hateful that one has no longer the slightest desire

to see her, since before finding enjoyment in her company one would have

first to make her suffer, at another so pleasant that the pleasantness

in which one has invested her one adds to her own stock of good

qualities and finds in it a fresh reason for hope. But even although the

anguish that had reawakened in me did at length grow calm, I no longer

wished--except just occasionally--to visit Mme. Swann. In the first

place because, among those who love and have been forsaken, the state of

incessant--even if unconfessed--expectancy in which they live undergoes

a spontaneous transformation, and, while to all appearance unchanged,

substitutes for its original elements others that are precisely the

opposite. The first were the consequences of--a reaction from the

painful incidents which had upset us. The tension of waiting for what is

yet to come is mingled with fear, all the more since we desire at such

moments, should no message come to us from her whom we love, to act for

ourselves, and are none too confident of the success of a step which,

once we have taken it, we may find it impossible to follow up. But

presently, without our having noticed any change, this tension, which

still endures, is sustained, we discover, no longer by our recollection

of the past but by anticipation of an imaginary future. From that moment

it is almost pleasant. Besides, the first state, by continuing for some

time, has accustomed us to living in expectation. The suffering that we

felt during those last meetings survives in us still, but is already

lulled to sleep. We are in no haste to arouse it, especially as we do

not see very clearly what to ask for now. The possession of a little

more of the woman whom we love would only make more essential to us the

part that we did not yet possess, which is bound to remain, whatever

happens, since our requirements are begotten of our satisfactions, an

irreducible quantity.

Another, final reason came later on to reinforce this, and to make me

discontinue altogether my visits to Mme. Swann. This reason, slow in

revealing itself, was not that I had now forgotten Gilberte but that I

must make every effort to forget her as speedily as possible. No doubt,

now that the keen edge of my suffering was dulled, my visits to Mme.

Swann had become once again, for what sorrow remained in me, the

sedative and distraction which had been so precious to me at first. But

what made the sedative efficacious made the distraction impossible,

namely that with these visits the memory of Gilberte was intimately

blended. The distraction would be of no avail to me unless it was

employed to combat a sentiment which the presence of Gilberte no longer

nourished, thoughts, interests, passions in which Gilberte should have

no part. These states of consciousness, to which the person whom we love

remains a stranger, then occupy a place which, however small it may be

at first, is always so much reconquered from the love that has been in

unchallenged possession of our whole soul. We must seek to encourage

these thoughts, to make them grow, while the sentiment which is no more

now than a memory dwindles, so that the new elements introduced into our

mind contest with that sentiment, wrest from it an ever increasing part

of our soul, until at last the victory is complete. I decided that this

was the only way in which my love could be killed, and I was still young

enough, still courageous enough to undertake the attempt, to subject

myself to that most cruel grief which springs from the certainty that,

whatever time one may devote to the effort, it will prove successful in

the end. The reason I now gave in my letters to Gilberte for refusing to

see her was an allusion to some mysterious misunderstanding, wholly

fictitious, which was supposed to have arisen between her and myself,

and as to which I had hoped at first that Gilberte would insist upon my

furnishing her with an explanation. But, as a matter of fact, never,

even in the most insignificant relations in life, does a request for

enlightenment come from a correspondent who knows that an obscure,

untruthful, incriminating sentence has been written on purpose, so that

he shall protest against it, and is only too glad to feel, when he reads

it, that he possesses--and to keep in his own hands--the initiative in

the coming operations. For all the more reason is this so in our more

tender relations, in which love is endowed with so much eloquence,

indifference with so little curiosity. Gilberte having never appeared to

doubt nor sought to learn more about this misunderstanding, it became

for me a real entity, to which I referred anew in every letter. And

there is in these baseless situations, in the affectation of coldness a

sort of fascination which tempts one to persevere in them. By dint of

writing: "Now that our hearts are sundered," so that Gilberte might

answer: "But they are not. Do explain what you mean," I had gradually

come to believe that they were. By constantly repeating, "Life may have

changed for us, it will never destroy the feeling that we had for one

another," in the hope of hearing myself, one day, say: "But there has

been no change, the feeling is stronger now than ever it was," I was

living with the idea that life had indeed changed, that we should keep

only the memory of a feeling which no longer existed, as certain

neurotics, from having at first pretended to be ill, end by becoming

chronic invalids. Now, whenever I had to write to Gilberte, I brought my

mind back to this imagined change, which, being now tacitly admitted by

the silence which she preserved with regard to it in her replies, would

in future subsist between us. Then Gilberte ceased to make a point of

ignoring it. She too adopted my point of view; and, as in the speeches

at official banquets, when the foreign Sovereign who is being

entertained adopts practically the same expressions as have just been

used by the Sovereign who is entertaining him, whenever I wrote to

Gilberte: "Life may have parted us; the memory of the days when we knew

one another will endure," she never failed to respond: "Life may have

parted us; it cannot make us forget those happy hours which will always

be dear to us both," (though we should have found it hard to say why or

how "Life" had parted us, or what change had occurred). My sufferings

were no longer excessive. And yet, one day when I was telling her in a

letter that I had heard of the death of our old barley-sugar woman in

the Champs-Elysées, as I wrote the words: "I felt at once that this

would distress you, in me it awakened a host of memories," I could not

restrain myself from bursting into tears when I saw that I was speaking

in the past tense, as though it were of some dead friend, now almost

forgotten, of this love of which in spite of myself I had never ceased

to think as of a thing still alive, or one that at least might be born

again. Nothing can be more affectionate than this sort of correspondence

between friends who do not wish to see one another any more. Gilberte's

letters to me had all the delicate refinement of those which I used to

write to people who did not matter, and shewed me the same apparent

marks of affection, which it was so pleasant for me to receive from her.

But, as time went on, every refusal to see her disturbed me less. And as

she became less dear to me, my painful memories were no longer strong

enough to destroy by their incessant return the growing pleasure which I

found in thinking of Florence, or of Venice. I regretted, at such

moments, that I had abandoned the idea of diplomacy and had condemned

myself to a sedentary existence, in order not to be separated from a

girl whom I should not see again and had already almost forgotten. We

construct our house of life to suit another person, and when at length

it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is

dead to us, and we live on, a prisoner within the walls which were

intended only for her. If Venice seemed to my parents to be a long way

off, and its climate treacherous, it was at least quite easy for me to

go, without tiring myself, and settle down at Balbec. But to do that I

should have had to leave Paris, to forego those visits thanks to which,

infrequent as they were, I might sometimes hear Mme. Swann telling me

about her daughter. Besides, I was beginning to find in them various

pleasures in which Gilberte had no part.

When spring drew round, and with it the cold weather, during an icy Lent

and the hailstorms of Holy Week, as Mme. Swann began to find it cold in

the house, I used often to see her entertaining her guests in her furs,

her shivering hands and shoulders hidden beneath the gleaming white

carpet of an immense rectangular muff and a cape, both of ermine, which

she had not taken off on coming in from her drive, and which suggested

the last patches of the snows of winter, more persistent than the rest,

which neither the heat of the fire nor the advancing season had

succeeded in melting. And the whole truth about these glacial but

already flowering weeks was suggested to me in this drawing-room, which

soon I should be entering no more, by other more intoxicating forms of

whiteness, that for example of the guelder-roses clustering, at the

summits of their tall bare stalks, like the rectilinear trees in

pre-raphaelite paintings, their balls of blossom, divided yet composite,

white as annunciating angels and breathing a fragrance as of lemons. For

the mistress of Tansonville knew that April, even an ice-bound April was

not barren of flowers, that winter, spring, summer are not held apart by

barriers as hermetic as might be supposed by the town-dweller who, until

the first hot day, imagines the world as containing nothing but houses

that stand naked in the rain. That Mme. Swann was content with the

consignments furnished by her Combray gardener, that she did not, by the

intervention of her own "special" florist, fill up the gaps left by an

insufficiently powerful magic with subsidies borrowed from a precocious

Mediterranean shore, I do not for a moment suggest, nor did it worry me

at the time. It was enough to fill me with longing for country scenes

that, overhanging the loose snowdrifts of the muff in which Mme. Swann

kept her hands, the guelder-rose snow-balls (which served very possibly

in the mind of my hostess no other purpose than to compose, on the

advice of Bergotte, a 'Symphony in White' with her furniture and her

garments) reminded me that what the Good Friday music in _Parsifal_

symbolised was a natural miracle which one could see performed every

year, if one had the sense to look for it, and, assisted by the acid and

heady perfume of the other kinds of blossom, which, although their names

were unknown to me, had brought me so often to a standstill to gaze at

them on my walks round Combray, made Mme. Swann's drawing-room as

virginal, as candidly "in bloom", without the least vestige of greenery,

as overladen with genuine scents of flowers as was the little lane by

Tansonville.

But it was still more than I could endure that these memories should be

recalled to me. There was a risk of their reviving what little remained

of my love for Gilberte. Besides, albeit I no longer felt the least

distress during these visits to Mme. Swann, I extended the intervals

between them and endeavoured to see as little of her as possible. At

most, since I continued not to go out of Paris, I allowed myself an

occasional walk with her. Fine weather had come at last, and the sun was

hot. As I knew that before luncheon Mme. Swann used to go out every day

for an hour, and would stroll for a little in the Avenue du Bois, near

the Etoile--a spot which, at that time, because of the people who used

to collect there to gaze at the "swells" whom they knew only by name,

was known as the "Shabby-Genteel Club"--I persuaded my parents, on

Sundays, (for on weekdays I was busy all morning), to let me postpone my

luncheon until long after theirs, until a quarter past one, and go for a

walk before it. During May, that year, I never missed a Sunday, for

Gilberte had gone to stay with friends in the country. I used to reach

the Arc-de-Triomphe about noon. I kept watch at the entrance to the

Avenue, never taking my eyes off the corner of the side-street along

which Mme. Swann, who had only a few yards to walk, would come from her

house. As by this time many of the people who had been strolling there

were going home to luncheon, those who remained were few in number and,

for the most part, fashionably dressed. Suddenly, on the gravelled path,

unhurrying, cool, luxuriant, Mme. Swann appeared, displaying around her

a toilet which was never twice the same, but which I remember as being

typically mauve; then she hoisted and unfurled at the end of its long

stalk, just at the moment when her radiance was most complete, the

silken banner of a wide parasol of a shade that matched the showering

petals of her gown. A whole troop of people escorted her; Swann himself,

four or five fellows from the Club, who had been to call upon her that

morning or whom she had met in the street: and their black or grey

agglomeration, obedient to her every gesture, performing the almost

mechanical movements of a lifeless setting in which Odette was framed,

gave to this woman, in whose eyes alone was there any intensity, the air

of looking out in front of her, from among all those men, as from a

window behind which she had taken her stand, and made her emerge there,

frail but fearless, in the nudity of her delicate colours, like the

apparition of a creature of a different species, of an unknown race, and

of almost martial strength, by virtue of which she seemed by herself a

match for all her multiple escort. Smiling, rejoicing in the fine

weather, in the sunshine which had not yet become trying, with the air

of calm assurance of a creator who has accomplished his task and takes

no thought for anything besides; certain that her clothes--even though

the vulgar herd should fail to appreciate them--were the smartest

anywhere to be seen, she wore them for herself and for her friends,

naturally, without exaggerated attention to them but also without

absolute detachment; not preventing the little bows of ribbon upon her

bodice and skirt from floating buoyantly upon the air before her, like

separate creatures of whose presence there she was not unconscious, but

was indulgent enough to let them play if they chose, keeping their own

rhythm, provided that they accompanied her where she led the way; and

even upon her mauve parasol, which, as often as not, she had not yet

"put up" when she appeared on the scene, she let fall now and then, as

though upon a bunch of Parma violets, a gaze happy and so kindly that,

when it was fastened no longer upon her friends but on some inanimate

object, her eyes still seemed to smile. She thus kept open, she made her

garments occupy that interval of smartness, of which the men with whom

she was on the most familiar terms respected both the existence and its

necessity, not without shewing a certain deference, as of profane

visitors to a shrine, an admission of their own ignorance, an interval

over which they recognised that their friend had (as we recognise that a

sick man has over the special precautions that he has to take, or a

mother over her children's education) a competent jurisdiction. No less

than by the court which encircled her and seemed not to observe the

passers-by, Mme. Swann by the lateness of her appearance there at once

suggested those rooms in which she had spent so long, so leisurely a

morning and to which she must presently return for luncheon; she seemed

to indicate their proximity by the unhurrying ease of her progress, like

the turn that one takes up and down one's own garden of those rooms one

would have said that she was carrying about her still the cool, the

indoor shade. But for that very reason the sight of her gave me only a

stronger sensation of open air and warmth. All the more because, being

assured in my own mind that, in accordance with the liturgy, with the

ritual in which Mme. Swann was so profoundly versed, her clothes were

connected with the time of year and of day by a bond both inevitable and

unique, I felt that the flowers upon the stiff straw brim of her hat,

the baby-ribbons upon her dress had been even more naturally born of the

month of May than the flowers in gardens and in woods; and to learn what

latest change there was in weather or season I had not to raise my eyes

higher than to her parasol, open and outstretched like another, a nearer

sky, round, clement, mobile, blue. For these rites, if they were of

sovereign importance, subjugated their glory (and, consequently, Mme.

Swann her own) in condescending obedience to the day, the spring, the

sun, none of which struck me as being sufficiently flattered that so

elegant a woman had been graciously pleased not to ignore their

existence, and had chosen on their account a gown of a brighter, of a

thinner fabric, suggesting to me, by the opening of its collar and

sleeves, the moist warmness of the throat and wrists that they

exposed,--in a word, had taken for them all the pains that a great

personage takes who, having gaily condescended to pay a visit to common

folk in the country, whom everyone, even the most plebeian, knows, yet

makes a point of donning, for the occasion, suitable attire. On her

arrival I would greet Mme. Swann, she stop me and say (in English) "Good

morning," and smile. We would walk a little way together. And I learned

then that these canons according to which she dressed, it was for her

own satisfaction that she obeyed them, as though yielding to a Superior

Wisdom of which she herself was High Priestess: for if it should happen

that, feeling too warm, she threw open or even took off altogether and

gave me to carry the jacket which she had intended to keep buttoned up,

I would discover in the blouse beneath it a thousand details of

execution which had had every chance of remaining there unperceived,

like those parts of an orchestral score to which the composer has

devoted infinite labour albeit they may never reach the ears of the

public: or in the sleeves of the jacket that lay folded across my arm I

would see, I would drink in slowly, for my own pleasure or from

affection for its wearer, some exquisite detail, a deliciously tinted

strip, a lining of mauve satinette which, ordinarily concealed from

every eye, was yet just as delicately fashioned as the outer parts, like

those gothic carvings on a cathedral, hidden on the inside of a

balustrade eighty feet from the ground, as perfect as are the

bas-reliefs over the main porch, and yet never seen by any living man

until, happening to pass that way upon his travels, an artist obtains

leave to climb up there among them, to stroll in the open air, sweeping

the whole town with a comprehensive gaze, between the soaring towers.

What enhanced this impression that Mme. Swann was walking in the Avenue

as though along the paths of her own garden, was--for people ignorant of

her habit of "taking exercise"--that she had come there on foot, without

any carriage following, she whom, once May had begun, they were

accustomed to see, behind the most brilliant "turn-out", the smartest

liveries in Paris, gently and majestically seated, like a goddess, in

the balmy air of an immense victoria on eight springs. On foot Mme.

Swann had the appearance--especially as her pace began to slacken in the

heat of the sun--of having yielded to curiosity, of committing an

"exclusive" breach of all the rules of her code, like those Crowned

Heads who, without consulting anyone, accompanied by the slightly

scandalised admiration of a suite which dares not venture any criticism,

step out of their boxes during a gala performance and visit the lobby of

the theatre, mingling for a moment or two with the rest of the audience.

So between Mme. Swann and themselves the crowd felt that there existed

those barriers of a certain kind of opulence which seem to them the most

insurmountable that there are. The Faubourg Saint-Germain may have its

barriers also, but these are less "telling" to the eyes and imagination

of the "shabby-genteel". These latter, when in the presence of a real

personage, more simple, more easily mistaken for the wife of a small

professional or business man, less remote from the people, will not feel

the same sense of their own inequality, almost of their unworthiness, as

dismays them when they encounter Mme. Swann. Of course women of that

sort are not themselves dazzled, as the crowd are, by the brilliance of

their apparel, they have ceased to pay any attention to it, but only

because they have grown used to it, that is to say have come to look

upon it more and more as natural and necessary, to judge their fellow

creatures according as they are more or less initiated into these

luxurious ways: so that (the grandeur which they allow themselves to

display or discover in others being wholly material, easily verified,

slowly acquired, the lack of it hard to compensate) if such women place

a passer-by in the lowest rank of society, it is by the same instinctive

process that has made them appear to him as in the highest, that is to

say instinctively, at first sight, and without possibility of appeal.

Perhaps that special class of society which included in those days women

like Lady Israels, who mixed with the women of the aristocracy, and Mme.

Swann, who was to get to know them later on, that intermediate class,

inferior to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, since it "ran after" the

denizens of that quarter, but superior to everything that was not of the

Faubourg Saint-Germain, possessing this peculiarity that, while already

detached from the world of the merely rich, it was riches still that it

represented, but riches that had been canalised, serving a purpose,

swayed by an idea that were artistic, malleable gold, chased with a

poetic design, taught to smile; perhaps that class--in the same form, at

least, and with the same charm--exists no longer. In any event, the

women who were its members would not satisfy to-day what was the primary

condition on which they reigned, since with advancing age they have

lost--almost all of them--their beauty. Whereas it was (just as much as

from the pinnacle of her noble fortune) from the glorious zenith of her

ripe and still so fragrant summer that Mme. Swann, majestic, smiling,

kind, as she advanced along the Avenue du Bois, saw like Hypatia,

beneath the slow tread of her feet, worlds revolving. Various young men

as they passed looked at her anxiously, not knowing whether their vague

acquaintance with her (especially since, having been introduced only

once, at the most, to Swann, they were afraid that he might not remember

them) was sufficient excuse for their venturing to take off their hats.

And they trembled to think of the consequences as they made up their

minds, asking themselves whether the gesture, so bold, so sacrilegious a

tempting of providence, would not let loose the catastrophic forces of

nature or bring down upon them the vengeance of a jealous god. It

provoked only, like the winding of a piece of clockwork, a series of

gesticulations from little, responsive bowing figures, who were none

other than Odette's escort, beginning with Swann himself, who raised his

tall hat lined in green leather with an exquisite courtesy, which he had

acquired in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but to which was no longer

wedded the indifference that he would at one time have shewn. Its place

was now taken (as though he had been to some extent permeated by

Odette's prejudices) at once by irritation at having to acknowledge the

salute of a person who was none too well dressed and by satisfaction at

his wife's knowing so many people, a mixed sensation to which he gave

expression by saying to the smart friends who walked by his side: "What!

another! Upon my word, I can't imagine where my wife picks all these

fellows up!" Meanwhile, having greeted with a slight movement of her

head the terrified youth, who had already passed out of sight though his

heart was still beating furiously, Mme. Swann turned to me: "Then it's

all over?" she put it to me, "You aren't ever coming to see Gilberte

again? I'm glad you make an exception of me, and are not going to 'drop'

me straight away. I like seeing you, but I used to like also the

influence you had over my daughter. I'm sure she's very sorry about it,

too. However, I mustn't bully you, or you'll make up your mind at once

that you never want to set eyes on me again." "Odette, Sagan's trying to

speak to you!" Swann called his wife's attention. And there, indeed, was

the Prince, as in some transformation scene at the close of a play, or

in a circus, or an old painting, wheeling his horse round so as to face

her, in a magnificent heroic pose, and doffing his hat with a sweeping

theatrical and, so to speak, allegorical flourish in which he displayed

all the chivalrous courtesy of a great noble bowing in token of his

respect for Woman, were she incarnate in a woman whom it was impossible

for his mother or his sister to know. And at every moment, recognised in

the depths of the liquid transparency and of the luminous glaze of the

shadow which her parasol cast over her, Mme. Swann was receiving the

salutations of the last belated horsemen, who passed as though in a

cinematograph taken as they galloped in the blinding glare of the

Avenue, men from the clubs, whose names of whom, which meant only

celebrities to the public, Antoine de Castellane, Adalbert de

Montmorency and the rest--were for Mme. Swann the familiar names of

friends. And as the average span of life, the relative longevity of our

memories of poetical sensations is much greater than that of our

memories of what the heart has suffered, long after the sorrows that I

once felt on Gilberte's account have faded and vanished, there has

survived them the pleasure that I still derive--whenever I close my eyes

and read, as it were upon the face of a sundial, the minutes that are

recorded between a quarter past twelve and one o'clock in the month of

May--from seeing myself once again strolling and talking thus with Mme.

Swann beneath her parasol, as though in the coloured shade of a wistaria

bower.

_PLACE-NAMES: THE PLACE_

I had arrived at a state almost of complete indifference to Gilberte

when, two years later, I went with my grandmother to Balbec. When I

succumbed to the attraction of a strange face, when it was with the help

of some other girl that I hoped to discover gothic cathedrals, the

palaces and gardens of Italy, I said to myself sadly that this love of

ours, in so far as it is love for one particular creature, is not

perhaps a very real thing, since if the association of pleasant or

unpleasant trains of thought can attach it for a time to a woman so as

to make us believe that it has been inspired by her, in a necessary

sequence of effect to cause, yet when we detach ourselves, deliberately

or unconsciously, from those associations, this love, as though it were

indeed a spontaneous thing and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive

in order to bestow itself on another woman. At the time, however, of my

departure for Balbec, and during the earlier part of my stay there, my

indifference was still only intermittent. Often, our life being so

careless of chronology, interpolating so many anachronisms in the

sequence of our days, I lived still among those--far older days than

yesterday or last week--in which I loved Gilberte. And at once not

seeing her became as exquisite a torture to me as it had been then. The

self that had loved her, which another self had already almost entirely

supplanted, rose again in me, stimulated far more often by a trivial

than by an important event. For instance, if I may anticipate for a

moment my arrival in Normandy, I heard some one who passed me on the

sea-front at Balbec refer to the "Secretary to the Ministry of Posts and

his family". Now, seeing that as yet I knew nothing of the influence

which that family was to exercise over my life, this remark ought to

have passed unheeded; instead, it gave me at once an acute twinge, which

a self that had for the most part long since been outgrown in me felt at

being parted from Gilberte. Because I had never given another thought to

a conversation which Gilberte had had with her father in my hearing, in

which allusion was made to the Secretary to the Ministry of Posts and

his family. Now our love memories present no exception to the general

rules of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general

rules of Habit. And as Habit weakens every impression, what a person

recalls to us most vividly is precisely what we had forgotten, because

it was of no importance, and had therefore left in full possession of

its strength. That is why the better part of our memory exists outside

ourself, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the

first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we

happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last

treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all

our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep

again. Outside ourself, did I say; rather within ourself, but hidden

from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to

this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the creature

that we were, range ourself face to face with past events as that

creature had to face them, suffer afresh because we are no longer

ourself but he, and because he loved what leaves us now indifferent. In

the broad daylight of our ordinary memory the images of the past turn

gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall

never find them again. Or rather we should never find them again had not

a few words (such as this "Secretary to the Ministry of Posts") been

carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the

National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become

unobtainable.

But this suffering and this recrudescence of my love for Gilberte lasted

no longer than such things last in a dream, and this time, on the

contrary, because at Balbec the old Habit was no longer there to keep

them alive. And if these two effects of Habit appear to be incompatible,

that is because Habit is bound by a diversity of laws. In Paris I had

grown more and more indifferent to Gilberte, thanks to Habit. The change

of habit, that is to say the temporary cessation of Habit, completed

Habit's task when I started for Balbec. It weakens, but it stabilises;

it leads to disintegration but it makes the scattered elements last

indefinitely. Day after day, for years past, I had begun by modelling my

state of mind, more or less effectively, upon that of the day before. At

Balbec, a strange bed, to the side of which a tray was brought in the

morning that differed from my Paris breakfast tray, could not,

obviously, sustain the fancies upon which my love for Gilberte had fed:

there are cases (though not, I admit, commonly) in which, one's days

being paralysed by a sedentary life, the best way to save time is to

change one's place of residence. My journey to Balbec was like the first

outing of a convalescent who needed only that to convince him that he

was cured.

The journey was one that would now be made, probably, in a motor-car,

which would be supposed to render it more interesting. We shall see too

that, accomplished in such a way, it would even be in a sense more

genuine, since one would be following more nearly, in a closer intimacy,

the various contours by which the surface of the earth is wrinkled. But

after all the special attraction of the journey lies not in our being

able to alight at places on the way and to stop altogether as soon as we

grow tired, but in its making the difference between departure and

arrival not as imperceptible but as intense as possible, so that we are

conscious of it in its totality, intact, as it existed in our mind when

imagination bore us from the place in which we were living right to the

very heart of a place we longed to see, in a single sweep which seemed

miraculous to us not so much because it covered a certain distance as

because it united two distinct individualities of the world, took us

from one name to another name; and this difference is accentuated (more

than in a form of locomotion in which, since one can stop and alight

where one chooses, there can scarcely be said to be any point of

arrival) by the mysterious operation that is performed in those peculiar

places, railway stations, which do not constitute, so to speak, a part

of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality just

as upon their sign-boards they bear its painted name.

But in this respect as in every other, our age is infected with a mania

for shewing things only in the environment that properly belongs to

them, thereby suppressing the essential thing, the act of the mind which

isolated them from that environment. A picture is nowadays "presented"

in the midst of furniture, ornaments, hangings of the same period, a

second-hand scheme of decoration in the composition of which in the

houses of to-day excels that same hostess who but yesterday was so

crassly ignorant, but now spends her time poring over records and in

libraries; and among these the masterpiece at which we glance up from

the table while we dine does not give us that exhilarating delight which

we can expect from it only in a public gallery, which symbolises far

better by its bareness, by the absence of all irritating detail, those

innermost spaces into which the artist withdrew to create it.

Unhappily those marvellous places which are railway stations, from which

one sets out for a remote destination, are tragic places also, for if in

them the miracle is accomplished whereby scenes which hitherto have had

no existence save in our minds are to become the scenes among which we

shall be living, for that very reason we must, as we emerge from the

waiting-room, abandon any thought of finding ourself once again within

the familiar walls which, but a moment ago, were still enclosing us. We

must lay aside all hope of going home to sleep in our own bed, once we

have made up our mind to penetrate into the pestiferous cavern through

which we may have access to the mystery, into one of those vast,

glass-roofed sheds, like that of Saint-Lazare into which I must go to

find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the rent bowels of

the city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an

accumulation of dramatic menaces, like certain skies painted with an

almost Parisian modernity by Mantegna or Veronese, beneath which could

be accomplished only some solemn and tremendous act, such as a departure

by train or the Elevation of the Cross.

So long as I had been content to look out from the warmth of my own bed

in Paris at the Persian church of Balbec, shrouded in driving sleet, no

sort of objection to this journey had been offered by my body. Its

objections began only when it had gathered that it would have itself to

take part in the journey, and that on the evening of my arrival I should

be shewn to "my" room which to my body would be unknown. Its revolt was

all the more deep-rooted in that on the very eve of my departure I

learned that my mother would not be coming with us, my father, who would

be kept busy at the Ministry until it was time for him to start for

Spain with M. de Norpois, having preferred to take a house in the

neighbourhood of Paris. On the other hand, the spectacle of Balbec

seemed to me none the less desirable because I must purchase it at the

price of a discomfort which, on the contrary, I felt to indicate and to

guarantee the reality of the impression which I was going there to seek,

an impression the place of which no spectacle of professedly equal

value, no "panorama" which I might have gone to see without being

thereby precluded from returning home to sleep in my own bed, could

possibly have filled. It was not for the first time that I felt that

those who love and those who find pleasure are not always the same. I

believed myself to be longing fully as much for Balbec as the doctor who

was treating me, when he said to me, surprised, on the morning of our

departure, to see me look so unhappy; "I don't mind telling you that if

I could only manage a week to go down and get a blow by the sea, I

shouldn't wait to be asked twice. You'll be having races, regattas; you

don't know what all!" But I had already learned the lesson--long before

I was taken to hear Berma--that, whatever it might be that I loved, it

would never be attained save at the end of a long and heart-rending

pursuit, in the course of which I should have first to sacrifice my own

pleasure to that paramount good instead of seeking it there.

My grandmother, naturally enough, looked upon our exodus from a somewhat

different point of view, and (for she was still as anxious as ever that

the presents which were made me should take some artistic form) had

planned, so that she might be offering me, of this journey, a "print"

that was, at least, in parts "old", that we should repeat, partly by

rail and partly by road, the itinerary that Mme. de Sévigné followed

when she went from Paris to "L'Orient" by way of Chaulnes and "the

Pont-Audemer". But my grandmother had been obliged to abandon this

project, at the instance of my father who knew, whenever she organised

any expedition with a view to extracting from it the utmost intellectual

benefit that it was capable of yielding, what a tale there would be to

tell of missed trains, lost luggage, sore throats and broken rules. She

was free at least to rejoice in the thought that never, when the time

came for us to sally forth to the beach, should we be exposed to the

risk of being kept indoors by the sudden appearance of what her beloved

Sévigné calls a "beast of a coachload", since we should know not a

soul at Balbec, Legrandin having refrained from offering us a letter of

introduction to his sister. (This abstention had not been so well

appreciated by my aunts Céline and Flora, who, having known as a child

that lady, of whom they had always spoken until then, to commemorate

this early intimacy, as "Renée de Cambremer", and having had from her

and still possessing a number of those little presents which continue to

ornament a room or a conversation but to which the feeling between the

parties no longer corresponds, imagined that they were avenging the

insult offered to us by never uttering again, when they called upon Mme.

Legrandin, the name of her daughter, confining themselves to a mutual

congratulation, once they were safely out of the house: "I made no

reference to you know whom!" "I think that went home!")

And so we were simply to leave Paris by that one twenty-two train which

I had too often beguiled myself by looking out in the railway

time-table, where its itinerary never failed to give me the emotion,

almost the illusion of starting by it, not to feel that I already knew

it. As the delineation in our mind of the features of any form of

happiness depends more on the nature of the longings that it inspires in

us than the accuracy of the information which we have about it, I felt

that I knew this train in all its details, nor did I doubt that I should

feel, sitting in one of its compartments, a special delight as the day

began to cool, should be contemplating this or that view as the train

approached one or another station; so much so that this train, which

always brought to my mind's eye the images of the same towns, which I

bathed in the sunlight of those post-meridian hours through which it

sped, seemed to me to be different from every other train; and I had

ended--as we are apt to do with a person whom we have never seen but of

whom we like to believe that we have won his friendship--by giving a

distinct and unalterable cast of countenance to the traveller, artistic,

golden-haired, who would thus have taken me with him upon his journey,

and to whom I should bid farewell beneath the Cathedral of Saint-Lô,

before he hastened to overtake the setting sun.

As my grandmother could not bring herself to do anything so "stupid" as

to go straight to Balbec, she was to break the journey half-way, staying

the night with one of her friends, from whose house I was to proceed the

same evening, so as not to be in the way there and also in order that I

might arrive by daylight and see Balbec church, which, we had learned,

was at some distance from Balbec-Plage, so that I might not have a

chance to visit it later on, when I had begun my course of baths. And

perhaps it was less painful for me to feel that the desirable goal of my

journey stood between me and that cruel first night on which I should

have to enter a new habitation, and consent to dwell there. But I had

had first to leave the old; my mother had arranged to "move in", that

afternoon, at Saint-Cloud, and had made, or pretended to make all the

arrangements for going there directly after she had seen us off at the

station, without needing to call again at our own house to which she was

afraid that I might otherwise feel impelled at the last moment, instead

of going to Balbec, to return with her. In fact, on the pretext of

having so much to see to in the house which she had just taken and of

being pressed for time, but in reality so as to spare me the cruel

ordeal of a long-drawn parting, she had decided not to wait with us

until that moment of the signal to start at which, concealed hitherto

among ineffective comings and goings and preparations that lead to

nothing definite, separation is made suddenly manifest, impossible to

endure when it is no longer possibly to be avoided, concentrated in its

entirety in one enormous instant of impotent and supreme lucidity.

For the first time I began to feel that it was possible that my mother

might live without me, otherwise than for me, a separate life. She was

going to stay with my father, whose existence it may have seemed to her

that my feeble health, my nervous excitability complicated somewhat and

saddened. This separation made me all the more wretched because I told

myself that it probably marked for my mother an end of the successive

disappointments which I had caused her, of which she had never said a

word to me but which had made her realise the difficulty of our taking

our holidays together; and perhaps also the first trial of a form of

existence to which she was beginning, now, to resign herself for the

future, as the years crept on for my father and herself, an existence in

which I should see less of her, in which (a thing that not even in my

nightmares had yet been revealed to me) she would already have become

something of a stranger, a lady who might be seen going home by herself

to a house in which I should not be, asking the porter whether there was

not a letter for her from me.

I could scarcely answer the man in the station who offered to take my

bag. My mother, to comfort me, tried the methods which seemed to her

most efficacious. Thinking it to be useless to appear not to notice my

unhappiness, she gently teased me about it:

"Well, and what would Balbec church say if it knew that people pulled

long faces like that when they were going to see it? Surely this is not

the enraptured tourist Ruskin speaks of. Besides, I shall know if you

rise to the occasion, even when we are miles apart I shall still be with

my little man. You shall have a letter to-morrow from Mamma."

"My dear," said my grandmother, "I picture you like Mme. de Sévigné,

your eyes glued to the map, and never losing sight of us for an

instant."

Then Mamma sought to distract my mind, asked me what I thought of having

for dinner, drew my attention to Françoise, complimented her on a hat

and cloak which she did not recognise, in spite of their having

horrified her long ago when she first saw them, new, upon my great-aunt,

one with an immense bird towering over it, the other decorated with a

hideous pattern and jet beads. But the cloak having grown too shabby to

wear, Françoise had had it turned, exposing an "inside" of plain cloth

and quite a good colour. As for the bird, it had long since come to

grief and been thrown away. And just as it is disturbing, sometimes, to

find the effects which the most conscious artists attain only by an

effort occurring in a folk-song, on the wall of some peasant's cottage

where above the door, at the precisely right spot in the composition,

blooms a white or yellow rose--so the velvet band, the loop of ribbon

which would have delighted one in a portrait by Chardin or Whistler,

Françoise had set with a simple but unerring taste upon the hat, which

was now charming.

To take a parallel from an earlier age, the modesty and integrity which

often gave an air of nobility to the face of our old servant having

spread also to the garments which, as a woman reserved but not humbled,

who knew how to hold her own and to keep her place, she had put on for

the journey so as to be fit to be seen in our company without at the

same time seeming or wishing to make herself conspicuous,--Françoise in

the cherry-coloured cloth, now faded, of her cloak, and the discreet nap

of her fur collar, brought to mind one of those miniatures of Anne of

Brittany painted in Books of Hours by an old master, in which everything

is so exactly in the right place, the sense of the whole is so evenly

distributed throughout the parts that the rich and obsolete singularity

of the costume expresses the same pious gravity as the eyes, lips and

hands.

Of thought, in relation to Françoise, one could hardly speak. She knew

nothing, in that absolute sense in which to know nothing means to

understand nothing, save the rare truths to which the heart is capable

of directly attaining. The vast world of ideas existed not for her. But

when one studied the clearness of her gaze, the lines of nose and lips,

all those signs lacking from so many people of culture in whom they

would else have signified a supreme distinction, the noble detachment of

a chosen spirit, one was disquieted, as one is by the frank, intelligent

eyes of a dog, to which, nevertheless, one knows that all our human

concepts must be alien, and was led to ask oneself whether there might

not be, among those other humble brethren, our peasant countrymen,

creatures who were, like the great ones of the earth, of simple mind, or

rather, doomed by a harsh fate to live among the simple-minded, deprived

of heavenly light, were yet more naturally, more instinctively akin to

the chosen spirits than most educated people, were, so to speak, all

members, though scattered, straying, robbed of their heritage of reason,

of the celestial family, kinsfolk, that have been lost in infancy, of

the loftiest minds to whom--as is apparent from the unmistakable light

in their eyes, although they can concentrate that light on

nothing--there has been lacking, to endow them with talent, knowledge

only.

My mother, seeing that I had difficulty in keeping back my tears, said

to me: "'Regulus was in the habit, when things looked grave. . . .'

Besides, it isn't nice for Mamma! What does Mme. de Sévigné say? Your

grandmother will tell you: 'I shall be obliged to draw upon all the

courage that you lack.'" And remembering that affection for another

distracts one's selfish griefs, she endeavoured to beguile me by telling

me that she expected the removal to Saint-Cloud to go without a hitch,

that she liked the cab, which she had kept waiting, that the driver

seemed civil and the seats comfortable. I made an effort to smile at

these trifles, and bowed my head with an air of acquiescence and

satisfaction. But they helped me only to depict to myself with more

accuracy Mamma's imminent departure, and it was with an agonised heart

that I gazed at her as though she were already torn from me, beneath

that wide-brimmed straw hat which she had bought to wear in the country,

in a flimsy dress which she had put on in view of the long drive through

the sweltering midday heat; hat and dress making her some one else, some

one who belonged already to the Villa Montretout, in which I should not

see her.

To prevent the choking fits which the journey might otherwise give me

the doctor had advised me to take, as we started, a good stiff dose of

beer or brandy, so as to begin the journey in a state of what he called

"euphoria", in which the nervous system is for a time less vulnerable.

I had not yet made up my mind whether I should do this, but I wished at

least that my grandmother should admit that, if I did so decide, I

should have wisdom and authority on my side. I spoke therefore as if my

hesitation were concerned only with where I should go for my drink, to

the bar on the platform or to the restaurant-car on the train. But

immediately, at the air of reproach which my grandmothers face assumed,

an air of not wishing even to entertain such an idea for a moment,

"What!" I said to myself, suddenly determining upon this action of going

out to drink, the performance of which became necessary as a proof of my

independence since the verbal announcement of it had not succeeded in

passing unchallenged, "What! You know how ill I am, you know what the

doctor ordered, and you treat me like this!"

When I had explained to my grandmother how unwell I felt, her distress,

her kindness were so apparent as she replied, "Run along then, quickly;

get yourself some beer or a liqueur if it will do you any good," that I

flung myself upon her, almost smothering her in kisses. And if after

that I went and drank a great deal too much in the restaurant-car of the

train, that was because I felt that otherwise I should have a more

violent attack than usual, which was just what would vex her most. When

at the first stop I clambered back into our compartment I told my

grandmother how pleased I was to be going to Balbec, that I felt that

everything would go off splendidly, that after all I should soon grow

used to being without Mamma, that the train was most comfortable, the

steward and attendants in the bar so friendly that I should like to make

the journey often so as to have opportunities of seeing them again. My

grandmother, however, did not appear to feel the same joy as myself at

all these good tidings. She answered, without looking me in the face:

"Why don't you try to get a little sleep?" and turned her gaze to the

window, the blind of which, though we had drawn it, did not completely

cover the glass, so that the sun could and did slip in over the polished

oak of the door and the cloth of the seat (like an advertisement of a

life shared with nature far more persuasive than those posted higher

upon the walls of the compartment, by the railway company, representing

places in the country the names of which I could not make out from where

I sat) the same warm and slumberous light which lies along a forest

glade.

But when my grandmother thought that my eyes were shut I could see her,

now and again, from among the large black spots on her veil, steal a

glance at me, then withdraw it, and steal back again, like a person

trying to make himself, so as to get into the habit, perform some

exercise that hurts him.

Thereupon I spoke to her, but that seemed not to please her either. And

yet to myself the sound of my own voice was pleasant, as were the most

imperceptible, the most internal movements of my body. And so I

endeavoured to prolong it. I allowed each of my inflexions to hang

lazily upon its word, I felt each glance from my eyes arrive just at the

spot to which it was directed and stay there beyond the normal period.

"Now, now, sit still and rest," said my grandmother. "If you can't

manage to sleep, read something." And she handed me a volume of Madame

de Sévigné which I opened, while she buried herself in the _Mémoires

de Madame de Beausergent._ She never travelled anywhere without a volume

of each. They were her two favourite authors. With no conscious movement

of my head, feeling a keen pleasure in maintaining a posture after I had

adopted it, I lay back holding in my hands the volume of Madame de

Sévigné which I had allowed to close, without lowering my eyes to it,

or indeed letting them see anything but the blue window-blind. But the

contemplation of this blind appeared to me an admirable thing, and I

should not have troubled to answer anyone who might have sought to

distract me from contemplating it. The blue colour of this blind seemed

to me, not perhaps by its beauty but by its intense vivacity, to efface

so completely all the colours that had passed before my eyes from the

day of my birth up to the moment in which I had gulped down the last of

my drink and it had begun to take effect, that when compared with this

blue they were as drab, as void as must be retrospectively the darkness

in which he has lived to a man born blind whom a subsequent operation

has at length enabled to see and to distinguish colours. An old

ticket-collector came to ask for our tickets. The silvery gleam that

shone from the metal buttons of his jacket charmed me in spite of my

absorption. I wanted to ask him to sit down beside us. But he passed on

to the next carriage, and I thought with longing of the life led by

railwaymen for whom, since they spent all their time on the line, hardly

a day could pass without their seeing this old collector. The pleasure

that I found in staring at the blind, and in feeling that my mouth was

half-open, began at length to diminish. I became more mobile; I even

moved in my seat; I opened the book that my grandmother had given me and

turned its pages casually, reading whatever caught my eye. And as I read

I felt my admiration for Madame de Sévigné grow.

It is a mistake to let oneself be taken in by the purely formal details,

idioms of the period or social conventions, the effect of which is that

certain people believe that they have caught the Sévigné manner when

they have said: "Tell me, my dear," or "That Count struck me as being a

man of parts," or "Haymaking is the sweetest thing in the world." Mme.

de Simiane imagines already that she is being like her grandmother

because she can write: "M. de la Boulie is bearing wonderfully, Sir, and

is in excellent condition to hear the news of his death," or "Oh, my

dear Marquis, how your letter enchanted me! What can I do but answer

it?" or "Meseems, Sir, that you owe me a letter, and I owe you some

boxes of bergamot. I discharge my debt to the number of eight; others

shall follow. . . . Never has the soil borne so many. Apparently for

your gratification." And she writes in this style also her letter on

bleeding, on lemons and so forth, supposing it to be typical of the

letters of Madame de Sévigné. But my grandmother who had approached

that lady from within, attracted to her by her own love of kinsfolk and

of nature, had taught me to enjoy the real beauties of her

correspondence, which are altogether different. They were presently to

strike me all the more forcibly inasmuch as Madame de Sévigné is a

great artist of the same school as a painter whom I was to meet at

Balbec, where his influence on my way of seeing things was immense. I

realised at Balbec that it was in the same way as he that she presented

things to her readers, in the order of our perception of them, instead

of first having to explain them in relation to their several causes. But

already that afternoon in the railway carriage, as I read over again

that letter in which the moonlight comes: "I cannot resist the

temptation: I put on all my bonnets and veils, though there is no need

of them, I walk along this mall, where the air is as sweet as in my

chamber; I find a thousand phantasms, monks white and black, sisters

grey and white, linen cast here and there on the ground, men enshrouded

upright against the tree-trunks," I was enraptured by what, a little

later, I should have described (for does not she draw landscapes in the

same way as he draws characters?) as the Dostoievsky side of Madame de

Sévigné's Letters.

When, that evening, after having accompanied my grandmother to her

destination and spent some hours in her friend's house, I had returned

by myself to the train, at any rate I found nothing to distress me in

the night which followed; this was because I had not to spend it in a

room the somnolence of which would have kept me awake; I was surrounded

by the soothing activity of all those movements of the train which kept

me company, offered to stay and converse with me if I could not sleep,

lulled me with their sounds which I wedded--as I had often wedded the

chime of the Combray bells--now to one rhythm now to another (hearing as

the whim took me first four level and equivalent semi-quavers, then one

semi-quaver furiously dashing against a crotchet); they neutralised the

centrifugal force of my insomnia by exercising upon it a contrary

pressure which kept me in equilibrium and on which my immobility and

presently my drowsiness felt themselves to be borne with the same sense

of refreshment that I should have had, had I been resting under the

protecting vigilance of powerful forces, on the breast of nature and of

life, had I been able for a moment to incarnate myself in a fish that

sleeps in the sea, driven unheeding by the currents and the tides, or in

an eagle outstretched upon the air, with no support but the storm.

Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are

hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which

boats strain but make no progress. At a certain moment, when I was

counting over the thoughts that had filled my mind, in the preceding

minutes, so as to discover whether I had just been asleep or not (and

when the very uncertainty which made me ask myself the question was to

furnish me with an affirmative answer), in the pale square of the

window, over a small black wood I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy

edges were of a fixed, dead pink, not liable to change, like the colour

that dyes the wing which has grown to wear it, or the sketch upon which

the artists fancy has washed it. But I felt that, unlike them, this

colour was due neither to inertia nor to caprice but to necessity and

life. Presently there gathered behind it reserves of light. It

brightened; the sky turned to a crimson which I strove, glueing my eyes

to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related

somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line

altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of

the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight,

its pond encrusted with the opalescent nacre of night, beneath a

firmament still powdered with all its stars, and I was lamenting the

loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it afresh, but red

this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the

line, so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to

reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean

fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a

comprehensive view of it and a continuous picture.

The scenery became broken, abrupt, the train stopped at a little station

between two mountains. Far down the gorge, on the edge of a hurrying

stream, one could see only a solitary watch-house, deep-planted in the

water which ran past on a level with its windows. If a person can be the

product of a soil the peculiar charm of which one distinguishes in that

person, more even than the peasant girl whom I had so desperately longed

to see appear when I wandered by myself along the Méséglise way, in

the woods of Roussainville, such a person must be the big girl whom I

now saw emerge from the house and, climbing a path lighted by the first

slanting rays of the sun, come towards the station carrying a jar of

milk. In her valley from which its congregated summits hid the rest of

the world, she could never see anyone save in these trains which stopped

for a moment only. She passed down the line of windows, offering coffee

and milk to a few awakened passengers. Purpled with the glow of morning,

her face was rosier than the sky. I felt in her presence that desire to

live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty

and of happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual

qualities, and, substituting for them in our mind a conventional type at

which we arrive by striking a sort of mean amongst the different faces

that have taken our fancy, the pleasures we have known, we are left with

mere abstract images which are lifeless and dull because they are

lacking in precisely that element of novelty, different from anything we

have known, that element which is proper to beauty and to happiness. And

we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we suppose to be fair,

for we believed that we were taking into account when we formed it

happiness and beauty, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them

by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either. So it is

that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when anyone

speaks to him of a new "good book", because he imagines a sort of

composite of all the good books that he has read and knows already,

whereas a good book is something special, something incalculable, and is

made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something

which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not

enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it.

Once he has become acquainted with this new work, the well-read man,

till then apathetic, feels his interest awaken in the reality which it

depicts. So, alien to the models of beauty which my fancy was wont to

sketch when I was by myself, this strapping girl gave me at once the

sensation of a certain happiness (the sole form, always different, in

which we may learn the sensation of happiness), of a happiness that

would be realised by my staying and living there by her side. But in

this again the temporary cessation of Habit played a great part. I was

giving the milk-girl the benefit of what was really my own entire being,

ready to taste the keenest joys, which now confronted her. As a rule it

is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live, most of our

faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what

there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on this

morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the

change of place and time had made their presence indispensable. My

habits, which were sedentary and not matutinal, played me false, and all

my faculties came hurrying to take their place, viewing with one another

in their zeal, rising, each of them, like waves in a storm, to the same

unaccustomed level, from the basest to the most exalted, from breath,

appetite, the circulation of my blood to receptivity and imagination. I

cannot say whether, so as to make me believe that this girl was unlike

the rest of women, the rugged charm of these barren tracts had been

added to her own, but if so she gave it back to them. Life would have

seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it,

hour after hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to

the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her,

had my place in her thoughts. She would have initiated me into the

delights of country life and of the first hours of the day. I signalled

to her to give me some of her coffee. I felt that I must be noticed by

her. She did not see me; I called to her. Above her body, which was of

massive build, the complexion of her face was so burnished and so ruddy

that she appeared almost as though I were looking at her through a

lighted window. She had turned and was coming towards me; I could not

take my eyes from her face which grew larger as she approached, like a

sun which it was somehow possible to arrest in its course and draw

towards one, letting itself be seen at close quarters, blinding the eyes

with its blaze of red and gold. She fastened on me her penetrating

stare, but while the porters ran along the platform shutting doors the

train had begun to move. I saw her leave the station and go down the

hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from

the dawn. Whether my exaltation had been produced by this girl or had on

the other hand been responsible for most of the pleasure that I had

found in the sight of her, in the sense of her presence, in either event

she was so closely associated with it that my desire to see her again

was really not so much a physical as a mental desire, not to allow this

state of enthusiasm to perish utterly, not to be separated for ever from

the person who, although quite unconsciously, had participated in it. It

was not only because this state was a pleasant one. It was principally

because (just as increased tension upon a cord or accelerated vibration

of a nerve produces a different sound or colour) it gave another

tonality to all that I saw, introduced me as an actor upon the stage of

an unknown and infinitely more interesting universe; that handsome girl

whom I still could see, while the train gathered speed, was like part of

a life other than the life that I knew, separated from it by a clear

boundary, in which the sensations that things produced in me were no

longer the same, from which to return now to my old life would be almost

suicide. To procure myself the pleasure of feeling that I had at least

an attachment to this new life, it would suffice that I should live near

enough to the little station to be able to come to it every morning for

a cup of coffee from the girl. But alas, she must be for ever absent

from the other life towards which I was being borne with ever increasing

swiftness, a life to the prospect of which I resigned myself only by

weaving plans that would enable me to take the same train again some day

and to stop at the same station, a project which would have the further

advantage of providing with subject matter the selfish, active,

practical, mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of

the human mind; for our mind turns readily aside from the effort which

is required if it is to analyse in itself, in a general and

disinterested manner, a pleasant impression which we have received. And

as, on the other hand, we wish to continue to think of that impression,

the mind prefers to imagine it in the future tense, which while it gives

us no clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of

recreating it in our own consciousness and allows us to hope that we may

receive it afresh from without.