Certain names of towns, Vezelay or Chartres, Bourges or Beauvais, serve

to indicate, by abbreviation, the principal church in those towns. This

partial acceptation, in which we are so accustomed to take the word,

comes at length--if the names in question are those of places that we do

not yet know--to fashion for us a mould of the name as a solid whole,

which from that time onwards, whenever we wish it to convey the idea of

the town--of that town which we have never seen--will impose on it, as

on a cast, the same carved outlines, in the same style of art, will make

of the town a sort of vast cathedral. It was, nevertheless, in a

railway station, above the door of a refreshment-room, that I read the

name--almost Persian in style--of Balbec. I strode buoyantly through the

station and across the avenue that led past it, I asked my way to the

beach so as to see nothing in the place but its church and the sea;

people seemed not to understand what I meant. Old Balbec,

Balbec-en-Terre, at which I had arrived, had neither beach nor harbour.

It was, most certainly, in the sea that the fishermen had found,

according to the legend, the miraculous Christ, of which a window in the

church that stood a few yards from where I now was recorded the

discovery; it was indeed from cliffs battered by the waves that had been

quarried the stone of its nave and towers. But this sea, which for those

reasons I had imagined as flowing up to die at the foot of the window,

was twelve miles away and more, at Balbec-Plage, and, rising beside its

cupola, that steeple, which, because I had read that it was itself a

rugged Norman cliff on which seeds were blown and sprouted, round which

the sea-birds wheeled, I had always pictured to myself as receiving at

its base the last drying foam of the uplifted waves, stood on a Square

from which two lines of tramway diverged, opposite a Café which bore,

written in letters of gold, the word "Billiards"; it stood out against a

background of houses with the roofs of which no upstanding mast was

blended. And the church--entering my mind with the Café, with the

passing stranger of whom I had had to ask my way, with the station to

which presently I should have to return--made part of the general whole,

seemed an accident, a by-product of this summer afternoon, in which its

mellow and distended dome against the sky was like a fruit of which the

same light that bathed the chimneys of the houses was ripening the skin,

pink, glowing, melting-soft. But I wished only to consider the eternal

significance of the carvings when I recognised the Apostles, which I had

seen in casts in the Trocadéro museum, and which on either side of the

Virgin, before the deep bay of the porch, were awaiting me as though to

do me reverence. With their benign, blunt, mild faces and bowed

shoulders they seemed to be advancing upon me with an air of welcome,

singing the Alleluia of a fine day. But it was evident that their

expression was unchanging as that on a dead man's face, and could be

modified only by my turning about to look at them in different aspects.

I said to myself: "Here I am: this is the Church of Balbec. This square,

which looks as though it were conscious of its glory, is the only place

in the world that possesses Balbec Church. All that I have seen so far

have been photographs of this Church--and of these famous Apostles, this

Virgin of the Porch, mere casts only. Now it is the Church itself, the

statue itself; these are they; they, the unique things--this is

something far greater."

It was something less, perhaps, also. As a young man on the day of an

examination or of a duel feels the question that he has been asked, the

shot that he has fired, to be a very little thing when he thinks of the

reserves of knowledge and of valour that he possesses and would like to

have displayed, so my mind, which had exalted the Virgin of the Porch

far above the reproductions that I had had before my eyes, inaccessible

by the vicissitudes which had power to threaten them, intact although

they were destroyed, ideal, endowed with universal value, was astonished

to see the statue which it had carved a thousand times, reduced now to

its own apparent form in stone, occupying, on the radius of my

outstretched arm, a place in which it had for rivals an election placard

and the point of my stick, fettered to the Square, inseparable from the

head of the main street, powerless to hide from the gaze of the Café

and of the omnibus office, receiving on its face half of that ray of the

setting sun (half, presently, in few hours' time, of the light of the

street lamp) of which the Bank building received the other half, tainted

simultaneously with that branch office of a money-lending establishment

by the smells from the pastry-cook's oven, subjected to the tyranny of

the Individual to such a point that, if I had chosen to scribble my name

upon that stone, it was she, the illustrious Virgin whom until then I

had endowed with a general existence and an intangible beauty, the

Virgin of Balbec, the unique (which meant, alas, the only one) who, on

her body coated with the same soot as defiled the neighbouring houses,

would have displayed--powerless to rid herself of them--to all the

admiring strangers come there to gaze upon her, the marks of my piece of

chalk and the letters of my name; it was she, indeed, the immortal work

of art, so long desired, whom I found, transformed, as was the church

itself, into a little old woman in stone whose height I could measure

and count her wrinkles. But time was passing; I must return to the

station, where I was to wait for my grandmother and Françoise, so that

we should all arrive at Balbec-Plage together. I reminded myself of what

I had read about Balbec, of Swann's saying: "It is exquisite; as fine as

Siena." And casting the blame for my disappointment upon various

accidental causes, such as the state of my health, my exhaustion after

the journey, my incapacity for looking at things properly, I endeavoured

to console myself with the thought that other towns remained still

intact for me, that I might soon, perhaps, be making my way, as into a

shower of pearls, into the cool pattering sound that dripped from

Quimperlé, cross that green water lit by a rosy glow in which Pont-Aven

was bathed; but as for Balbec, no sooner had I set foot in it than it

was as though I had broken open a name which ought to have been kept

hermetically closed, and into which, seizing at once the opportunity

that I had imprudently given them when I expelled all the images that

had been living in it until then, a tramway, a Café, people crossing

the square, the local branch of a Bank, irresistibly propelled by some

external pressure, by a pneumatic force, had come crowding into the

interior of those two syllables which, closing over them, let them now

serve as a border to the porch of the Persian church, and would never

henceforward cease to contain them.

In the little train of the local railway company which was to take us to

Balbec-Plage I found my grandmother, but found her alone--for,

imagining that she was sending Françoise on ahead of her, so as to have

everything ready before we arrived, but having mixed up her

instructions, she had succeeded only in packing off Françoise in the

wrong direction, who at that moment was being carried down all

unsuspectingly, at full speed, to Nantes, and would probably wake up

next morning at Bordeaux. No sooner had I taken my seat in the carriage,

filled with the fleeting light of sunset and with the lingering heat of

the afternoon (the former enabling me, alas, to see written clearly upon

my grandmother's face how much the latter had tired her), than she

began: "Well, and Balbec?" with a smile so brightly illuminated by her

expectation of the great pleasure which she supposed me to have been

enjoying that I dared not at once confess to her my disappointment.

Besides, the impression which my mind had been seeking occupied it

steadily less as the place drew nearer to which my body would have to

become accustomed. At the end--still more than an hour away--of this

journey I was trying to form a picture of the manager of the hotel at

Balbec, to whom I, at that moment, did not exist, and I should have

liked to be going to present myself to him in more impressive company

than that of my grandmother, who would be certain to ask for a

reduction of his terms. The only thing positive about him was his

haughty condescension; his lineaments were still vague.

Every few minutes the little train brought us to a standstill in one of

the stations which came before Balbec-Plage, stations the mere names of

which, (Incarville, Marcouville, Doville, Pont-à-Couleuvre,

Arambouville, Saint-Mars-le-Vieux, Hermonville, Maineville) seemed to me

outlandish, whereas if I had come upon them in a book I should at once

have been struck by their affinity to the names of certain places in the

neighbourhood of Combray. But to the trained ear two musical airs,

consisting each of so many notes, several of which are common to them

both, will present no similarity whatever if they differ in the colour

of their harmony and orchestration. So it was that nothing could have

reminded me less than these dreary names, made up of sand, of space too

airy and empty and of salt, out of which the termination "ville" always

escaped, as the "fly" seems to spring out from the end of the word

"butterfly"--nothing could have reminded me less of those other names,

Roussainville or Martinville, which, because I had heard them pronounced

so often by my great-aunt at table, in the dining-room, had acquired a

certain sombre charm in which were blended perhaps extracts of the

flavour of "preserves", the smell of the fire of logs and of the pages

of one of Bergotte's books, the colour of the stony front of the house

opposite, all of which things still to-day when they rise like a gaseous

bubble from the depths of my memory preserve their own specific virtue

through all the successive layers of rival interests which must be

traversed before they reach the surface.

These were--commanding the distant sea from the crests of their several

dunes or folding themselves already for the night beneath hills of a

crude green colour and uncomfortable shape, like that of the sofa in

one's bedroom in an hotel at which one has just arrived, each composed

of a cluster of villas whose line was extended to include a lawn-tennis

court and now and then a casino, over which a flag would be snapping in

the freshening breeze, like a hollow cough--a series of watering-places

which now let me see for the first time their regular visitors, but let

me see only the external features of those visitors--lawn-tennis players

in white hats, the stationmaster spending all his life there on the spot

among his tamarisks and roses, a lady in a straw "boater" who, following

the everyday routine of an existence which I should never know, was

calling to her dog which had stopped to examine something in the road

before going in to her bungalow where the lamp was already lighted for

her return--which with these strangely usual and slightingly familiar

sights stung my ungreeted eyes and stabbed my exiled heart. But how much

were my sufferings increased when we had finally landed in the hall of

the Grand Hotel at Balbec, and I stood there in front of the monumental

staircase that looked like marble, while my grandmother, regardless of

the growing hostility of the strangers among whom we should have to

live, discussed "terms" with the manager, a sort of nodding mandarin

whose face and voice were alike covered with scars (left by the excision

of countless pustules from one and from the other of the divers accents

acquired from an alien ancestry and in a cosmopolitan upbringing) who

stood there in a smart dinner jacket, with the air of an expert

psychologist, classifying, whenever the "omnibus" discharged a fresh

load, the "nobility and gentry" as "geesers" and the "hotel crooks" as

nobility and gentry. Forgetting, probably, that he himself was not

drawing five hundred francs a month, he had a profound contempt for

people to whom five hundred francs--or, as he preferred to put it,

"twenty-five louis" was "a lot of money", and regarded them as belonging

to a race of pariahs for whom the Grand Hotel was certainly not

intended. It is true that even within its walls there were people who

did not pay very much and yet had not forfeited the manager's esteem,

provided that he was assured that they were watching their expenditure

not from poverty so much as from avarice. For this could in no way lower

their standing since it is a vice and may consequently be found at every

grade of social position. Social position was the one thing by which the

manager was impressed, social position, or rather the signs which seemed

to him to imply that it was exalted, such as not taking one's hat off

when one came into the hall, wearing knickerbockers, or an overcoat with

a waist, and taking a cigar with a band of purple and gold out of a

crushed morocco case--to none of which advantages could I, alas, lay

claim. He would also adorn his business conversation with choice

expressions, to which, as a rule, he gave a wrong meaning.

While I heard my grandmother, who shewed no sign of annoyance at his

listening to her with his hat on his head and whistling through his

teeth at her, ask him in an artificial voice, "And what are . . . your

charges? . . . Oh! far too high for my little budget," waiting upon a

bench, I sought refuge in the innermost depths of my own consciousness,

strove to migrate to a plane of eternal thoughts--to leave nothing of

myself, nothing that lived and felt on the surface of my body,

anaesthetised as are those of animals which by inhibition feign death

when they are attacked--so as not to suffer too keenly in this place,

with which my total unfamiliarity was made all the more evident to me

when I saw the familiarity that seemed at the same moment to be enjoyed

by a smartly dressed lady for whom the manager shewed his respect by

taking liberties with the little dog that followed her across the hall,

the young "blood" with a feather in his hat who asked, as he came in,

"Any letters?" all these people to whom it was an act of home-coming to

mount those stairs of imitation marble. And at the same time the triple

frown of Minos, Æacus and Rhadamanthus (beneath which I plunged my

naked soul as into an unknown element where there was nothing now to

protect it) was bent sternly upon me by a group of gentlemen who, though

little versed perhaps in the art of receiving, yet bore the title

"Reception Clerks", while beyond them again, through a closed wall of

glass, were people sitting in a reading-room for the description of

which I should have had to borrow from Dante alternately the colours in

which he paints Paradise and Hell, according as I was thinking of the

happiness of the elect who had the right to sit and read there

undisturbed, or of the terror which my grandmother would have inspired

in me if, in her insensibility to this sort of impression, she had asked

me to go in there and wait for her by myself.

My sense of loneliness was further increased a moment later: when I had

confessed to my grandmother that I did not feel well, that I thought

that we should be obliged to return to Paris, she had offered no

protest, saying merely that she was going out to buy a few things which

would be equally useful whether we left or stayed (and which, I

afterwards learned, were all for my benefit, Françoise having gone off

with certain articles which I might need); while I waited for her I had

taken a turn through the streets, packed with a crowd of people who

imparted to them a sort of indoor warmth, streets in which were still

open the hairdresser's shop and the pastry-cook's, the latter filled

with customers eating ices, opposite the statue of Duguay-Trouin. This

crowd gave me just about as much pleasure as a photograph of it in one

of the "illustrateds" might give a patient who was turning its pages in

the surgeon's waiting-room. I was astonished to find that there were

people so different from myself that this stroll through the town had

actually been recommended to me by the manager as a distraction, and

also that the torture chamber which a new place of residence is could

appear to some people a "continuous amusement", to quote the hotel

prospectus, which might, it was true, exaggerate, but was, for all that,

addressed to a whole army of clients to whose tastes it must appeal.

True, it invoked, to make them come to the Grand Hotel, Balbec, not only

the "exquisite fare" and the "fairy-like view across the Casino

gardens," but also the "ordinances of her Majesty Queen Fashion, which

no one may break with impunity, or without being taken for a Bœotian,

a charge that no well-bred man would willingly incur." The need that I

now had of my grandmother was enhanced by my fear that I had shattered

another of her illusions. She must be feeling discouraged, feeling that

if I could not stand the fatigue of this journey there was no hope that

any change of air could ever do me good. I decided to return to the

hotel and to wait for her there: the manager himself came forward and

pressed a button, and a person whose acquaintance I had not yet made,

labelled "lift" (who at that highest point in the building, which

corresponded to the lantern in a Norman church, was installed like a

photographer in his dark-room or an organist in his loft) came rushing

down towards me with the agility of a squirrel, tamed, active, caged.

Then, sliding upwards again along a steel pillar, he bore me aloft in

his train towards the dome of this temple of Mammon. On each floor, on

either side of a narrow communicating stair, opened out fanwise a range

of shadowy galleries, along one of which, carrying a bolster, a

chambermaid came past. I lent to her face, which the gathering dusk made

featureless, the mask of my most impassioned dreams of beauty, but read

in her eyes as they turned towards me the horror of my own nonentity.

Meanwhile, to dissipate, in the course of this interminable assent, the

mortal anguish which I felt in penetrating thus in silence the mystery

of this chiaroscuro so devoid of poetry, lighted by a single vertical

line of little windows which were those of the solitary water-closet on

each landing, I addressed a few words to the young organist, artificer

of my journey and my partner in captivity, who continued to manipulate

the registers of his instrument and to finger the stops. I apologised

for taking up so much room, for giving him so much trouble, and asked

whether I was not obstructing him in the practice of an art to which, so

as to flatter the performer, I did more than display curiosity, I

confessed my strong attachment. But he vouchsafed no answer, whether

from astonishment at my words, preoccupation with what he was doing,

regard for convention, hardness of hearing, respect for holy ground,

fear of danger, slowness of understanding, or by the manager's orders.

There is perhaps nothing that gives us so strong an impression of the

reality of the external world as the difference in the positions,

relative to ourself, of even a quite unimportant person before we have

met him and after. I was the same man who had taken, that afternoon, the

little train from Balbec to the coast, I carried in my body the same

consciousness. But on that consciousness, in the place where, at six

o'clock, there had been, with the impossibility of forming any idea of

the manager, the Grand Hotel or its occupants, a vague and timorous

impatience for the moment at which I should reach my destination, were

to be found now the pustules excised from the face of the cosmopolitan

manager (he was, as a matter of fact, a naturalised Monegasque,

although--as he himself put it, for he was always using expressions

which he thought distinguished without noticing that they were

incorrect--"of Rumanian originality"), his action in ringing for the

lift, the lift-boy himself, a whole frieze of puppet-show characters

issuing from that Pandora's box which was the Grand Hotel, undeniable,

irremovable, and, like everything that is realised, sterilising. But at

least this change, which I had done nothing to bring about, proved to me

that something had happened which was external to myself--however devoid

of interest that thing might be--and I was like a traveller who, having

had the sun in his face when he started, concludes that he has been for

so many hours on the road when he finds the sun behind him. I was half

dead with exhaustion, I was burning with fever; I would gladly have gone

to bed, but I had no night-things. I should have liked at least to lie

down for a little while on the bed, but what good would that have done

me, seeing that I should not have been able to find any rest there for

that mass of sensations which is for each of us his sentient if not his

material body, and that the unfamiliar objects which encircled that

body, forcing it to set its perceptions on the permanent footing of a

vigilant and defensive guard, would have kept my sight, my hearing, all

my senses in a position as cramped and comfortless (even if I had

stretched out my legs) as that of Cardinal La Balue in the cage in which

he could neither stand nor sit. It is our noticing them that puts things

in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and

clears a space for us. Space there was none for me in my bedroom (mine

in name only) at Balbec; it was full of things which did not know me,

which flung back at me the distrustful look that I had cast at them,

and, without taking any heed of my existence, shewed that I was

interrupting the course of theirs. The clock--whereas at home I heard my

clock tick only a few seconds in a week, when I was coming out of some

profound meditation--continued without a moment's interruption to utter,

in an unknown tongue, a series of observations which must have been most

uncomplimentary to myself, for the violet curtains listened to them

without replying, but in an attitude such as people adopt who shrug

their shoulders to indicate that the sight of a third person irritates

them. They gave to this room with its lofty ceiling a semi-historical

character which might have made it a suitable place for the

assassination of the Duc de Guise, and afterwards for parties of

tourists personally conducted by one of Messrs. Thomas Cook and Son's

guides, but for me to sleep in--no. I was tormented by the presence of

some little bookcases with glass fronts which ran along the walls, but

especially by a large mirror with feet which stood across one corner,

for I felt that until it had left the room there would be no possibility

of rest for me there. I kept raising my eyes--which the things in my

room in Paris disturbed me no more than did my eyelids themselves, for

they were merely extensions of my organs, an enlargement of

myself--towards the fantastically high ceiling of this belvedere planted

upon the summit of the hotel which my grandmother had chosen for me; and

in that region more intimate than those in which we see and hear, that

region in which we test the quality of odours, almost in the very heart

of my inmost self, the smell of flowering grasses next launched its

offensive against my last feeble line of trenches, where I stood up to

it, not without tiring myself still further, with the futile incessant

defence of an anxious sniffing. Having no world, no room, no body now

that was not menaced by the enemies thronging round me, invaded to the

very bones by fever, I was utterly alone; I longed to die. Then my

grandmother came in, and to the expansion of my ebbing heart there

opened at once an infinity of space.

She was wearing a loose cambric gown which she put on at home whenever

any of us was ill (because she felt more comfortable in it, she used to

say, for she always ascribed to her actions a selfish motive), and which

was, for tending us, for watching by our beds, her servant's livery, her

nurse's uniform, her religious habit. But whereas the trouble that

servants, nurses, religious take, their kindness to us, the merits that

we discover in them and the gratitude that we owe them all go to

increase the impression that we have of being, in their eyes, some one

different, of feeling that we are alone, keeping in our own hands the

control over our thoughts, our will to live, I knew, when I was with my

grandmother, that, however great the misery that there was in me, it

would be received by her with a pity still more vast; that everything

that was mine, my cares, my wishes, would be, in my grandmother,

supported upon a desire to save and prolong my life stronger than was my

own; and my thoughts were continued in her without having to undergo any

deflection, since they passed from my mind into hers without change of

atmosphere or of personality. And--like a man who tries to fasten his

necktie in front of a glass and forgets that the end which he sees

reflected is not on the side to which he raises his hand, or like a dog

that chases along the ground the dancing shadow of an insect in the

air--misled by her appearance in the body as we are apt to be in this

world where we have no direct perception of people's souls, I threw

myself into the arms of my grandmother and clung with my lips to her

face as though I had access thus to that immense heart which she opened

to me. And when I felt my mouth glued to her cheeks, to her brow, I drew

from them something so beneficial, so nourishing that I lay in her arms

as motionless, as solemn, as calmly gluttonous as a babe at the breast.

At last I let go, and lay and gazed, and could not tire of gazing at her

large face, as clear in its outline as a fine cloud, glowing and serene,

behind which I could discern the radiance of her tender love. And

everything that received, in however slight a degree, any share of her

sensations, everything that could be said to belong in any way to her

was at once so spiritualised, so sanctified that with outstretched hands

I smoothed her dear hair, still hardly grey, with as much respect,

precaution, comfort as if I had actually been touching her goodness. She

found a similar pleasure in taking any trouble that saved me one, and in

a moment of immobility and rest for my weary limbs something so

delicious that when, having seen that she wished to help me with my

undressing and to take my boots off, I made as though to stop her and

began to undress myself, with an imploring gaze she arrested my hands as

they fumbled with the top buttons of my coat and boots.

"Oh, do let me!" she begged. "It is such a joy for your Granny. And be

sure you knock on the wall if you want anything in the night. My bed is

just on the other side, and the partition is quite thin. Just give a

knock now, as soon as you are ready, so that we shall know where we

are."

And, sure enough, that evening I gave three knocks--a signal which, the

week after, when I was ill, I repeated every morning for several days,

because my grandmother wanted me to have some milk early. Then, when I

thought that I could hear her stirring, so that she should not be kept

waiting but might, the moment she had brought me the milk, go to sleep

again, I ventured on three little taps, timidly, faintly, but for all

that distinctly, for if I was afraid of disturbing her, supposing that I

had been mistaken and that she was still asleep, I should not have

wished her either to lie awake listening for a summons which she had not

at once caught and which I should not have the courage to repeat. And

scarcely had I given my taps than I heard three others, in a different

intonation from mine, stamped with a calm authority, repeated twice over

so that there should be no mistake, and saying to me plainly: "Don't get

excited; I heard you; I shall be with you in a minute!" and shortly

afterwards my grandmother appeared. I explained to her that I had been

afraid that she would not hear me, or might think that it was some one

in the room beyond who was tapping; at which she smiled:

"Mistake my poor chick's knocking for anyone else! Why, Granny could

tell it among a thousand! Do you suppose there's anyone else in the

world who's such a silly-billy, with such feverish little knuckles, so

afraid of waking me up and of not making me understand? Even if he just

gave the least scratch, Granny could tell her mouse's sound at once,

especially such a poor miserable little mouse as mine is. I could hear

it just now, trying to make up its mind, and rustling the bedclothes,

and going through all its tricks."

She pushed open the shutters; where a wing of the hotel jutted out at

right angles to my window, the sun was already installed upon the roof,

like a slater who is up betimes, and starts early and works quietly so

as not to rouse the sleeping town, whose stillness seems to enhance his

activity. She told me what o'clock, what sort of day it was; that it was

not worth while my getting up and coming to the window, that there was a

mist over the sea; if the baker's shop had opened yet; what the vehicle

was that I could hear passing. All that brief, trivial curtain-raiser,

that negligible _introit_ of a new day, performed without any spectator,

a little scrap of life which was only for our two selves, which I should

have no hesitation in repeating, later on, to Françoise or even to

strangers, speaking of the fog "which you could have cut with a knife"

at six o'clock that morning, with the ostentation of one who was

boasting not of a piece of knowledge that he had acquired but of a mark

of affection shewn to himself alone; dear morning moment, opened like a

symphony by the rhythmical dialogue of my three taps, to which the thin

wall of my bedroom, steeped in love and joy, grown melodious,

immaterial, singing like the angelic choir, responded with three other

taps, eagerly awaited, repeated once and again, in which it contrived to

waft to me the soul of my grandmother, whole and perfect, and the

promise of her coming, with a swiftness of annunciation and melodic

accuracy. But on this first night after our arrival, when my grandmother

had left me, I began again to feel as I had felt, the day before, in

Paris, at the moment of leaving home. Perhaps this fear that I had--and

shared with so many of my fellow-men--of sleeping in a strange room,

perhaps this fear is only the most humble, obscure, organic, almost

unconscious form of that great and desperate resistance set up by the

things that constitute the better part of our present life towards our

mentally assuming, by accepting it as true, the formula of a future in

which those things are to have no part; a resistance which was at the

root of the horror that I had so often been made to feel by the thought

that my parents must, one day, die, that the stern necessity of life

might oblige me to live remote from Gilberte, or simply to settle

permanently in a place where I should never see any of my old friends; a

resistance which was also at the root of the difficulty that I found in

imagining my own death, or a survival such as Bergotte used to promise

to mankind in his books, a survival in which I should not be allowed to

take with me my memories, my frailties, my character, which did not

easily resign themselves to the idea of ceasing to be, and desired for

me neither annihilation nor an eternity in which they would have no

part.

When Swann had said to me, in Paris one day when I felt particularly

unwell: "You ought to go off to one of those glorious islands in the

Pacific; you'd never come back again if you did." I should have liked to

answer: "But then I shall not see your daughter any more; I shall be

living among people and things she has never seen." And yet my better

judgment whispered: "What difference can that make, since you are not

going to be affected by it? When M. Swann tells you that you will not

come back he means by that that you will not want to come back, and if

you don't want to that is because you will be happier out there." For my

judgment was aware that Habit--Habit which was even now setting to work

to make me like this unfamiliar lodging, to change the position of the

mirror, the shade of the curtains, to stop the clock--undertakes as well

to make dear to us the companions whom at first we disliked, to give

another appearance to their faces, to make attractive the sound of their

voices, to modify the inclinations of their hearts. It is true that

these new friendships for places and people are based upon forgetfulness

of the old; but what my better judgment was thinking was simply that I

could look without apprehension along the vista of a life in which I

should be for ever separated from people all memory of whom I should

lose, and it was by way of consolation that my mind was offering to my

heart a promise of oblivion which succeeded only in sharpening the edge

of its despair. Not that the heart also is not bound in time, when

separation incomplete, to feel the anodyne effect of habit; but until

then it will continue to suffer. And our dread of a future in which we

must forego the sight of faces, the sound of voices that we love,

friends from whom we derive to-day our keenest joys, this dread, far

from being dissipated, is intensified, if to the grief of such a

privation we reflect that there will be added what seems to us now in

anticipation an even more cruel grief; not to feel it as a grief at

all--to remain indifferent; for if that should occur, our ego would have

changed, it would then be not merely the attractiveness of our family,

our mistress, our friends that had ceased to environ us, but our

affection for them; it would have been so completely eradicated from our

heart, in which to-day it is a conspicuous element, that we should be

able to enjoy that life apart from them the very thought of which to-day

makes us recoil in horror; so that it would be in a real sense the death

of ourself, a death followed, it is true, by resurrection but in a

different ego, the life, the love of which are beyond the reach of those

elements of the existing ego that are doomed to die. It is they--even

the meanest of them, such as our obscure attachments to the dimensions,

to the atmosphere of a bedroom--that grow stubborn and refuse, in acts

of rebellion which we must recognise to be a secret, partial, tangible

and true aspect of our resistance to death, of the long resistance,

desperate and daily renewed, to a fragmentary and gradual death such as

interpolates itself throughout the whole course of our life, tearing

away from us at every moment a shred of ourself, dead matter on which

new cells will multiply, and grow. And for a neurotic nature such as

mine, one that is to say in which the intermediaries, the nerves,

perform their functions badly--fail to arrest on its way to the

consciousness, allow indeed to penetrate there, distinct, exhausting,

innumerable, agonising, the plaint of those most humble elements of the

personality which are about to disappear--the anxiety and alarm which I

felt as I lay outstretched beneath that strange and too lofty ceiling

were but the protest of an affection that survived in me for a ceiling

that was familiar and low. Doubtless this affection too would disappear,

and another have taken its place (when death, and then another life,

would, in the guise of Habit, have performed their double task); but

until its annihilation, every night it would suffer afresh, and on this

first night especially, confronted with a future already realised in

which there would no longer be any place for it, it rose in revolt, it

tortured me with the sharp sound of its lamentations whenever my

straining eyes, powerless to turn from what was wounding them,

endeavoured to fasten their gaze upon that inaccessible ceiling.

But next morning!--after a servant had come to call me, and had brought

me hot water, and while I was washing and dressing myself and trying in

vain to find the things that I wanted in my trunk, from which I

extracted, pell-mell, only a lot of things that were of no use whatever,

what a joy it was to me, thinking already of the delights of luncheon

and of a walk along the shore, to see in the window, and in all the

glass fronts of the bookcases as in the portholes of a ship's cabin, the

open sea, naked, unshadowed, and yet with half of its expanse in shadow,

bounded by a thin and fluctuant line, and to follow with my eyes the

waves that came leaping towards me, one behind another, like divers

along a springboard. Every other moment, holding in one hand the

starched, unyielding towel, with the name of the hotel printed upon it,

with which I was making futile efforts to dry myself, I returned to the

window to gaze once more upon that vast amphitheatre, dazzling,

mountainous, and upon the snowy crests of its emerald waves, here and

there polished and translucent, which with a placid violence, a leonine

bending of the brows, let their steep fronts, to which the sun now added

a smile without face or features, run forward to their goal, totter and

melt and be no more. Window in which I was, henceforward, to plant

myself every morning, as at the pane of a mail coach in which one has

slept, to see whether, in the night, a long sought mountain-chain has

come nearer or withdrawn--only here it was those hills of the sea which,

before they come dancing back towards us, are apt to retire so far that

often it was only at the end of a long and sandy plain that I would

distinguish, miles it seemed away, their first undulations upon a

background transparent, vaporous, bluish, like the glaciers that one

sees in the backgrounds of the Tuscan Primitives. On other mornings it

was quite close at hand that the sun was smiling upon those waters of a

green as tender as that preserved in Alpine pastures (among mountains on

which the sun spreads himself here and there like a lazy giant who may

at any moment come leaping gaily down their craggy sides) less by the

moisture of their soil than by the liquid mobility of their light.

Anyhow, in that breach which shore and water between them drive through

all the rest of the world, for the passage, the accumulation there of

light, it is light above all, according to the direction from which it

comes and along which our eyes follow it, it is light that shifts and

fixes the undulations of the sea. Difference of lighting modifies no

less the orientation of a place, constructs no less before our eyes new

goals which it inspires in us the yearning to attain, than would a

distance in space actually traversed in the course of a long journey.

When, in the morning, the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to

me the sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it

seemed to be shewing me another side of the picture, and to be engaging

me on the pursuit, along the winding path of its rays, of a journey

motionless but ever varied amid all the fairest scenes of the

diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning the sun

pointed out to me far off with a jovial finger those blue peaks of the

sea, which bear no name upon any geographer's chart, until, dizzy with

its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their

crests and avalanches, it came back to take shelter from the wind in my

bedroom, swaggering across the unmade bed and scattering its riches over

the splashed surface of the basin-stand, and into my open trunk, where

by its very splendour and ill-matched luxury it added still further to

the general effect of disorder. Alas, that wind from the sea; an hour

later, in the great dining-room--while we were having our luncheon, and

from the leathern gourd of a lemon were sprinkling a few golden drops on

to a pair of soles which presently left on our plates the plumes of

their picked skeletons, curled like stiff feathers and resonant as

citherns,--it seemed to my grandmother a cruel deprivation not to be

able to feel its life-giving breath on her cheek, on account of the

window, transparent but closed, which like the front of a glass case in

a museum divided us from the beach while allowing us to look out upon

its whole extent, and into which the sky entered so completely that its

azure had the effect of being the colour of the windows and its white

clouds only so many flaws in the glass. Imagining that I was "seated

upon the mole" or at rest in the "boudoir" of which Baudelaire speaks I

asked myself whether his "Sun's rays upon the sea" were not--a very

different thing from the evening ray, simple and superficial as the

wavering stroke of a golden pencil--just what at that moment was

scorching the sea topaz-brown, fermenting it, turning it pale and milky

like foaming beer, like milk, while now and then there hovered over it

great blue shadows which some god seemed, for his pastime, to be

shifting to and fro by moving a mirror in the sky. Unfortunately, it was

not only in its outlook that it differed from our room at Combray,

giving upon the houses over the way, this dining-room at Balbec,

bare-walled, filled with a sunlight green as the water in a marble font,

while a few feet away the full tide and broad daylight erected as though

before the gates of the heavenly city an indestructible and moving

rampart of emerald and gold. At Combray, since we were known to

everyone, I took heed of no one. In life at the seaside one knows only

one's own party. I was not yet old enough, I was still too sensitive to

have outgrown the desire to find favour in the sight of other people and

to possess their hearts. Nor had I acquired the more noble indifference

which a man of the world would have felt, with regard to the people who

were eating their luncheon in the room, nor to the boys and girls who

strolled past the window, with whom I was pained by the thought that I

should never be allowed to go on expeditions, though not so much pained

as if my grandmother, contemptuous of social formalities and concerned

about nothing but my health, had gone to them with the request,

humiliating for me to overhear, that they would consent to let me

accompany them. Whether they were returning to some villa beyond my ken,

or had emerged from it, racquet in hand, on their way to some

lawn-tennis court, or were mounted on horses whose hooves trampled and

tore my heart, I gazed at them with a passionate curiosity, in that

blinding light of the beach by which social distinctions are altered, I

followed all their movements through the transparency of that great bay

of glass which allowed so much light to flood the room. But it

intercepted the wind, and this seemed wrong to my grandmother, who,

unable to endure the thought that I was losing the benefit of an hour in

the open air, surreptitiously unlatched a pane and at once set flying,

with the bills of fare, the newspapers, veils and hats of all the people

at the other tables; she herself, fortified by the breath of heaven,

remained calm and smiling like Saint Blandina, amid the torrent of

invective which, increasing my sense of isolation and misery, those

scornful, dishevelled, furious visitors combined to pour on us.

To a certain extent--and this, at Balbec, gave to the population, as a

rule monotonously rich and cosmopolitan, of that sort of smart and

"exclusive" hotel, a quite distinctive local character--they were

composed of eminent persons from the departmental capitals of that

region of France, a chief magistrate from Caen, a leader of the

Cherbourg bar, a big solicitor from Le Mans, who annually, when the

holidays came round, starting from the various points over which,

throughout the working year, they were scattered like snipers in a

battle or draughtsmen upon a board, concentrated their forces upon this

hotel. They always reserved the same rooms, and with their wives, who

had pretensions to aristocracy, formed a little group, which was joined

by a leading barrister and a leading doctor from Paris, who on the day

of their departure would say to the others:

"Oh, yes, of course; you don't go by our train. You are fortunate, you

will be home in time for luncheon."

"Fortunate, do you say? You, who live in the Capital, in 'Paris, the

great town', while I have to live in a wretched county town of a hundred

thousand souls (it is true, we managed to muster a hundred and two

thousand at the last census, but what is that compared to your two and a

half millions?) going back, too, to asphalt streets and all the bustle

and gaiety of Paris life."

They said this with a rustic burring of their 'r's, but without

bitterness, for they were leading lights each in his own province, who

could like other people have gone to Paris had they chosen--the chief

magistrate of Caen had several times been offered a judgeship in the

Court of Appeal--but had preferred to stay where they were, from love of

their native towns or of obscurity or of fame, or because they were

reactionaries, and enjoyed being on friendly terms with the country

houses of the neighbourhood. Besides several of them were not going back

at once to their county towns.

For--inasmuch as the Bay of Balbec was a little world apart in the midst

of a great world, a basketful of the seasons in which were clustered in

a ring good days and bad, and the months in their order, so that not

only, on days when one could make out Rivebelle, which was in itself a

sign of coming storms, could one see the sunlight on the houses there

while Balbec was plunged in darkness, but later on, when the cold

weather had reached Balbec, one could be certain of finding on that

opposite shore two or three supplementary months of warmth--those of the

regular visitors to the Grand Hotel whose holidays began late or lasted

long, gave orders, when rain and fog came and Autumn was in the air, for

their boxes to be packed and embarked, and set sail across the Bay to

find summer again at Rivebelle or Costedor. This little group in the

Balbec hotel looked with distrust upon each new arrival, and while

affecting to take not the least interest in him, hastened, all of them,

to ply with questions their friend the head waiter. For it was the same

head waiter--Aimé--who returned every year for the season, and kept

their tables for them; and their good ladies, having heard that his wife

was "expecting", would sit after meals working each at one of the

"little things", stopping only to put up their glasses and stare at us,

my grandmother and myself, because we were eating hard-boiled eggs in

salad, which was considered common, and was, in fact, "not done" in the

best society of Alençon. They affected an attitude of contemptuous

irony with regard to a Frenchman who was called "His Majesty" and had

indeed proclaimed himself King of a small island in the South Seas,

inhabited by a few savages. He was staying in the hotel with his pretty

mistress, whom, as she crossed the beach to bathe, the little boys would

greet with "Three cheers for the Queen!" because she would reward them

with a shower of small silver. The chief magistrate and the barrister

went so far as to pretend not to see her, and if any of their friends

happened to look at her, felt bound to warn him that she was only a

little shop-girl.

"But I was told that at Ostend they used the royal bathing machine."

"Well, and why not? It's on hire for twenty francs. You can take it

yourself, if you care for that sort of thing. Anyhow, I know for a fact

that the fellow asked for an audience, when he was there, with the King,

who sent back word that he took no cognisance of any Pantomime Princes."

"Really, that's interesting! What queer people there are in the world,

to be sure!"

And I dare say it was all quite true: but it was also from resentment of

the thought that, to many of their fellow-visitors, they were themselves

simply respectable but rather common people who did not know this King

and Queen so prodigal with their small change, that the solicitor, the

magistrate, the barrister, when what they were pleased to call the

"Carnival" went by, felt so much annoyance, and expressed aloud an

indignation that was quite understood by their friend the head waiter

who, obliged to shew proper civility to these generous if not authentic

Sovereigns, still, while he took their orders, would dart from afar at

his old patrons a covert but speaking glance. Perhaps there was also

something of the same resentment at being erroneously supposed to be

less and unable to explain that they were more smart, underlining the

"fine specimen" with which they qualified a young "blood", the

consumptive and dissipated son of an industrial magnate, who appeared

every day in a new suit of clothes with an orchid in his buttonhole,

drank champagne at luncheon, and then strolled out of the hotel, pale,

impassive, a smile of complete indifference on his lips, to the casino

to throw away at the baccarat table enormous sums, "which he could ill

afford to lose," as the solicitor said with a resigned air to the chief

magistrate, whose wife had it "on good authority" that this

"detrimental" young man was bringing his parents' grey hair in sorrow to

the grave.

On the other hand, the barrister and his friends could not exhaust their

flow of sarcasm on the subject of a wealthy old lady of title, because

she never moved any where without taking her whole household with her.

Whenever the wives of the solicitor and the magistrate saw her in the

dining-room at meal-times they put up their glasses and gave her an

insolent scrutiny, as minute and distrustful as if she had been some

dish with a pretentious name but a suspicious appearance which, after

the negative result of a systematic study, must be sent away with a

lofty wave of the hand and a grimace of disgust.

No doubt by this behaviour they meant only to shew that, if there were

things in the world which they themselves lacked--in this instance,

certain prerogatives which the old lady enjoyed, and the privilege of

her acquaintance--it was not because they could not, but because they

did not choose to acquire them. But they had succeeded in convincing

themselves that this really was what they felt; and it was the

suppression of all desire for, of all curiosity as to forms of life

which were unfamiliar, of all hope of pleasing new people (for which, in

the women, had been substituted a feigned contempt, an artificial

brightness) that had the awkward result of obliging them to label their

discontent satisfaction, and lie everlastingly to themselves, for which

they were greatly to be pitied. But everyone else in the hotel was no

doubt behaving in a similar fashion, though his behaviour might take a

different form, and sacrificing, if not to self-importance, at any rate

to certain inculcated principles and mental habits the thrilling delight

of mixing in a strange kind of life. Of course, the atmosphere of the

microcosm in which the old lady isolated herself was not poisoned with

virulent bitterness, as was that of the group in which the wives of the

solicitor and magistrate sat chattering with impotent rage. It was

indeed embalmed with a delicate and old world fragrance which, however,

was none the less artificial. For at heart the old lady would probably

have found in attracting, in attaching to herself (and, with that

object, recreating herself) the mysterious sympathy of new friends a

charm which is altogether lacking from the pleasure that is to be

derived from mixing only with the people of one's own world, and

reminding oneself that, one's own being the best of all possible worlds,

the ill-informed contempt of "outsiders" may be disregarded. Perhaps she

felt that--were she to arrive _incognito_ at the Grand Hotel, Balbec,

she would, in her black stuff gown and old-fashioned bonnet, bring a

smile to the lips of some old reprobate, who from the depths of his

rocking chair would glance up and murmur, "What a scarecrow!" or, still

worse, to those of some man of repute who had, like the magistrate, kept

between his pepper-and-salt whiskers a rosy complexion and a pair of

sparkling eyes such as she liked to see, and would at once bring the

magnifying lens of the conjugal glasses to bear upon so quaint a

phenomenon; and perhaps it was in unconfessed dread of those first few

minutes, which, though one knows that they will be but a few minutes,

are none the less terrifying, like the first plunge of one's head under

water, that this old lady sent down in advance a servant, who would

inform the hotel of the personality and habits of his mistress, and,

cutting short the manager's greetings, made, with an abruptness in which

there was more timidity than pride, for her room, where her own

curtains, substituted for those that draped the hotel windows, her own

screens and photographs set up so effectively between her and the

outside world, to which otherwise she would have had to adapt herself,

the barrier of her private life that it was her home (in which she had

comfortably stayed) that travelled rather than herself.

Thenceforward, having placed between herself, on the one hand, and the

staff of the hotel and its decorators on the other the servants who bore

instead of her the shock of contact with all this strange humanity, and

kept up around their mistress her familiar atmosphere, having set her

prejudices between herself and the other visitors, indifferent whether

or not she gave offence to people whom her friends would not have had in

their houses, it was in her own world that she continued to live, by

correspondence with her friends, by memories, by her intimate sense of

and confidence in her own position, the quality of her manners, the

competence of her politeness. And every day, when she came downstairs to

go for a drive in her own carriage, the lady's maid who came after her

carrying her wraps, the footman who preceded her seemed like sentries

who, at the gate of an embassy, flying the flag of the country to which

she belonged, assured to her upon foreign soil the privilege of

extra-territoriality. She did not leave her room until late in the

afternoon on the day following our arrival, so that we did not see her

in the dining-room, into which the manager, since we were strangers

there, conducted us, taking us under his wing, as a corporal takes a

squad of recruits to the master-tailor, to have them fitted; we did see

however, a moment later, a country gentleman and his daughter, of an

obscure but very ancient Breton family, M. and Mlle. de Stermaria, whose

table had been allotted to us, in the belief that they had gone out and

would not be back until the evening. Having come to Balbec only to see

various country magnates whom they knew in that neighbourhood, they

spent in the hotel dining-room, what with the invitations they accepted

and the visits they paid, only such time as was strictly unavoidable. It

was their stiffness that preserved them intact from all human sympathy,

from interesting at all the strangers seated round about them, among

whom M. de Stermaria kept up the glacial, preoccupied, distant, rude,

punctilious and distrustful air that we assume in a railway

refreshment-room, among fellow-passengers whom we have never seen before

and will never see again, and with whom we can conceive of no other

relations than to defend from their onslaught our "portion" of cold

chicken and our corner seat in the train. No sooner had we begun our

luncheon than we were asked to leave the table, on the instructions of

M. de Stermaria who had just arrived and, without the faintest attempt

at an apology to us, requested the head waiter, in our hearing to "see

that such a mistake did not occur again," for it was repugnant to him

that "people whom he did not know" should have taken his table.

And certainly into the feeling which impelled a young actress (better

known, though, for her smart clothes, her smart sayings, her collection

of German porcelain, than in the occasional parts that she had played at

the Odéon), her lover, an immensely rich young man for whose sake she

had acquired her culture, and two sprigs of aristocracy at that time

much in the public eye to form a little band apart, to travel only

together, to come down to luncheon--when at Balbec--very late, after

everyone had finished; to spend the whole day in their sitting-room

playing cards, there entered no sort of ill-humour against the rest of

us but simply the requirements of the taste that they had formed for a

certain type of conversation, for certain refinements of good living,

which made them find pleasure in spending their time, in taking their

meals only by themselves, and would have rendered intolerable a life in

common with people who had not been initiated into those mysteries. Even

at a dinner or a card-table, each of them had to be certain that, in the

diner or partner who sat opposite to him, there was, latent and not yet

made use of, a certain brand of knowledge which would enable him to

identify the rubbish with which so many houses in Paris were littered as

genuine mediaeval or renaissance "pieces" and, whatever the subject of

discussion, to apply the critical standards common to all their party

whereby they distinguished good work from bad. Probably it was only--at

such moments--by some infrequent, amusing interruption flung into the

general silence of meal or game, or by the new and charming frock which

the young actress had put on for luncheon or for poker, that the special

kind of existence in which these four friends desired, above all things,

to remain plunged was made apparent. But by engulfing them thus in a

system of habits which they knew by heart it sufficed to protect them

from the mystery of the life that was going on all round them. All the

long afternoon, the sea was suspended there before their eyes only as a

canvas of attractive colouring might hang on the wall of a wealthy

bachelor's flat and it was only in the intervals between the "hands"

that one of the players, finding nothing better to do, raised his eyes

to it to seek from it some indication of the weather or the time, and to

remind the others that tea was ready. And at night they did not dine in

the hotel, where, hidden springs of electricity flooding the great

dining-room with light, it became as it were an immense and wonderful

aquarium against whose wall of glass the working population of Balbec,

the fishermen and also the tradesmen's families, clustering invisibly in

the outer darkness, pressed their faces to watch, gently floating upon

the golden eddies within, the luxurious life of its occupants, a thing

as extraordinary to the poor as the life of strange fishes or molluscs

(an important social question, this; whether the wall of glass will

always protect the wonderful creatures at their feasting, whether the

obscure folk who watch them hungrily out of the night will not break in

some day to gather them from their aquarium and devour them). Meanwhile

there may have been, perhaps, among the gazing crowd, a motionless,

formless mass there in the dark, some writer, some student of human

ichthyology who, as he watched the jaws of old feminine monstrosities

close over a mouthful of food which they proceeded then to absorb, was

amusing himself by classifying them according to their race, by their

innate characteristics as well as by those acquired characteristics

which bring it about that an old Serbian lady whose buccal protuberance

is that of a great sea-fish, because from her earliest years she has

moved in the fresh waters of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, eats her salad

for all the world like a La Rochefoucauld.

At that hour one could see the three young men in dinner-jackets,

waiting for the young woman, who was as usual late but presently,

wearing a dress that was almost always different and one of a series of

scarves, chosen to gratify some special instinct in her lover, after

having from her landing rung for the lift, would emerge from it like a

doll coming out of its box. And then all four, because they found that

the international phenomenon of the "Palace", planted on Balbec soil,

had blossomed there in material splendour rather than in food that was

fit to eat, bundled into a carriage and went to dine, a mile off, in a

little restaurant that was well spoken of, where they held with the cook

himself endless discussions of the composition of their meal and the

cooking of its various dishes. During their drive, the road bordered

with apple-trees that led out of Balbec was no more to them than the

distance that must be traversed--barely distinguishable in the darkness

from that which separated their homes in Paris from the Café Anglais or

the Tour d'Argent--before they could arrive at the fashionable little

restaurant where, while the young man's friends envied him because he

had such a smartly dressed mistress, the latter's scarves were spread

about the little company like a fragrant, flowing veil, but one that

kept it apart from the outer world.

Alas for my peace of mind, I had none of the detachment that all these

people shewed. To many of them I gave constant thought; I should have

liked not to pass unobserved by a man with a receding brow and eyes that

dodged between the blinkers of his prejudices and his education, the

great nobleman of the district, who was none other than the

brother-in-law of Legrandin, and came every now and then to see somebody

at Balbec and on Sundays, by reason of the weekly garden-party that his

wife and he gave, robbed the hotel of a large number of its occupants,

because one or two of them were invited to these entertainments and the

others, so as not to appear to have been not invited, chose that day for

an expedition to some distant spot. He had had, as it happened, an

exceedingly bad reception at the hotel on the first day of the season,

when the staff, freshly imported from the Riviera, did not yet know who

or what he was. Not only was he not wearing white flannels, but, with

old-fashioned French courtesy and in his ignorance of the ways of smart

hotels, on coming into the hall in which there were ladies sitting, he

had taken off his hat at the door, the effect of which had been that the

manager did not so much as raise a finger to his own in acknowledgment,

concluding that this must be some one of the most humble extraction,

what he called "sprung from the ordinary." The solicitor's wife, alone,

had felt herself attracted by the stranger, who exhaled all the starched

vulgarity of the really respectable, and had declared, with the unerring

discernment and the indisputable authority of a person from whom the

highest society of Le Mans held no secrets, that one could see at a

glance that one was in the presence of a gentleman of great distinction,

of perfect breeding, a striking contrast to the sort of people one

usually saw at Balbec, whom she condemned as impossible to know so long

as she did not know them. This favourable judgment which she had

pronounced on Legrandin's brother-in-law was based perhaps on the

spiritless appearance of a man about whom there was nothing to

intimidate anyone; perhaps also she had recognised in this gentleman

farmer with the gait of a sacristan the Masonic signs of her own

inveterate clericalism.

It made no difference my knowing that the young fellows who went past

the hotel every day on horseback were the sons of the questionably

solvent proprietor of a linen-drapery to whom my father would never have

dreamed of speaking; the glamour of "seaside life" exalted them in my

eyes to equestrian statues of demi-gods, and the best thing that I could

hope for was that they would never allow their proud gaze to fall upon

the wretched boy who was myself, who left the hotel dining-room only to

sit humbly upon the sands. I should have been glad to arouse some

response even from the adventurer who had been king of a desert island

in the South Seas, even of the young consumptive, of whom I liked to

think that he was hiding beneath his insolent exterior a shy and tender

heart, which would perhaps have lavished on me, and on me alone, the

treasures of its affection. Besides (unlike what one generally says of

the people one meets when travelling) just as being seen in certain

company can invest us, in a watering-place to which we shall return

another year, with a coefficient that has no equivalent in our true

social life, so there is nothing--not which we keep so resolutely at a

distance, but--which we cultivate with such assiduity after our return

to Paris as the friendships that we have formed by the sea. I was

anxious about the opinion that might be held of me by all these

temporary or local celebrities whom my tendency to put myself in the

place of other people and to reconstruct what was in their minds had

made me place not in their true rank, that which they would have held in

Paris, for instance, and which would have been quite low, but in that

which they must imagine to be, and which indeed was their rank at

Balbec, where the want of a common denominator gave them a sort of

relative superiority and an individual interest. Alas, none of these

people's contempt for me was so unbearable as that of M. de Stermaria.

For I had noticed his daughter, the moment she came into the room, her

pretty features, her pallid, almost blue complexion, what there was

peculiar in the carriage of her tall figure, in her gait, which

suggested to me--and rightly--her long descent, her aristocratic

upbringing, all the more vividly because I knew her name, like those

expressive themes composed by musicians of genius which paint in

splendid colours the glow of fire, the rush of water, the peace of

fields and woods, to audiences who, having first let their eyes run over

the programme, have their imaginations trained in the right direction.

The label "Centuries of Breeding", by adding to Mlle. de Stermaria's

charms the idea of their origin, made them more desirable also,

advertising their rarity as a high price enhances the value of a thing

that has already taken our fancy. And its stock of heredity gave to her

complexion, in which so many selected juices had been blended, the

savour of an exotic fruit or of a famous vintage.

And then mere chance put into our hands, my grandmother's and mine, the

means of giving ourselves an immediate distinction in the eyes of all

the other occupants of the hotel. On that first afternoon, at the moment

when the old lady came downstairs from her room, producing, thanks to

the footman who preceded her, the maid who came running after her with a

book and a rug that had been left behind, a marked effect upon all who

beheld her and arousing in each of them a curiosity from which it was

evident that none was so little immune as M. de Stermaria, the manager

leaned across to my grandmother and, from pure kindness of heart (as one

might point out the Shah, or Queen Ranavalo to an obscure onlooker who

could obviously have no sort of connexion with so mighty a potentate,

but might be interested, all the same, to know that he had been standing

within a few feet of one) whispered in her ear, "The Marquise de

Villeparisis!" while at the same moment the old lady, catching sight of

my grandmother, could not repress a start of pleased surprise.

It may be imagined that the sudden appearance, in the guise of a little

old woman, of the most powerful of fairies would not have given me so

much pleasure, destitute as I was of any means of access to Mlle. de

Stermaria, in a strange place where I knew no one: no one, that is to

say, for any practical purpose. Aesthetically the number of types of

humanity is so restricted that we must constantly, wherever we may be,

have the pleasure of seeing people we know, even without looking for

them in the works of the old masters, like Swann. Thus it happened that

in the first few days of our visit to Balbec I had succeeded in finding

Legrandin, Swann's hall porter and Mme. Swann herself, transformed into

a waiter, a foreign visitor whom I never saw again and a bathing

superintendent. And a sort of magnetism attracts and retains so

inseparably, one after another, certain characteristics, facial and

mental, that when nature thus introduces a person into a new body she

does not mutilate him unduly. Legrandin turned waiter kept intact his

stature, the outline of his nose, part of his chin; Mme. Swann, in the

masculine gender and the calling of a bathing superintendent, had been

accompanied not only by familiar features, but even by the way she had

of speaking. Only, she could be of little if any more use to me,

standing upon the beach there in the red sash of her office, and

hoisting at the first gust of wind the flag which forbade us to bathe

(for these superintendents are prudent men, and seldom know how to swim)

than she would have been in that fresco of the _Life of Moses_ in which

Swann had long ago identified her in the portrait of Jethro's Daughter.

Whereas this Mme. de Villeparisis was her real self, she had not been

the victim of an enchantment which had deprived her of her power, but

was capable, on the contrary, of putting at the service of my power an

enchantment which would multiply it an hundred fold, and thanks to

which, as though I had been swept through the air on the wings of a

fabulous bird, I was to cross in a few moments the infinitely wide (at

least, at Balbec) social gulf which separated me from Mlle. de

Stermaria.

Unfortunately, if there was one person in the world who, more than

anyone else, lived shut up in a little world of her own, it was my

grandmother. She would not, indeed, have despised me, she would simply

not have understood what I meant had she been told that I attached

importance to the opinions, that I felt an interest in the persons of

people the very existence of whom she had never noticed and would, when

the time came to leave Balbec, retain no impression of their names. I

dared not confess to her that if these same people had seen her talking

to Mme. de Villeparisis, I should have been immensely gratified, because

I felt that the Marquise counted for much in the hotel and that her

friendship would have given us a position in the eyes of Mlle. de

Stermaria. Not that my grandmother's friend represented to me, in any

sense of the word, a member of the aristocracy: I was too well used to

her name, which had been familiar to my ears before my mind had begun to

consider it, when as a child I had heard it occur in conversation at

home: while her title added to it only a touch of quaintness--as some

uncommon Christian name would have done, or as in the names of streets,

among which we can see nothing more noble in the Rue Lord Byron, in the

plebeian and even squalid Rue Rochechouart, or in the Rue Grammont than

in the Rue Léonce Reynaud or the Rue Hippolyte Lebas. Mme. de

Villeparisis no more made me think of a person who belonged to a special

world than did her cousin MacMahon, whom I did not clearly distinguish

from M. Carnot, likewise President of the Republic, or from Raspail,

whose photograph Françoise had bought with that of Pius IX. It was one

of my grandmother's principles that, when away from home, one should

cease to have any social intercourse, that one did not go to the seaside

to meet people, having plenty of time for that sort of thing in Paris,

that they would make one waste on being merely polite, in pointless

conversation, the precious time which ought all to be spent in the open

air, beside the waves; and finding it convenient to assume that this

view was shared by everyone else, and that it authorised, between old

friends whom chance brought face to face in the same hotel, the fiction

of a mutual incognito, on hearing her friend's name from the manager she

merely looked the other way, and pretended not to see Mme. de

Villeparisis, who, realising that my grandmother did not want to be

recognised, looked also into the void. She went past, and I was left in

my isolation like a shipwrecked mariner who has seen a vessel apparently

coming towards him which has then, without lowering a boat, vanished

under the horizon.

She, too, had her meals in the dining-room, but at the other end of it.

She knew none of the people who were staying in the hotel, or who came

there to call, not even M. de Cambremer; in fact, I noticed that he gave

her no greeting, one day when, with his wife, he had accepted an

invitation to take luncheon with the barrister, who drunken with the

honour of having the nobleman at his table avoided his friends of every

day, and confined himself to a distant twitch of the eyelid, so as to

draw their attention to this historic event but so discreetly that his

signal could not be interpreted by them as an invitation to join the

party.

"Well, I hope you've got on your best clothes; I hope you feel smart

enough," was the magistrate's wife's greeting to him that evening.

"Smart? Why should I?" asked the barrister, concealing his rapture in an

exaggerated astonishment. "Because of my guests, do you mean?" he went

on, feeling that it was impossible to keep up the farce any longer. "But

what is there smart about having a few friends in to luncheon? After

all, they must feed somewhere!"

"But it is smart! They are the de Cambremers, aren't they? I recognised

them at once. She is a Marquise. And quite genuine, too. Not through the

females."

"Oh, she's a very simple soul, she is charming, no stand-offishness

about her. I thought you were coming to join us. I was making signals to

you. . . . I would have introduced you!" he asserted, tempering with a

hint of irony the vast generosity of the offer, like Ahasuerus when he

says to Esther:

Of all my Kingdom must I give you half!

"No, no, no, no! We lie hidden, like the modest violet."

"But you were quite wrong, I assure you," replied the barrister, growing

bolder now that the danger point was passed. "They weren't going to eat

you. I say, aren't we going to have our little game of bezique?"

"Why, of course! We were afraid to suggest it, now that you go about

entertaining Marquises."

"Oh, get along with you; there's nothing so very wonderful about them.

Why, I'm dining there to-morrow. Would you care to go instead of me? I

mean it. Honestly, I'd just as soon stay here."

"No, no! I should be removed from the bench as a Reactionary," cried the

chief magistrate, laughing till the tears stood in his eyes at his own

joke. "But you go to Féterne too, don't you?" he went on, turning to

the solicitor.

"Oh, I go there on Sundays--in at one door and out at the other. But I

don't have them here to luncheon, like the Leader."

M. de Stermaria was not at Balbec that day, to the barrister's great

regret. But he managed to say a word in season to the head waiter:

"Aimé, you can tell M. de Stermaria that he's not the only nobleman

you've had in here. You saw the gentleman who was with me to-day at

luncheon? Eh? A small moustache, looked like a military man. Well, that

was the Marquis de Cambremer!"

"Was it indeed? I'm not surprised to hear it."

"That will shew him that he's not the only man who's got a title. That

will teach him! It's not a bad thing to take 'em down a peg or two,

those noblemen. I say, Aimé, don't say anything to him unless you like:

I mean to say, it's no business of mine; besides, they know each other

already."

And next day M. de Stermaria, who remembered that the barrister had once

held a brief for one of his friends, came up and introduced himself.

"Our friends in common, the de Cambremers, were anxious that we should

meet; the days didn't fit; I don't know quite what went wrong--"

stammered the barrister, who, like most liars, imagined that other

people do not take the trouble to investigate an unimportant detail

which, for all that, may be sufficient (if chance puts you in possession

of the humble facts of the case, and they contradict it) to shew the

liar in his true colours and to inspire a lasting mistrust.

Then as at all times, but more easily now that her father had left her

and was talking to the barrister, I was gazing at Mlle. de Stermaria. No

less than the bold and always graceful originality of her attitudes, as

when, leaning her elbows on the table, she raised her glass in both

hands over her outstretched arms, the dry flame of a glance at once

extinguished, the ingrained, congenital hardness that one could feel,

ill-concealed by her own personal inflexions, in the sound of her voice,

which had shocked my grandmother; a sort of atavistic starting-point to

which she recoiled whenever, by glance or utterance, she had succeeded

in expressing a thought of her own; all of these qualities carried the

mind of him who watched her back to the line of ancestors who had

bequeathed to her that inadequacy of human sympathy, those blanks in her

sensibility, that short measure of humanity which was at every moment

running out. But from a certain look which flooded for a moment the

wells--instantly dry again--of her eyes, a look in which I could discern

that almost obsequious docility which the predominance of a taste for

sensual pleasures gives to the proudest of women, who will soon come to

recognise but one form of personal distinction, that namely which any

man enjoys who can make her feel those pleasures, an actor, an acrobat

even, for whom, perhaps, she will one day leave her husband;--from a

certain rosy tint, warm and sensual, which flushed her pallid cheeks,

like the colour that stained the hearts of the white water-lilies in the

Vivonne, I thought I could discern that she would readily have consented

to my coming to seek in her the savour of that life of poetry and

romance which she led in Brittany, a life to which, whether from

over-familiarity or from innate superiority, or from disgust at the

penury or the avarice of her family, she seemed not to attach any great

value, but which, for all that, she held enclosed in her body. In the

meagre stock of will-power that had been transmitted to her, and gave an

element of weakness to her expression, she would not perhaps have found

the strength to resist. And, crowned by a feather that was a trifle

old-fashioned and pretentious, the grey felt hat which she invariably

wore at meals made her all the more attractive to me, not because it was

in harmony with her pearly or rosy complexion, but because, by making me

suppose her to be poor, it brought her closer to myself. Obliged by her

father's presence to adopt a conventional attitude, but already bringing

to the perception and classification of the people who passed before her

eyes other principles than his, perhaps she saw in me not my humble

rank, but the right sex and age. If one day M. de Stermaria had gone out

leaving her behind, if, above all, Mme. de Villeparisis, by coming to

sit at our table, had given her an opinion of me which might have

emboldened me to approach her, perhaps then we might have contrived to

exchange a few words, to arrange a meeting, to form a closer tie. And

for a whole month during which she would be left alone, without her

parents, in her romantic Breton castle, we should perhaps have been able

to wander by ourselves at evening, she and I together in the dusk which

would shew in a softer light above the darkening water pink briar roses,

beneath oak trees beaten and stunted by the hammering of the waves.

Together we should have roamed that isle impregnated with so intense a

charm for me because it had enclosed the everyday life of Mlle. de

Stermaria and lay at rest in her remembering eyes. For it seemed to me

that I should not really have possessed her save there, when I should

have traversed those regions which enveloped her in so many memories--a

veil which my desire sought to tear apart, one of those veils which

nature interposes between woman and her pursuers (with the same

intention as when, for all of us, she places the act of reproduction

between ourselves and our keenest pleasure, and for insects, places

before the nectar the pollen which they must carry away with them) in

order that, tricked by the illusion of possessing her thus more

completely, they may be forced to occupy first the scenes among which

she lives, and which, of more service to their imagination than sensual

pleasure can be, yet would not without that pleasure have had the power

to attract them.

But I was obliged to take my eyes from Mlle. de Stermaria, for already,

considering no doubt that making the acquaintance of an important person

was a brief, inquisitive act which was sufficient in itself, and to

bring out all the interest that was latent in it required only a

handshake and a penetrating stare, without either immediate conversation

or any subsequent relations, her father had taken leave of the barrister

and returned to sit down facing her, rubbing his hands like a man who

has just made a valuable acquisition. As for the barrister, once the

first emotion of this interview had subsided, then, as on other days, he

could be heard every minute addressing the head waiter:

"But I am not a king, Aimé; go and attend to the king! I say, Chief,

those little trout don't look at all bad, do they? We must ask Aimé to

let us have some. Aimé, that little fish you have over there looks to

me highly commendable: will you bring us some, please, Aimé, and don't

be sparing with it."

He would repeat the name "Aimé" all day long, one result of which was

that when he had anyone to dinner the guest would remark "I can see, you

are quite at home in this place," and would feel himself obliged to keep

on saying "Aimé" also, from that tendency, combining elements of

timidity, vulgarity and silliness, which many people have, to believe

that it is smart and witty to copy to the letter what is said by the

company in which they may happen to be. The barrister repeated the name

incessantly, but with a smile, for he felt that he was exhibiting at

once the good terms on which he stood with the head waiter and his own

superior station. And the head waiter, whenever he caught the sound of

his own name, smiled too, as though touched and at the same time proud,

shewing that he was conscious of the honour and could appreciate the

pleasantry.

Terrifying as I always found these meals, in the vast restaurant,

generally full, of the mammoth hotel, they became even more terrifying

when there arrived for a few days the Proprietor (or he may have been

only the General Manager, appointed by a board of directors) not only of

this "palace" but of seven or eight more besides, situated at all the

four corners of France, in each of which, travelling continuously, he

would spend a week now and again. Then, just after dinner had begun,

there appeared every evening in the doorway of the dining-room this

small man with white hair and a red nose, astonishingly neat and

impassive, who was known, it appeared, as well in London as at Monte

Carlo, as one of the leading hotelkeepers in Europe. Once when I had

gone out for a moment at the beginning of dinner, as I came in again I

passed close by him, and he bowed to me, but with a coldness in which I

could not distinguish whether it should be attributed to the reserve of

a man who could never forget what he was, or to his contempt for a

customer of so little importance. To those whose importance was

considerable the Managing Director would bow, with quite as much

coldness but more deeply, lowering his eyelids with a reverence that was

almost offended modesty, as though he had found himself confronted, at a

funeral, with the father of the deceased or with the Blessed Sacrament.

Except for these icy and infrequent salutations, he made not the

slightest movement, as if to shew that his glittering eyes, which

appeared to be starting out of his head, saw everything, controlled

everything, assured to us in the "Hotel dinner" perfection in every

detail as well as a general harmony. He felt, evidently, that he was

more than the producer of a play, than the conductor of an orchestra,

nothing less than a general in supreme command. Having decided that a

contemplation carried to its utmost intensity would suffice to assure

him that everything was in readiness, that no mistake had been made

which could lead to disaster,--to invest him, in a word, with full

responsibility, he abstained not merely from any gesture but even from

moving his eyes, which, petrified by the intensity of their gaze, took

in and directed everything that was going on. I felt that even the

movements of my spoon did not escape him, and were he to vanish after

the soup, for the whole of dinner the review that he had held would have

taken away my appetite. His own was exceedingly good, as one could see

at luncheon, which he took like an ordinary guest of the hotel at a

table that anyone else might have had in the public dining-room. His

table had this peculiarity only, that by his side, while he was eating,

the other manager, the resident one, remained standing all the time to

make conversation. For being subordinate to this Managing Director he

was anxious to please a man of whom he lived in constant fear. My fear

of him diminished during these luncheons, for being then lost in the

crowd of visitors he would exercise the discretion of a general sitting

in a restaurant where there are also private soldiers, in not seeming to

take any notice of them. Nevertheless when the porter, from among a

cluster of pages, announced to me: "He leaves to-morrow morning for

Dinard. Then he's going down to Biarritz, and after that to Cannes," I

began to breathe more freely.

My life in the hotel was rendered not only dull because I had no friends

there but uncomfortable because Françoise had made so many. It might be

thought that they would have made things easier for us in various

respects. Quite the contrary. The proletariat, if they succeeded only

with great difficulty in being treated as people she knew by Françoise,

and could not succeed at all unless they fulfilled the condition of

shewing the utmost politeness to her, were, on the other hand, once they

had reached the position, the only people who "counted". Her

time-honoured code taught her that she was in no way bound to the

friends of her employers, that she might, if she was busy, shut the door

without ceremony in the face of a lady who had come to call on my

grandmother. But towards her own acquaintance, that is to say, the

select handful of the lower orders whom she admitted to an unconquerable

intimacy, her actions were regulated by the most subtle and most

stringent of protocols. Thus Françoise having made the acquaintance of

the man in the coffee-shop and of a little maid who did dressmaking for

a Belgian lady, no longer came upstairs immediately after luncheon to

get my grandmother's things ready, but came an hour later, because the

coffee man had wanted to make her a cup of coffee or a tisane in his

shop, or the maid had invited her to go and watch her sew, and to refuse

either of them would have been impossible, and one of the things that

were not done. Moreover, particular attention was due to the little

sewing-maid, who was an orphan and had been brought up by strangers to

whom she still went occasionally for a few days' holiday. Her unusual

situation aroused Françoise's pity, and also a benevolent contempt.

She, who had a family, a little house that had come to her from her

parents, with a field in which her brother kept his cows, how could she

regard so uprooted a creature as her equal? And since this girl hoped,

on Assumption Day, to be allowed to pay her benefactors a visit,

Françoise kept on repeating: "She does make me laugh! She says, 'I hope

to be going home for the Assumption.' 'Home!' says she! It isn't just

that it's not her own place, they're people who took her in from

nowhere, and the creature says 'home' just as if it really was her home.

Poor girl! What a wretched state she must be in, not to know what it is

to have a home." Still, if Françoise had associated only with the

ladies'-maids brought to the hotel by other visitors, who fed with her

in the "service" quarters and, seeing her grand lace cap and her

handsome profile, took her perhaps for some lady of noble birth, whom

"reduced circumstances", or a personal attachment had driven to serve as

companion to my grandmother, if in a word Françoise had known only

people who did not belong to the hotel, no great harm would have been

done, since she could not have prevented them from doing us any service,

for the simple reason that in no circumstances, even without her

knowledge, would it have been possible for them to serve us at all. But

she had formed connexions also with one of the wine waiters, with a man

in the kitchen, and with the head chambermaid of our landing. And the

result of this in our every day life was that Françoise, who on the day

of her arrival, when she still did not know anyone, would set all the

bells jangling for the slightest thing, at an hour when my grandmother

and I would never have dared to ring, and if we offered some gentle

admonition answered: "Well, we're paying enough for it, aren't we?" as

though it were she herself that would have to pay; nowadays, since she

had made friends with a personage in the kitchen, which had appeared to

us to augur well for our future comfort, were my grandmother or I to

complain of cold feet, Françoise, even at an hour that was quite

normal, dared not ring; she assured us that it would give offence

because they would have to light the furnace again, or because it would

interrupt the servants' dinner and they would be annoyed. And she ended

with a formula that, in spite of the ambiguous way in which she uttered

it, was none the less clear, and put us plainly in the wrong: "The fact

is . . ." We did not insist, for fear of bringing upon ourselves

another, far more serious: "It's a matter . . .!" So that it amounted

to this, that we could no longer have any hot water because Françoise

had become a friend of the man who would have to heat it.

In the end we too formed a connexion, in spite of but through my

grandmother, for she and Mme. de Villeparisis came in collision one

morning in a doorway and were obliged to accost each other, not without

having first exchanged gestures of surprise and hesitation, performed

movements of recoil and uncertainty, and finally uttered protestations

of joy and greeting, as in some of Molière's plays, where two actors

who have been delivering long soliloquies from opposite sides of the

stage, a few feet apart, are supposed not to have seen each other yet,

and then suddenly catch sight of each other, cannot believe their eyes,

break off what they are saying and finally address each other (the

chorus having meanwhile kept the dialogue going) and fall into each

other's arms. Mme. de Villeparisis was tactful, and made as if to leave

my grandmother to herself after the first greetings, but my grandmother

insisted on her staying to talk to her until luncheon, being anxious to

discover how her friend managed to get her letters sent up to her

earlier than we got ours, and to get such nice grilled things (for Mme.

de Villeparisis, a great epicure, had the poorest opinion of the hotel

kitchen which served us with meals that my grandmother, still quoting

Mme. de Sévigné, described as "of a magnificence to make you die of

hunger.") And the Marquise formed the habit of coming every day, until

her own meal was ready, to sit down for a moment at our table in the

dining-room, insisting that we should not rise from our chairs or in any

way put ourselves out. At the most we would linger, as often as not, in

the room after finishing our luncheon, to talk to her, at that sordid

moment when the knives are left littering the tablecloth among crumpled

napkins. For my own part, so as to preserve (in order that I might be

able to enjoy Balbec) the idea that I was on the uttermost promontory of

the earth I compelled myself to look farther afield, to notice only the

sea, to seek in it the effects described by Baudelaire and to let my

gaze fall upon our table only on days when there was set on it some

gigantic fish, some marine monster, which unlike the knives and forks

was contemporary with the primitive epochs in which the Ocean first

began to teem with life, in the Cimmerians' time, a fish whose body with

its numberless vertebrae, its blue veins and red, had been constructed

by nature, but according to an architectural plan, like a polychrome

cathedral of the deep.

As a barber, seeing an officer whom he is accustomed to shave with

special deference and care recognise a customer who has just entered the

shop and stop for a moment to talk to him, rejoices in the thought that

these are two men of the same social order, and cannot help smiling as

he goes to fetch the bowl of soap, for he knows that in his

establishment, to the vulgar routine of a mere barber's shop, are being

added social, not to say aristocratic pleasures, so Aimé, seeing that

Mme. de Villeparisis had found in us old friends, went to fetch our

finger-bowls with precisely the smile, proudly modest and knowingly

discreet, of a hostess who knows when to leave her guests to themselves.

He suggested also a pleased and loving father who looks on, without

interfering, at the happy pair who have plighted their troth at his

hospitable board. Besides, it was enough merely to utter the name of a

person of title for Aimé to appear pleased, unlike Françoise, before

whom you could not mention Count So-and-so without her face darkening

and her speech becoming dry and sharp, all of which meant that she

worshipped the aristocracy not less than Aimé but far more. But then

Françoise had that quality which in others she condemned as the worst

possible fault; she was proud. She was not of that friendly and

good-humoured race to which Aimé belonged. They feel, they exhibit an

intense delight when you tell them a piece of news which may be more or

less sensational but is at any rate new, and not to be found in the

papers. Françoise declined to appear surprised. You might have

announced in her hearing that the Archduke Rudolf--not that she had the

least suspicion of his having ever existed--was not, as was generally

supposed, dead, but "alive and kicking"; she would have answered only

"Yes," as though she had known it all the time. It may, however, have

been that if even from our own lips, from us whom she so meekly called

her masters, who had so nearly succeeded in taming her, she could not,

without having to check an angry start, hear the name of a noble, that

was because the family from which she had sprung occupied in its own

village a comfortable and independent position, and was not to be

threatened in the consideration which it enjoyed save by those same

nobles, in whose households, meanwhile, from his boyhood, an Aimé would

have been domiciled as a servant, if not actually brought up by their

charity. Of Françoise, then, Mme. de Villeparisis must ask pardon,

first, for her nobility. But (in France, at any rate) that is precisely

the talent, in fact the sole occupation of our great gentlemen and

ladies. Françoise, following the common tendency of servants, who pick

up incessantly from the conversation of their masters with other people

fragmentary observations from which they are apt to draw erroneous

inductions, as the human race generally does with respect to the habits

of animals, was constantly discovering that somebody had "failed" us, a

conclusion to which she was easily led, not so much, perhaps, by her

extravagant love for us, as by the delight that she took in being

disagreeable to us. But having once established, without possibility of

error, the endless little attentions paid to us, and paid to herself

also by Mme. de Villeparisis, Françoise forgave her for being a

Marquise, and, as she had never ceased to be proud of her because she

was one, preferred her thenceforward to all our other friends. It must

be added that no one else took the trouble to be so continually nice to

us. Whenever my grandmother remarked on a book that Mme. de Villeparisis

was reading, or said she had been admiring the fruit which some one had

just sent to our friend, within an hour the footman would come to our

rooms with book or fruit. And the next time we saw her, in response to

our thanks, she would say only, seeming to seek some excuse for the

meagreness of her present in some special use to which it might be put:

"It's nothing wonderful, but the newspapers come so late here, one must

have something to read." Or, "It is always wiser to have fruit one can

be quite certain of, at the seaside."--"But I don't believe I've ever

seen you eating oysters," she said to us, increasing the sense of

disgust which I felt at that moment, for the living flesh of the oyster

revolted me even more than the gumminess of the stranded jellyfish

defiled for me the beach at Balbec; "they are delicious down here! Oh,

let me tell my maid to fetch your letters when she goes for mine. What,

your daughter writes _every day?_ But what on earth can you find to say

to each other?" My grandmother was silent, but it may be assumed that

her silence was due to scorn, in her who used to repeat, when she wrote

to Mamma, the words of Mme. de Sévigné: "As soon as I have received a

letter, I want another at once; I cannot breathe until it comes. There

are few who are worthy to understand what I mean." And I was afraid of

her applying to Mme. de Villeparisis the conclusion: "I seek out those

who are of the chosen few, and I avoid the rest." She fell back upon

praise of the fruit which Mme. de Villeparisis had sent us the day

before. And this had been, indeed, so fine that the manager, in spite of

the jealousy aroused by our neglect of his official offerings, had said

to me: "I am like you; I'm madder about fruit than any other kind of

dessert." My grandmother told her friend that she had enjoyed them all

the more because the fruit which we got in the hotel was generally

horrid. "I cannot," she went on, "say, like Mme. de Sévigné, that if

we should take a sudden fancy for bad fruit we should be obliged to

order it from Paris." "Oh yes, of course, you read Mme. de Sévigné. I

saw you with her letters the day you came." (She forgot that she had

never officially seen my grandmother in the hotel until their collision

in the doorway.) "Don't you find it rather exaggerated, her constant

anxiety about her daughter? She refers to it too often to be really

sincere. She is not natural." My grandmother felt that any discussion

would be futile, and so as not to be obliged to speak of the things she

loved to a person incapable of understanding them, concealed by laying

her bag upon them the _Mémoires de Mme. de Beausergent._

Were she to encounter Françoise at the moment (which Françoise called

"the noon") when, wearing her fine cap and surrounded with every mark of

respect, she was coming downstairs to "feed with the service", Mme.

Villeparisis would stop her to ask after us. And Françoise, when

transmitting to us the Marquise's message: "She said to me, 'You'll be

sure and bid them good day,' she said," counterfeited the voice of Mme.

de Villeparisis, whose exact words she imagined herself to be quoting

textually, whereas she was really corrupting them no less than Plato

corrupts the words of Socrates or Saint John the words of Jesus.

Françoise, as was natural, was deeply touched by these attentions. Only

she did not believe my grandmother, but supposed that she must be lying

in the interest of her class (the rich always combining thus to support

one another) when she assured us that Mme. de Villeparisis had been

lovely as a young woman. It was true that of this loveliness only the

faintest trace remained, from which no one--unless he happened to be a

great deal more of an artist than Françoise--would have been able to

restore her ruined beauty. For in order to understand how beautiful an

elderly woman can once have been one must not only study but interpret

every line of her face.

"I must remember, some time, to ask her whether I'm not right, after

all, in thinking that there is some connexion with the Guermantes," said

my grandmother, to my great indignation. How could I be expected to

believe in a common origin uniting two names which had entered my

consciousness, one through the low and shameful gate of experience, the

other by the golden gate of imagination?

We had several times, in the last few days, seen driving past us in a

stately equipage, tall, auburn, handsome, with a rather prominent nose,

the Princesse de Luxembourg, who was staying in the neighbourhood for a

few weeks. Her carriage had stopped outside the hotel, a footman had

come in and spoken to the manager, had gone back to the carriage and had

reappeared with the most amazing armful of fruit (which combined in a

single basket, like the bay itself, different seasons) with a card: "La

Princesse de Luxembourg", on which were scrawled a few words in pencil.

For what princely traveller sojourning here incognito, could they be

intended, those glaucous plums, luminous and spherical as was at that

moment the circumfluent sea, transparent grapes clustering on a

shrivelled stick, like a fine day in autumn, pears of a heavenly

ultramarine? For it could not be on my grandmother's friend that the

Princess had meant to pay a call. And yet on the following evening Mme.

de Villeparisis sent us the bunch of grapes, cool, liquid, golden; plums

too and pears which we remembered, though the plums had changed, like

the sea at our dinner-hour, to a dull purple, and on the ultramarine

surface of the pears there floated the forms of a few rosy clouds. A few

days later we met Mme. de Villeparisis as we came away from the symphony

concert that was given every morning on the beach. Convinced that the

music to which I had been listening (the Prelude to _Lohengrin_, the

Overture to _Tannhäuser_ and suchlike) expressed the loftiest of

truths, I was trying to elevate myself, as far as I could, so as to

attain to a comprehension of them, I was extracting from myself so as to

understand them, and was attributing to them, all that was best and most

profound in my own nature at that time.

Well, as we came out of the concert, and, on our way back to the hotel,

had stopped for a moment on the front, my grandmother and I, for a few

words with Mme. de Villeparisis who told us that she had ordered some

_croque-monsieurs_ and a dish of creamed eggs for us at the hotel, I

saw, a long way away, coming in our direction, the Princesse de

Luxembourg, half leaning upon a parasol in such a way as to impart to

her tall and wonderful form that slight inclination, to make it trace

that arabesque dear to the women who had been beautiful under the

Empire, and knew how, with drooping shoulders, arched backs, concave

hips and bent limbs, to make their bodies float as gently as a silken

scarf about the rigidity of the invisible stem which might be supposed

to have been passed diagonally through them. She went out every morning

for a turn on the beach almost at the time when everyone else, after

bathing, was climbing home to luncheon, and as hers was not until half

past one she did not return to her villa until long after the hungry

bathers had left the scorching "front" a desert. Mme. de Villeparisis

presented my grandmother and would have presented me, but had first to

ask me my name, which she could not remember. She had, perhaps, never

known it, or if she had must have forgotten years ago to whom my

grandmother had married her daughter. My name, when she did hear it,

appeared to impress Mme. de Villeparisis considerably. Meanwhile the

Princesse de Luxembourg had given us her hand and, now and again, while

she conversed with the Marquise, turned to bestow a kindly glance on my

grandmother and myself, with that embryonic kiss which we put into our

smiles when they are addressed to a baby out with its "Nana". Indeed, in

her anxiety not to appear to be a denizen of a higher sphere than ours,

she had probably miscalculated the distance there was indeed between us,

for by an error in adjustment she made her eyes beam with such

benevolence that I could see the moment approaching when she would put

out her hand and stroke us, as if we were two nice beasts and had poked

our heads out at her through the bars of our cage in the Gardens. And,

immediately, as it happened, this idea of caged animals and the Bois de

Boulogne received striking confirmation. It was the time of day at which

the beach is crowded by itinerant and clamorous vendors, hawking cakes

and sweets and biscuits. Not knowing quite what to do to shew her

affection for us, the Princess hailed the next that came by; he had

nothing left but one rye-cake, of the kind one throws to the ducks. The

Princess took it and said to me: "For your grandmother." And yet it was

to me that she held it out, saying with a friendly smile, "You shall

give it to her yourself!" thinking that my pleasure would thus be more

complete if there were no intermediary between myself and the animals.

Other vendors came up; she stuffed my pockets with everything that they

had, tied up in packets, comfits, sponge-cakes, sugar-sticks. "You will

eat some yourself," she told me, "and give some to your grandmother,"

and she had the vendors paid by the little negro page, dressed in red

satin, who followed her everywhere and was a nine days' wonder upon the

beach. Then she said good-bye to Mme. de Villeparisis and held out her

hand to us with the intention of treating us in the same way as she

treated her friend, as people whom she knew, and of bringing herself

within our reach. But this time she must have reckoned our level as not

quite so low in the scale of creation, for her and our equality was

indicated by the Princess to my grandmother by that tender and maternal

smile which a woman gives a little boy when she says good-bye to him as

though to a grown-up person. By a miraculous stride in evolution, my

grandmother was no longer a duck or an antelope, but had already become

what the anglophil Mme. Swann would have called a "baby". Finally,

having taken leave of us all, the Princess resumed her stroll along the

basking "front", curving her splendid shape which, like a serpent coiled

about a wand, was interlaced with the white parasol patterned in blue

which Mme. de Luxembourg held, unopened, in her hand. She was my first

Royalty--I say my first, for strictly speaking Princesse Mathilde did

not count. The second, as we shall see in due course, was to astonish me

no less by her indulgence. One of the ways in which our great nobles,

kindly intermediaries between commoners and kings, can befriend us was

revealed to me next day when Mme. de Villeparisis reported: "She thought

you quite charming. She is a woman of the soundest judgment, the warmest

heart. Not like so many Queens and people! She has real merit." And Mme.

de Villeparisis went on in a tone of conviction, and quite thrilled to

be able to say it to us: "I am sure she would be delighted to see you

again."

But on that previous morning, after we had parted from the Princesse de

Luxembourg, Mme. de Villeparisis said a thing which impressed me far

more and was not prompted merely by friendly feeling.

"Are you," she had asked me, "the son of the Permanent Secretary at the

Ministry? Indeed! I am told your father is a most charming man. He is

having a splendid holiday just now."

A few days earlier we had heard, in a letter from Mamma, that my father

and his friend M. de Norpois had lost their luggage.

"It has been found; as a matter of fact, it was never really lost, I can

tell you what happened," explained Mme. de Villeparisis, who, without

our knowing how, seemed to be far better informed than ourselves of the

course of my father's travels. "I think your father is now planning to

come home earlier, next week, in fact, as he will probably give up the

idea of going to Algeçiras. But he is anxious to devote a day longer to

Toledo; it seems, he is an admirer of a pupil of Titian,--I forget the

name--whose work can only be seen properly there."

I asked myself by what strange accident, in the impartial glass through

which Mme. de Villeparisis considered, from a safe distance, the

bustling, tiny, purposeless agitation of the crowd of people whom she

knew, there had come to be inserted at the spot through which she

observed my father a fragment of prodigious magnifying power which made

her see in such high relief and in the fullest detail everything that

there was attractive about him, the contingencies that were obliging him

to return home, his difficulties with the customs, his admiration for El

Greco, and, altering the scale of her vision, shewed her this one man so

large among all the rest quite small, like that Jupiter to whom Gustave

Moreau gave, when he portrayed him by the side of a weak mortal, a

superhuman stature.

My grandmother bade Mme. de Villeparisis good-bye, so that we might stay

and imbibe the fresh air for a little while longer outside the hotel,

until they signalled to us through the glazed partition that our

luncheon was ready. There were sounds of tumult. The young mistress of

the King of the Cannibal Island had been down to bathe and was now

coming back to the hotel.

"Really and truly, it's a perfect plague: it's enough to make one decide

to emigrate!" cried the barrister, who had happened to cross her path,

in a towering rage.

Meanwhile the solicitor's wife was following the bogus Queen with eyes

that seemed ready to start from their sockets.

"I can't tell you how angry Mme. Blandais makes me when she stares at

those people like that," said the barrister to the chief magistrate, "I

feel I want to slap her. That is just the way to make the wretches

appear important; and of course that's the very thing they want, that

people should take an interest in them. Do ask her husband to tell her

what a fool she's making of herself. I swear I won't go out with them

again if they stop and gape at those masqueraders."

As to the coming of the Princesse de Luxembourg, whose carriage, on the

day on which she left the fruit, had drawn up outside the hotel, it had

not passed unobserved by the little group of wives, the solicitor's, the

barrister's and the magistrate's, who had for some time past been most

concerned to know whether she was a genuine Marquise and not an

adventuress, that Mme. de Villeparisis whom everyone treated with so

much respect, which all these ladies were burning to hear that she did

not deserve. Whenever Mme. de Villeparisis passed through the hall the

chief magistrate's wife, who scented irregularities everywhere, would

raise her eyes from her "work" and stare at the intruder in a way that

made her friends die with laughter.

"Oh, well, you know," she explained with lofty condescension, "I always

begin by believing the worst. I will never admit that a woman is

properly married until she has shewn me her birth certificate and her

marriage lines. But there's no need to alarm yourselves; just wait till

I've finished my little investigation."

And so, day after day the ladies would come together, and, laughingly,

ask one another: "Any news?"

But on the evening after the Princesse de Luxembourg's call the

magistrate's wife laid a finger on her lips.

"I've discovered something."

"Oh, isn't Mme. Poncin simply wonderful? I never saw anyone. . . . But

do tell us! What has happened?"

"Just listen to this. A woman with yellow hair and six inches of paint

on her face and a carriage like a--you could _smell_ it a mile off; which

only a creature like that would dare to have--came here to-day to call

on the Marquise, by way of!"

"Oh-yow-yow! Tut-tut-tut-tut. Did you ever! Why, it must be that woman

we saw--you remember, Leader,--we said at the time we didn't at all like

the look of her, but we didn't know that it was the 'Marquise' she'd

come to see. A woman with a nigger-boy, you mean?"

"That's the one."

"D'you mean to say so? You don't happen to know her name?"

"Yes, I made a mistake on purpose; I picked up her card; she _trades_

under the name of the 'Princesse de Luxembourg'! Wasn't I right to have

my doubts about her? It's a nice thing to have to mix promiscuously with

a Baronne d'Ange like that?" The barrister quoted Mathurin Régnier's

_Macette_ to the chief magistrate.

It must not, however, be supposed that this misunderstanding was merely

temporary, like those that occur in the second act of a farce to be

cleared up before the final curtain. Mme. de Luxembourg, a niece of the

King of England and of the Emperor of Austria, and Mme. de Villeparisis,

when one called to take the other for a drive, did look like nothing but

two "old trots" of the kind one has always such difficulty in avoiding

at a watering-place. Nine tenths of the men of the Faubourg

Saint-Germain appear to the average man of the middle class simply as

alcoholic wasters (which, individually, they not infrequently are) whom,

therefore, no respectable person would dream of asking to dinner. The

middle class fixes its standard, in this respect, too high, for the

feelings of these men would never prevent their being received with

every mark of esteem in houses which it, the middle class, may never

enter. And so sincerely do they believe that the middle class knows this

that they affect a simplicity in speaking of their own affairs and a

tone of disparagement of their friends, especially when they are "at the

coast", which make the misunderstanding complete. If, by any chance, a

man of the fashionable world is kept in touch with "business people"

because, having more money than he knows what to do with, he finds

himself elected chairman of all sorts of important financial concerns,

the business man who at last sees a nobleman worthy, he considers, to

rank with "big business", would take his oath that such a man can have

no dealings with the Marquis ruined by gambling whom the said business

man supposes to be all the more destitute of friends the more friendly

he makes himself. And he cannot get over his surprise when the Duke,

Chairman of the Board of Directors of the colossal undertaking, arranges

a marriage for his son with the daughter of that very Marquis, who may

be a gambler but who bears the oldest name in France, just as a

Sovereign would sooner see his son marry the daughter of a dethroned

King than that of a President still in office. That is to say, the two

worlds take as fantastic a view of one another as the inhabitants of a

town situated at one end of Balbec Bay have of the town at the other

end: from Rivebelle you can just see Marcouville l'Orgueilleuse; but

even that is deceptive, for you imagine that you are seen from

Marcouville, where, as a matter of fact, the splendours of Rivebelle are

almost wholly invisible.