PART II

_PLACE-NAMES: THE PLACE_

The Balbec doctor, who had been called in to cope with a sudden feverish

attack, having given the opinion that I ought not to stay out all day on

the beach, in the blazing sun, without shelter, and having written out

various prescriptions for my use, my grandmother took his prescriptions

with a show of respect in which I could at once discern her firm resolve

not to have any of them "made up", but did pay attention to his advice

on the matter of hygiene, and accepted an offer from Mme. de

Villeparisis to take us for drives in her carriage. After this I would

spend the mornings, until luncheon, going to and fro between my own room

and my grandmother's. Hers did not look out directly upon the sea, as

mine did, but was lighted from three of its four sides--with views of a

strip of the "front", of a well inside the building, and of the country

inland, and was furnished differently from mine, with armchairs

upholstered in a metallic tissue with red flowers from which seemed to

emanate the cool and pleasant odour that greeted me when I entered the

room. And at that hour when the sun's rays, coming from different

aspects and, as it were, from different hours of the day, broke the

angles of the wall, thrust in a reflexion of the beach, made of the

chest of drawers a festal altar, variegated as a bank of field-flowers,

attached to the wall the wings, folded, quivering, warm, of a radiance

that would, at any moment, resume its flight, warmed like a bath a

square of provincial carpet before the window overlooking the well,

which the sun festooned and patterned like a climbing vine, added to the

charm and complexity of the room's furniture by seeming to pluck and

scatter the petals of the silken flowers on the chairs, and to make

their silver threads stand out from the fabric, this room in which I

lingered for a moment before going to get ready for our drive suggested

a prism in which the colours of the light that shone outside were broken

up, or a hive in which the sweet juices of the day which I was about to

taste were distilled, scattered, intoxicating, visible, a garden of hope

which dissolved in a quivering haze of silver threads and rose leaves.

But before all this I had drawn back my own curtains, impatient to know

what Sea it was that was playing that morning by the shore, like a

Nereid. For none of those Seas ever stayed with us longer than a day. On

the morrow there would be another, which sometimes resembled its

predecessor. But I never saw the same one twice.

There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on

catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege, on

one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained

disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose lazy beauty,

gently breathing, had the transparence of a vaporous emerald beneath

whose surface I could see teeming the ponderable elements that coloured

it? She made the sun join in her play, with a smile rendered languorous

by an invisible haze which was nought but a space kept vacant about her

translucent surface, which, thus curtailed, became more appealing, like

those goddesses whom the sculptor carves in relief upon a block of

marble, the rest of which he leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless

colour, she invited us out over those rough terrestrial roads, from

which, seated beside Mme. de Villeparisis in her barouche, we should

see, all day long and without ever reaching it, the coolness of her

gentle palpitation.

Mme. de Villeparisis used to order her carriage early, so that we should

have time to reach Saint-Mars-le-Vêtu, or the rocks of Quetteholme, or

some other goal which, for a somewhat lumbering vehicle, was far enough

off to require the whole day. In my joy at the long drive we were going

to take I would be humming some tune that I had heard recently as I

strolled up and down until Mme. de Villeparisis was ready. If it was

Sunday hers would not be the only carriage drawn up outside the hotel;

several hired flies would be waiting there, not only for the people who

had been invited to Féterne by Mme. de Cambremer, but for those who,

rather than stay at home all day, like children in disgrace, declared

that Sunday was always quite impossible at Balbec and started off

immediately after luncheon to hide themselves in some neighbouring

watering-place or to visit one of the "sights" of the district. And

indeed whenever (which was often) anyone asked Mme. Blandais if she had

been to the Cambremers', she would answer peremptorily: "No; we went to

the Falls of the Bec," as though that were the sole reason for her not

having spent the day at Féterne. And the barrister would be charitable,

and say:

"I envy you. I wish I had gone there instead; they must be well worth

seeing."

Beside the row of carriages, in front of the porch in which I stood

waiting, was planted, like some shrub of a rare species, a young page

who attracted the eye no less by the unusual and effective colouring of

his hair than by his plant-like epidermis. Inside, in the hall,

corresponding to the narthex, or Church of the Catechumens in a

primitive basilica, through which persons who were not staying in the

hotel were entitled to pass, the comrades of this "outside" page did not

indeed work much harder than he but did at least execute certain drilled

movements. It is probable that in the early morning they helped with the

cleaning. But in the afternoon they stood there only like a Chorus who,

even when there is nothing for them to do, remain upon the stage in

order to strengthen the cast. The General Manager, the same who had so

terrified me, reckoned on increasing their number considerably next

year, for he had "big ideas". And this prospect greatly afflicted the

manager of the hotel, who found that all these boys about the place only

"created a nuisance", by which he meant that they got in the visitors'

way and were of no use to anyone. But between luncheon and dinner at

least, between the exits and entrances of the visitors, they did fill an

otherwise empty stage, like those pupils of Mme. de Maintenon who, in

the garb of young Israelites, carry on the action whenever Esther or

Joad "goes off". But the outside page, with his delicate tints, his

tall, slender, fragile trunk, in proximity to whom I stood waiting for

the Marquise to come downstairs, preserved an immobility into which a

certain melancholy entered, for his elder brothers had left the hotel

for more brilliant careers elsewhere, and he felt keenly his isolation

upon this alien soil. At last Mme. de Villeparisis appeared. To stand by

her carriage and to help her into it ought perhaps to have been part of

the young page's duties. But he knew on the one hand that a person who

brings her own servants to an hotel expects them to wait on her and is

not as a rule lavish with her "tips", and that generally speaking this

was true also of the nobility of the old Faubourg Saint-Germain. Mme. de

Villeparisis was included in both these categories. The arborescent page

concluded therefore that he need expect nothing from her, and leaving

her own maid and footman to pack her and her belongings into the

carriage, he continued to dream sadly of the enviable lot of his

brothers and preserved his vegetable immobility.

We would start off; some time after rounding the railway station, we

came into a country road which soon became as familiar to me as the

roads round Combray, from the bend where, like a fish-hook, it was

baited with charming orchards, to the turning at which we left it, with

tilled fields upon either side. Among these we could see here and there

an apple-tree, stripped it was true of its blossom, and bearing no more

now than a fringe of pistils, but sufficient even so to enchant me since

I could imagine, seeing those inimitable leaves, how their broad

expanse, like the ceremonial carpet spread for a wedding that was now

over, had been but the other day swept by the white satin train of their

blushing flowers.

How often in Paris, during the May of the following year, was I to bring

home a branch of apple-blossom from the florist, and to stay all night

long before its flowers in which bloomed the same creamy essence that

powdered besides and whitened the green unfolding leaves, flowers

between whose snowy cups it seemed almost as though it had been the

salesman who had, in his generosity towards myself, out of his wealth of

invention too and as an effective contrast, added on either side the

supplement of a becoming crimson bud: I sat gazing at them, I grouped

them in the light of my lamp--for so long that I was often still there

when the dawn brought to their whiteness the same flush with which it

must at that moment have been tingeing their sisters on the Balbec

road--and I sought to carry them back in my imagination to that

roadside, to multiply them, to spread them out, so as to fill the frame

prepared for them, on the canvas, all ready, of those closes the outline

of which I knew by heart, which I so longed to see--which one day I must

see again, at the moment when, with the exquisite fervour of genius,

spring was covering their canvas with its colours.

Before getting into the carriage I had composed the seascape for which I

was going to look out, which I had hoped to see with the "sun radiant",

upon it, and which at Balbec I could distinguish only in too fragmentary

a form, broken by so many vulgar intromissions that had no place in my

dream, bathers, dressing-boxes, pleasure yachts. But when, Mme. de

Villeparisis's carriage having reached high ground, I caught a glimpse

of the sea through the leafy boughs of trees, then no doubt at such a

distance those temporal details which had set the sea, as it were, apart

from nature and history disappeared, and I could as I looked down

towards its waves make myself realise that they were the same which

Leconte de Lisle describes for us in his _Orestie_, where "like a flight

of birds of prey, before the dawn of day" the long-haired warriors of

heroic Hellas "with oars an hundred thousand sweep the huge resounding

deep." But on the other hand I was no longer near enough to the sea

which seemed to me not a living thing now, but fixed; I no longer felt

any power beneath its colours, spread like those of a picture among the

leaves, through which it appeared as inconsistent as the sky and only of

an intenser blue.

Mme. de Villeparisis, seeing that I was fond of churches, promised me

that we should visit one one day and another another, and especially the

church at Carqueville "quite buried in all its old ivy", as she said

with a wave of the hand which seemed tastefully to be clothing the

absent front in an invisible and delicate screen of foliage. Mme. de

Villeparisis would often, with this little descriptive gesture, find

just the right word to define the attraction and the distinctive

features of an historic building, always avoiding technical terms, but

incapable of concealing her thorough understanding of the things to

which she referred. She appeared to seek an excuse for this erudition in

the fact that one of her father's country houses, the one in which she

had lived as a girl, was situated in a district in which there were

churches similar in style to those round Balbec, so that it would have

been unaccountable if she had not acquired a taste for architecture,

this house being, incidentally, one of the finest examples of that of

the Renaissance. But as it was also a regular museum, as moreover Chopin

and Liszt had played there, Lamartine recited poetry, all the most

famous artists for fully a century had inscribed "sentiments", scored

melodies, made sketches in the family album, Mme. de Villeparisis

ascribed, whether from delicacy, good breeding, true modesty or want of

intelligence, only this purely material origin to her acquaintance with

all the arts, and had come, apparently, to regard painting, music,

literature and philosophy as the appanage of a young lady brought up on

the most aristocratic lines in an historic building that was catalogued

and starred. You would have said, listening to her, that she knew of no

pictures that were not heirlooms. She was pleased that my grandmother

liked a necklace which she wore, and which fell over her dress. It

appeared in the portrait of an ancestress of her own by Titian which had

never left the family. So that one could be certain of its being

genuine. She would not listen to a word about pictures bought, heaven

knew where, by a Croesus, she was convinced before you spoke that they

were forgeries, and had no desire to see them. We knew that she herself

painted flowers in water-colour, and my grandmother, who had heard these

praised, spoke to her of them. Mme. de Villeparisis modestly changed the

subject, but without shewing either surprise or pleasure more than would

an artist whose reputation was established and to whom compliments meant

nothing. She said merely that it was a delightful pastime because, even

if the flowers that sprang from the brush were nothing wonderful, at

least the work made you live in the company of real flowers, of the

beauty of which, especially when you were obliged to study them closely

in order to draw them, you could never grow tired. But at Balbec Mme. de

Villeparisis was giving herself a holiday, so as to spare her eyes.

We were astonished, my grandmother and I, to find how much more

"Liberal" she was than even the majority of the middle class. She did

not understand how anyone could be scandalised by the expulsion of the

Jesuits, saying that it had always been done, even under the Monarchy,

in Spain even. She took up the defence of the Republic, and against its

anti-clericalism had no more to say than: "I should be equally annoyed

whether they prevented me from hearing mass when I wanted to, or forced

me to hear it when I didn't!" and even startled us with such utterances

as: "Oh! the aristocracy in these days, what does it amount to?" "To my

mind, a man who doesn't work doesn't count!"--perhaps only because she

felt that they gained point and flavour, became memorable, in fact, on

her lips.

When we heard these advanced opinions--though never so far advanced as

to amount to Socialism, which Mme. de Villeparisis held in

abhorrence--expressed so frequently and with so much frankness precisely

by one of those people in consideration of whose intelligence our

scrupulous and timid impartiality would refuse to condemn outright the

ideas of the Conservatives, we came very near, my grandmother and I, to

believing that in the pleasant companion of our drives was to be found

the measure and the pattern of truth in all things. We took her word for

it when she appreciated her Titians, the colonnade of her country house,

the conversational talent of Louis-Philippe. But--like those mines of

learning who hold us spell-bound when we get them upon Egyptian

paintings or Etruscan inscriptions, and yet talk so tediously about

modern work that we ask ourselves whether we have not been

overestimating the interest of the sciences in which they are versed

since there is not apparent in their treatment of them the mediocrity of

mind which they must have brought to those studies just as much as to

their fatuous essays on Baudelaire--Mme. de Villeparisis, questioned by

me about Chateaubriand, about Balzac, about Victor Hugo, each of whom

had in his day been the guest of her parents, and had been seen and

spoken to by her, smiled at my reverence, told amusing anecdotes of

them, such as she had a moment ago been telling us of dukes and

statesmen, and severely criticised those writers simply because they had

been lacking in that modesty, that self-effacement, that sober art which

is satisfied with a single right line, and lays no stress on it, which

avoids more than anything else the absurdity of grandiloquence, in that

opportuneness, those qualities of moderation, of judgment and simplicity

to which she had been taught that real greatness aspired and attained:

it was evident that she had no hesitation in placing above them men who

might after all, perhaps, by virtue of those qualities, have had the

advantage of a Balzac, a Hugo, a Vigny in a drawing-room, an academy, a

cabinet council, men like Molé, Fontanes, Vitroles, Bersot, Pasquier,

Lebrun, Salvandy or Daru.

"Like those novels of Stendhal, which you seem to admire. You would have

given him a great surprise, I assure you, if you had spoken to him in

that tone. My father, who used to meet him at M. Mérimée's--now he was

a man of talent, if you like--often told me that Beyle (that was his

real name) was appallingly vulgar, but quite good company at dinner, and

never in the least conceited about his books. Why, you can see for

yourself how he just shrugged his shoulders at the absurdly extravagant

compliments of M. de Balzac. There at least he shewed that he knew how

to behave like a gentleman." She possessed the autographs of all these

great men, and seemed, when she put forward the personal relations which

her family had had with them, to assume that her judgment of them must

be better founded than that of young people who, like myself, had had no

opportunity of meeting them. "I'm sure I have a right to speak, for they

used to come to my father's house; and as M. Sainte-Beuve, who was a

most intelligent man, used to say, in forming an estimate you must take

the word of people who saw them close, and were able to judge more

exactly of their real worth."

Sometimes as the carriage laboured up a steep road through tilled

country, making the fields more real, adding to them a mark of

authenticity like the precious flower with which certain of the old

masters used to sign their pictures, a few hesitating cornflowers, like

the Combray cornflowers, would stream in our wake. Presently the horses

outdistanced them, but a little way on we would catch sight of another

which while it stayed our coming had pricked up to welcome us amid the

grass its azure star; some made so bold as to come and plant themselves

by the side of the road, and the impression left in my mind was a

nebulous blend of distant memories and of wild flowers grown tame.

We began to go down hill; and then met, climbing on foot, on a bicycle,

in a cart or carriage, one of those creatures--flowers of a fine day but

unlike the flowers of the field, for each of them secretes something

that is not to be found in another, with the result that we can never

satisfy upon any of her fellows the desire which she has brought to

birth in us--a farm-girl driving her cow or half-lying along a waggon, a

shopkeeper's daughter taking the air, a fashionable young lady erect on

the back-seat of a landau, facing her parents. Certainly Bloch had been

the means of opening a new era and had altered the value of life for me

on the day when he had told me that the dreams which I had entertained

on my solitary walks along the Méséglise way, when I hoped that some

peasant girl might pass whom I could take in my arms, were not a mere

fantasy which corresponded to nothing outside myself, but that all the

girls one met, whether villagers or "young ladies", were alike ready and

willing to give ear to such prayers. And even if I were fated, now that

I was ill and did not go out by myself, never to be able to make love to

them, I was happy all the same, like a child born in a prison or a

hospital, who, having always supposed that the human organism was

capable of digesting only dry bread and "physic", has learned suddenly

that peaches, apricots and grapes are not simply part of the decoration

of the country scene but delicious and easily assimilated food. Even if

his gaoler or his nurse does not allow him to pluck those tempting

fruits, still the world seems to him a better place and existence in it

more clement. For a desire seems to us more attractive, we repose on it

with more confidence, when we know that outside ourself there is a

reality which conforms to it, even if, for us, it is not to be realised.

And we think with more joy of a life in which (on condition that we

eliminate for a moment from our mind the tiny obstacle, accidental and

special, which prevents us personally from doing so) we can imagine

ourself to be assuaging that desire. As to the pretty girls who went

past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be

kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the universe had

appeared to me more interesting.

Mme. de Villeparisis's carriage moved fast. Scarcely had I time to see

the girl who was coming in our direction; and yet--as the beauty of

people is not like the beauty of things, as we feel that it is that of

an unique creature, endowed with consciousness and free-will--as soon as

her individuality, a soul still vague, a will unknown to me, presented a

tiny picture of itself, enormously reduced but complete, in the depths

of her indifferent eyes, at once, by a mysterious response of the

pollen ready in me for the pistils that should receive it, I felt

surging through me the embryo, as vague, as minute, of the desire not to

let this girl pass without forcing her mind to become conscious of my

person, without preventing her desires from wandering to some one else,

without coming to fix myself in her dreams and to seize and occupy her

heart. Meanwhile our carriage rolled away from her, the pretty girl was

already left behind, and as she had--of me--none of those notions which

constitute a person in one's mind, her eyes which had barely seen me had

forgotten me already. Was it because I had caught but a fragmentary

glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive? It may have been. In

the first place, the impossibility of stopping when I came to her, the

risk of not meeting her again another day, give at once to such a girl

the same charm as a place derives from the illness or poverty that

prevents us from visiting it, or the so unadventurous days through which

we should otherwise have to live from the battle in which we shall

doubtless fall. So that, if there were no such thing as habit, life must

appear delightful to those of us who would at every moment be threatened

with death--that is to say, to all mankind. Then, if our imagination is

set going by the desire for what we may not possess, its flight is not

limited by a reality completely perceived, in these casual encounters in

which the charms of the passing stranger are generally in direct ratio

to the swiftness of our passage. If only night is falling and the

carriage is moving fast, whether in town or country, there is not a

female torso, mutilated like an antique marble by the speed that tears

us away and the dusk that drowns it, but aims at our heart, from every

turning in the road, from the lighted interior of every shop, the arrows

of Beauty, that Beauty of which we are sometimes tempted to ask

ourselves whether it is, in this world, anything more than the

complementary part that is added to a fragmentary and fugitive stranger

by our imagination over-stimulated by regret.

Had I been free to stop, to get down from the carriage and to speak to

the girl whom we were passing, should I perhaps have been disillusioned

by some fault in her complexion which from the carriage I had not

distinguished? (After which every effort to penetrate into her life

would have seemed suddenly impossible. For beauty is a sequence of

hypotheses which ugliness cuts short when it bars the way that we could

already see opening into the unknown.) Perhaps a single word which she

might have uttered, a smile would have furnished me with a key, a clue

that I had not expected, to read the expression of her face, to

interpret her bearing, which would at once have ceased to be of any

interest. It is possible, for I have never in real life met any girls so

desirable as on days when I was with some serious person from whom,

despite the myriad pretexts that I invented, I could not tear myself

away: some years after that in which I went for the first time to

Balbec, as I was driving through Paris with a friend of my father, and

had caught sight of a woman walking quickly along the dark street, I

felt that it was unreasonable to forfeit, for a purely conventional

scruple, my share of happiness in what may very well be the only life

there is, and jumping from the carriage without a word of apology I

followed in quest of the stranger; lost her where two streets crossed;

caught her up again in a third, and arrived at last, breathless, beneath

a street lamp, face to face with old Mme. Verdurin whom I had been

carefully avoiding for years, and who, in her delight and surprise,

exclaimed: "But how very nice of you to have run all this way just to

say how d'ye do to me!"

That year at Balbec, at the moments of such encounters, I would assure

my grandmother and Mme. de Villeparisis that I had so severe a headache

that the best thing for me would be to go home alone on foot. But they

would never let me get out of the carriage. And I must add that the

pretty girl (far harder to find again than an historic building, for she

was nameless and had the power of locomotion) to the collection of all

those whom I promised myself that I would examine more closely at a

later date. One of them, however, happened to pass more than once before

my eyes in circumstances which allowed me to believe that I should be

able to get to know her when I chose. This was a milk-girl who came from

a farm with an additional supply of cream for the hotel. I fancied that

she had recognised me also; and she did, in fact, look at me with an

attentiveness which was perhaps due only to the surprise which my

attentiveness caused her. And next day, a day on which I had been

resting all morning, when Françoise came in about noon to draw my

curtains, she handed me a letter which had been left for me downstairs.

I knew no one at Balbec. I had no doubt that the letter was from the

milk-girl. Alas, it was only from Bergotte who, as he happened to be

passing, had tried to see me, but on hearing that I was asleep had

scribbled a few charming lines for which the lift-boy had addressed an

envelope which I had supposed to have been written by the milk-girl. I

was bitterly disappointed, and the thought that it was more difficult,

and more flattering to myself to get a letter from Bergotte did not in

the least console me for this particular letter's not being from her. As

for the girl, I never came across her again any more than I came across

those whom I had seen only from Mme. de Villeparisis's carriage. Seeing

and then losing them all thus increased the state of agitation in which

I was living, and I found a certain wisdom in the philosophers who

recommend us to set a limit to our desires (if, that is, they refer to

our desire for people, for that is the only kind that ends in anxiety,

having for its object a being at once unknown and unconscious. To

suppose that philosophy could refer to the desire for wealth would be

too silly.) At the same time I was inclined to regard this wisdom as

incomplete, for I said to myself that these encounters made me find even

more beautiful a world which thus caused to grow along all the country

roads flowers at once rare and common, fleeting treasures of the day,

windfalls of the drive, of which the contingent circumstances that would

never, perhaps, recur had alone prevented me from taking advantage, and

which gave a new zest to life.

But perhaps in hoping that, one day, with greater freedom, I should be

able to find on other roads girls much the same, I was already beginning

to falsify and corrupt what there is exclusively individual in the

desire to live in the company of a woman whom one has found attractive,

and by the mere fact that I admitted the possibility of making this

desire grow artificially, I had implicitly acknowledged my illusion.

The day on which Mme. de Villeparisis took us to Carqueville, where

there was that church, covered in ivy, of which she had spoken to us, a

church that, built upon rising ground, dominated both its village and

the river that flowed beneath it, and had kept its own little bridge

from the middle ages, my grandmother, thinking that I would like to be

left alone to study the building at my leisure, suggested to her friend

that they should go on and wait for me at the pastry-cook's, in the

village square which was clearly visible from where we were and, in its

mellow bloom in the sunshine, seemed like another part of a Whole that

was all mediaeval. It was arranged that I should join them there later.

In the mass of verdure before which I was left standing I was obliged,

if I was to discover the church, to make a mental effort which involved

my grasping more intensely the idea "Church"; in fact, as happens to

schoolboys who gather more fully the meaning of a sentence when they are

made, by translating or by paraphrasing it, to divest it of the forms to

which they are accustomed, this idea of "Church", which as a rule I

scarcely needed when I stood beneath steeples that were recognisable in

themselves, I was obliged perpetually to recall so as not to forget,

here that the arch in this clump of ivy was that of a pointed window,

there that the projection of the leaves was due to the swelling

underneath of a capital. Then came a breath of wind, and sent a tremor

through the mobile porch, which was overrun by eddies that shot and

quivered like a flood of light; the pointed leaves opened one against

another; and, shuddering, the arboreal front drew after it green

pillars, undulant, caressed and fugitive.

As I came away from the church I saw by the old bridge a cluster of

girls from the village who, probably because it was Sunday, were

standing about in their best clothes, rallying the young men who went

past. Not so well dressed as the others, but seeming to enjoy some

ascendancy over them--for she scarcely answered when they spoke to

her--with a more serious and a more determined air, there was a tall one

who, hoisted upon the parapet of the bridge with her feet hanging down,

was holding on her lap a small vessel full of fish which she had

presumably just been catching. She had a tanned complexion, gentle eyes

but with a look of contempt for her surroundings, a small nose,

delicately and attractively modelled. My eyes rested upon her skin; and

my lips, had the need arisen, might have believed that they had followed

my eyes. But it was not only to her body that I should have liked to

attain, there was also her person, which abode within her, and with

which there is but one form of contact, namely to attract its attention,

but one sort of penetration, to awaken an idea in it.

And this inner self of the charming fisher-girl seemed to be still

closed to me, I was doubtful whether I had entered it, even after I had

seen my own image furtively reflect itself in the twin mirrors of her

gaze, following an index of refraction that was as unknown to me as if I

had been placed in the field of vision of a deer. But just as it would

not have sufficed that my lips should find pleasure in hers without

giving pleasure to them also, so I should have wished that the idea of

me which was to enter this creature, was to fasten itself in her, should

attract to me not merely her attention but her admiration, her desire,

and should compel her to keep me in her memory until the day when I

should be able to meet her again. Meanwhile I could see, within a

stone's-throw, the square in which Mme. de Villeparisis's carriage must

be waiting for me. I had not a moment to lose; and already I could feel

that the girls were beginning to laugh at the sight of me thus held

suspended before them. I had a five-franc piece in my pocket. I drew it

out, and, before explaining to the girl the errand on which I proposed

to send her, so as to have a better chance of her listening to me, I

held the coin for a moment before her eyes:

"Since you seem to belong to the place," I said to her, "I wonder if you

would be so good as to take a message for me. I want you to go to a

pastry-cook's--which is apparently in a square, but I don't know where

that is--where there is a carriage waiting for me. One moment! To make

quite sure, will you ask if the carriage belongs to the Marquise de

Villeparisis? But you can't miss it; it's a carriage and pair."

That was what I wished her to know, so that she should regard me as

someone of importance. But when I had uttered the words "Marquise" and

"carriage and pair", suddenly I had a great sense of calm. I felt that

the fisher-girl would remember me, and I felt vanishing, with my fear of

not being able to meet her again, part also of my desire to meet her. It

seemed to me that I had succeeded in touching her person with invisible

lips, and that I had pleased her. And this assault and capture of her

mind, this immaterial possession had taken from her part of her mystery,

just as physical possession does.

We came down towards Hudimesnil; suddenly I was overwhelmed with that

profound happiness which I had not often felt since Combray; happiness

analogous to that which had been given me by--among other things--the

steeples of Martinville. But this time it remained incomplete. I had

just seen, standing a little way back from the steep ridge over which we

were passing, three trees, probably marking the entrance to a shady

avenue, which made a pattern at which I was looking now not for the

first time; I could not succeed in reconstructing the place from which

they had been, as it were, detached, but I felt that it had been

familiar to me once; so that my mind having wavered between some distant

year and the present moment, Balbec and its surroundings began to

dissolve and I asked myself whether the whole of this drive were not a

make-believe, Balbec a place to which I had never gone save in

imagination, Mme. de Villeparisis a character in a story and the three

old trees the reality which one recaptures on raising one's eyes from

the book which one has been reading and which describes an environment

into which one has come to believe that one has been bodily transported.

I looked at the three trees; I could see them plainly, but my mind felt

that they were concealing something which it had not grasped, as when

things are placed out of our reach, so that our fingers, stretched out

at arm's length, can only touch for a moment their outer surface, and

can take hold of nothing. Then we rest for a little while before

thrusting out our arm with refreshed vigour, and trying to reach an inch

or two farther. But if my mind was thus to collect itself, to gather

strength, I should have to be alone. What would I not have given to be

able to escape as I used to do on those walks along the Guermantes way,

when I detached myself from my parents! It seemed indeed that I ought to

do so now. I recognised that kind of pleasure which requires, it is

true, a certain effort on the part of the mind, but in comparison with

which the attractions of the inertia which inclines us to renounce that

pleasure seem very slight. That pleasure, the object of which I could

but dimly feel, that pleasure which I must create for myself, I

experienced only on rare occasions, but on each of these it seemed to me

that the things which had happened in the interval were of but scant

importance, and that in attaching myself to the reality of that pleasure

alone I could at length begin to lead a new life. I laid my hand for a

moment across my eyes, so as to be able to shut them without Mme. de

Villeparisis's noticing. I sat there, thinking of nothing, then with my

thoughts collected, compressed and strengthened I sprang farther forward

in the direction of the trees, or rather in that inverse direction at

the end of which I could see them growing within myself. I felt again

behind them the same object, known to me and yet vague, which I could

not bring nearer. And yet all three of them, as the carriage moved on, I

could see coming towards me. Where had I looked at them before? There

was no place near Combray where an avenue opened off the road like that.

The site which they recalled to me, there was no room for it either in

the scenery of the place in Germany where I had gone one year with my

grandmother to take the waters. Was I to suppose, then, that they came

from years already so remote in my life that the landscape which

accompanied them had been entirely obliterated from my memory, and that,

like the pages which, with sudden emotion, we recognise in a book which

we imagined that we had never read, they surged up by themselves out of

the forgotten chapter of my earliest infancy? Were they not rather to be

numbered among those dream landscapes, always the same, at least for me

in whom their unfamiliar aspect was but the objectivation in my dreams

of the effort that I had been making while awake either to penetrate the

mystery of a place beneath the outward appearance of which I was dimly

conscious of there being something more, as had so often happened to me

on the Guermantes way, or to succeed in bringing mystery back to a place

which I had longed to know and which, from the day on which I had come

to know it, had seemed to me to be wholly superficial, like Balbec? Or

were they but an image freshly extracted from a dream of the night

before, but already so worn, so altered that it seemed to me to come

from somewhere far more distant? Or had I indeed never seen them before;

did they conceal beneath their surface, like the trees, like the tufts

of grass that I had seen beside the Guermantes way, a meaning as

obscure, as hard to grasp as is a distant past, so that, whereas they

were pleading with me that I would master a new idea, I imagined that I

had to identify something in my memory? Or again were they concealing no

hidden thought, and was it simply my strained vision that made me see

them double in time as one occasionally sees things double in space? I

could not tell. And yet all the time they were coming towards me;

perhaps some fabulous apparition, a ring of witches or of norns who

would propound their oracles to me. I chose rather to believe that they

were phantoms of the past, dear companions of my childhood, vanished

friends who recalled our common memories. Like ghosts they seemed to be

appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back to life. In

their simple, passionate gesticulation I could discern the helpless

anguish of a beloved person who has lost the power of speech, and feels

that he will never be able to say to us what he wishes to say and we can

never guess. Presently, at a cross-roads, the carriage left them. It was

bearing me away from what alone I believed to be true, what would have

made me truly happy; it was like my life.

I watched the trees gradually withdraw, waving their despairing arms,

seeming to say to me: "What you fail to learn from us to-day, you will

never know. If you allow us to drop back into the hollow of this road

from which we sought to raise ourselves up to you, a whole part of

yourself which we were bringing to you will fall for ever into the

abyss." And indeed if, in the course of time, I did discover the kind of

pleasure and of disturbance which I had just been feeling once again,

and if one evening--too late, but then for all time--I fastened myself

to it, of those trees themselves I was never to know what they had been

trying to give me nor where else I had seen them. And when, the road

having forked and the carriage with it, I turned my back on them and

ceased to see them, with Mme. de Villeparisis asking me what I was

dreaming about, I was as wretched as though I had just lost a friend,

had died myself, had broken faith with the dead or had denied my God.

It was time to be thinking of home. Mme. de Villeparisis, who had a

certain feeling for nature, colder than that of my grandmother but

capable of recognising, even outside museums and noblemen's houses, the

simple and majestic beauty of certain old and venerable things, told her

coachman to take us back by the old Balbec road, a road little used but

planted with old elm-trees which we thought quite admirable.

Once we had got to know this road, for a change we would return--that

is, if we had not taken it on the outward journey--by another which ran

through the woods of Chantereine and Canteloup. The invisibility of the

numberless birds that took up one another's song close beside us in the

trees gave me the same sense of being at rest that one has when one

shuts one's eyes. Chained to my back-seat like Prometheus on his rock I

listened to my Oceanides. And when it so happened that I caught a

glimpse of one of those birds as it passed from one leaf to another,

there was so little apparent connexion between it and the songs that I

heard that I could not believe that I was beholding their cause in that

little body, fluttering, startled and unseeing.

This road was like many others of the same kind which are to be found in

France, climbing on a fairly steep gradient to its summit and then

gradually falling for the rest of the way. At the time, I found no great

attraction in it, I was only glad to be going home. But it became for me

later on a frequent source of joy by remaining in my memory as a

lodestone to which all the similar roads that I was to take, on walks or

drives or journeys, would at once attach themselves without breach of

continuity and would be able, thanks to it, to communicate directly with

my heart. For as soon as the carriage or the motor-car turned into one

of these roads that seemed to be merely the continuation of the road

along which I had driven with Mme. de Villeparisis, the matter to which

I found my consciousness directly applying itself, as to the most recent

event in my past, would be (all the intervening years being quietly

obliterated) the impressions that I had had on those bright summer

afternoons and evenings, driving round Balbec, when the leaves smelt

good, a mist rose from the ground, and beyond the village close at hand

one could see through the trees the sun setting as though it had been

merely some place farther along the road, a forest place and distant,

which we should not have time to reach that evening. Harmonised with

what I was feeling now in another place, on a similar road, surrounded

by all the accessory sensations of breathing deep draughts of air, of

curiosity, indolence, appetite, lightness of heart which were common to

them both, and excluding all others, these impressions would be

reinforced, would take on the consistency of a particular type of

pleasure, and almost of a setting of life which, as it happened, I

rarely had the luck to come across, but in which these awakened memories

placed, amid the reality that my senses could perceive, no small part of

a reality suggested, dreamed, unseizable, to give me, among those

regions through which I was passing, more than an aesthetic feeling, a

transient but exalted ambition to stay there and to live there always.

How often since then, simply because I could smell green leaves, has not

being seated on a back-seat opposite Mme. de Villeparisis, meeting the

Princesse de Luxembourg who waved a greeting to her from her own

carriage, coming back to dinner at the Grand Hotel appeared to me as one

of those indescribable happinesses which neither the present nor the

future can restore to us, which we may taste once only in a lifetime.

Often dusk would have fallen before we reached the hotel. Timidly I

would quote to Mme. de Villeparisis, pointing to the moon in the sky,

some memorable expression of Chateaubriand or Vigny or Victor Hugo:

"Shedding abroad that ancient secret of melancholy" or "Weeping like

Diana by the brink of her streams" or "The shadows nuptial, solemn and

august."

"And so you think that good, do you?" she would ask, "inspired, as you

call it. I must confess that I am always surprised to see people taking

things seriously nowadays which the friends of those gentlemen, while

doing ample justice to their merits, were the first to laugh at. People

weren't so free then with the word 'inspired' as they are now, when if

you say to a writer that he has mere talent he thinks you're insulting

him. You quote me a fine passage from M. de Chateaubriand about

moonlight. You shall see that I have my own reasons for being

refractory. M. de Chateaubriand used constantly to come to see my

father. He was quite a pleasant person when you were alone with him,

because then he was simple and amusing, but the moment he had an

audience he would begin to pose, and then he became absurd; when my

father was in the room, he pretended that he had flung his resignation

in the King's face, and that he had controlled the voting in the

Conclave, forgetting that it was my father whom he had asked to beg the

King to take him back, and that my father had heard him make the most

idiotic forecasts of the Papal election. You ought to have heard M. de

Blacas on that famous Conclave; he was a very different kind of man from

M. de Chateaubriand. As to his fine phrases about the moon, they became

part of our regular programme for entertaining our guests. Whenever

there was any moonlight about the house, if there was anyone staying

with us for the first time he would be told to take M. de Chateaubriand

for a stroll after dinner. When they came in, my father would take his

guest aside and say: 'Well, and was M. de Chateaubriand very

eloquent?'--'Oh, yes.' 'He's been talking about the moon?'--'Yes, how

did you know?'--'One moment, didn't he say----' and then my father would

quote the passage. 'He did; but how in the world . . .?'--'And he spoke

to you of the moonlight on the Roman Campagna?'--'But, my dear sir,

you're a magician.' My father was no magician, but M. de Chateaubriand

had the same little speech about the moon which he served up every

time."

At the mention of Vigny she laughed: "The man who said: 'I am the Comte

Alfred de Vigny!' One either is a Comte or one isn't; it is not of the

slightest importance." And then perhaps she discovered that it was after

all, of some slight importance, for she went on: "For one thing I am by

no means sure that he was, and in any case he was of the humblest

origin, that gentleman who speaks in his verses of his 'Esquire's

crest'. In such charming taste, is it not, and so interesting to his

readers! Like Musset, a plain Paris cit, who laid so much stress on 'The

golden falcon that surmounts my helm'. As if you would ever hear a real

gentleman say a thing like that! And yet Musset had some talent as a

poet. But except _Cinq-Mars_ I have never been able to read a thing by

M. de Vigny. I get so bored that the book falls from my hands. M. Molé,

who had all the cleverness and tact that were wanting in M. de Vigny,

put him properly in his place when he welcomed him to the Academy. Do

you mean to say you don't know the speech? It is a masterpiece of irony

and impertinence." She found fault with Balzac, whom she was surprised

to see her nephews admire, for having pretended to describe a society

"in which he was never received" and of which his descriptions were

wildly improbable. As for Victor Hugo, she told us that M. de Bouillon,

her father, who had friends among the young leaders of the Romantic

movement, had been taken by some of them to the first performance of

_Hernani_, but that he had been unable to sit through it, so ridiculous

had he found the lines of that talented but extravagant writer who had

acquired the title of "Major Poet" only by virtue of having struck a

bargain, and as a reward for the not disinterested indulgence that he

shewed to the dangerous errors of the Socialists.

We had now come in sight of the hotel, with its lights, so hostile that

first evening, on our arrival, now protecting and kind, speaking to us

of home. And when the carriage drew up outside the door, the porter, the

pages, the lift-boy, attentive, clumsy, vaguely uneasy at our lateness,

were numbered, now that they had grown familiar, among those beings who

change so many times in the course of our life, as we ourself change,

but by whom, when they are for the time being the mirror of our habits,

we find something attractive in the feeling that we are being faithfully

reflected and in a friendly spirit. We prefer them to friends whom we

have not seen for some time, for they contain more of what we actually

are. Only the outside page, exposed to the sun all day, had been taken

indoors for protection from the cold night air and swaddled in thick

woollen garments which, combined with the orange effulgence of his locks

and the curiously red bloom of his cheeks, made one, seeing him there

through the glass front of the hall, think of a hot-house plant muffled

up for protection from the frost. We got out of the carriage, with the

help of a great many more servants than were required, but they were

conscious of the importance of the scene and each felt obliged to take

some part in it. I was always very hungry. And so, often, so as not to

keep dinner waiting, I would not go upstairs first to the room which had

succeeded in becoming so really mine that to catch sight of its long

violet curtains and low bookcases was to find myself alone again with

that self of which things, like people, gave me a reflected image; but

we would all wait together in the hall until the head waiter came to

tell us that our dinner was ready. And this gave us another opportunity

of listening to Mme. de Villeparisis.

"But you must be tired of us by now," protested my grandmother.

"Not at all! Why, I am delighted, what could be nicer?" replied her

friend with a winning smile, drawing out, almost intoning her words in a

way that contrasted markedly with her customary simplicity of speech.

And indeed at such moments as this she was not natural, her mind

reverted to her early training, to the aristocratic manner in which a

great lady is supposed to shew common people that she is glad to see

them, that she is not at all stiff. And her one and only failure in true

politeness lay in this excess of politeness; which it was easy to

identify as one of the professional "wrinkles" of a lady of the Faubourg

Saint-Germain, who, always seeing in her humbler friends the latent

discontent that she must one day arouse in their bosoms, greedily seizes

every opportunity on which she can possibly, in the ledger in which she

keeps her social account with them, write down a credit balance which

will allow her to enter presently on the opposite page the dinner or

reception to which she will not invite them. And so, having long ago

taken effect in her once and for all, and ignoring the fact that now

both the circumstances and the people concerned were different, that in

Paris she hoped to see us often come to her house, the spirit of her

caste was urging Mme. de Villeparisis on with feverish ardour, and as if

the time that was allowed her for being kind to us was limited, to

multiply, while we were still at Balbec, her gifts of roses and melons,

loans of books, drives in her carriage and verbal effusions. And for

that reason, quite as much as the dazzling glories of the beach, the

many-coloured flamboyance and subaqueous light of the rooms, as much

even as the riding-lessons by which tradesmen's sons were deified like

Alexander of Macedon, the daily kindnesses shewn us by Mme. de

Villeparisis and also the unaccustomed, momentary, holiday ease with

which my grandmother accepted them have remained in my memory as typical

of life at a watering-place.

"Give them your cloaks to take upstairs."

My grandmother handed hers to the manager, and because he had been so

nice to me I was distressed by this want of consideration, which seemed

to pain him.

"I think you've hurt his feelings," said the Marquise. "He probably

fancies himself too great a gentleman to carry your wraps. I remember so

well the Duc de Nemours, when I was still quite little, coming to see my

father who was living then on the top floor of the Bouillon house, with

a fat parcel under his arm of letters and newspapers. I can see the

Prince now, in his blue coat, framed in our doorway, which had such

pretty woodwork round it--I think it was Bagard made it--you know those

fine laths that they used to cut, so supple that the joiner would twist

them sometimes into little shells and flowers, like the ribbons round a

nosegay. 'Here you are, Cyrus,' he said to my father, 'look what your

porter's given me to bring you. He said to me: Since you're going up to

see the Count, it's not worth my while climbing all those stairs; but

take care you don't break the string.'" "Now that you have got rid of

your things, why don't you sit down; look, sit in this seat," she said

to my grandmother, taking her by the hand.

"Oh, if you don't mind, not in that one! There is not room for two, and

it's too big for me by myself; I shouldn't feel comfortable."

"You remind me, for it was exactly like this, of a seat that I had for

many years until at last I couldn't keep it any longer because it had

been given to my mother by the poor Duchesse de Praslin. My mother,

though she was the simplest person in the world, really, had ideas that

belonged to another generation, which even in those days I could

scarcely understand; and at first she had not been at all willing to let

herself be introduced to Mme. de Praslin, who had been plain Mlle.

Sebastiani, while she, because she was a Duchess, felt that it was not

for her to be introduced to my mother. And really, you know," Mme. de

Villeparisis went on, forgetting that she herself did not understand

these fine shades of distinction, "even if she had just been Mme. de

Choiseul, there was a good deal to be said for her claim. The Choiseuls

are everything you could want; they spring from a sister of Louis the

Fat; they were ruling princes down in Basigny. I admit that we beat them

in marriages and in distinction, but the precedence is pretty much the

same. This little difficulty gave rise to several amusing incidents,

such as a luncheon-party which was kept waiting a whole hour or more

before one of these ladies could make up her mind to let herself be

introduced to the other. In spite of which they became great friends,

and she gave my mother a seat like that, in which people always refused

to sit, just as you did, until one day my mother heard a carriage drive

into the courtyard. She asked a young servant we had, who it was. 'The

Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, ma'am.' 'Very well, say that I am at

home.' A quarter of an hour passed; no one came. 'What about the

Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld?' my mother asked, 'where is she?' 'She's

on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who

had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent

habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's

the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of

luxuries. And sure enough the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld had the

greatest difficulty in getting upstairs, for she was an enormous woman,

so enormous, indeed, that when she did come into the room my mother was

quite at a loss for a moment to know where to put her. And then the seat

that Mme. de Praslin had given her caught her eye. 'Won't you sit down?'

she said, bringing it forward. And the Duchess filled it from side to

side. She was quite a pleasant woman, for all her massiveness. 'She

still creates an effect when she comes in,' one of our friends said

once. 'She certainly creates an effect when she goes out,' said my

mother, who was rather more free in her speech than would be thought

proper nowadays. Even in Mme. de La Rochefoucauld's own drawing-room

people weren't afraid to make fun of her to her face (at which she was

always the first to laugh) over her ample proportions. 'But are you all

alone?' my grandmother once asked M. de La Rochefoucauld, when she had

come to pay a call on the Duchess, and being met at the door by him had

not seen his wife who was at the other end of the room. 'Is Mme. de La

Rochefoucauld not at home? I don't see her.'--'How charming of you!'

replied the Duke, who had about the worst judgment of any man I have

ever known, but was not altogether lacking in humour."

After dinner, when I had retired upstairs with my grandmother, I said to

her that the qualities which attracted us in Mme. de Villeparisis, her

tact, her shrewdness, her discretion, her modesty in not referring to

herself, were not, perhaps, of very great value since those who

possessed them in the highest degree were simply people like Molé and

Loménie, and that if the want of them can make our social relations

unpleasant yet it did not prevent from becoming Chateaubriand, Vigny,

Hugo, Balzac, a lot of foolish fellows who had no judgment, at whom it

was easy to mock, like Bloch. . . . But at the name of Bloch, my

grandmother cried out in protest. And she began to praise Mme. de

Villeparisis. As we are told that it is the preservation of the species

which guides our individual preferences in love, and, so that the child

may be constituted in the most normal fashion, sends fat men in pursuit

of lean women and _vice versa_, so in some dim way it was the

requirements of my happiness threatened by my disordered nerves, by my

morbid tendency to melancholy, to solitude, that made her allot the

highest place to the qualities of balance and judgment, peculiar not

only to Mme. de Villeparisis but to a society in which our ancestors saw

blossom the minds of a Doudan, a M. de Rémusat, not to mention a

Beausergent, a Joubert, a Sévigné, a type of mind that invests life

with more happiness, with greater dignity than the converse refinements

which brought a Baudelaire, a Poe, a Verlaine, a Rimbaud to sufferings,

to a disrepute such as my grandmother did not wish for her daughter's

child. I interrupted her with a kiss and asked her if she had noticed

some expression which Mme. de Villeparisis had used and which seemed to

point to a woman who thought more of her noble birth than she was

prepared to admit. In this way I used to submit my impressions of life

to my grandmother, for I was never certain what degree of respect was

due to anyone until she had informed me. Every evening I would come to

her with the mental sketches that I had made during the day of all those

non-existent people who were not her. Once I said to her: "I shouldn't

be able to live without you." "But you mustn't speak like that;" her

voice was troubled. "We must harden our hearts more than that, you know.

Or what would become of you if I went away on a journey? But I hope that

you would be quite sensible and quite happy."

"I could manage to be sensible if you went away for a few days, but I

should count the hours."

"But if I were to go away for months . . ." (at the bare suggestion of

such a thing my heart was wrung.) ". . . for years . . . for . . ."

We both remained silent. We dared not look one another in the face. And

yet I was suffering more keenly from her anguish than from my own. And

so I walked across to the window, and said to her, with a studied

clearness of tone but with averted eyes:

"You know what a creature of habit I am. For the first few days after I

have been parted from the people I love best, I am wretched. But though

I go on loving them just as much, I grow used to their absence; life

becomes calm, bearable, pleasant; I could stand being parted from them

for months, for years . . ."

I was obliged to stop, and looked straight out of the window. My

grandmother went out of the room for something. But next day I began to

talk to her about philosophy, and, speaking in a tone of complete

indifference, but at the same time taking care that my grandmother

should pay attention to what I was saying, I remarked what a curious

thing it was that, according to the latest scientific discoveries, the

materialist position appeared to be crumbling, and the most likely thing

to be, once again, the survival of the soul and reunion in a life

everlasting.

Mme. de Villeparisis gave us warning that presently she would not be

able to see so much of us. A young nephew who was preparing for Saumur,

and was meanwhile stationed in the neighbourhood, at Doncières, was

coming to spend a few weeks' furlough with her, and she would be

devoting most of her time to him. In the course of our drives together

she had boasted to us of his extreme cleverness, and above all of his

goodness of heart; already I was imagining that he would have an

instinctive feeling for me, that I was to be his best friend; and when,

before his arrival, his aunt gave my grandmother to understand that he

had unfortunately fallen into the clutches of an appalling woman with

whom he was quite infatuated and who would never let him go, since I

believed that that sort of love was doomed to end in mental aberration,

crime and suicide, thinking how short the time was that was set apart

for our friendship, already so great in my heart, although I had not yet

set eyes on him, I wept for that friendship and for the misfortunes that

were in store for it, as we weep for a person whom we love when some one

has just told us that he is seriously ill and that his days are

numbered.

One afternoon of scorching heat I was in the dining-room of the hotel,

which they had plunged in semi-darkness, to shield it from the glare, by

drawing the curtains which the sun gilded, while through the gaps

between them I caught flashing blue glimpses of the sea, when along the

central gangway leading inland from the beach to the high road I saw,

tall, slender, his head held proudly erect upon a springing neck, a

young man go past with searching eyes, whose skin was as fair and his

hair as golden as if they had absorbed all the rays of the sun. Dressed

in a clinging, almost white material such as I could never have believed

that any man would have the audacity to wear, the thinness of which

suggested no less vividly than the coolness of the dining-room the heat

and brightness of the glorious day outside, he was walking fast. His

eyes, from one of which a monocle kept dropping, were of the colour of

the sea. Everyone looked at him with interest as he passed, knowing that

this young Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray was famed for the smartness of

his clothes. All the newspapers had described the suit in which he had

recently acted as second to the young Duc d'Uzès in a duel. One felt

that this so special quality of his hair, his eyes, his skin, his

figure, which would have marked him out in a crowd like a precious vein

of opal, azure-shot and luminous, embedded in a mass of coarser

substance, must correspond to a life different from that led by other

men. So that when, before the attachment which Mme. de Villeparisis had

been deploring, the prettiest women in society had disputed the

possession of him, his presence, at a watering-place for instance, in

the company of the beauty of the season to whom he was paying court, not

only made her conspicuous, but attracted every eye fully as much to

himself. Because of his "tone", of his impertinence befitting a young

"lion", and especially of his astonishing good looks, some people even

thought him effeminate, though without attaching any stigma, for

everyone knew bow manly he was and that he was a passionate "womaniser".

This was Mme. de Villeparisis's nephew of whom she had spoken to us. I

was overcome with joy at the thought that I was going to know him and to

see him for several weeks on end, and confident that he would bestow on

me all his affection. He strode rapidly across the hotel, seeming to be

in pursuit of his monocle, which kept darting away in front of him like

a butterfly. He was coming from the beach, and the sea which filled the

lower half of the glass front of the hall gave him a background against

which he was drawn at full length, as in certain portraits whose

painters attempt, without in any way falsifying the most accurate

observation of contemporary life, but by choosing for their sitter

appropriate surroundings, a polo ground, golf links, a race-course, the

bridge of a yacht, to furnish a modern equivalent of those canvases on

which the old masters used to present the human figure in the foreground

of a landscape. A carriage and pair was waiting for him at the door;

and, while his monocle resumed its gambollings in the air of the sunlit

street, with the elegance and mastery which a great pianist contrives to

display in the simplest piece of execution, where it has not appeared

possible that he could shew himself superior to a performer of the

second class, Mme. de Villeparisis's nephew, taking the reins that were

handed him by the groom, jumped on to the box seat by his side and,

while he opened a letter which the manager of the hotel sent out after

him, made his horses start.

What a disappointment was mine on the days that followed, when, each

time that I met him outside or in the hotel--his head erect, perpetually

balancing the movements of his limbs round the fugitive and dancing

monocle which seemed to be their centre of gravity--I was forced to

admit that he had evidently no desire to make our acquaintance, and saw

that he did not bow to us although he must have known that we were

friends of his aunt. And calling to mind the friendliness that Mme. de

Villeparisis, and before her M. de Norpois had shewn me, I thought that

perhaps they were only of a bogus nobility, and that there might be a

secret section in the laws that govern the aristocracy which allowed

women, perhaps, and certain diplomats to discard, in their relations

with plebeians, for a reason which was beyond me, the stiffness which

must, on the other hand, be pitilessly maintained by a young Marquis. My

intelligence might have told me the opposite. But the characteristic

feature of the silly phase through which I was passing--a phase by no

means irresponsive, indeed highly fertile--is that we do not consult our

intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem

to us then to form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world

thronged with monsters and with gods, we are barely conscious of

tranquillity. There is hardly one of the actions which we performed in

that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able

to erase from our memory. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no

longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life

we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the

rest of society, but youth was the only time in which we learned

anything.

This insolence which I surmised in M. de Saint-Loup, and all that it

implied of ingrained severity, received confirmation from his attitude

whenever he passed us, his body as inflexibly erect, his head always

held as high, his gaze as impassive, or rather, I should say, as

implacable, devoid of that vague respect which one has for the rights of

other people, even if they do not know one's aunt, one example of which

was that I did not look in quite the same way at an old lady as at a gas

lamp. These frigid manners were as far removed from the charming letters

which, but a few days since, I had still been imagining him as writing

to tell me of his regard for myself, as is removed from the enthusiasm

of the Chamber and of the populace which he has been picturing himself

as rousing by an imperishable speech, the humble, dull, obscure position

of the dreamer who, after pondering it thus by himself, for himself,

aloud, finds himself, once the imaginary applause has died away, just

the same Tom, Dick or Harry as before. When Mme. de Villeparisis,

doubtless in an attempt to counteract the bad impression that had been

made on us by an exterior indicative of an arrogant and evil nature,

spoke to us again of the inexhaustible goodness of her great-nephew (he

was the son of one of her nieces, and a little older than myself), I

marvelled how the world, with an utter disregard of truth, ascribes

tenderness of heart to people whose hearts are in reality so hard and

dry, provided only that they behave with common courtesy to the

brilliant members of their own sets. Mme. de Villeparisis herself

confirmed, though indirectly, my diagnosis, which was already a

conviction, of the essential points of her nephew's character one day

when I met them both coming along a path so narrow that there was

nothing for it but to introduce me to him. He seemed not to hear that a

person's name was being repeated to him, not a muscle of his face moved;

his eyes, in which there shone not the faintest gleam of human sympathy,

shewed merely in the insensibility, in the inanity of their gaze an

exaggeration failing which there would have been nothing to distinguish

them from lifeless mirrors. Then fastening on me those hard eyes, as

though he wished to make sure of me before returning my salute, by an

abrupt release which seemed to be due rather to a reflex action of his

muscles than to an exercise of will, keeping between himself and me the

greatest possible interval, he stretched his arm out to its full

extension and, at the end of it, offered me his hand. I supposed that it

must mean, at the very least, a duel when, next day, he sent me his

card. But he spoke to me only of literature, declared after a long talk

that he would like immensely to spend several hours with me every day.

He had not only, in this encounter, given proof of an ardent zest for

the things of the spirit, he had shewn a regard for myself which was

little in keeping with his greeting of me the day before. After I had

seen him repeat the same process whenever anyone was introduced to him,

I realised that it was simply a social usage peculiar to his branch of

the family, to which his mother, who had seen to it that he should be

perfectly brought up, had moulded his limbs; he went through those

motions without thinking, any more than he thought about his beautiful

clothes or hair; they were a thing devoid of the moral significance

which I had at first ascribed to them, a thing purely acquired like that

other habit that he had of at once demanding an introduction to the

family of anyone whom he knew, which had become so instinctive in him

that, seeing me again the day after our talk, he fell upon me and

without asking how I did begged me to make him known to my grandmother,

who was with me, with the same feverish haste as if the request had been

due to some instinct of self-preservation, like the act of warding off a

blow, or of shutting one's eyes to avoid a stream of boiling water,

without which precautions it would have been dangerous to stay where one

was a moment longer.

The first rites of exorcism once performed, as a wicked fairy discards

her outer form and endues all the most enchanting graces, I saw this

disdainful creature become the most friendly, the most considerate young

man that I had ever met. "Good," I said to myself, "I've been mistaken

about him once already; I was taken in by a mirage; but I have corrected

the first only to fall into a second, for he must be a great gentleman

who has grown sick of his nobility and is trying to hide it." As a

matter of fact it was not long before all the exquisite breeding, all

the friendliness of Saint-Loup were indeed to let me see another

creature but one very different from what I had suspected.

This young man who had the air of a scornful, sporting aristocrat had in

fact no respect, no interest save for and in the things of the spirit,

and especially those modern manifestations of literature and art which

seemed so ridiculous to his aunt; he was imbued, moreover, with what she

called "Socialistic spoutings," was filled with the most profound

contempt for his caste and spent long hours in the study of Nietzsche

and Proudhon. He was one of those intellectuals, quick to admire what is

good, who shut themselves up in a book, and are interested only in pure

thought. Indeed in Saint-Loup the expression of this highly abstract

tendency, which removed him so far from my customary preoccupations,

while it seemed to me touching, also annoyed me not a little. I may say

that when I realised properly who had been his father, on days when I

had been reading memoirs rich in anecdotes of that famous Comte de

Marsantes, in whom were embodied the special graces of a generation

already remote, the mind full of speculation--anxious to obtain fuller

details of the life that M. de Marsantes had led, it used to infuriate

me that Robert de Saint-Loup, instead of being content to be the son of

his father, instead of being able to guide me through the old-fashioned

romance of what had been that father's existence, had trained himself to

enjoy Nietzsche and Proudhon. His father would not have shared my

regret. He had been himself a man of brains, who had transcended the

narrow confines of his life as a man of the world. He had hardly had

time to know his son, but had hoped that his son would prove a better

man than himself. And I really believe that, unlike the rest of the

family, he would have admired his son, would have rejoiced at his

abandoning what had been his own small diversions for austere

meditations, and without saying a word, in his modesty as a great

gentleman endowed with brains, he would have read in secret his son's

favourite authors in order to appreciate how far Robert was superior to

himself.

There was, however, this rather painful consideration: that if M. de

Marsantes, with his extremely open mind, would have appreciated a son so

different from himself, Robert de Saint-Loup, because he was one of

those who believe that merit is attached only to certain forms of art

and of life, had an affectionate but slightly contemptuous memory of a

father who had spent all his time hunting and racing, who yawned at

Wagner and raved over Offenbach. Saint-Loup had not the intelligence to

see that intellectual worth has nothing to do with adhesion to any one

aesthetic formula, and had for the intellectuality of M. de Marsantes

much the same sort of scorn as might have been felt for Boieldieu or

Labiche by a son of Boieldieu or Labiche who had become adepts in the

most symbolic literature and the most complex music. "I scarcely knew my

father," he used to say. "He seems to have been a charming person. His

tragedy was the deplorable age in which he lived. To have been born in

the Faubourg Saint-Germain and to have to live in the days of La Belle

Hélène would be enough to wreck any existence. Perhaps if he'd been

some little shopkeeper mad about the Ring he'd have turned out quite

different. Indeed they tell me that he was fond of literature. But that

can never be proved, because literature to him meant such utterly

god-forsaken books." And in my own case, if I found Saint-Loup a trifle

earnest, he could not understand why I was not more earnest still. Never

judging anything except by the weight of the intelligence that it

contained, never perceiving the magic appeal to the imagination that I

found in things which he condemned as frivolous, he was astonished that

I--I, to whom he imagined himself to be so utterly inferior--could take

any interest in them.

From the first Saint-Loup made a conquest of my grandmother, not only by

the incessant acts of kindness which he went out of his way to shew to

us both, but by the naturalness which he put into them as into

everything. For naturalness--doubtless because through the artifice of

man it allows a feeling of nature to permeate--was the quality which my

grandmother preferred to all others, whether in gardens, where she did

not like there to be, as there had been in our Combray garden, too

formal borders, or at table, where she detested those dressed-up dishes

in which you could hardly detect the foodstuff's that had gone to make

them, or in piano-playing, which she did not like to be too finicking,

too laboured, having indeed had a special weakness for the discords, the

wrong notes of Rubinstein. This naturalness she found and enjoyed even

in the clothes that Saint-Loup wore, of a pliant elegance, with nothing

swagger, nothing formal about them, no stiffness or starch. She

appreciated this rich young man still more highly for the free and

careless way that he had of living in luxury without "smelling of

money", without giving himself airs; she even discovered the charm of

this naturalness in the incapacity which Saint-Loup had kept, though as

a rule it is outgrown with childhood, at the same time as certain

physiological peculiarities of that period, for preventing his face from

at once reflecting every emotion. Something, for instance, that he

wanted to have but had not expected, were it no more than a compliment,

reacted in him in a burst of pleasure so quick, so burning, so volatile,

so expansive that it was impossible for him to contain and to conceal

it; a grin of delight seized irresistible hold of his face; the too

delicate skin of his cheeks allowed a vivid glow to shine through them,

his eyes sparkled with confusion and joy; and my grandmother was

infinitely touched by this charming show of innocence and frankness,

which, incidentally, in Saint-Loup--at any rate at the period of our

first friendship--was not misleading. But I have known another person,

and there are many such, in whom the physiological sincerity of that

fleeting blush in no way excluded moral duplicity; as often as not it

proves nothing more than the vivacity with which pleasure is felt--so

that it disarms them and they are forced publicly to confess it--by

natures capable of the vilest treachery. But where my grandmother did

really adore Saint-Loup's naturalness was in his way of admitting,

without any evasion, his affection for me, to give expression to which

he found words than which she herself, she told me, could not have

thought of any more appropriate, more truly loving, words to which

"Sévigné and Beausergent" might have set their signatures. He was not

afraid to make fun of my weaknesses--which he had discerned with an

acuteness that made her smile--but as she herself would have done,

lovingly, at the same time extolling my good qualities with a warmth, an

impulsive freedom that shewed no sign of the reserve, the coldness by

means of which young men of his age are apt to suppose that they give

themselves importance. And he shewed in forestalling every discomfort,

however slight, in covering my legs if the day had turned cold without

my noticing it, in arranging (without telling me) to stay later with me

in the evening if he thought that I was depressed or felt unwell, a

vigilance which, from the point of view of my health, for which a more

hardening discipline would perhaps have been better, my grandmother

found almost excessive, though as a proof of his affection for myself

she was deeply touched by it.

It was promptly settled between us that he and I were to be great

friends for ever, and he would say "our friendship" as though he were

speaking of some important and delightful thing which had an existence

independent of ourselves, and which he soon called--not counting his

love for his mistress--the great joy of his life. These words made me

rather uncomfortable and I was at a loss for an answer, for I did not

feel when I was with him and talked to him--and no doubt it would have

been the same with everyone else--any of that happiness which it was, on

the other hand, possible for me to experience when I was by myself. For

alone, at times, I felt surging from the depths of my being one or other

of those impressions which gave me a delicious sense of comfort. But as

soon as I was with some one else, when I began to talk to a friend, my

mind at once "turned about", it was towards the listener and not myself

that it directed its thoughts, and when they followed this outward

course they brought me no pleasure. Once I had left Saint-Loup, I

managed, with the help of words, to put more or less in order the

confused minutes that I had spent with him; I told myself that I had a

good friend, that a good friend was a rare thing, and I tasted, when I

felt myself surrounded by "goods" that were difficult to acquire, what

was precisely the opposite of the pleasure that was natural to me, the

opposite of the pleasure of having extracted from myself and brought to

light something that was hidden in my inner darkness. If I had spent two

or three hours in conversation with Saint-Loup, and he had expressed his

admiration of what I had said to him, I felt a sort of remorse, or

regret, or weariness at not having been left alone and ready, at last,

to begin my work. But I told myself that one is not given intelligence

for one's own benefit only, that the greatest of men have longed for

appreciation, that I could not regard as wasted hours in which I had

built up an exalted idea of myself in the mind of my friend; I had no

difficulty in persuading myself that I ought to be happy in consequence,

and I hoped all the more anxiously that this happiness might never be

taken from me simply because I had not yet been conscious of it. We fear

more than the loss of everything else the disappearance of the "goods"

that have remained beyond our reach, because our heart has not taken

possession of them. I felt that I was capable of exemplifying the

virtues of friendship better than most people (because I should always

place the good of my friends before those personal interests to which

other people were devoted but which did not count for me), but not of

finding happiness in a feeling which, instead of multiplying the

differences that there were between my nature and those of other

people--as there are among all of us--would cancel them. At the same

time my mind was distinguishing in Saint-Loup a personality more

collective than his own, that of the "noble"; which like an indwelling

spirit moved his limbs, ordered his gestures and his actions; then, at

such moments, although in his company, I was as much alone as I should

have been gazing at a landscape the harmony of which I could understand.

He was no more then than an object the properties of which, in my musing

contemplations, I sought to explore. The perpetual discovery in him of

this pre-existent, this aeonial creature, this aristocrat who was just

what Robert aspired not to be, gave me a keen delight, but one that was

intellectual and not social. In the moral and physical agility which

gave so much grace to his kindnesses, in the ease with which he offered

my grandmother his carriage and made her get into it, in the alacrity

with which he sprang from the box, when he was afraid that I might be

cold, to spread his own cloak over my shoulders, I felt not only the

inherited litheness of the mighty hunters who had been for generations

the ancestors of this young man who made no pretence save to

intellectuality, their scorn of wealth which, subsisting in him side by

side with his enjoyment of it simply because it enabled him to entertain

his friends more lavishly, made him so carelessly shower his riches at

their feet; I felt in him especially the certainty or the illusion in

the minds of those great lords of being "better than other people",

thanks to which they had not been able to hand down to Saint-Loup that

anxiety to shew that one is "just as good", that dread of seeming

inferior, of which he was indeed wholly unconscious, but which mars with

so much ugliness, so much awkwardness, the most sincere overtures of a

plebeian. Sometimes I found fault with myself for thus taking pleasure

in my friend as in a work of art, that is to say in regarding the play

of all the parts of his being as harmoniously ordered by a general idea

from which they depended but which he did not know, so that it added

nothing to his own good qualities, to that personal value, intellectual

and moral, to which he attached so high a price.

And yet that idea was to a certain extent their determining cause. It

was because he was a gentleman that that mental activity, those

socialist aspirations, which made him seek the company of young

students, arrogant and ill-dressed, connoted in him something really

pure and disinterested which was not to be found in them. Looking upon

himself as the heir of an ignorant and selfish caste, he was sincerely

anxious that they should forgive in him that aristocratic origin which

they, on the contrary, found irresistibly attractive and on account of

which they sought to know him, though with a show of coldness and indeed

of insolence towards him. He was thus led to make advances to people

from whom my parents, faithful to the sociological theories of Combray,

would have been stupefied at his not turning away in disgust. One day

when we were sitting on the sands, Saint-Loup and I, we heard issuing

from a canvas tent against which we were leaning a torrent of

imprecation against the swarm of Israelites that infested Balbec. "You

can't go a yard without meeting them," said the voice. "I am not in

principle irremediably hostile to the Jewish nation, but here there is a

plethora of them. You hear nothing but, 'I thay, Apraham, I've chust

theen Chacop.' You would think you were in the Rue d'Aboukir." The man

who thus inveighed against Israel emerged at last from the tent; we

raised our eyes to behold this antisemite. It was my old friend Bloch.

Saint-Loup at once begged me to remind him that they had met before the

Board of Examiners, when Bloch had carried off the prize of honour, and

since then at a popular university course.

At the most I may have smiled now and then, to discover in Robert the

marks of his Jesuit schooling, in the awkwardness which the fear of

hurting people's feelings at once created in him whenever one of his

intellectual friends made a social error, did something silly to which

Saint-Loup himself attached no importance but felt that the other would

have blushed if anybody had noticed it. And it was Robert who used to

blush as though it had been he that was to blame, for instance on the

day when Bloch, after promising to come and see him at the hotel, went

on:

"As I cannot endure to be kept waiting among all the false splendour of

these great caravanserais, and the Hungarian band would make me ill, you

must tell the 'lighft-boy' to make them shut up, and to let you know at

once."

Personally, I was not particularly anxious that Bloch should come to the

hotel. He was at Balbec not by himself, unfortunately, but with his

sisters, and they in turn had innumerable relatives and friends staying

there. Now this Jewish colony was more picturesque than pleasant. Balbec

was in this respect like such countries as Russia or Rumania, where the

geography books teach us that the Israelite population does not enjoy

anything approaching the same esteem and has not reached the same stage

of assimilation as, for instance, in Paris. Always together, with no

blend of any other element, when the cousins and uncles of Bloch or

their coreligionists male or female repaired to the Casino, the ladies

to dance, the gentlemen branching off towards the baccarat-tables, they

formed a solid troop, homogeneous within itself, and utterly dissimilar

to the people who watched them go past and found them there again every

year without ever exchanging a word or a sign with them, whether these

were on the Cambremers' list, or the presiding magistrate's little

group, professional or "business" people, or even simple corn-chandlers

from Paris, whose daughters, handsome, proud, derisive and French as the

statues at Rheims, would not care to mix with that horde of ill-bred

tomboys, who carried their zeal for "seaside fashions" so far as to be

always apparently on their way home from shrimping or out to dance the

tango. As for the men, despite the brilliance of their dinner-jackets

and patent-leather shoes, the exaggeration of their type made one think

of what people call the "intelligent research" of painters who, having

to illustrate the Gospels or the Arabian Nights, consider the country in

which the scenes are laid, and give to Saint Peter or to Ali-Baba the

identical features of the heaviest "punter" at the Balbec tables. Bloch

introduced his sisters, who, though he silenced their chatter with the

utmost rudeness, screamed with laughter at the mildest sallies of this

brother, their blindly worshipped idol. So that it is probable that this

set of people contained, like every other, perhaps more than any other,

plenty of attractions, merits and virtues. But in order to experience

these, one had first to penetrate its enclosure. Now it was not popular;

it could feel this; it saw in its unpopularity the mark of an

anti-semitism to which it presented a bold front in a compact and closed

phalanx into which, as it happened, no one ever dreamed of trying to

make his way.

At his use of the word "lighft" I had all the less reason to be

surprised in that, a few days before, Bloch having asked me why I had

come to Balbec (although it seemed to him perfectly natural that he

himself should be there) and whether it had been "in the hope of making

grand friends", when I had explained to him that this visit was a

fulfilment of one of my earliest longings, though one not so deep as my

longing to see Venice, he had replied: "Yes, of course, to sip iced

drinks with the pretty ladies, while you pretend to be reading the

_Stones of Venighce_, by Lord John Ruskin, a dreary shaver, in fact one

of the most garrulous old barbers that you could find." So that Bloch

evidently thought that in England not only were all the inhabitants of

the male sex called "Lord", but the letter 'i' was invariably pronounced

'igh'. As for Saint-Loup, this mistake in pronunciation seemed to him

all the less serious inasmuch as he saw in it pre-eminently a want of

those almost "society" notions which my new friend despised as fully as

he was versed in them. But the fear lest Bloch, discovering one day that

one says "Venice" and that Ruskin was not a lord, should retrospectively

imagine that Robert had been laughing at him, made the latter feel as

guilty as if he had been found wanting in the indulgence with which, as

we have seen, he overflowed, so that the blush which would no doubt one

day dye the cheek of Bloch on the discovery of his error, Robert

already, by anticipation and reflex action, could feel mounting to his

own. For he fully believed that Bloch attached more importance than he

to this mistake. Which Bloch proved to be true some time later, when he

heard me pronounce the word "lift", by breaking in with:

"Oh, you say 'lift', do you?" And then, in a dry and lofty tone: "Not

that it is of the slightest importance." A phrase that is like a reflex

action of the body, the same in all men whose self-esteem is great, in

the gravest circumstances as well as in the most trivial, betraying

there as clearly as on this occasion how important the thing in question

seems to him who declares that it is of no importance; a tragic phrase

at times, the first to escape (and then how heart-breaking) the lips of

every man at all proud from whom we have just taken the last hope to

which he still clung by refusing to do him a service. "Oh, well, it's

not of the slightest importance; I shall make some other arrangement:"

the other arrangement which it is not of the slightest importance that

he should be driven to adopt being often suicide.

Apart from this, Bloch made me the prettiest speeches. He was certainly

anxious to be on the best of terms with me. And yet he asked me: "Is it

because you've taken a fancy to raise yourself to the peerage that you

run after de Saint-Loup-en-Bray? You must be going through a fine crisis

of snobbery. Tell me, are you a snob? I think so, what?" Not that his

desire to be friendly had suddenly changed. But what is called, in not

too correct language, "ill breeding" was his defect, and therefore the

defect which he was bound to overlook, all the more that by which he did

not believe that other people could be shocked. In the human race the

frequency of the virtues that are identical in us all is not more

wonderful than the multiplicity of the defects that are peculiar to each

one of us. Undoubtedly, it is not common sense that is "the commonest

thing in the world"; but human kindness. In the most distant, the most

desolate ends of the earth, we marvel to see it blossom of its own

accord, as in a remote valley a poppy like the poppies in the world

beyond, poppies which it has never seen as it has never known aught but

the wind that, now and again, stirring the folds of its scarlet cloak,

disturbs its solitude. Even if this human kindness, paralysed by

self-interest, is not exercised, it exists none the less, and whenever

any inconstant egoist does not restrain its action, when, for example,

he is reading a novel or a newspaper, it will bud, blossom, grow, even

in the heart of him who, cold-blooded in real life, has retained a

tender heart, as a lover of fiction, for the weak, the righteous and the

persecuted. But the variety of our defects is no less remarkable than

the similarity of our virtues. Each of us has his own, so much so that

to continue loving him we are obliged not to take them into account but

to ignore them and look only to the rest of his character. The most

perfect person in the world has a certain defect which shocks us or

makes us angry. One man is of rare intelligence, sees everything from an

exalted angle, never speaks evil of anyone, but will pocket and forget

letters of supreme importance which it was he himself who asked you to

let him post for you, and will then miss a vital engagement without

offering you any excuse, with a smile, because he prides himself upon

never knowing the time. Another is so refined, so gentle, so delicate in

his conduct that he never says anything about you before your face

except what you are glad to hear; but you feel that he refrains from

uttering, that he keeps buried in his heart, where they grow bitter,

very different opinions, and the pleasure that he derives from seeing

you is so dear to him that he will let you faint with exhaustion sooner

than leave you to yourself. A third has more sincerity, but carries it

so far that he feels bound to let you know, when you have pleaded the

state of your health as an excuse for not having been to see him, that

you were seen going to the theatre and were reported to be looking well,

or else that he has not been able to profit entirely by the action which

you have taken on his behalf, which, by the way, three other of his

friends had already offered to take, so that he is only moderately

indebted to you. In similar circumstances the previous friend would have

pretended not to know that you had gone to the theatre, or that other

people could have done him the same service. But this last friend feels

himself obliged to repeat or to reveal to somebody the very thing that

is most likely to give offence; is delighted with his own frankness and

tells you, emphatically: "I am like that." While others infuriate you by

their exaggerated curiosity, or by a want of curiosity so absolute that

you can speak to them of the most sensational happenings without their

grasping what it is all about; and others again take months to answer

you if your letter has been about something that concerns yourself and

not them, or else, if they write that they are coming to ask you for

something and you dare not leave the house for fear of missing them, do

not appear, but leave you in suspense for weeks because, not having

received from you the answer which their letter did not in the least

"expect", they have concluded that you must be cross with them. And

others, considering their own wishes and not yours, talk to you without

letting you get a word in if they are in good spirits and want to see

you, however urgent the work you may have in hand, but if they feel

exhausted by the weather or out of humour, you cannot get a word out of

them, they meet your efforts with an inert languor and no more take the

trouble to reply, even in monosyllables, to what you say to them than if

they had not heard you. Each of our friends has his defects so markedly

that to continue to love him we are obliged to seek consolation for

those defects--in the thought of his talent, his goodness, his affection

for ourself--or rather to leave them out of account, and for that we

need to display all our good-will. Unfortunately our obliging obstinacy

in refusing to see the defect in our friend is surpassed by the

obstinacy with which he persists in that defect, from his own blindness

to it or the blindness that he attributes to other people. For he does

not notice it himself, or imagines that it is not noticed. Since the

risk of giving offence arises principally from the difficulty of

appreciating what does and what does not pass unperceived, we ought, at

least, from prudence, never to speak of ourself, because that is a

subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in

accordance with our own. If we find as many surprises as on visiting a

house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures,

torture-chambers, skeletons, when we discover the true lives of other

people, the real beneath the apparent universe, we are no less surprised

if, in place of the image that we have made of ourself with the help of

all the things that people have said to us, we learn from the terms in

which they speak of us in our absence what an entirely different image

they have been carrying in their own minds of us and of our life. So

that whenever we have spoken about ourself, we may be sure that our

inoffensive and prudent words, listened to with apparent politeness and

hypocritical approbation, have given rise afterwards to the most

exasperated or the most mirthful, but in either case the least

favourable criticism. The least risk that we run is that of irritating

people by the disproportion that there is between our idea of ourself

and the words that we use, a disproportion which as a rule makes

people's talk about themselves as ludicrous as the performances of those

self-styled music-lovers who when they feel the need to hum a favourite

melody compensate for the inadequacy of their inarticulate murmurings by

a strenuous mimicry and a look of admiration which is hardly justified

by all that they let us hear. And to the bad habit of speaking about

oneself and one's defects there must be added, as part of the same

thing, that habit of denouncing in other people defects precisely

analogous to one's own. For it is always of those defects that people

speak, as though it were a way of speaking about oneself, indirectly,

which added to the pleasure of absolution that of confession. Besides it

seems that our attention, always attracted by what is characteristic of

ourself, notices that more than anything else in other people. One

short-sighted man says of another: "But he can scarcely open his eyes!";

a consumptive has his doubts as to the pulmonary integrity of the most

robust; an unwashed man speaks only of the baths that other people do

not take; an evil-smelling man insists that other people smell; a

cuckold sees cuckolds everywhere, a light woman light women, a snob

snobs. Then, too, every vice, like every profession, requires and trains

a special knowledge which we are never loath to display. The invert

detects and denounces inverts; the tailor asked out to dine, before he

has begun to talk to you, has passed judgment on the cloth of your coat,

which his fingers are itching to feel, and if after a few words of

conversation you were to ask a dentist what he really thought of you, he

would tell you how many of your teeth wanted filling. To him nothing

appears more important, nor more absurd to you who have noticed his own.

And it is not only when we speak of ourselves that we imagine other

people to be blind; we behave as though they were. On every one of us

there is a special god in attendance who hides from him or promises him

the concealment from other people of his defect, just as he stops the

eyes and nostrils of people who do not wash to the streaks of dirt which

they carry in their ears and the smell of sweat which emanates from

their armpits, and assures them that they can with impunity carry both

of these about a world that will notice nothing. And those who wear

artificial pearls, or give them as presents, imagine that people will

take them to be genuine. Bloch was ill-bred, neurotic, a snob, and,

since he belonged to a family of little repute, had to support, as on

the floor of ocean, the incalculable pressure that was imposed on him

not only by the Christians upon the surface but by all the intervening

layers of Jewish castes superior to his own, each of them crushing with

its contempt the one that was immediately beneath it. To carve his way

through to the open air by raising himself from Jewish family to Jewish

family would have taken Bloch many thousands of years. It was better

worth his while to seek an outlet in another direction.

When Bloch spoke to me of the crisis of snobbery through which I must be

passing, and bade me confess that I was a snob, I might well have

replied: "If I were, I should not be going about with you." I said

merely that he was not being very polite. Then he tried to apologise,

but in the way that is typical of the ill-bred man who is only too glad

to hark back to whatever it was if he can find an opportunity to

aggravate his offence. "Forgive me," he used now to plead, whenever we

met, "I have vexed you, tormented you; I have been wantonly mischievous.

And yet--man in general and your friend in particular is so singular an

animal--you cannot imagine the affection that I, I who tease you so

cruelly, have for you. It carries me often, when I think of you, to

tears." And he gave an audible sob.