(1913)

Characters
Marcel	The narrator of the novel, he is a representation of Marcel Proust, though noticeably different from the author in some ways. He suffers from nervous ailments and longs for the nightly comfort of his mother's kiss. He is fascinated by art and becomes an avid reader and lover of architecture, theater, painting and music. He loves to walk around Combray by himself and admire the stunning hawthorn blossoms that inspire him to become a writer. After losing himself in books and his imagination, he is easily disappointed by the "real" world, especially with women he loves. He even imagines the dark eyes of Gilberte and the Duchess of Guermentes to be blue so that they will be more beautiful to him. He learns quickly about the vices of the world by spying on people.
Charles Swann	A friend of Marcel's family in Combray, he is also a celebrity in the Parisian social scene, counting among his friends the Prince of Wales and major players in the French aristocracy. A wealthy stockbroker, he becomes an expert art critic and dealer. Swann is also a womanizer who does not see women for who they really are, but instead compares them to paintings in order to make them more attractive. This tendency leads him to fall hopelessly in love with Odette even though she is not his "type." Swann's idealization of Odette keeps him from seeing her as she really is, to the point that his love for her becomes a tragic form of vanity and self-love.
Odette	The love of Swann's life and the cause of his most wretched suffering. She is an expert seductress and lures Swann into an affair and marriage that he will never escape. Though Odette is devoid of intelligence, class, and even beauty, Swann still falls in love with her after seeing a close resemblance between her face and that of the girl in the Boticelli painting "Jethro's Daughter." Odette leads a torrid life, taking lovers behind Swann's back, including other guests at the Verdurins, Forcheville, and even other women. Despite her inability to love Swann, she nevertheless thinks very highly of him.
M. de Charlus	One of Swann's closest friends and allies. He encourages Odette to think more highly of Swann and later becomes her "watchdog," making sure that she does not cheat on Swann. The narrator hints that Charlus helps Swann not only out friendliness, but also in the name of an undeclared love for him.
Marcel's mother	Marcel's mother. She is the focal point of all of Marcel's pain and happiness. Her nightly goodnight kiss brings him immense joy, but once it is over, he suffers terribly. She worries about his nervous disposition and one night sleeps in his room to make him feel better.
Marcel's father	Marcel's father. He intimidates Marcel to keep him from expressing his nightly desire to kiss his "mamma" goodnight. One night, however, he realizes how sad Marcel is and lets her spend the night with him.
Marcel's grandparents	Marcel's grandparents, who live in Combray. They worry about his health and encourage him to read. They were great friends with Swann's father and remain close to Swann, although they greatly disapprove of his marriage to Odette.
Comte de Forcheville	Odette's other lover who insults and mocks Swann one night at the Verdurins. Swann finds out that Forcheville was at Odette's house one day when she pretended to be asleep; he later discovers that Odette had first been with Forcheville the night that Swann and Odette first slept together.
Gilberte	Swann and Odette's daughter. Marcel falls in love with her from the moment he sees her because she has been a taboo subject in his family. He hardly speaks with her and is convinced that her dark eyes are really blue.
Bloch	One of Marcel's friends at Combray. He introduces Marcel to his favorite writer, Bergotte. He is Jewish, and his presence evokes some anti-Semitic comments from Marcel's grandfather.
Verdurins	The insufferably hypocritical and obnoxious bourgeois couple that first introduces Odette to Swann and then to Forcheville. They enlist a salon of "faithful" members who become their slaves and whom they force to attend various functions. Compared to Swann, the Verdurins have no class, intelligence, culture, or social distinction.
Adolphe	Marcel's uncle, who is a connoisseur of courtesans even into old age. He and Swann nearly duel over Odette. Because Marcel accidentally visits him one day while he is with a courtesan, Adolphe never returns to Combray.
Aunt Leonie	Marcel's great aunt. She is convinced that she will die at any moment and tries to get as much sympathy as possible for her various "ailments." Nevertheless, Marcel has fond memories of her and her habit of dipping madeleines in tea. Marcel later dips madeleines himself, helping him recall his lost memories of Combray.
Eulalie	One of Aunt Leonie's few remaining friends. Eulalie visits Aunt Leonie each Sunday to gossip about the townspeople.
M. Vinteuil	The composer of Swann and Odette's favorite sonata, which becomes the theme music of Swann's love. This sonata has the power to conjure up Swann's feelings for Odette even when he tries not to think of her. The sorrow and despair that Vinteuil expresses in this sonata about the lesbian love affair of his daughter, Mademoiselle Vinteuil, come to stand for Swann's sufferings as well.
Mlle. Vinteuil	The daughter of Vinteuil. She breaks her father's heart when she begins a sordid affair with another woman. She insults her father shortly after his death.
Francoise	First Aunt Leonie's maid and then a servant for Marcel's own family, she becomes a dedicated and devoted friend to everyone. Marcel greatly admires her service, displaying his own class snobbery.

M. Legrandin	A stereotype of bourgeois snobbery. He refuses to introduce Marcel's family to his sister.
Duchess of Guermentes	The local aristocrat at Combray. Marcel imagines her to be the most beautiful woman on earth and is sorely disappointed with her physical appearance when they actually meet.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 　　　　　Part One


　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 　　　COMBRAY


　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　I


　　　　For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out,
my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: "I'm falling
asleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep
would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was
still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I
was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken
a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate sub-
ject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and
Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I awoke;'
it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented
them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it
would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a previous existence
must be after reincarnation; the subject of my book would separate itself
from me, leaving me free to apply myself to it or not; and at the same time
tiny sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of
darkness, pleasant and restful enough for my eyes, but even more, perhaps,
for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, some-
thing dark indeed.
　　　　I would ask myself what time it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains,
which, now nearer and now further off, punctuating the distance like the note
of a bird in a forest, showed me in perspective the deserted countryside through
which a traveller is hurrying towards the nearby station: and the path he is ta-
king will be engraved in his memory by the excitement induced by strange sur-
roundings, by unaccustomed activities, by the conversation he has had and the
farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp that still echo in his ears amid
the silence of the night, and by the happy prospect of being home again.
　　　　I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow,
as plump and fresh as the cheeks of childhood. I would strike a match to look at
my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid, who has been obliged to set
out on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakened by a sudden spasm,
sees with glad relief a streak of daylight showing under his door. Thank God,
it is morning! The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and someone
will come to look after him. The thought of being assuaged gives him strength
to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and
then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight;
someone has just turned down the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and
he must lie all night suffering without remedy.
　　　　I would fall asleep again, and thereafter would reawaken for short
snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot,
or to open my eyes to stare at the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to
savour, in a momentary glimmer of consciousness. the .sieep which lay heavy u-
pon the furniture, the room, that whole of which I formed no more than a small
part and whose insensibility I should very soon return to share. Or else while
sleeping I had drifted back to an earlier stake in my life, now for ever outgrown,
and had come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors, such as that old
terror of my great-uncle's pulling my curls which was effectually dispelled on
the day--the dawn of a new era to me--when they were finally cropped from
my head. I had forgotten that event during my sleep, but I remembered it again
immediately I had succeeded in waking myself up to escape my great-uncle's
fingers, and as a measure of precaution I would bury the whole of my head in
the pillow before returning to the world of dreams.
　　　　Sometimes, too, as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, a woman would be
born during my sleep from some misplacing of my thigh. Conceived from the plea-
sure I was on the point of enjoying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that
pleasure. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive
to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very re-
mote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago;
my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body ached beneath the weight of hers.
If, as would sometimes happen, she had the features of some woman whom I had
known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to this end: to find
her again, like people who set out on a journey to see with their eyes some
city of their desire, and imagine that one can taste in reality what has charm-
ed one's fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had
forgotten the girl of my dream.
　　　　When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours,
the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies. Instinctively he
consults them when he awakes, and in an instant reads off his own position on
the earth's surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this
ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that,
towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is
reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to
sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its
course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will
conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he dozes off in some even
more abnormal and divergent position, sitting in an armchair, for instance, after
dinner: then the world will go hurtling out of orbit, the magic chair will carry
him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his 06 again he will
imagine that he went to sleep months earl'e in another place. But for me it was
enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax
consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep,
and. when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I couldn't
even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of
existence, such as may lurk and flicker. in the depths of an animal's consciousness;
I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory--not yet of the
place in which I was, but of various places where I had lived and might now very
possibly be--would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the
abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I
would traverse centuries of civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps,
then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original
components of my ego.
　　　　　Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by
our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of
our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my
mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover　where I was, everything
revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years.　My body, still too
heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its
tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction
of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the
house in which it lay. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its
shoulder-blades, offered it a series of rooms in which it had at one time or another
slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each
successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark. And even before my
brain,　hesitating at the threshold of times and shapes, had reassembled the
circumstances sufficiently to identify the room, it--my body--would recall from each
room in succession the style of the bed, the position of the doors, the angle at which
the daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had
had in my mind when I went to sleep and found there when I awoke. The stiffened side
on which I lay would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying
face to the wall in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to myself, "Why, I
must have fallen asleep before Mamma came to say good night," for I was in the
country at my grandfather's, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I
was lying, faithful guardians of a past which my mind should never have forgotten,
brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its urn-shaped
bowl of Bohemian glass that hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece
of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray;_in my grand-parents' house, in those far
distant days which at this moment I imagined to be in the present without being able
to picture them exactly, and which would become plainer in a little while when I was
properly awake.
　　　　　Then the memory of a new position would spring up, and the wall would slide
away in another direction; I was in my room in Mine de Saint-Loup's house in the
country; good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will have finished dinner! I must
have overslept myself in the little nap which I always take when I come in from my
walk with Mine de Saint-Loup, before dressing for the evening. For many years have
now elapsed since the Combray days when, coming in from the longest and latest
walks' I would still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the panes
of my bedroom window. It is a very different kind of life that one leads at Tansonville,
at Mme de Saint-Loup's, and a different kind of pleasure that I derive from taking
walks only in the evenings, from visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to
play as a child in the sunshine; as for the bedroom in which I must have fallen asleep
instead of dressing for dinner, I can see it from the distance as we return from our
walk with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the night.
　　　　　These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a
few seconds; it often happened that, in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I
was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more
than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body
as they　appear　upon a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the
rooms in　which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in
the long　course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would
at once bury my head in a nest woven out of the most diverse materials--the corner
of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a
copy of a children's paper--which I had contrived to cement together, bird-fashion,
by dint of continuous pressure; rooms where, in freezing weather. I would enjoy the
satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds
at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the
fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug
and smoky air, shot with the glow of the logs intermittently breaking out again in flame,
a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room
itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in
temperature as gusts of air traversed them to strike freshly upon my face, from the
corners of the room or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had
therefore remained cold; -- or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself
a part of the warm night, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters
would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder, where I would fall asleep,
as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze gently rocks at the
tip of a sunbeam: or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I never felt too
miserable in it, even on my first night, and in which the slender columns that lightly
supported its ceiling drew so gracefully apart to reveal and frame the site of the bed;
--sometimes, again, the little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a
pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the
first moment, mentally poisoned by the unfamiliar scent of vetiver, I was convinced of
the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that
chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; in which a strange
and pitiless rectangular cheval-glass, standing across one corner of the room, carved
out for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the soft plenitude of my
normal field of vision; in which my mind, striving for hours on end to break away
from its moorings, to stretch upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room
and to reach to the topmost height of its gigantic funnel, had endured many a painful
night as I lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my
nostrils flaring. heart beating; until habit had changed the colour of the curtains,
silenced the clock, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the
glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of vetiver, and
appreciably reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Habit! that skilful but
slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in
temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover
at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make
any room seem habitable.
　　　　　Certainly I was now well awake; my body had veered round for the last time and
the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still, had
set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom, and had fixed, approximately in
their right places in the uncertain light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table,
my fireplace, the window overlooking the street, and both the doors. But for all
that I now knew that I was not in any of the houses of which the ignorance of the
waking moment had, in a flash, if not presented me with a distinct picture, at
least persuaded me of the possible presence, my memory had been set in motion; as
a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the
greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my
great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncieres, Venice, and the rest; remembering again
all the places and people I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what
others had told me.
　　　　　At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should
have to go to bed and lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my
bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were
centred. Someone had indeed had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on
evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set
on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come; and, after the fashion
of the master-builders and glass-painters of Gothic days, it substituted for the
opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many
colours, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transtory window.
But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting
was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room, thanks to which,
save for the torture of going to bed, it had become quite endurable. Now I no
longer recognised it, and felt uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or
chalet, in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time.
　　　　　Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, filled with an infamous design, issued from
the little triangular forest which softened with dark green the slope of a
hill, and advanced fitfully towards the castle of poor Genevieve de Brabant,
This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference
of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position
through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front
of it stretched a moor on which Genevieve stood dreaming, wearing a blue girdle.
The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their colour without
waiting to see them, for before the slides made their appearance the old-gold
sonorous name of Brabant had given me unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a
moment and listened sadly to the accompanying patter read aloud by great-aunt,
which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a
docility not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to indications given
in the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could
arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo's
horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving
into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance
as his steed's, overcame every material obstacle--everything that seemed to bar his
way--by taking it as an ossature and absorbing it into himself: even the doorknob--
on which, adapting themselves at once, his red cloak or his pale face, still as noble
and as melancholy, floated invincibly--would never betray the least concern at this
transvertebration.
　　　　　And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which
seemed to emanate from a Merovingian past and shed around me the reflections of
such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at this
intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling
with my own personality until I thought no more of it than of myself The
anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think--and to
feel--such melancholy things. The doorknob of my room, which was different to me
from all the other doorknobs in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to move of its
own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation
become--lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. And as soon as the
dinner-bell rang I would hurry down to the dining-room, where the big hanging
lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the
dish of stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would
fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Genevieve de Brabant
had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven
me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.
　　　　　But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed talking
with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little parlour where
everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my grandmother, who held
that "It's a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country," and used to have
endless arguments with my father on the very wettest days, because he would send
me up to my room with a book instead of letting me stay out of doors. "That is not
the way to make him strong and active," she would say sadly, "especially this little
man, who needs all the strength and willpower that he can get." My father would
shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an interest in meteorology,
while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb him, looked at him with
tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his
superior mind. But my grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming
down in torrents and Francoise had rushed the precious wicker armchairs indoors so
that they should not get soaked, was to be seen pacing the deserted rain-lashed
garden, pushing back her disordered grey locks so that her forehead might be freer
to absorb the health-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, "At last one
can breathe!" and would trot up and down the sodden paths--too straight and
symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new
gardener, whom my father had been asking all a morning if the weather were going to
improve--her keen and jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought
upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the power of hygiene, the stupidity
of my upbringing and the symmetry of gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that
was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the mudstains
beneath which it would gradually disappear to a height that was the constant bane
and despair of her maid.
　　　　　When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner there was one
thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: this wasaf (at one of those
points when her circular itinerary brought her back, moth-like, in sight of the lamp in
the little parlour where the liqueurs were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt
called out to her: "Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband drinking brandy! For, simply
to tease her (she had brought so different a type of mind into my father's family
that everyone made fun of her), my great-aunt used to make my grandfather, who was
forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops. My poor grandmother would come in and beg
and implore her husband not to taste the brandy; and he would get angry and gulp it
down all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still smiling,
for she was so humble of heart and so gentle that her tenderness for others and her
disregard for herself and her own troubles blended in a smile which, unlike those
seen on the majority of human faces, bore no trace of irony save for herself, while
for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those
she loved without seeming to bestow upon them passionate caresses: This torture
inflicted on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties,
of her feeble attempts, doomed in advance, to remove the liqueur-glass from my
grandfather's hands--all these were things of the sort to which, in later years one can
grow so accustomed as to smile at them and take the persecutor's side resolutely
and cheerfully enought to persuade oneself it is not really persecution; but in those
days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt.
And yet, as soon as I heard her "Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband drinking
brandy," in my cowardice I became at once a man and did what all we grown men do
when face to face with suffering and injustice: I preferred not to see them; I ran
up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom
and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root and was scented also by a wild
currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust
a flowering branch in through the half-opened window. Intended for a more special
and a baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, could see as far as the
keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless
because it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock whenever my occu-
pation was such as required an inviolable solitude: reading or day-dreaming, tears or
sensual pleasure, Alas! I did not realise that my own lack of will-power, my delicate
health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future, weighed far more heavily on
my grandmother's mind than any little dietary indiscretion by husband in the course
of those endless perambulautions, afternoon and evening, during which we used to see
her handsome face passing to and fro, half raised toward the sky, its brown and wrinkled
cheeks, which with age acquired almost the purple hue of tilled field in autumn,
covered, if she were "going out," by a half-lifted veil, while upon them either the cold
or some sad reflection in-variably left the drying traces of an involuntary tear.
　　　　　My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would
come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time,
she went down again so soon, that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs,
and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little
tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a
moment of the utmost pain; for it heralded the moment which was to follow it, when
she would have left me and gone downstairs again. So much so that I reached the
point of hoping that this good night which I loved so much would come as late as
possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have
appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to
call her back, to say to her "Kiss me just once more," but I knew that then she would
at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and
agitation in coming up to give me this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who
thought such rituals absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow
the need, the habit, of having her there at all, let alone get into the habit of
asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And
to see her look displeased destroyed all the calm and serenity she had brought me a
moment before, when she had bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to
me like a host for an act of peace-giving communion in which my lips might imbibe her
real presence and with it the power to sleep, But those evenings on which Mamma
stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we
had people to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all. Our "people" were usually
limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few passing strangers, was almost the only
person who ever came to the house at Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner
(but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive
his wife) and sometimes after dinner, uninvited. On those evenings when, as we sat in
front of the house round the iron table beneath the big chestnut-tree, we heard,
from the far end of the garden, not the shrill and assertive alarm bell which
assailed and deafened with its ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member
of the household who set it off on entering "without ringing," but the double
tinkle, timid, oval, golden, of the visitors' bell, everyone would at once exclaim
"A visitor! Who in the world can it be?" but they knew quite well that it could
only be M. Swann. My great-aunt, speaking in a loud voice to set an example, in a
tone which she endeavoured to make sound natural, would tell the others not to
whisper so; that nothing could be more offensive to a stranger coming in, who would
be led to think that people were saying things about him which he was not meant
to hear; and then my grandmother, always happy to find an excuse for an additional
turn in the garden, would be sent out to reconnoitre, and would take the opportunity
to remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or two so as
to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother might run her hand through
her boy's hair the barber has smoothed it down, to make it look naturally wavy.
　　　　　We would all wait there in suspense for the report which my grandmother
would bring back from the enemy lines, as though there might be a choice between a
large number of possible assailants, and then, soon after, my grandfather would say: "
I recognise Swann's voice." And indeed one could tell him only by his voice, for it
was difficult to make out his face with its arched nose and green eyes, under a high
forehead fringed with fair, almost red hair, done in the Bressant style, because in the
garden we used as little light as possible, so as not to attract mosquitoes; and I
would slip away unobtrusively to order the liqueurs to be brought out, for my
grandmother made a great point, thinking it "nicer," of their not being allowed to
seem anything out of the ordinary, which we kept for visitors only. Although a far
younger man, M. Swann was very attached to my grandfather, who had been an
intimate friend of Swann's father, an excellent but eccentric man the ardour of
whose feelings and the current of whose thoughts would often be checked or
diverted by the most trifling thing. Several times in the course of a year I would
hear my grandfather tell at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of
M. Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched
day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, hastened to join
him at the Swanns' family property on the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice
him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should
not be present when the body was laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the
park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather by
the arm and cried, "Ah, my dear old friend, how fortunate we are to be walking here
together on such a charming day! Don't you see how pretty they are, all these trees,
my hawthorns, and my new pond, on which you have never congratulated me? You look
as solemn as the grave. Don't you feel this little breeze? Ah! whatever you may say,
it's good to be alive all the same, my dear Amedie!" And then. abruptly, the memory of
his dead wife returned to him, and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire into
how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried away by an impulse
of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which he habitually employed whenever
any perplexing question came into his mind: that is, he passed his hand across his
forehead, rubbed his eyes, and wiped his glasses. And yet he never got over the
loss of his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years by which
he survived her, "It's a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but
I cannot think of her for long at a time." "Often, but a little at a time, like poor old
Swann," became one of my grandfather's favourite sayings, which he would apply to all
manner of things. I should have assumed that this father of Swann's had been a
monster if my grandfather, whom I regarded as a better judge than myself, and whose
word was my law and often led me in the long run to pardon offences which I should
have been inclined to condemn, had not gone on to exclaim, after all, he had a heart of
gold."
　　　　　For many years, during the course of which--especially before his marriage
M. Swann the younger often came to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and my
grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the society
which his family had frequented, and that, under the sort of incognito which the
name of Swann gave him among us, they were harbouring--with the complete innocence
of a family of respectable innkeepers who have in their midst some celebrated high-
wayman without knowing it--one of the most distin-guished members of the Jockey
Club, a particular friend of the Comte de Paris and of the Prince of Wales, and one
of the men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
　　　　　Our utter ignorance of the brilliant social life which Swann led was, of course,
due in part to his own reserve and discretion, but also to the fact thatrmiddle-
class peo-ple in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which
they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found
himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied, and
from which nothing, save the accident of an exceptional career or of a "good"
marriage, could extract you and translate you to a superior caste. M. Swann the
elder had been a stockbroker; and so "young Swann" found himself immured for life
in a caste whose members' fortunes, as in a category of tax-payers, varied
between such and such limits of income. One knew the people with whom his father
had associated, and so one knew his own associates, the people with whom he was
"in a position" to mix. If he knew other people besides, those were youthful
acquaintances on whom the old friends of his family, like my relatives, shut their
eyes all the more good-naturedly because Swann himself, after he was left an
orphan, still came most faithfully to see us; but we would have been ready to
wager that the people outside our acquaintance whom Swann knew were of the sort
to whom he would not have dared to raise his hat if he met them while he was
walking with us. Had it been absolutely essential to apply to Swann a social
coefficeient peculiar to himself, as distinct from all the other sons of other
stockbrokers in his father's position, his coefficient would have been rather
lower than theirs, because beg very simple in his habits, and having always had
a "craze" for antiques and pictures, he now lived and amassed his collections in
an old house which my grand-mother longed to visit but which was situated on the
Quai d'Orleans, a neighbourhood in which my great-aunt thought it most degrading
to be quartered. "





　　　　As she was the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle
"common," she would always take care to remark to strangers, when Swann was
mentioned, that he could easily, had he so wished, have lived in the Boulevard
Haussmann or the Avenue de l'Opera, and that he was the son of old M. Swann who
must have left four or five million francs, but that it was a fad of his. A fad which,
moreover, she thought was bound to amuse other people so much that in Paris, when M.
Swann called on New Year's Day bringing her a little packet of marrons glaces, she
never failed, if there were strangers in the room, to say to him: "Well, M. Swann, and do
you still live next door to the bonded warehouse, so as to be sure of not missing your
train when you go to Lyons?" and she would peep out of the corner of her eye, over her
glasses, at the other visitors.
　　　　　But if anyone had suggested to my great-aunt that this Swann, who, in his
capacity as the son of old M. Swann, was "fully qualified" to be received by any of the
"best people," by the most respected barristers and solicitors of Paris (though he was
perhaps a trifle inclined to let this hereditary privilege go by default), had another
almost secret existence of a wholly different kind; that when he left our house in
Paris, saying that he must go home to bed, he would no sooner have turned the corner
than he would stop, retrace his steps, and be off to some salon on whose like no
stockbroker or associate of stock-brokers had ever set eyes--that would have seemed to
my aunt as extraordinary as, to a woman of wider reading, the thought of being herself
on terms of intimacy with Aristaeus and of learning that after having a chat with
her he would plunge deep into the realms of Thetis into an empire veiled from
mortal eyes, in which Virgil depicts him as being received with open arms; or--to be
content with an image more likely to have occurred to her, for she had seen it
painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray--as the thought of having had
to dinner Ali Baba, who, as soon as he finds himself alone and unobserved, will make
his way into the cave, resplendent with its unsuspected treasures.
　　　　　One day when he had come to see us after dinner in Paris, apologising for being
in evening clothes, Francoise told us after he had left that she had got it from his
coachman that he had been dining "with a princess." "A nice sort of princess,"
retorted my aunt, shrugging her shoulders without raising her eyes from her knitting,
serenely sarcastic.
　　　　　Altogether, my great-aunt treated him with scant ceremony. Since she was of the
opinion that he ought to feel flattered by our invitations, she thought it only right
and proper that he should never come to see us in summer without a basket of peaches
or raspberries from his garden, and that from each of his visits to Italy he should
bring back some photographs of old masters for me. .
　　　　　It seemed quite natural, therefore, to send for him whenever a recipe for some
special sauce or for a pineapple-salad was needed for which he himself would one of
our big dinner-parties, to which he himself would not be invited, being regarded as
insufficiently important to be served up to new friends who might be in our house for
the first time. If the conversation turned upon the princes of the House of France,
"gentlemen you and I will never know, will we, and don't want to, do we?" my great-aunt
would say tartly to Swann, who had, perhaps, a letter from Twickenham in his pocket'
she would make him push the piano into place and turn over the music on evenings
when my grandmother's sister sang, manipulating this person who was elsewhere so
sought after with the rough simplicity of a child who will play with a collectors' piece
with no more circumspection than if it were a cheap gewgaw. Doubtless the Swann who
was a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from the Swann
created by my great-aunt when, of an evening, in our little garden at Combray,
after the two shy peals had sounded from the gate, she would inject and vitalise
with everything she knew about the Swann family the obscure and shadowy figure who
emerged, with my grandmother in his wake, from the dark background and who was
identified by his voice. But then, even in the most insignificant details of our
daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is
identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book
or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of
other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing someone we know"
is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the
person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the
total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly
the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve
of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so
harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent
envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which
we recognise and to which we listen. And so, no doubt, from the Swann they had
constructed for themselves my family had left out, in their ignorance, a whole
host of details of his life n the world of fashior details which caused other
people, when they met him, to see all the graces enthroned in his face and
stopping at the line of his aquiline nose as at a natural frontier; but they
had contrived also to put into this face divested of all glamour, vacant and
roomy as an untenanted house, to plant in the depths of these undervalued eyes,
a lingering residuum, vague but not unpleasing-- half-memory and half-oblivion--
of idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, round the card-table or
in the garden, during our companionable country life. Our friend's cor-poreal
envelope had been so well lined with this residuum, as well as various earlier
memories of his par-ents, that their own special Swann had become to my family
a complete and living creature; so that even now I Ihave the feeling of leaving
someone I know for another quite different person when, going back in memory, I
pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately to this early Swann--
this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my youth,
and who in fact is less like his successor than he is like the other people I
knew at that time, as though one's life were a picture gallery in which all the
portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, a similar tonality --
this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great
chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon.





　　　　　My grandmother had returned from the call full of praise for the house,
which overlooked some gardens, and in which Mme de Villeparisis had advised her
to rent a flat, and also for a repairing tailor and his daughter who kept a
little shop in the courtyard, into which she had gone to ask them to put a
stitch in her skirt, which she had torn on the staircase. My grandmother had
found these people perfectly charming: the girl, she said, was a jewel, and the
tailor the best and most distinguished man she had ever seen. For in her eyes
distinction was a thing wholly independent of social position. She was in
ecstasies over some answer the tailor had made to her, saying to Mamma:
　　　　　"Sevigne would not have put it better!" and, by way of contrast, of a nephew
of Mme de Villeparisis whom she had met at the house:
　　　　　"My dear, he is so common!"
　　　　　Now, the effect of the remark about Swann had been, not to raise him in my
great-aunt's estimation, but to lower Mme de VilleparisisjIt appeared that the
deference which, on my grandmother's authority, we owed to Mme de Villeparisis
imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to do nothing that would render her
less worthy of our regard, and that she had failed in this duty by becoming
aware of Swarin's existence and in allowing members of her family to associate
with him. "





My great-aunt, on the other hand, interpreted this piece of news in a sense
discreditable to Swann; for anyone who chose his associates outside the caste in
which he had been born and bred, outside his "proper station," automatically
lowered himself in her eyes. It seemed to her that such a one abdicated all
claim to enjoy the fruits of the splendid connections with people of good
position which prudent parents cultivate and store up for their children's
benefit, and she had actually ceased to "see" the son of a lawyer our
acquaintance because he had married a "Highness" and had thereby stepped down --
in her eyes-- from the respectable position of a lawyer's son to that of those
adventurers, upstart footmen or stable-boys mostly, to whom, we are told, queens
have sometimes shown their favours. She objected, therefore, to my grandfather's
plan of questioning Swann, when next he came to dine with us, about these people
whose friendship with him we had discovered. At the same time my grandmother's
two sisters, elderly spinsters who shared her nobility of character but lacked
her intelligence, declared that they could not conceive what pleasure their brother
-in-law could find in talking about such trifles. They were ladies of lofty
aspirations, who for that reason were incapable of taking the least interest in
what might be termed gossip, even if it had some historical import, or, generally
speaking, in any-thing that was not directly associated with some aesthetic or
virtuous object. So complete was their negation of interest in anything which
seemed directly or indirectly connected with worldly matters that their sense of
hearing--having finally come to realise its temporary futility when the tone of
the conversation at the dinner-table became frivolous or merely mundane without
the two old ladies' being able to guide it back to topics dear to themselves--
would put its receptive organs into abeyance to the point of actually becoming
atrophied. So that if my grandfather wished to attract the attention of the two
sisters, he had to resort to some such physical stimuli as alienists adopt in
dealing with their distracted patients: to wit, repeated taps on a glass with
the blade of a knife, accompanied by a sharp word and a compelling glance,
violent methods which these psychiatrists are apt to bring with them into their
everyday life among the sane, either from force of professional habit or because
they think the whole world a trifle mad.
　　　　　Their interest grew, however, when, the day before Swann was to dine with us,
and when he had made the special present of a case of Asti, my great-aunt, who had
in her hand a copy of the Figaro in which to the name of a picture then on view in
a Corot exhibition were added the words, "from the collection of M. Charles Swann,"
asked: "Did you see that Swann is 'mentioned' in the Figaro?"
　　　　　"But I've always told you," said my grandmother, "that he had a great deal
of taste."
　　　　　"You would, of course," retorted my great-aunt, "say anything just to seem
different from us." For, knowing that my grandmother never agreed with her, and not
being quite confident that it was her own opinion which the rest of us invariably
endorsed, she wished to extort from us a wholesale condemnation of my grandmother's
views, against which she hoped to force us into solidarity with her own. But we sat
silent. My grandmother's sisters having expressed a desire to mention to Swann
this reference to him in the Figaro, my great-aunt dissuaded them. Whenever she saw
in others an advantage, however triv-ial, which she herself lacked, she would
persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity
so as not to have to envy them.
　　　　　"I don't think that would please him at all; I know very well that I should
hate to see my name printed like that, as large as life, in the paper, and I
shouldn't feel a t all flattered if anyone spoke to me about it."
　　　　　She did not, however, put any very great pressure upon my grandmother's
sisters, for they, in their horror of vulgarity, had brought to such a fine art
the concealment of a personal allusion in a wealth of ingenious circumlocution,
that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed.
As for my mother, her only thought was of trying to induce my father to speak to
Swann, not about his wife but about his daugh-ter, whom he worshipped, and for
whose sake it was understood that he had ultimately made his unfortunate marriage.
　　　　　"You need only say a word; just ask him how she is. It must be so very hard
for him."
　　　　　My father, however, was annoyed: "No, no; you have the most absurd ideas.
It would be utterly ridiculous."
　　　　　But the only one of us in whom the prospect of Swarm's arrival gave rise to
an unhappy foreboding was myself. This was because on the evenings when there
were visitors, or just M. Swann, in the house, Mamma did not come up to my room.
I dined before the others, and afterwards came and sat at table until eight
o'clock, when it was understood that I must go upstairs; that frail and precious
kiss which Mamma used normally to bestow on me when I was in bed and just going
to sleep had to be transported from the dining-room to my bedroom where I must
keep it inviolate all the time that it took me to undress, without letting
its sweet charm be broken, without letting its volatile essence diffuse itself
and evapo-rate; and it was precisely on those very evenings when I needed to
receive it with special care that I was obliged to take it, to snatch it
brusquely and in public, without even having the time or the equanimity to
bring to what I was doing the single-minded attention of lunatics who compel
themselves to exclude all other thoughts from their minds while they are shutting
a door, so that when the sickn of uncertainty sweeps over them again they can
triumphantly oppose it with the recollection of the precise moment when they shut
the door.
　　　　　We were all in the garden when the double tinkle of the visitors bell sounded
shyly. Everyone knew that it must be Swann, and yet they looked at one another
inquiringly and sent my grandmother to reconnoitre.
　　　　　"See that you thank him intelligibly for the wine, my grandfather warned his
two sisters-in-law. "You know how good it is, and the case is huge."
　　　　　"Now, don't start whispering!" said my great-aunt. "How would you like to
come into a house and find everyone muttering to themselves?"
　　　　　"Ah! There's M. Swann," cried my father. "Let's ask him if he thinks it will
be fine tomorrow."
　　　　　My mother fancied that a word from her would wipe out all the distress which
my family had contrived to cause Swann since his marriage. She found an opportunity
to draw him aside for a moment. But I followed her I could not bring myself to let
her out of my sight while I felt that in a few minutes I should have to leave her
in the dining-room and go up to my bed without the consoling thought, as on
ordinary evenings, that she woul come up later to kiss me.
　　　　　"Now, M. Swann," she said, "do tell me about Your daughter. I'm sure she
already has a taste for beautifu; things, like her papa."
　　　　　"Come along and sit down here with us all on the verandah," said my grandfather,
coming up to him. My mother had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from
the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like good poets whom the tyranny
of rhyme forces into the 'discovery of their finest lines. "We can talk about
her again when we are by our-selves," she said, or rather whispered to Swann. "Only
a mother is capable of understanding these things. I'm sure that hers would agree
with me."
　　　　　And so we all sat down round the iron table. ..1 should have liked not to
think of the hours of anguish which I should have to spend that evening alone in my
room, without being able to go to sleep: I tried to convince myself that they were
of no importance since I should have forgotten them next morning, and to fix my
mind on thoughts of the future which would carry me, as on a bridge, across the
terrifying abyss that yawned at my feet. But my mind, strained by this foreboding,
distended like the look which I shot at my mother, would not allow any extraneous
impression to enter. Thoughts did indeed enter it, but only on the condition that
they left behind them every element of beauty, or even of humour, by which I might
have been distracted or beguiled. As a surgical patient, thanks to a local
anaesthetic, can look on fully conscious while an operation is being performed upon
him and yet feel nothing, I could repeat to myself some favourite lines, or watch
my grandfather's efforts to talk to Swann about the Duc d'Audiffret-Pasquier,
without being able to kindle any emotion from the one or amusement from the other.





　　　　　"M. Vinteuil is not the only one who has nice neigh-bours," cried my aunt Celine
in a voice that was loud be-cause of shyness and forced because of premeditation,
darting, as she spoke, what she called a "significant glance" at Swann. And my aunt
Flora, who realised that this veiled utterance was Celine's way of thanking Swann
for the Asti, looked at him also with a blend of congratulation and irony, either
because she simply wished to un-derline her sister's little witticism, or because she
envied Swann his having inspired it, or because she imagined that he was embarrassed,
and could not help having a little fun at his expense.
　　　　　"I think it would be worth while," Flora went on, "to have this old gentleman to
dinner. When you get him going on Maubant or Mme Materna he will talk for hours on end."
　　　　　"That must be delightful," sighed my grandfather, in whose mind nature had
unfortunately forgotten to include any capacity whatsoever for becoming passionately
interested in the Swedish co-operative movement or in st methods employed by Maubant
to get up his parts, just as it had forgotten to endow my grandmother's two sisters with
a grain of that precious salt which one has oneself to "add to taste" in order to
extract any savour from a narrative of the private life of Mole or of the Comte de Paris.





"The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some
fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give
us anything that is of real importance. Sup-pose that, every morning, when we tore the
wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we
were to find inside it--oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensies?" He
articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. And then,
in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years," he went on, showing
that contempt for worldly matters which some men of the world like to fect, "we should
read that the Queen of the Hellenes haf'ci arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de
Leon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at a happy medium." But
at once regretting that he had allowed himself to speak of serious matters even in jest,
he added ironically: "What a fine conversation we're having! I can't think why we climb
to these lofty heights," and then, turning to my grandfather: "Well, Saint-Simon tells
how Maulevrier had had the audacity to try to shake hands with his sons. You remember
how he says of Maulevrier, 'Never did I find in that coarse bottle any-thing but ill-
humour, boorishness, and folly.'
　　　　　"Coarse or not, I know bottles in which there is something very different," said
Flora briskly, feeling bound to thank Swann as well as her sister, since the present
of Asti had been addressed to them both. Chine laughed.
　　　　　Swann was puzzled, but went on: " 'I cannot say whether it was ignorance or
cozenage,' writes Saint-Simon. 'He tried to give his hand to my children. I noticed
it in time to prevent him.'
　　　　　My grandfather was already in ecstasies over "ignorance or cozenage," but Mlle
Celine--the name of Saint Simon, a "man of letters," having arrested the corrmplete
paralysis of her auditory faculties-- was indignant:
　　　　　"What! You admire that? Well, that's a fine thing must say! But what's it
supposed to mean? Isn't one man as good as the next? What difference can it make
wheether he's a duke or a groom so long as he's intelligent kind? He had a fine way
of bringing up his children, your Saint-Simon, if he didn't teach them to shake
hands with all decent folk. Really and truly, it's abominable. And you dare
to quote it!"
　　　　　And my grandfather, utterly depressed, realising how futile it would be, against
this opposition, to attempt to get Swann to tell him the stories which would have
amused him, murmured to my mother: "Just tell me again that line of yours which
always comforts me so much on these occasions. Oh, yes: 'What virtues, Lord, Thou
makest us abhor!' How good that is!"
　　　　　I never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at table I
should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time, and that Mamma,
for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to kiss her several times in
public, as I would have done in my room. And so I promised myself that in the
dining-room, as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I
would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and furtive,
everything that my own efforts could muster, would carefully choose in advance
the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my
thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the
whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against
my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only
prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in
advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence. But tonight,
before the dinner-bell had sounded, my grandfather said with unconscious cruelty:
"The little man looks tired; he'd better go up to bed. Besides, we're dining late
tonight."
　　　　　And my father, who was less scrupulous than my my mother in observing
the letter of a treaty went on: "Yes; run along; oft to bed."
　　　　　I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the dinner-
bell rang. "No, no, leave your mother alone. You've said good night to one another,
that's enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs."
　　　　　And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the
staircase "against my heart," as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my
heart's desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had not, by kissing
me, given my heart leave to accompany me. That hateful staircase, up which I
always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were,
absorbed and crystallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each
evening, and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it
assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we
have gone to sleep with a raging toothache and are conscious of it only as of
a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or
a line of Moliere which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great
relief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of
toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. It
was the converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at having to go
up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid,
instantaneous almost, a manner at once insidious and brutal, through the
inhalation -- far more poisonous than moral penetration--of the smell of
varnish peculiar to that staircase.
　　　　　Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters,
to dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the
shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which had been
placed there because, on summer nights, I was too hot among the rep curtains
of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and attempted the desperate
stratagem of a condemned prisoner. I wrote to my mother begging her to come
upstairs for an important reason which I could not put in writing. My fear
was that Francoise, my aunt's cook who used to be put in charge of me when I
was at Combray, might refuse to take my note. I had a suspicion that, in her
eyes, to carry a mes-sage to my mother when there was a guest would appear
as flatly inconceivable as for the door-keeper of a theatre to hand a letter
to an actor upon the stage. On the subject of things which might or might
not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant, subtle, and
uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or irrelevant, which gave
it a resemblance to those ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances
as the massacre of infants at the breast with prohibitions of exaggerated
refinement against "seething the kid in his mother's milk," or "eating of
the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh." This code, judging by
the sudden obstinacy which she would put into her refusal to carry out
certain of our instructions, seemed to have provided for social complexities
and refinements of etiquette which nothing in Francoise's background or in
her career as a servant in a Village household could have put into her head;
and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past
existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood,
as in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their
former courtly days and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured
scenes from Le Miracle de Theophile or Les quatres fils Aymonel.
　　　　　In this particular instance, the article of her code which made it
highly improbable that--barring an out break of fire--Francoise would go
down and disturb Mamma in the presence of M. Swann for so unimportant a
person as myself was one embodying the respect she showed not only for
the family (as for the dead, for the clergy, or for royalty), but also
for the stranger within our gates; a respect which I should perhaps have
found touching in a book, but which never failed to irritate me on her
lips, because of the solemn and sentimental tones in which she would
express it, and which irritated me more than usual this evening when the
sacred character with which she invested the dinner-party might have the
effect of making her decline to disturb its ceremonial.





　　　　A moment later she returned to say that they were still at the ice stage and
that it was impossible for the butler to deliver the note at once, in front of
everybody; but that when the finger-bowls were put round he would find a way of
slipping it into Mamma's hand. At once my anxiety subsided; it was now no longer
(as it had been a moment ago) until tomorrow that I had lost my mother, since my
little note--though it would annoy her, no doubt, and doubly so because this
stratagem would make me ridiculous in Swann's eyes--would at least admit me,
invisible and enraptured, into the same room as herself, would whisper about me
into her ear; since that forbidden and unfriendly dining-room, where but a moment
ago the ice itself--with burned nuts in it--and the finger-bowls seemed to me to be
concealing pleasures that were baleful and of a mortal sadness because Mamma was
tasting of them while I was far away, had opened its doors to me and, like a ripe
fruit which bursts through its skin, was going to pour out into my intoxicated
heart the sweetness of Mamma's attention while she was reading what I had written.
Now I was no longer separated from her; the barriers were down; an exquisite
thread united us. Besides, that was not all: for surely Mamma would come.
　　　　　As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that Swann would
have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose;
whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had
been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood
my feelings at that moment so well as he; to him, the anguish that comes from knowing
that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not cannot
follow--to him that anguish came through love which it is in a sense predestined, by
which it will be seized upon and exploited; but when, as had befallen me, it possesses
one's soul before love has yet entered into one's life, then it must drift, awaiting love's
coming vague and free, without precise attachment, at the dis posal of one sentiment
today, of another tomorrow, of filial piety or affection for a friend.





How we love him--as at that moment I loved Francoise --the good-natured intermediary
who by a single word has made supportable, human, almost propitious the inconceivable,
infernal scene of gaiety in the thick of which we had been imagining swarms of enemies,
perverse and seductive, beguiling away from us, even making laugh at us, the woman we
love! If we are to judge of him--this relative who has accosted us and who is himself an
initiate in those cruel mysteries--then the other guests cannot be so very demoniacal.
Those inaccessible and excruciating hours during which she was about to taste of
unknown pleasures--suddenly, through an unexpected breach, we have broken into them,
suddenly we can picture to ourselves, we possess, we intervene upon, we have almost
created, one of the moments the succession of which would have composed those hours
a moment as real as all the rest, if not actually more important to us because our mistress
is more intensely a part of it: namely, the moment in which he goes to tell her that we
are waiting below. And doubtless the other moments of the party would not have been so
very different from this one, would be no more exquisite, no more calculated to make us
suffer, since this kind friend has assured us that "Of course, she will be delighted to
come down! It will be far more amusing for her to talk to you than to be bored up there."
Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are
powerless to influence a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a
ballroom by a man she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone.





　　　　But after a few seconds I realised that, by writing that note to Mamma, by
approaching--at the risk of making her angry--so near to her that I felt I could reach
out and grasp the moment in which I should see her again, I had cut myself off from the
possibility of going to sleep until I actually had seen her, and my heart began to beat
more and more painfully as I increased my agitation by ordering myself to keep calm and
to acquiesce in my ill-fortune. Then, suddenly, my anxiety subsided, a feeling of intense
happiness coursed through me, as when a strong medicine begins to take effect and one's
pain vanishes: I had formed a resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without
seeing Mamma, had made up my mind to kiss her at all costs, even though this meant the
certainty of being in disgrace with her for long afterwards--when she herself came up to
bed. The calm which succeeded my anguish filled me with extraordinary exhilaration,
no less than my sense of expectation, my thirst for and my fear of danger. Noiselessly
I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed lo dared to move in case they
should hear me from below. Outside, things too seemed frozen, rapt in a mute intentness
not to disturb the moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the
extension in front of it of a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance, had
made the whole landscape at once thinner and larger, like a map which, after being folded
up, is spread out upon the ground. What had to move--a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for
instance--moved. But its minute quivering, total, self-contained, finished down to its
minutest gradation and its last delicate tremor, did not impinge upon the rest of the
scene, did not merge with it, remained circumscribed. Exposed upon this surface of
silence which absorbed nothing of them, the most distant sounds, those which must have
come from gardens at the far end of the town, could be distinguished with such exact
"finish" that the impression they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to
their "pianissimo" execution, like those movements on muted strings so well per-formed
by the orchestra of the Conservatoire that, even though one does not miss a single note,
one thinks none the less that they are being played somewhere outside, a long way from
the concert hall, so that all the old subscribers--my grandmother's sisters too, when
Swann had given them his seats--used to strain their ears as if they had caught the
distant approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded the corner of the
Rue de Trevise.





　　　　My mother opened the latticed door which led from the hall to the staircase.
Presently I heard her coming upstiars to close her window. I went quietly into the
passage; my heart was beating so violently that I could heardly move, but at least it was
throbbing no longer with anxiety, but with terror and joy. I saw in the well of the stair
a light coming upwards, from Mama's candle. Then I saw Mama herself and I threw myself
upon her. For an instant she looked at me in astonishment, not realising what could have
happened. Then her face assumed an expression of anger. She said not a single word to
me; and indeed I used to go for days on end without being spoken to, for far more venial
offences than this. A single word from Mamma would have been an admission that further
intercourse with me was within the bounds of possibility, and that might perhaps have
appeared to me more terrible still, as indicating that, with such a punishment as was
in store for me, mere silence and black looks would have been puerile. A word from her
then would have implied the false calm with which one addresses a servant to whom one
has just decided to give notice; the kiss one bestows on a son who is being packed off
to enlist, which would have been denied him if it had merely been a matter of being
angry with him for a few days. But she heard my father coming from the dressing-room,
where he had gone to take off his clothes, and, to avoid the scene which he would make
if he saw me, she said to me in a voice half-stifled with anger: "Off you go at once.
Do you want your father to see you waiting there like an idiot?" But I implored her
again: "Come and say good night to me," terrified as I saw the light from my father's
candle already creeping up the wall, but also making use of his approach as a means of
blackmail, in the hope that my mother, not wishing him to find me there, as find me he
must if she continued to refuse me, would give in and say: "Go back to your room. I
will come."
　　　　Too late: my father was upon us. Instinctively I murmured, though no one heard
me, "I'm done for!"
　　　　I was not, however. My father used constantly to refuse to let me do things which
were quite clearly allowed by the more liberal charters granted me by mother and
grandmother, because he paid no heed to "principles," and because for him there was
no such thing as the "rule of law." For some quite irrelevant reason, or for no reason
at all, he would at the last moment prevent me from taking some particular walk, one
so regular, so hallowed, that to deprive me of it was a clear breach of faith; or again,
as he had done this evening, long before the appointed hour he would snap out: "Run
along up to bed now; no excuses!" But at the same time, because he was devoid of prin-
ciples (in my grandmother's sense), he could not, strictly speaking, be called intran-
sigent. He looked at me for a moment with an air of surprise and annoyance, and then
when Mamma had told him, not without some embarrassment, what had happened, said to
her: "Go along with him, then. You said just now that you didn't feel very sleepy,
so stay in his room for a little. I don't need anything."
　　　　"But, my dear," my mother answered timidly: "whether or not I feel sleepy is not
the point; we mustnt let the child get into the habit..."
　　　　"There's no question of getting into a habit," said father, with a shrug of the
shoulders; "you can see quite well that the child is unhappy. After all, we aren't
gaolers. You'll end by making him ill, and a lot of good that will do. There are two
beds in his room; tell Francoise make up the big one for you, and stay with him, for
the rest of the night. Anyhow, I'm off to bed; I'm not so nervy as you. Good night."
　　　　It was impossible for me to thank my father; he would have been exasperated
by what he called mawkishness. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still in
front of us, a tall figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet
cashmere scarf which he used to wrap around his head since he had begun to suffer
from neuralgia, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which
M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac.
Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had
watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in
myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and
new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days
I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand. It is a long
time, too, since my father has been able to say to Mamma: "Go along with the child."
Never again will such moments be possible for me But of late I have been increas-
ingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the
strength to control in my father's presence, and which broke out only when I found
myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased; and it is only
because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them anew,
like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises
of the street that one would suppose them to have stopped, until they ring out again
through the silent evening air.
　　　　Mamma spent that night in my room: when I had Just committed an offence for
which I expected to be banished from the household, my parents gave me a far greater
concession than I could ever have won as the reward of a good deed. Even at the
moment when it manifested itself in this crowning mercy, my father's behaviour
towards me still retained that arbitrary and unwarranted quality which was so
characteristic of him and which arose from the fact that his actions were generally
dictated by chance expediencies rather than based on any formal plan. And perhaps
even what I called his severity, when he sent me off to bed, deserved that title
less than my mother's or my grandmother's attitude, for his nature, which in some
respects differed more than theirs from my own, had probably prevented him from
realising until then how wretched I was every evening, something which my mother
and grandmother knew well; but they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me
that suffering, which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my
nervous sensibility and to strengthen my will. Whereas my father, whose affection
for me was of another kind, would not, I suspect, have had the same courage, for
as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he had said to my mother:
"Go and comfort him."
　　　　Mamma stayed that night in my room, and it seemed that she did not wish to mar
by recrimination those hours which were so different from anything that I had had
a right to expect, for when Francoise (who guessed that something extraordinary
must have happened when she saw Mamma sitting by my side, holding my hand and
letting me cry unchided) said to her: "But, Madame, what is young master
crying for?" she replied: "Why, Francoise, he doesn't know himself: it's his nerves.
Make up the big bed for me quickly and then go off to your own." And thus for
the first time my unhappiness was regarded no longer as a punishable offence but
as an involuntary ailment which had been officially recognised, a nervous condition
for which I was in no way responsible. I had the consolation of no longer having to
mingle apprehensive scruples with the bitterness of my tears; I could weep hence-
forth without sin. I felt no small degree of pride, either, in Francoise's presence
at this return to humane conditions which, not an hour after Mamma had refused to
come up to my room and had sent the snubbing message that I was to go to sleep,
raised me to the dignity of a grown-up person, brought me of a sudden to a sort of
puberty of sorrow, a manumission of tears. I ought to have been happy; I was not.
It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been
painful to her, that it was a first abdication on her part from the ideal she had
formed for me, and that for the first time she who was so brave had to confess
herself beaten: It struck me that if I had just won a victory it was over her,
that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relax-
ing her will, in undermining her judgment; and that this evening opened a new era,
would remain a black date in the calendar. And if I had dared now, I should have
said to Mamma: "No, I don't want you to, you mustn't sleep here." But I was
conscious of the practical wisdom, of what would nowadays be called the realism,
with which she tempered the ardent idealism of my grandmother's nature, and I knew
that now the mischief was done she would prefer to let me enjoy the soothing plea-
sure of her company, and not to disturb my father again. Certainly my mother's
beautiful face seemed to shine again with youth that evening, as she sat gently
holding my hands and trying to check my tears; but this was just what I felt should
not have been; her anger would have saddened me less than this new gentleness,
unknown to my childhood experience; I felt that I had with an impious and secret finger
traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and brought out a first white hair on her head. This
thought redoubled my sobs, and then I saw that Mamma, who had never allowed herself
to indulge in any undue emotion with roe. was suddenly overcome by my tears and had to
struggle to keep back her own. When she realised that I had noticed this, she said to me
with a smile: "Why, my little chick, my little canary, he's going to make Mamma as silly as
himself if this goes on. Look, since you can't sleep, and Mamma can't either, we mustn't
go on in this stupid way; we must do something; I'll get one of your books." But I had
none there. "Would you like me to get out the books now that your grandmother is going
to give you for your birthday? Just think it over first, and don't be disappointed if there's
nothing new for you then."
　　　　I was only too delighted, and Mamma went to fetch a parcel of books of which I
could not distinguish, through the paper in which they were wrapped, any more than their
short, wide format but which, even at this first glimpse, brief and obscure as it was, bade
fair to eclipse already the paintbox of New Year's Day and the silkworms of the year
before. The books were La Mare an Diable, Francois le Champi, La Petite Fadette and Len
Maitres Sonneurs. My grandmother, as I learned afterwards, had at first chosen Musset's
poems, a voliune. Rousseau, and Indiana; for while she considered reading as unwhole-
some as sweets and cakes, she did not reflect that the strong breath of genius might
have upon the mind even of a child an influence at once more dangerous and less
invigorating than that of fresh air and breezes upon his body. But when my father had
almost called her an imbecile on learning the names of the books she proposed to give
me, she had journeyed back by herself to Jouy-le-Vicomte to the bookseller's, so that
there should be no danger of my not having my present in time (it was a boiling hot day,
and she had come home so unwell that the doctor had warned my mother not to allow
her to tire herself so), and had fallen back upon the four pastoral novels of George Sand.
"My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not bring myself to give the child anything
that was not well written."
　　　　The truth was that she could never permit herself to buy anything from which no
intellectual profit was to be derived, above all the profit which fine things afford us by
teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly
wealth. Even when she had to make someone a present of the kind called "useful," when
she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose
antiques, as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility
and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve
the common requirements of our own She would have liked me to have in my room
photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places. But at the moment of buying
them, and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value, he would find
that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature
of their reproduction by photography. She attempted by a subterfuge, if not to eliminate
altogether this commercial banality, at least to minimise it, to supplant it to a certain
extent with what was art still, to introduce, as it were, several "thicknesses" of art:
instead of photograph Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Clouds of of
Vesuvius, she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not depicted
them, and preferred to me photographs of "Chartres Cathedral" after Corot, of the
"Fountains of Saint-Cloud" after Hubert Robert, and of "Vesuvius" after Turner, which
were a stage higher in the scale of art. But although the photographer had been preven-
ted from reproducing directly these masterpieces or beauties of nature, and had there
been replaced by a great artist, he resumed his odious position when it came to re-
producing the artist's interpretation. Accordingly, having to reckon again with vulgarity,
my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still further. She
would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved, preferring, when possible, old
engravings with some interest of association apart from themselves, such, for example,
as show us a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it today (like
Morghen's print of Leonardo's "Last Supper" before its defacement). It must be admitted
that the results of this method of interpreting the art of making presents were not
always happy. The idea which I formed of Venice, from a drawing by Titian which is
supposed to have the lagoon in the background, was certainly far less accurate than
what I should have derived from ordinary photographs. We could no longer keep count in
the family (when my great-aunt wanted draw up an indictment of my grandmother) of all
the armchairs she had presented to married couples, young and old, which on a first
attempt to sit down upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipi-
ents. But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too closely
with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still be discerned a flourish, a
smile, a brave conceit of the past. And. even what in such pieces answered a material
need since it did so in a manner to which we are no longer accustomed charmed her like
those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a metaphor whose fine
point has been worn away by the rough usage of our modern tongue. As it happened, the
pastoal novels of George Sand which she was giving me for my birthday were regular
lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and
picturesque, and are now only to be found in country dialects. And my grandmother had
bought them in preference to other books, as she would more readily have taken a
house with a Gothic dovecot or some other such piece of antiquity as will exert a
benign influence on the mind by giving it a hankering for impossible journeys through
the realms of time.
　　　　Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen Francois le Champi, whose reddish
cover and incomprehensible title gave it, for me, a distinct personality and a mysterious
attraction. I had not then read any real novels. I had heard it said that George Sand was
a typical novelist. This predisposed me to imagine that Francois le Champi contained
something inexpressibly delicious. The narrative devices designed to arouse curiosity or
melt to pity, certain modes of expression which disturb or sadden the reader, and which,
with a little experience, he may recognise as common to a great many novels, seemed to
me--for whom a new book was not one of a number of similar objects but, as it were, a
unique person, absolutely self-contained --simply an intoxicating distillation of the
peculiar essence of Francois le Champs. Beneath the everyday incidents, the ordinary
objects and common words sensed a strange and individual tone of voice. The plot began
to unfold: to me it seemed all the more Obscure because in those days, when I read, I
used often to day-dream about something quite different for page after page. And the
gaps which this habit left in my knowledge of the story were widened by the fact that
when it was Mamma who was reading to me aloud she left all the love-scenes out. And
so all the odd changes which take place in the relations between the miller's wife and
the boy, changes which only the gradual dawning of love can explain, seemed to me
steeped in a mystery the key to which (I readily believed) lay in that strange and
mellifluous name of Champi, which invested the boy who bore it, I had no idea why, with
its own vivid, ruddy, charming colour. If mother was not a faithful reader, she was none
the less an admirable one, when reading a work in which she found the note of true
feeling, in the respectful simplicity of her interpretation and the beauty and sweetness
of her voice. Even in ordinary life, when it was not works of art but men and women
whom she was moved to pity or admire, it was touching to observe with what deference
she would banish from her voice, her gestures, from her whole conversation, now the
note of gaiety which might have distressed some mother who had once lost a child, now
the recollection of an event or anniversary which might have reminded some old
gentleman of the burden of his years, now the household topic which might have bored
some young man of letters. And so when she read aloud the prose of George Sand, prose
which is everywhere redolent of that generosity and moral distinction which Mamma had
learned from my grandmother to place above all other qualities in life, and which I was
not to teach her until much later to refrain from placing above all other qualities in
literature too, taking pains to banish from her voice any pettiness or affectation which
might have choked that powerful stream of language, she supplied all the natural
tenderness, all the lav-ish sweetness which they demanded to sentences which
seemed to have been composed for her voice and which. were all, so to speak, within
the compass of her sensibility. She found, to tackle them in the required tone, the
warmth of feeling which pre-existed and dictated them, but which is not to be found in
the words themselves, and by this means she smoothed away, as she read, any harsh-
ness or discordance in the tenses of verbs, endowing the imperfect and the preterite
with all the sweetness to be found in generosity, all the melancholy to be found in love,
guiding the sentence that was drawing to a close towards the one that was about to
begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, de-
spite their differences of quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathing into this quite
ordinary prose a kind of emotional life and continuity.
　　　　My aching heart was soothed; I let myself be borne upon the current of this
gentle night on which I had my mother by my side. I knew that such a night could not be
repeated; that the strongest desire I had in the world, namely, to keep my mother in my
room through the sad hours of darkness, ran too much counter to general requirements
and to the wishes of others for such a conces-sion as had been granted me this evening
to be anything but a rare and artificial exception.





　　　　And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and
revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel,
sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which the glow
of a Bengal light or a searchlight beam will cut out and illuminate in a building the other
parts of which remain plunged in darkness: broad enough at its base, the little parlour,
the dining-room, the opening of the dark path from which M. Swann, the unwitting author
of my sufferings, would emerge, the hall through which I would journey to the first step
of that staircase, so painful to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the slender cone of
this irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom, with the little passage through
whose glazed door Mamma would enter; in a word, seen always at the same evening hour,
isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against the dark
background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the decor one sees prescribed
on the title-page of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my
undressing; as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender
staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night. I must
own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and
did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled
would have been prompted only by voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect, and
since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past
itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me
it was in reality all dead.
　　　　Permanently dead? Very possibly.
　　　　There is a large element of chance in these matters, and a second chance occur-
rence, that of our own death, often prevents us from awaiting for any length of time the
favours of the first.
　　　　I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those
whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in
some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many ne-
ver comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object
which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as
soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have over-
come death and return to share our life.
　　　　And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all
the efforts of our intell.eccit must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside
the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which
that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends chance
whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.
　　　　Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, except what lay in the
theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day
in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a
thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason,
changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called "petites
madeleines," which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop
shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depress-
ing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of
the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than
a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was
happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated,
detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had be-
come indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation
having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather
this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent,
mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was
connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended
those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What
did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?
　　　　I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a
third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing
its virtue. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The
drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with
a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though
I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at
my disposal, for my final enlight-enment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It
alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind
feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region
through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek?
More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which
it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
　　　　And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state
which brought with it no logical proof, but the indisputable evidence, of its felicity, its
reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I want
to try to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first
spoonful of tea. I rediscover the same state, illuminated by no fresh light. I ask my mind
to make one further effort, to bring back once more t fleeting sensation. And so that
nothing may interrupt an it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea.
I stop my ears and screen my attention from the sounds from the next room. And then,
feeling that my mind is tiring itself without having any success to report, I compel it for
a change to enjoy the distraction which I hay just denied it, to think of other things, to
rest and refresh itself before making a final effort. And then for the second time I clear
an empty space in front of it; I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent
taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that
leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been anchored at a
great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can
measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.
　　　　Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image,
the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my
conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too confused and chaotic; scarcely
can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up
colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one
possible interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its
inseparable paramour, the taste, cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance
is in question, from what period in my past life.
　　　　Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory,
this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far
to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell.
Now I feel nothing; it has stopped, has perhaps sunk back into its dark ness, from
which who can say whether it will ever rise again? Ten times over I must essay the
task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the cowardice that deters us from
every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone,
to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow,
which can be brooded over painlessly.
　　　　And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of
madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go
out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt
Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of
the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because
I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in
pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days
to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because, of those memories so long
abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the
shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly
sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long
dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume
their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists,
after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell
alone, more fragile but more en-during, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful,
remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, wait ing, hoping, amid the ruins of
all the rest; and bear ur flinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their
essence, the vast structure of recollection.
　　　　And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her
decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know
and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately
the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to
attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out
behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I
could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the
Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run
errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the
Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it
little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment
they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become
flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers
in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good
folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of
Combray and surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens
alike, from my cup of tea.




　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　II




Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it from the railway
when we arrived there in the week before Easter, was no more than a church epitomising
the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near,
gathering close about its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain,
as a shepherdess gathers her sheep, the woolly grey backs of its huddled houses, which
the remains of its mediaeval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in an outline as
scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting. To live in,
Combray was a trifle depressing, like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackened
stone of the country, fronted with outside steps, capped with gables which projected
long shadows downwards, were so dark that as soon as the sun began to go down one had
to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows; streets with the solemn names of
saints, not a few of whom figured in the history of the early lords of Combray, such as
the Rue Saint-Hilaire, the Rue Saint-Jacques, in which my aunt's house stood, the Rue
Sainte-Hildegarde, which ran past her railings, and the Rue du Saint-Esprit, on to which
the little garden gate opened; and these Combray streets exist in so remote a corner of
my memory, painted in colours so different from those in which the world is decked for
me today, that in fact one and all of them, and the church which towered above them in
the Square, seem to me now more unreal than the projections of my magic lantern; and at
times I feel that to be able to cross the Rue Saint-Hilaire again, to engage a room in
the Rue de l'Oiseau, in the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesche, from whose ba windows
used to rise a smell of cooking which rises still in my mind, now and then, in the same
warm and intermittent gusts, would be to secure a contact with the Beyond more
marvellously supernatural than it would be make Golo's acquaintance and to chat with
Genevieve de Brabant.
　　　　My grandfather's cousin--by courtesy my great aunt--with whom we used to stay,
was the mother of that aunt Leonie who, since her husband's (my uncle Octave's) death,
had gradually declined to leave, first Cormbray, then her house in Combray, then her
bedroom, and finally her bed, and now never "came down," but lay perpetually in a vague
state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety. Her private apartment
looked out over the Rue Saint-Jacques, which ran a long way further to end in the Grand-
Pre (as distinct from the Petit-Pre, a green space in the centre of the town where three
streets met) and which, monotonous and grey, with the three high sandstone steps before
almost every one of its doors, seemed like a deep furrow carved by some sculptor of
Gothic images out of the block of stone from which he might have fashioned a calvary or
a crib. My aunt's life was now practically confined to two adjoining rooms, m one of
which she would spend the afternoon while the other was being aired. They were rooms
of that country order which--just as in certain climes whole tracts of air or ocean are
illuminated or scented by myriads of protozoa which we cannot see--enchants us with
the countless odours emanating from the virtues, wisdom, habits a whole secret system
of life, invisible, superabundant and profoundly moral, which their atmosphere holds in
solution; smells natural enough indeed, and weather-tinted like those of the neighbouring
countryside, but already humanised, domesticated, snug, an exquisite, limpid jelly
skilfully blended from all the fruits of the year which have left the orchard for the
store-room, smells changing with the season, but plenishing and homely, offsetting the
sharpness of hoarfrost with the sweetness of warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a
village clock, roving and settled, heedless and provident, linen smells, morning smells,
pious smells, rejoicing in a peace which brings only additional anxiety, and in a
prosaicness which serves as a deep reservoir of poetry to the stranger who passes
through their midst without having lived among them. The air of those rooms was
saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent, that I never
went into them without a sort of greedy anticipation particularly on those first
mornings, chilly still, of the?Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully because
I had only just arrived in Combray: before I went in to say good morning to my aunt I
ould be kept waiting a mo-ment inale outer room where the sun, wintry still had crept
in to warm itself before the fire, which was already alight between its two bricks and
plastering the whole room with a smell of sooti turning it into one of those great
rustic open hearths, or one of those canopied man-telpieces in country houses, beneath
which one sits hop-ing that in the world outside it is raining or snowing, hoping almost
for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of being in winter quarters to the comfort
of a snug retreat; I would pace to and fro between the prie-dieu and the stamped velvet
armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking
like dough the appetising smells with which the air of the room was thickly clotted
and which the moist and sunny freshness of the morning had already "raised" and started
to "set," puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible
though not impalpable country pie, an immense "turnover" to which, barely waiting to
savour the crisper, more delicate, more reputable but also drier aromas of the cupboard,
the chest of drawers and the patterned wall-paper, I always returned with an unconfessed
gluttony to wallow in the central, glutinous, insipid, indigestible and fruity smell of
the flowered bedspread.
　　　　In the next room I could hear my aunt talking quietly to herself. She never spoke
except in low tones, because she believed that there was something broken inside her
head and floating loose there, which she might displace by talking too loud, but she never
remained for long, even when alone, without saying something, because she believed
that it was good for her throat, and that by keeping the blood there in circulation it would
make less frequent the chokings and the pains from which she suffered; besides, in the
life of complete inertia which she led, she attached to the least of her sensations an
extraordinary importance, endowed them with a Protean ubiquity which made it difficult
for her to keep them to herself, and, failing a confidant to whom she might communicate
them, she used to promulgate them to herself in an unceasing monologue which was her
sole form of activity. Unfortunately, having formed the habit of thinking aloud, she did
not always take care to see that there was no one in the adjoining room, and I would
often hear her saying to her self: "I must not forget that I never slept a wink"--for
"never sleeping a wink" was her great claim to distinction, and one admitted and re-
spected in our household vocabulary: in the morning Francoise would not "wake" but
would simply "go in" to her; during the day, when my aunt wished to take a nap, we used
to say just that she wished to "ponder" or to "rest"; and when in conversation she so
far forgot herself as to say "what woke me up," or "I dreamed that," she would blush
and at once correct herself.
　　　　After waiting a minute, I would go in and kiss her; Francoise would be making her
tea; or, if my aunt felt agitated, she would ask instead for her tisane, and it would
be my duty to shake out of the chemist's little package on to a plate the amount of lime-
blossom required for infusion in boiling water. The drying of the stems had twisted them
into a fantastic trellis, in the interlacings of which the pale flowers opened, as though
a painter had arranged them there, grouping them in the most decorative poses. The
leaves, having lost or altered their original appearance, resembled the most disparate
things, the transparent wing of a fly, the blank side of a label, the petal of a rose. which
had all been piled together, pounded or interwoven like the materials for a nest. A thous-
sand trifling little details--a charming prodigality on the part of the chemist--details
which would have been eliminated from an artificial preparation, gave me, like a book in
which one reads with astonished delight the name of a person one knows, the pleasure of
finding that these were sprigs of real lime-trees, like those I had seen, when coming from
the train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered indeed, precisely because they were not
imitations but themselves, and because they had aged. And as each new character is
merely a metamorphosis from something earlier, in these little grey balls I recognised
green buds plucked before their time; but beyond all else the rosy, lunar, tender gleam
that lit up the blossoms among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little
golden roses--marking, as the glow upon an old wall still marks the place of a vanished
fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree which had and those which had
not been "in colour"--showed me that these were indeed petals which, before filling the
chemist's bag with their spring fragrance, had perfumed the evening air. That rosy candle-
glow was still their colour, but half-extinguished and deadened in the diminished life which
was now theirs, and which may be called the twilight of a flower. Presently my aunt would
dip a little madeleine in the boiling infusion, whose taste of dead leaves or faded blossom
she so relished, and hand me a piece when it was sufficiently soft.
　　　　At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest of drawers of lemon-wood, and a
table which served at once as dispensary and high altar, on which, beneath a statue of
the Virgin and a bottle of Vichy-Celestins, might be found her prayer-books and her
medical prescriptions, everything that she needed for the performance, in bed of her
duties to soul and body, to keep the proper times for pepsin and for vespers. On the
other side her bed bounded by the window: she had the street in full and would while
away the time by reading in ue morning to night, like the Persian princes of old, th
but immemorial chronicles of Combray, which she would discuss in detail later with
Francoise.
　　　　Scarcely had I been five minutes with my aunt before she would send me away for
fear that I might tire her. She would hold out for me to kiss her sad, pale, lacklustre
forehead, on which at this early hour she would not yet have arranged the false hair and
through which the bones shone like the points of a crown of thorns or the beads of a
rosary, and she would say to me: "Now, my poor child, off you go and get ready for mass;
and if you see Francoise downstairs, tell her not to stay too long amusing herself with
you; she must come up soon to see if I need anything."
　　　　Francoise, who had been for many years in my aunt's service and did not at that
time suspect that she would one day be transferred entirely to ours, was a little in-
clined to neglect my aunt during the months which we spent there. There had been in my
early childhood, before we first went to Combray, and when my aunt Leonie used still to
spend the winter in Paris with her mother, a time when I knew Francoise so little that
on New Year's Day, before going into my great-aunt's house, my mother would put a five-
franc piece into my hand and say: "Now, be careful. Don't make any mistake. Wait until
you hear me say 'Good morning, Francoise,' and tap you on the arm, before you give it to
her." No sooner had we arrived in my aunt's dark hall than we saw in the gloom, beneath
the frills of a snowy bonnet as stiff and fragile as if it had been made of spun sugar,
the concentric ripples of a smile of anticipatory gratitude. It was Francoise, motion-
less and erect, framed in the small doorway of the corridor like the statue of a saint
in its niche. When we had grown more accustomed to this religious darkness we could di-
scern in her features the disinterested love of humanity, the tender respect for the
gentry, which the hope of receiving New Year bounty intensified in the nobler regions of
her heart. Mamma pinched my arm sharply and said in a loud voice: "Good morning, Fran-
coise." At this signal my fingers parted and I let fall the coin, which found a receptacle
in a shy but outstretched hand. But since we had begun to go to Combray there was no
one I knew better than Francoise. We were her favourites, and in the first years at least
she showed for us not only the same consideration as for my aunt, but a keener relish,
because we had, in addition to the prestige of belonging to "the family" (for she had for
those invisible bonds which the community of blood creates between the members of a
family as much respect as any Greek tragedian), the charm of not being her customary
employers.' And so with what joy would she welcome us, with what sorrow complain that
the weather was still so bad for us, on the day of our arrival, just before Easter, when
there was often an icy wind; while Mamma inquired after her daughter and her nephews,
and if her grandson was a nice boy, and what they were going to do with him, and whe-
ther he took after his granny.
　　　　And later, when no one else was in the room. Mamma, who knew that Francoise was
still mourning for her parents, who had been dead for years, would speak to her kindly
about them, asking her endless little questions concerning their lives.
　　　　She had guessed that Francoise was not over-fond of her son-in-law, and that he
spoiled the pleasure she found in visiting her daughter, with whom she could not talk so
freely when he was there. And so, when Francoise was going to their house, some miles
from Combray, Marnruaf would say to her with a smile: "Tell me, Francoise, if Julien has
had to go away, and you have Marguerite to yourself all day, you'll be very sorry, but you
will make the best of it, won't you?"
　　　　And Francoise answered, laughing: "Madame knows everything; Madame is worse
than the X-rays" (she pronounced the "x" with an affectation of difficulty and a. self-
mocking smile that someone so ignorant should employ this learned term) "that they
brought here for Mme Octave, and which can see what's in your heart" --and she went
off, overwhelmed that anyone should be caring about her, perhaps anxious that we should
not see her in tears: Mamma was the first person who had given her the heart-warming
feeling that her peasant existence, with its simple joys and sorrows, might be an object of
interest, might be a source of grief or pleasure to someone other than herself.





　　　　"I'm sure you wouldn't, my poor Francoise," my aunt would reply, shrugging her
shoulders. "From the cures, indeed! You know quite well that he never grows anything but
wretched little twigs ot asparaus. I tell you these ones were as thick as my arm. Not your
arm, of course, but my poor arm, which has grown so much thinner again this year...Fran-
coise, didn't you hear that bell just now that nearly split my skull?"
　　　　"No, Mme Octave."
　　　　"Ah, my poor girl, your skull must be very thick; you may thank God for that. It was
Maguelone come to fetch Dr Piperaud. He came out with her at once and they went off
along the Rue de l'Oiseau. There must be some child ill."
　　　　"Oh, dear God!" Francoise would sigh, for she could not hear of any calamity be-
falling a person unknown to her, even in some distant part of the world, without beginning
to lament.
　　　　"Francoise, who were they tolling the knell for just now? Oh dear, of course, it
would be for Mme Rousseau. And to think that I had forgotten that she passed away the
other night. Ah! it's time the good Lord called me too; I don't know what has become of
my head since I lost my poor Octave. But I'm wasting your time, my good girl."
　　　　"Not at all, Mme Octave, my time is not so precious; the one who made it doesn't
charge us for it: I'm just going to see if my fire's going out."
　　　　Thus Francoise and my aunt between them made a critical evaluation, in the course
of these morning sessions, of the earliest events of the day. But sometimes these
events assumed so mysterious or so alarming a character that my aunt felt she could
not wait until it was time for Francoise to come upstairs, and then a formidable and
quadruple peal would resound through the house.






　　　　But it was not for nothing, as my aunt well knew, that she had rung for Francoise,
since at Combray a person whom one "didn't know from Adam" was as incredible a being
as any mythological deity, and indeed no one could remember, on the various occasions
when one of these startling apparitions had occurred in the Rue du Saint-Esprit or in
the Square, exhaustive inquiries ever having failed to reduce the fabulous monster to the
proportions of a person whom one "did know," either personally or in the abstract, in
his or her civil status as being more or less closely related to some family in Combray. It
would turn out to be Mme Sauton's son back from military service, or the Abbe Perdreau's
niece home from her convent, or the Cure's brother, a tax-collector at Chateaudun, who
had just retired on a pension or had come over to Combray for the holidays. They had on
first appearance aroused the exciting thought that there might be in Combray people
hom one "didn't know from Adam," simply because they had not been recognised or iden-
tified at once. And yet long beforehand Mme Sauton and the Cure had given warning that
they expected their "strangers." Whenever I went upstairs on returning home of an eve-
ning, to tell my aunt about our walk, if I was rash enough to say to her that we had
passed, near the Pont-Vieux, a man whom my grandfather didn't know: "A man grand-
father didn't know from Adam!" she would exclaim. "That's a likely story." None the less,
she would be a little disturbed by the news, would wish to have it cleared up, and so my
grandfather would be summoned. "Who can it have been that you passed near the Pont-
Vieux, uncle? A man you didn't know from Adam?"
　　　　"Why, of course I knew him," my grandfather woud answer. "It was Prosper, Mme
Bouillebceuf s gardeners brother."
　　　　"Ah, good," my aunt would say, reassured .but slightly flushed; shrugging her
shoulders and smiling ironically, she would add: "You see, he told me that you passed a
man you didn't know from Adam!" After which would be warned to be more circumspect in
future, and lot to upset my aunt so by thoughtless remarks. Everyone was so well known
in Combray, animals as well as people, that if my aunt had happened to see a dog go by
which she "didn't know from Adam" she never stopped thinking about it, devoting all her
inductive talents and her leisure hours to this incomprehensible phenomenon.
　　　　"That will be Mme Sazerat's dog," Francoise would suggest, without any real con-
viction, but in the hope of appeasement, and so that my aunt should not "split her head."
　　　　"As if I didn't know Mme Sazerat's dog!" My aunt's critical mind would not be fobbed
off so easily.
　　　　"Well then, it must be the new dog M. Galopin brought back from Lisieux."
　　　　"Oh, if that's what it is!"
　　　　"They say he's a very friendly animal," Francoise would go on, having got the story
from Theodore, "as clever as a Christian, always in a good temper, always friendly, always
well-behaved. You don't often see an animal so gentlemanly at that age. Mme Octave, I've
got to leave you now; I haven't time to dilly-dally; it's nearly ten o'clock and my fire
not lighted yet, and I've still got to scrape my asparagus."
　　　　"What, Francoise, more asparagus! It's a regular ma-nia for asparagus you've got
this year. You'll make our Parisians sick of it."





How I loved our church, and how clearly I can see it still! The old porch by which
we entered, black, and full of holes as a colander, was worn out of shape and deeply fur-
rowed at the sides (as also was the font to which it led us) just as if the gentle fric-
tion of the cloaks of peasant-women coming into church, and of their fingers dipping into
the holy water, had managed by age-long repetition to acquire a destructive force, to im-
press itself on the stone, to carve grooves in it like those made by cart-wheels upon
stone gate-posts which they bump against every day. Its memorial stones, beneath which
the noble dust of the Abbots of Combray who lay buried there furnished the choir with a
sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time
had softened them and made them flow like honey beyond their proper margins. here
oozing out in a golden stream, washing from its place a florid Gothic capital, drowning the
white violets of the marble floor, and elsewhere reabsorbed into their limits, contracting
still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrange-
ment of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the
rest were disproportionately distended. Its windows were never so sparkling on days
when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you could be sure it would
be fine inside church. One of them was filled from top to bottom solitary figure, like the
king on a playing-card, who lived up there beneath his canopy of stone, between earth and
heaven, and in whose slanting blue gleam, on weekdays sometimes, at noon, when there
was no service (at one of those rare moments when the airy, empty church, more human
somehow and more luxurious, with the sun showing off all its rich furnishings, had
an almost habitable air, like the entrance hall--all sculptured stone and painted
glass--of some hotel in the mediaeval style), you might see Mme Sazerat kneel for an
instant, laying down on the seat next to hers a neatly corded parcel of little cakes
which she had just bought at the baker's and was taking home for lunch. In another,
a mountain of pink snow, at whose foot a battle was being fought, seemed to have
frozen against the very glass itself, which it swelled and distorted with its cloudy
sleet, like a window to which snowflakes have drifted and clung, illumined by the
light of dawn--the same, doubtless, that tinged the reredos of the altar with hues
so fresh that they seemed rather to be thrown on it momentarily by a light shining
from outside and shortly to be extinguished than painted and permanently fastened on
the stone. And all of them were so old that you could see, here and there, their sil-
very antiquity sparkling with the dust of centuries and Showing in its threadbare
brilliance the texture of their lovely tapestry of glass. There was one among them
which was a tall panel composed of a hundred little rectangular panes, of blue
principally, like an enormous pack of cards of the kind planned to beguile King
Charles VI; but, either because a ray of sunlight had gleamed through it or because my
own shifting glance had sent shooting across the window, whose colours died away and
were rekindled by turns, a rare and flickering fire--the next instant it had taken on
the shimmering brilliance of a peacock's tail, then quivered and rippled in a flaming
and fantastic shower that streamed from the groin of the dark and stony vault down the
moist walls, as though it were along the bed of some grotto glowing with sinuous
stalactites that I was following my parents, who preceded me with their prayer-books
clasped in their hands. A moment later the little lozenge panes had taken on the deep
transparency, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on some enormous
breastplate behind which, however, could be distinguished, dearer than all such
treasures, a fleeting smile from the sun, which could be seen and felt as well here,
in the soft, blue stream with which it bathed the jewelled windows, as on the pavement
of the Square or the straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when
we had come down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness
of the earth outside by quickening into blossom, as in some spring-time in old history
among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling, gilded carpet of forget-me-nots in glass.
　　　　There were two tapestries of high warp representing the coronation of Esther
(tradition had it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the features of one of the
kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of Guermantes whose lover he had been),
to which the colours, in melting into one another, had added expression, relief
ans light: a touch of pink over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their
outline; the yellow of her dress was so spread so unctuously, so thickly, as to have
acquired solidity, and stood out boldly against the receding ground; while the
green of the trees, still bright in the lower parts of the panel of silk and wool,
but quite "gone" at the top, brought out in a paler tone, above the dark trunks,
the yellowing upper branches, gilded and half-obliterated by the sharp though
sidelong rays of an invisible sun.
　　　　All this, and still more the treasures which had come to the church from
personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross
wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of
the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of
which I used to advance into the church, as we made our way to our seats, as
into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement in a rock, a
tree, a pond, the tangible traces of the little people's supernatural passage--
all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest
of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space--the
name of the fourth being Time--extending through the centuries its ancient nave,
which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer
not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged
triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the
thickness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches,
long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where, near the
porch, a deep cleft had been hollowed out by the tower staircase, and veiling it
even there by the graceful Gothic arcades which crowded coquettishly around it
like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers,
arrange themselves smilingly in front of a rustic, peevish and ill-dressed
younger brother; raising up into the sky above the Square a tower which had
looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to see him still; and thrusting down
with its crypt into a Merovingian darkness, through which, guiding us with
groping fingertips beneath the shadowy vault, powerfully ribbed like an immense
bat's wing of stone, Theodore and his sister would light up for us with a
candle the tomb of Sigebert's daughter, in which a deep cavity, like the bed
of a fossil had been dug, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the
night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had detached itself, of its
own accord, from the golden chains by which it was suspended on the site of
the pres. ent apse and, with neither the crystal being broken nor the light
extinguished, had buried itself in the stone, which had softly given way
beneath it."
　　　　And then the apse of Combray: what can one say of that? It was so crude,
so devoid of artistic beauty, even of religious feeling. From the outside,
since the street crossing which it commanded was on a lower level, its
great wall was thrust upwards from a basement of unlaced ashlar, jagged with
flints, in which there was nothing particularly ecclesiastical, the windows
seemed to have been pierced at an abnormal height, and its whole appearance
was that of a prison wall rather than of a church. And certainly in later
years, when I recalled all the glorious apses that I had seen, it would never
have occurred to me to compare with any one of them the apse of Combray





　　　　The church! Homely and familiar, cheek by jowl in the Rue Saint-Hilaire,
upon which its north door opened, with its two neighbours, Mme Loiseau's house
and M. Rapin's pharmacy, against which its walls rested without interspace,
a simple citizen of Combray, which might have had its number in the street had
the streets of Com-bray borne numbers, and at whose door one felt that the
postman ought to stop on his morning rounds, before go-ing into Mme Loiseau's
and after leaving M. Rapin's, there existed, none the less, between the church
and everything in Combray that was not the church a clear line of demarcation
which my mind has never succeeded in crossing. in vain might Mme Loiseau deck
her window-sills with fuchsias, which developed the bad habit of letting their
branches trail at all times and in all directions, head downwards, and whose
flowers had no more important business, when they were big enough to taste the
joys of life, than to go and cool their purple, congested cheeks against the
dark front of the church, to me such conduct sanctified the fuchsias not at all;
between the flowers and the blackened stone against which they leaned, if my
eyes could discern no gap, my mind preserved the impression of an abyss.
　　　　The steeple of Saint-Hilaire could be distinguished from a long way off,
inscribing its unforgettable form upon a horizon against which Combray had not
yet appeared; when from the train which brought us down frorri Paris at Easter-
time my father caught sight of it, as it slipped into every fold of the sky in
turn; its little iron weathercock veering in all directions, he would say:
"Come on, get your wraps together, we're there." And on one of the longest
walks we used to take from Cornbray there was a spot where the narrow road
emerged suddenly on to an immense plain, closed at the horizon by a jagged
ridge of forest above which rose the solitary point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple,
so slender and so pink that it seemed to be no more than scratched on the sky
by the finger-nail of a painter anxious to give to such a land-scape, to so
pure a piece of nature, this little sign of art, this single indication of
human existence. As one drew near it and could see the remains of the square
tower, half in ruins, which still stood by its side, though without rivalling
it in height, one was struck most of all by the dark-red tone of its stones;
and on a misty morning in au-tumn one might have thought it, rising above the
violet thunder-cloud of the vineyards, a ruin of purple, almost the colour of
Virginia creeper.
　　　　Often in the Square, as we came home, my grandmother would make me
stop to look up at it. From the tower windows, placed two by two, one pair above
another, with that right and original proportion in their spacing which gives
beauty and dignity not only to human faces, it released, it let fall at regul-
ar intervals, flocks of jackdaws which would wheel noisily for a while, though
the ancient stones which allowed them to disport themselves without seeming to
see them, becoming of asudden untenantable and discharging some element of
extreme perturbation, had struck them and driven them out. Then, having criss-
crossed in all directions the violet velvet of the evening air, they would return,
suddenly calmed, to absorb themselves in the tower, baleful longer but benignant,
some perching here and there (not seeming to move, but perhaps snapping up
some passing insect) on the points of turrets, as a seagull perches with an angler's
immobility on the crest of a wave. Without quite knowing why, my grandmother
found in the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that absence of vulgarity, pretension,
and niggardliness which made her love, and deem rich in beneficent influences,
nature itself--when the hand of man had not, as did my great-aunt's gardener,
trimmed it--and the works of genius.: And certainly every part of the church
that one saw distinguished it from any other building by a kind of innate
thoughtfulness, but it was in its steeple that it seemed most truly to find
itself, to affirm its individual and responsible existence. It was the steeple
that spoke for the church. I think, too, that in a confused way my grandmother
found in the steeple of Combray what she prized above anything else in the
world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinction. Ignorant of architec-
ture, she would say:
　　　　"My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful,
but there is something in its quaint old face that pleases me. If it could play
the piano, I'm sure it wouldn't sound tinny." And when she gazed up at it, when
her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent inclination of its stony
slopes which drew together as they rose, like hands joined in prayer, she would
absorb herself so utterly in the effusion of the spire that her gaze seemed to
leap upwards with it; her lips at the same time curving in a friendly smile for
the worn old stones of which the setting sun now illumined no more than the top-
most pinnacles and which, at the point where they entered that sunlit zone and
were softened by it, seemed to have mounted suddenly far higher, to have become
truly remote, like a song taken up again in a "head voice," an octave above.
　　　　It was the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that shaped and crowned and consecrated
every occupation, every hour of the day, every view in the town. From my bedroom
window I could discern no more than its base, which had been freshly covered with
slates; but when, on a Sunday, I saw these blaze like a black sun in the hot light
of a summer morning, I would say to myself: "Good heavens! nine o'clock! I must
get ready for mass at once if I am to have time to go in and kiss aunt Leonie
first," and I would know exactly what was the colour of the sunlight upon the
Square, I could feel the heat and dust of the market, the shade thrown by the
awning of the shop into which Mamma would perhaps go on her way to mass, penetra-
ting its odour of unbleached calico, to purchase a handkerchief or something which
the draper, bowing from the waist, would order to be shown to her while, in readi-
ness for shutting up, he went into the back shop to put on his Sunday coat and to
wash his hands, which it was his habit, every few minutes, even in the most melan-
choly circumstances, to rub together with an air of enterprise. cunning, and suc-
cess.
　　　　And again, after mass, when we looked in to tell Theodore to bring a larger
loaf than usual because our cousins had taken advantage of the fine weather to
come over from Thiberzy for lunch, we had in front of us the steeple which, baked
golden-brown itself like a still larger consecrated loaf, with gummy flakes
and droplets of sunlight, thrust its sharp point into the blue sky. And, in the
evening, when I came in from my walk and thought of: the approaching moment when
I must say good night to my mother and see her no more:--the steeple was by con-
trast so soft and gentle, there at the close of day, that it looked as if it had
been thrust like a brown velvet cushion against the pallid sky which had yielded
beneath its pressure, had hollowed slightly to make room for it, and had corre-
spondingly risen on either side; while the cries of the birds that wheeled around
it seemed to intensify its silence, to elongate its spire still further, and to
invest it with some quality beyond the power of words.





I shall never forget, in a quaint Norman town not far from Balbec, two charming
eighteenth-century houses, dear to me and venerable for many reasons, between which,
when one looks up at it from the fine garden which descends in terraces to the river,
the Gothic spire of a church (itself hidden by the houses) soars into the sky with the
effect of crowning and completing their facades, but in a style so different, so precious,
so annulated, so pink, so polished, that one sees at once that it no more belongs
to them than would the purple, crinkled spire of some sea-shell spun out into a
turret and gay with glossy colour to a pair of handsome, smooth pebbles between
which it had been washed up on the beach. Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest
parts of the town, I know a window from which one can see across a first, a se-
cond, and even a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street,' a violet dome,
sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest "prints" which the atmosphere
makes of it, of an ashy solution of black, which is, in fact, none other than
the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this view of Paris the char-
acter of some of the Piranesi views of Rome. But since into none of these lit-
tle etchings, whatever the discernment my memory may have been able to bring
to their execution, was it able to contribute an element I have long lost, the
feeling which makes us not merely regard a thing as a spectacle, but believe in
it as in a unique essence, so none of them keeps in its thrall a whole section
of my inmost life as does the memory of those aspects of the steeple of Cornbray
from the streets behind the church. Whether one saw it at five o'clock when go-
ing to call for letters at the post-office, some doors away from one, on the left,
raising abruptly with its isolated peak the ridge of housetops; or whether, if
one were looking in to ask for news of Mme Sazerat, one's eyes followed that
ridge which had now become low again after the descent of its other slope, and
one knew that it would be the second turning after the steeple; or again if,
pressing further afield, one went tho the station and saw it obliquely, showing
in profile fresh angles and surfaces, like a solid body surprised at some
unknown point in its revolution; or if seen from the banks of the Vivonne, the
apse, crouched muscularly and heightened by the perspective, seemed to spring
upward with the effort which the steeple was making to hurl its spire-point
into the heart of heaven--it was alwavs to the steeple that one must return,
always the steeple that dominated everything else, summoning the houses from an
unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the finger of God, whose body might
have been concealed below among the crowd of humans without fear of my confusing
it with them. And so even today, if, in a large provincial town, or in a quarter
of Paris which I do not know very well, a passer-by who is "putting me on the
right road" shows me in the distance, as a point to aim at, some hospital bel-
fry or convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap at the corner
of the street which I am to take, my memory need only find in it some dim resem-
blance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round
to make sure that I have not gone astray, may be amazed to see me still standing
there, oblivious of the walk that I had planned to take or the place where I was
obliged to call, gazing at the steeple for hours on end, motionless, trying to
remember, feeling deep within my-self a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters
of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt,
and then more anxiously than when, just now, I asked him to direct me, I seek my
way again, I turn a corner. . . but. . . the goal is in my heart . . .
　　　　On our way home from mass we would often meei M. Legrandin, who, detained
in Paris by his professional duties as an engineer, could only (except in the
regular holiday seasons) visit his house at Combray between Saturday evenings
and Monday mornings. He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific
career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired
an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their
professional specialisation has no use but by which their conversation profits.
More lettered than many men of letters (we were not aware at this period that
M. Legrandin had a distinct reputation as a writer, and were greatly astonished
to find that a well-known composer had set some verses of his to music), en-
dowed with greater "facility" than many painters, they imagine that the life
they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they
bring to their regular occupations either an indifference tinged with fantasy,
or a sustained and haughty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.
Vtall and handsome of bearing, with a fine, thoughtful face, drooping fair
moustaches, blue eyes, an air of disenchantment, an almost exaggerated re-
finement of courtesy, a talker such as we had never heard, he was in the sight
of my family, who never ceased to quote him as an example, the very pattern of
a gentleman, who took life in the noblest and most delicate manner. My grand-
mother alone found fault with him for speaking a little too well, a little too
much like a book, for not using a vocabulary as natural as his loosely knotted
bow-ties, his short, straight, almost schoolboyish coat. She was astonished,
too, at the furious tirades which he was always launching at the aristocracy,
at fashionable life, at snobbishness--"undoubtedly," he would say, "the sin of
which St Paul is thinking when he speaks of the unforgivable sin against the Holy
Ghost."
　　　　Worldly ambition was a thing which my grandmother was so little capable
of feeling, or indeed of understanding, that it seemed to her futile to apply so
much heat to its condemnation. Besides, she did not think it in vert good taste
for M. Legrandin, whose sister was a country gentleman of Lower Normandy, near
Balbec, to deliver himself of such violent attacks upon the nobility, going so
far as to blame the Revolution for not having guillotined them all.
"Well met, my friends!" he would say as he came to-wards us. "You are
lucky to spend so much time here; to morrow - I have to go back to Paris, to
squeeze back into my niche. Oh, I admit," he went on, with the gentle, ironical,
disillusioned, rather absent-minded smile that was peculiar to him, "I have
every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is
the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep
a patch of sky above your life, little boy," he added, turning to me. "You have
a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack
of what it needs."





　　　　Eulalie was a limping, energetic, deaf spinster who had "retired" after
the death of Mme de la Bretonnerie, with whom she had been in service since her
childhood, and had then taken a room beside the church from which she would
incessantly emerge either to attend some service or, when there was no service,
to say a prayer by herself or to give Theodore a hand; the rest of her time she
spent in visiting sick persons like my aunt Lionie, to whom she would relate
everything that had occurred at mass or vespers. She was not above adding occa-
sional pocket-money to the small annuity paid to her by the family of her former
employers by going from time to time to look after the Cure's linen, or that of
some other person of note in the clerical world of Combray. Above a mantle of
black cloth she wore a little white coif that seemed almost to attach her to
some Order, and an infirmity of the skin had stained part of her cheeks and
her crooked nose the bright red colour of balsam. Her visits were the one great
distraction in the life of my aunt Lionie, who now saw hardly anyone else, ex-
cept the Cure. My aunt had by degrees dropped every other visitor's name from
her list, because they were all guilty of the fatal error, in her eyes, of fall-
ing into one or other of the two categories of people she most detested. One
group, the worse of the two, and the one of which she rid herself first, con-
sisted of those who advised her not to "coddle" herself, and preached (even if
only negatively and with no outward signs beyond an occasional disapproving silence
or doubting smile) the subversive doctrine that a sharp walk in the sun and a good
red beefsteak would do her more good (when she had had only two wretched
mouthfuls of Vichy water on her stomach for fourteen hours!) than her
bed and her medicines. The other category was composed of people who appeared:
believe that she was more seriously ill than she thoug t: in fact that she was
as seriously ill as she said.





　　　　And since besides this Eulalie knew, as no one else knew, how to distract
my aunt without tiring her, her visits, which took place regularly every Sun-
day, unless something unforeseen occurred to prevent them, were for my aunt a
pleasure the prospect of which kept her on those days in a state of expecta-
tion, agreeable enough to begin with, but swiftly changing to the agony of a
hunger too long unsatisfied if Eulalie happened to be a little late. For, if
unduly prolonged, the rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture, and
my aunt would never stop looking at the time, and yawning, and complaining of
each of her symptoms in turn. Eulalie's ring, if it sounded from the front
door at the very end of the day, when she was no longer expecting it, would
almost make her ill. For the fact was that on Sundays she thought of nothing
else but this visit, and the moment our lunch was ended Francoise would be
impatient for us to leave the dining-room so that she might go upstairs to
"occupy" my aunt. But--especially after the fine weather had definitely set
in at Combray--the proud hour of noon, descending from the steeple of Saint-
Hilaire which it blazoned for a moment with the twelve points of its
sonorous crown, would long have echoed about our table, beside the blessed
bread, which too had come in, after church, in its famar way, and we would
still be seated in front of our Arabian Nights plates, weighed down by the
heat of the day even more by our heavy meal. For upon the permanent foun-
dation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, preserves, and biscuits, which she no
longer even bothered to announce, Francoise would add--as the labour of
fields and orchards, the harvest of the tides, the luck of the markets, the
kindness of neighbours, and her own genius might provide, so that our bill
of fare, like the quatrefoils that were carved on the porches of cathedrals
in the thirteenth century, reflected to some extent the rhythm of the sea-
sons and the incidents of daily life--a brill because the fish-woman had
guaranteed its freshness, a turkey because she had seen a beauty in the market
at Roussainville-le-Pin, cardoons with marrow because she had never done them
for us in that way before, a roast leg of mutton because the fresh air made
one hungry and there would be plenty of time for it to "settle down" in the
seven hours before dinner, spinach by way of a change, apricots because they
were still hard to get, gooseberries because in another fortnight there would
be none left, raspberries which M. Swann had brought specially, cherries, the
first to come from the cherry-tree which had yielded none for the last two
years, a cream cheese, of which in those days I was extremely fond, an almond
cake because she had ordered one the evening before, a brioche because it was
our turn to make them for the church. And when all this was finished, a work
composed expressly for ourselves, but dedicated more particularly to my father
who had a fondness for such things, a chocolate cream, Francoise's Personal
inspiration and speciality would be laid before us, light and fleeting as an
"occasional" piece of music into which she had poured the whole of her talent.
Anyone who refused to partake of it, saying: "No, thank you. I've finished;
I'm not hungry any more," would at once have been relegated to the level of
those Philistines who, even when an artist makes them a present of one of his
works, examine its weight and material, whereas what is of value is the crea-
tor's intention and his signature. To have left even the tiniest morsel in the
dish would have shown as much discourtesy as to rise and leave a concert hall
before the end of a piece under the composer's very eyes.
　　　　At length my mother would say to me: "Now, don't stay here all day; you
can go up to your room if you are too hot outside, but get a little fresh air
first; don't start reading immediately after your food." And I would go and sit
down beside the pump and its trough, ornamented here and there, like a Gothic
font, with a salamander, which impressed on the rough stone the mobile relief
of its tapering allegorical body, on the bench without a back, in the shade of
a lilac-tree in that little corner of the garden which opened, through a
service door, on to the Rue du Saint-Esprit, and from whose neglected soil
there rose, in two stages, jutting out from the house itself, ancl as it were
a separate building, my aunt's back-kitchen. One could see its red-tiled floor
gleaming like porphyry. It seemed not so much the cave of Francoise as a
little temple of Venus. It would be overflowing with the offerings of the
dairyman, the fruiterer, the greengrocer, come sometimes from distant villages
to dedicate to the goddes: the first-fruits of their fields. And its roof was
always crowned with a cooing dove.
　　　　In earlier days I did not linger in the sacred grove which surrounded
this temple, for, before going upstairs to read, I used to steal into the little
sitting-rooam old n ala uncle Adolphe, a brother of my grandfather and an old
soldier who had retired from the service as a major, occupied on the ground
floor, a room which, even when its opened windows let in the heat, if not act-
ually the rays of the sun which seldom penetrated so far, would never fail to
emit that oddly cool odour, suggestive at once of woodlands and the ancient
regime, which sets the nostrils quivering when one goes into an abandoned
shooting-lodge. But for some years now I had not gone into my uncle Adolphe's
sanctum, for he no longer came to Combray on account of a quarrel which had
arisen between him and my family, through my fault, in the following circum-
stances:
　　　　Once or twice a month, in Paris, I used to be sent to pay him a visit,
as he was finishing his luncheon, wearing a simple jacket and waited upon by his
manservant in a tunic of striped drill, purple and white. He would complain that
I had not been to see him for a long time, that he was being neglected; he would
offer me a biscuit or a tangerine, and we would go through a drawing-room in
which no one ever sat, whose fire was never lighted, whose walls were decorated
with gilded mouldings, its ceiling painted blue in imitation of the sky, and its
furniture upholstered in satin, as at my grandparents', only yellow; then we
would enter what he called his "study," a room whose walls were hung with prints
which showed, against a dark background, a pink and fleshy goddess driving a
chariot, or standing upon a globe, or wearing a star on her brow--pictures which
were popular under the e Second Empire because there was thought to be were thing
about them that suggested Pompeii, which then generally despised, and which are
now becoming fashionable again for one single and consistent reason (notwith-
standing all the others that are advanced), namely, that they suggest the Second
Empire.





　　　　At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, since my par-
ents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and so inaccurate was the picture I
had formed in my mind's eye of the pleasures to be enjoyed there that I almost
believed that each of the spectators looked, as through a stereoscope, at a
scene that existed for himself alone, though similar to the thousand other
scenes pre-sented to the rest of the audience individually.
　　　　Every morning I would hasten to the Morris column to see what new plays it
announced. Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than the day-dreams
with which these announcements filled my imagination, day-dreams which were con-
ditioned by the associations of the words forming the titles of the plays, and
also by the colour of the bills, still damp and wrinkled with paste, on which
those words stood out. Nothing, unless it such strange titles as the Testament
de Cesar Girodot Oedipus Rex, inscribed not on the green bills of_ the Opera-
Comique hut on the wine-coloured bills of the Comedie-Frangaise, nothing
seemed to me to differ more profoundly from the sparkling white plume of the Dia
mants de la Couronne than the sleek, mysterious satin of the Domino Noir; and
since my parents had told me that, for my first visit to the theatre, I should
have to choose between these two pieces, I would study exhaustively and in turn
the title of one and the title of the other (for these were all that I knew of
either), attempting to snatch from each a foretaste of the pleasure it promised,
and to compare this with the pleasure latent in the other, until in the end I
succeeded in conjuring up such vivid and com. pelling pictures of, on the one
hand, a play of dazzling arrogance, and on the other a gentle, velvety play,
that I was as little capable of deciding which of them I should prefer to see as
if, at the dinner-table, I had been obliged to choose between rice a l'Impera-
trice and the famous chocolate cream.)
　　　　All my conversations with my friends bore upon actors, whose art, although
as yet I had no experience of it, was the first of all its numberless forms in
which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its enjoyment. Between one actor's
tricks of intonation and inflection and another's, the most trifling differences
would strike me as being of an incalculable importance. And from what I had been
told of them II would arrange them in order of talent in lists which I used to
recite to myself all day and which ended up by hardening in my brain and hampering
it by their immovability.'
　　　　And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in Class, as soon as the
master's head was turned, to communicate with some new friend, I would always be-
gin by asking him whether he had already been to the theatre, and whether he agreed
that our greatest actor was Got our second Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his
judgrnen; Febvre came below Thiron, or Delaunay below Coquelin the sudden vola-
tility which the name of Coquelin, forsaking its stony rigidity, would acquire in
my mind, in order to move up to second place, the miraculous agility, the fecund
animation with which the name of Delaunay would suddenly be endowed, to enable it
to slip down to fourth, would stimulate and fertilise my brain with a sense of bud-
ding and blossoming life.
　　　　




　　　　I felt somewhat disillusioned, for this young lady was in no way different from
other pretty women whom I had seen from time to time at home, in particular the
daughter of one of our cousins to whose house I went every New Year's Day. Apart from
being better dressed, my uncle's friend had the same quick and kindly glance, the same
frank and friendly manner. I could find no trace in her of the theatrical appearance
which I admired in photographs of actresses, nothing of the diabolical expression
which would have been in keeping with the life she must lead. I had difficulty in be-
lieving that she was a courtesan, and certainly I should never have believed her to
be an ultra-fashionable one, had I not seen the carriage and pair, the pink dress,
the pearl necklace, had I not been aware too, that my uncle knew only those of the
top hat. But I asked myself how the millionaire who gave her her carriage and her
house and her jewels could find of any pleasure in flinging his money away upon a
woman of so simple and respectable an appearance. And yet, when I thought of what
her life must be like, its immorality disturbed me more, perhaps, than if it had
stood before me in some concrete and recognisable form, by being thus invisible,
like the secret of some novel or some scandal which had driven out of the home of
her genteel parents and dedicated to the service of all mankind, which had brought
to a bright bloom of beauty and raised to fame or notoriety, this woman the play
of whose features, the intonations of whose voice, reminiscent of so many others
I already knew, made me regard her, in spite of myself, as a young lady of good
family, when she was no longer of any family at all.
　　　　We had moved by this time into the "study," and my uncle, who seemed a trifle
embarrassed by my presence, offered her a cigarette.
　　　　"No, thank you, my dear," she said. "You know I only smoke the ones the grand
duke sends me. I told him that they made you jealous." And she drew from a case
cigarettes covered with gilt lettering in a foreign language. "But of course," she
began again suddenly, I must have met this young man's father with you. Isn't he
your nephew? How on earth could I have forgotten? He was so nice, so exquisitely
charming to me," she added, with an air of warmth and modesty. But when I thought
to myself, knowing my father's coldness and reserve what must actually have been
the brusque greeting which she claimed to have found so charming, I was embarr-
assed as though at some indelicacy on his part, by the contrast between the ex-
cessive recognition bestowed on it and his want of geniality. It has since struck
me as one most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, pain-
staking women, that they devote their generosity, their talent, a disposable
dream of sentiment (for, like artists, they never seek to realise the value of
their dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and
a wealth that counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting
for the rough, ill-polished lives of men. And just as this one filled the smoking-
room, where my uncle was entertaining her in his jacket, with the aura of her
charming person, her dress of pink silk, her pearls, the elegance that derives
from the friendship of a grand duke, so in the same way she had taken some casual
remark of my father's, had delicately fashioned it, given it a "turn," a precious
title, and embellishing it with a gem-like glance from her sparkling eyes, tinged
with humility and gratitude, had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work of
art, into something "exquisitely charming."
　　　　"Look here, my boy, it's time you were off," said my uncle.
　　　　I rose. I had an irresistible desire to kiss the hand of the lady in pink, but
I felt that to do so would require as much audacity as a forcible abduction. My heart
beat loud while I repeated to myself "Shall I do it, shall I not?" and then I ceased
to ask myself what I ought to do so as at least to do something. With a blind,
insensate gesture, divested of all the reasons in its favour that I had thought of
a moment before, I seized and raised to my lips the hand she held out to me.
　　　　'Isn't he delicious! Quite a ladies' man already; he takes after his uncle.
He'll be a perfect 'gentleman'" she added, clenching her teeth so as to give the
word a kind of, English accentuation. "Couldn't he come to me some day for 'a cup
of tea,' as our friends across the Channel say? He need only send me a 'blue' in
the morning?"





　　　　And so I no longer went into the little sitting (now kept shut) of my uncle
Adolphe; instead, after ha; jog about on the outskirts of the back-kitchen lin':
Francoise appeared on its threshold and announced: "I'm going to let my kitchen-
maid serve the coffee and take up the hot water; it's time I went off to Mme Oct-
ave," I would then decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my
room to read.' The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institu-
tion to which an invariable set of functions assured a sort of fixity and contin-
uity and identity throughout the succession of transitory human shapes in which it
was embodied; for we never had the same girl two years running. In the year is
which we ate such quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to
prepare them was a poor sickly creature, some way "gone" in pregnancy when we ar-
rived. a. at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that Francoise al-
lowed her to run so many errands and tityo so much work, for she was beginning to
find difficulty in bearing before her the mysterious basket, fuller and lager every
day, whose splendid outline could be detected beneath the folds of her ample smock.
This last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of his allegorical figures of
which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance,
and when he inquired after the kitchen maid he would say: "Well, how goes it with Gio-
tto's Charity?" And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened
every part of her, even including her face and her squarish, elongated cheeks, did
distinctly suggest those virgins, so sturdy and mannish as to seem matrons rather,
in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel. And I can see now that
those Virtues and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just
as the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which she
carried before her, without appearing to understand its meaning, with no awareness
in her facial expression of its beauty and spiritual significance, as if it were an
ordinary, rather heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspi-cion of what she
is about that the powerfully built house-wife who is portrayed in the Arena Chapel
beneath the label "Caritas," and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall
of my schoolroom at Combray, embodies that virtue, for it seems impossible that any
thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face.
By a fine stroke of the painter's Invention she is trampling all the treasures of the
earth beneath her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to
extract their juice, or rather as if she had climbed on to a heap of sacks to raise
herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart to God, or shall we say
"handing" it to him, exactly as a cook 'night hand up a corkscrew through the sky-
light of her basement kitchen to someone who has called down for it the ground-floor
window. The "Invidia," again, this. have had some look of envy on her face. But in this
fresco, too, the symbol occupies so large a place and is represented with such realism,
the serpent hissing between the lips of Envy is so huge, and so completely fills her
wide-opened mouth, that the muscles of her face strained and contorted, like those of
a child blowing up a balloon, and her attention--and ours too for that matter--is so ut-
terly concentrated on the activity of her lips as to leave little time to spare for
envious thoughts.
　　　　Despite all the admiration M. Swann professecifo r these figures of Giotto,
it was a long time before I c,ould find any pleasure in contemplating on the walls
of our schoolroom (where the copies he had brought me were hung) that Charity devoid
of charity, that Envy who looked like nothing so much as a plate in some medical book,
illustrating the compression of the glottis or the uvula by a tumour of the tongue or
by the introduction of the operator's instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly
regular features were identical with those which characterised the faces of certain
pious, desiccated ladies of Combray whom I used to see at mass and many of whom had
long been enrolled in the reserve forces of Injustice. But in later years I came to
understand that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes de-
rived from the great part played in them by symbolism, and the fact that this was
represented not as a symbol (for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed) but
as a reality, actually felt or materially handled, added some-thing more precise and
more literal to the meaning of the work, something more concrete and more striking to
the lesson it imparted. Similarly, in the case of the Poor kitchen-maid, was not one's
attention incessantly drawn. . and in to her belly by the weight which dragged it down;
and in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of the dying ten turned towards the
practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards that "seamy side" of death which is,
as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel,
and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a
destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name
of Death?
　　　　There must have been a strong element of reality in those Virtues and Vices of
Padua, since they appeared to me to be as alive as the pregnant servant-girl, while
she herself seemed scarcely less allegorical than they. And, quite possibly, this
lack (or seeming lack) of participation by a person's soul in the virtue of which he
or she is the agent has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which, if not
strictly psychological, may at least be called physiognomical. Since then, whenever
in the course of my life I have come across, in convents for instance, truly saintly
embodiments of practical charity, they have generally had the cheerful, practical,
brusque and unemotioned air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can dis-
cern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, no fear of
hurting it, the impassive, unsympathetic, sublime face of true goodness.
　　　　While the kitchen-maid--who, all unawares, made the superior qualities of Fran-
coise shine with added lustre, just as Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph
of Truth--served coffee which (according to Mamma) was nothing more than hot water,
and then carried up to our rooms hot water which was barely luke-warm, I would be ly-
ing stretched out on my bed with a book in my hand. My room quivered with the effort
to defend its frail, transparent coolness against the afternoon sun behind its almost
closed shutters through which, however, a gleam of daylight had contrived to insinuate
its golden wings, remaining motionless in a corner, between glass and woodwork, like a
butterfly poised upon a flower. It was hardly light enough for me to read, and a
sense of the day's brightness and splendour was derived solely from the blows struck
down below, in the Rue de la Cure, by Camus (whom Francoise had assured that my aunt
was not "resting" and that he might therefore maina noise) upon some dusty packing-
cases which, reverberating in the sonorous atmosphere that accompanies hot weather,
seemed to scatter broadcast a rain of blood-red stars; and also from the flies who per-
formed for my benefit, in their tiny chorus, as it were the chamber music of summer,
evoking it quite differently from a snatch of human music which, heard by chance in high
summer, will remind you of it later, whereas the music of the flies is I bound to the sea-
son by a more compelling tie--born of the sunny days, and not to be reborn but with them,
containing something of their essential nature, it not merely calls up their image in our
memory, but guarantees their return, their actual, circumjacent, immediately accessible
presence.
　　　　This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daY-light of the street what the
shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imaginat-
ion the entire panorama of summer, which my, senses, if I had been out walking, could
have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of
repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a
hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a tor-
rent of activity.
　　　　But my grandmother, even if the weather, after growing too hot, had broken, and a
storm, or just a shower, had burst over us, would come up and beg me to go out-side. And
as I did not wish to interrupt my reading, I would go on with it in the garden, under the
chestnut. tree, in a hooded chair of wicker and canvas in the depths of which I used to
sit and feel that I was hidden from the eyes of anyone who might be coming to call upon
the family.
　　　　And then my thoughts, too, formed a similar sort of recess, in the depths of which
I felt that I could bury my-self and remain invisible even while I looked at what went
on outside. When I saw an external object, my conscious-ness that I was seeing it would
remain between me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me
from ever touching its substance directly; for it would somehow evaporate before I could
make contact with it, just as an incandescent body that is brought into prox-imity with
something wet never actually touches its mois-ture, since it is always preceded by a zone
of evaporation. On the sort of screen dappled with different states and impressions which
my consciousness would simulta-neously unfold while I was reading, and which ranged
from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my being to the wholly external view of the
horizon spread out before my eyes at the bottom of the garden, what was my pri-mary, my
innermost impulse, the lever whose incessant movements controlled everything else, was
my belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and , my desire
to appropriate them for myself, whatever the book might be: For even if I had bought it at
Combray, having seen it outside Borange's--whose grocery lay too far from our house for
Francoise to be able to shop there, as she did at Camus's, but was bette stocked as a
stationer and bookseller--tied with string ,r keep it in its place in the mosaic of monthly
serials and pamphlets which adorned either side of his doorway, a doorway more myster-
ious, more teeming with suggestion than that of a cathedral, it was because I had recog-
nised it as a book which had been well spoken of by the school. master or the school-
friend who at that particular time seemed to me to be entrusted with the secret of truth
and beauty, things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full understanding of which
was the vague but permanent object of my thoughts.
　　　　Next to this central belief which, while I was reading, would be constantly reaching
out from my inner self to the outer world, towards the discovery of truth, came the emo-
tions aroused in me by the action in which I was tak-ing part, for these afternoons were
crammed with more dramatic events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime These were the
events taking place in the book I 'was reading. It is true that the people concerned in
them were not what Francoise would have called "real people." But none of the feelings
which the joys or misfortunes of real person arouse in us can be awakened except throve'
a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay
in his understanding that, as the image was the one essential element in the complicated
structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression,
pure and simple of real people would be a decided improvement. A real person, profoundly
as we may sympathise with him, is in great measure perceptible only through our senses,
that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the
strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the
complete idea we have of him that we are capable of any emotion; indeed it is only in one
small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable off feeling any
emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those
opaque sections, penetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections,
things, that is, which one's soul can assimilate. After which it matters not that the actions,
the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we
have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening. that they are
holding in thrall, as we feverishly turn over the pages of the book, our quickened breath
and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which. as in all
purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to
disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those which
come to us in sleep, why then, for the Space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys
and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have to Spend years of our act-
ual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us
because the slow course of their development prevents us tin perceiving them. It is the
same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through
reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural pheno-
mena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish succesively, each of its differ-
ent states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
　　　　Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself t than this human element,
would come the landscape more or less projected before my eyes, in which the plot' of the
story was taking place, and which made a far stronger impression on my mind than the
other, the actual landscape which met my eyes when I raised them from my book. Thus
for two consecutive summers I sat in the heat of our Combray garden, sick with a longing
inspired by the book I was then reading for a land of mountains and rivers, where I could
see innumerable sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments of wood lay
mouldering in beds of watercress; and near by, rambling and clustering along low walls,
purple and red flowers. And since there was always lurking in my mind the dream of a
woman who would enrich me with her love, that dream in those two summers was quick-
ened with the fresh coolness of running water; and whoever she might be, the woman
whose image I called to mind, flowers, purple and red, would at once spring up on
either side of her like complementary colours.





　　　　Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it de-
scribed, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate
conquest of truth. For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, sur-
rounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison: rather do we
seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to transcend it, to break out into
the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly all around us that
unvarying sound which is not an echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from
within. We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the
reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find
that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the asso-
ciation of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array
in order to bring our influence to bear on other human beings who, we very well know,
are situated outside ourselves where we can never reach them. And so. If I always
imagined the woman I loved in the setting I most longed at the time to visit, if I wished
that it were she who showed it to me, who opened to me the gates of an unknown world,
it was not by the mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because my
dreams of travel and of love were only moments which I isolate artificially today as though
I were cutting sections at different heights in a jet of water, iridescent but seemingly
without flow or motion--in a single, undeviating, irresistible outpouring of all the forces
of my life.
　　　　Finally, continuing to trace from the inside outswards these states simultaneously
juxtaposed in my consciousness, and before reaching the horizon of reality which envel-
oped them,. I discover pleasures of another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of
sniffing the fragrance of the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor, and, when an hour
chimed from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of seeing what was already spent of the after-
noon fall drop by drop until I heard the last stroke which enabled me to add up the total,
after which the long silence that followed seemed to herald the beginning, in the blue
sky above me, of all that part of the day that still remained to me for reading, until the
good dinner which Francoise was even now preparing and which would strengthen and
refresh me after the strenuous pursuit of the hero through the pages of my book. And
as each hour struck, it would seem to me that a few moments only had passed since the
hour before; the latest would inscribe itself close to its predecessor on the sky's surface,
and I was unable to believe that sixty minutes could have been squeezed into the tiny arc
of blue which was comprised between their two golden figures. Sometimes it would even
happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must
then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something that had taken place had.
not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest
slumber, had deceived my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell
from the azure surface of the enveloping silence. Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath
the chestnut tree in the garden at Combray, carefully purged by me of every commonplace
incident of my personal existence, which I had replaced with a life of strange adventures
and aspirations in a land watered with living streams, you still recall that life to me when I
think of you, and you emobdy it in effect by virtue of having gradually encircled and
enclosed it--while I went on with my reading and the heat of the day declined--in the
crystalline succession, slowly changing and dappled with foliage, of your silent, sonorous,
fragrant, limpid hours.
　　　　Sometimes I would be torn from my book in the middle of the afternoon by the gar-
dener's daughter, who came running wildly, overturning an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a
finger, breaking a tooth, and screaming "They're coming, they're coming!" so that Fran-
coise and I should run too and not miss anything of the show. That was on the days when
the cavalry from the local garrison passed through Combray on their way to manoeuvres,
going as a rule by the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde. While our servants, sitting in a row on their
chairs outside the garden railings, stared at the people of Combray taking their Sunday
walk and were stared at in return, the gardener s daughter, through the gap between two
distant houses in the Avenue de la Gare, had spied the glitter of helmets. The servants
had then hurried in with their chairs: for When the troopers paraded down the Rue Sainte-
Hildegarde they filled it from side to side, and their jostling horses scraped against the
walls of the houses, covering and submerging the pavements like banks which present too
narrow a channel to a river in flood.
　　　　"Poor boys," Francoise would exclaim, in tears almost before she had reached the
railings, "poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a meadow. It's just shocking to think
of," she would add, laying a hand over her heart where presumably she had felt the shock.
　　　　"A fine sight, isn't it, Mme Francoise, all these young fellows not caring two straws
for their lives?" the gardener would ask, just to "draw" her. And he would not have spo-
ken in vain.
　　　　"Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world should we care for if it's
not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time? Alas, dear God! You're
right all the same, they don't care! I can remember them in '70; in those wretched wars
they've no fear of death left in them; they're nothing more nor less than madmen; and
then they aren't worth the price of a rope to hall.g them with; they're not men any more,
they're lions." For by her way of thinking, to compare a man with a lion, which she used
to pronounce "lie-on," was not at all complimentary.





　　　　But Frangoise would hasten back to my aunt, and I would return to my book, and the
servants would take their Places again outside the gate to watch the dust settle en the
pavement and the excitement caused by the pas-sage of the soldiers subside. Long after
calm had been restored, an abnormal tide of humanity would continue to darken the
streets of Combray. And in front of every house, even those where it was not the custom,
the servents, and sometimes even the masters, would sit and watch, festooning the door-
steps with a dark, irregular fringe, like the border of shells and sea-weed which a stronger
tide than usual leaves on the beach, as though trimming it with embroidered crape, when
the sea itself has retreated.
　　　　Except on such days as these, however, I would as a rule be left to read in peace.
But the interruption and the commentary which a visit from Swann once occasioned in the
course of my reading, which had brought me to the work of an author quite new to me,
Bergotte, resulted in the consequence that for a long time afterwards it was not against a
wall gay with spikes of purple blossom, but against a wholly different background, the
porch of a Gothic cathedral, that I saw the figure of one of the women of whom I
dreamed.
　　　　I had heard Bergotte spoken of for the first time by a friend older than myself whom
I greatly admired, Bloch. Hearing me confess my admiration for the Nuit d'Octobre, he had
burst out in a loud bray of laughter like a bugle-call, and said to me: "You really must con-
quer your vile taste for A. de Musset, Esquire. He is a bad egg, one of the very worst, a
pretty detestable specimen: I am bound to admit, natheless, that he, and even the man
Racine, did, each of them, once in his life, compose a line which is not only fairly rhythm-
ical but has also what is in my eyes the supreme merit of meaning absolutely nothing. One
is La blanche Oloossone et la blanche Camyre,' and the other La flue de Minos et dePasiphae.





　　　　"And what's the name of this friend of yours who is coming this evening?"
　　　　"Dumont, grandpapa."
　　　　"Dumont! Oh, I don't like the sound of that."
　　　　And he would sing:

　　　　　　　 　　　　　Archers, be on your guard!
　　　　　　　　　　　　 Watch without rest, without sound.

　　　　And then, after a few adroit questions on points of detail, he would call out "On
guard! on guard," or, if it were the victim himself who had already arrived, and had been
unwittingly obliged, by subtle interrogation, to admit his origins, then my grandfather, to
show us that he had no longer any doubts, would merely look at us, humming under his
breath the air of

　　　　　　　　　　　　What! do you hither guide the feet
　　　　　　　　　　　　Of this timid Israelite?

or of

　　　　　　　　　　　　Sweet vale of Hebron,
　　　　　　　　　　　　dear paternal fields,

or, perhaps, of

　　　　　　　　　　　　Yes, I am of the chosen race.

　　　　These little eccentricities on my grandfather's part implied no ill-will whatsoever to-
wards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for other reasons. He had begun by
irritating my father, who, seeing him come i with wet clothes, had asked him with keen
interest:
　　　　"Why, M. Bloch, is there a change in the weather? Has it been raining? I can't
understand it; the barometer was set fair."
　　　　Which drew from Bloch nothing more than: "Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling
you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingen-cies that my
senses no longer trouble to inform me of them.
　　　　"My poor boy," said my father after Bloch had gone, "your friend is out of his mind.
Why, he couldn't even tell me what the weather was like. As if there could be anything
more interesting! He's an imbecile."
　　　　Next Bloch had displeased my grandmother because once, after lunch, when she
complained of not feeling very well, he had stifled a sob and wiped tears from his eyes.
"How can he possibly be sincere," she observed to me. "Why, he doesn't know me. Unless
he's mad, of course."
　　　　And finally he had upset the whole household when :lie arrived an hour and a half
late for dinner and covered with mud from head to foot, and made not the least apology
saying merely: "I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by
atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as time. I would
willingly re-introduce the use of the opium pipe or the Malay kris, but I know nothing a-
bout that of those infinitely more pernicious and moreover flatly bourgeois implements, the
umbrella and the watch."
　　　　In spite of all this he would still have been received at Combray. He was, of course,
hardly the friend my parents would have chosen for me; they had, in the end, decided that
the tears which he had shed on hearing of my grandmother's indisposition were genuine
enough; but they knew, either instinctively or from experience, that our impulsive emo-
tions have but little influence over the course of our actions and the conduct of our lives;
and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty to friends, patience in finishing our work,
obedience to a rule of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly
followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile. They would have preferr-
ed for me, instead of Bloch, companions who would have given me no more than it is pro-
per to give according to the laws of middle-class morality, who would not unexpectedly
send me a basket of fruit because they happened, that morning, to have thought of me
with affection but who, being incapable of inclining in my favour, by a simple impulse of
their imagination and sensibility, the exact balance of the duties and claims of friendship,
would be equally incapable of loading the scales to my detriment. Even our faults will not
easily divert from the path of their duty towards us those conventional natures of which
the model was my great-aunt who, estranged for years from a niece to whom she never
spoke, yet made no change in the will in which she had left that niece the whole of her
fortune because she was her next-of-kin and it was the proper thing" to do.





　　　　For the first few days, like a tune with which one will soon be infatuated but which
one has not yet "got hold of," the things I was to love so passionately in Bergotte's style
did not immediately strike me. I could not, it is true, lay down the novel of his which I
was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the subject alone, as in the first dawn
of love when we go every day to meet .a woman at some party or entertainment which we think
is in itself the attraction. Then I observed the rare,. almost archaic expressions he liked
to employ at certain moments, in which a hidden stream of harmony, an inner prelude, would
heighten his style; and it was at such points as these, too, that he would begin to speak of
the "vain dream of life," of the "inexhaustible torrent of fair forms," of the "sterile and
exquisite torment of understanding and loving," of the "moving effigies which ennoble
for all time the charming and venerable fronts of our cathedrals," that he would express a
whole system of phi.losophy, new to me, by the use of marvellous images that one felt must
be the inspiration for the harp-song which then arose and to which they provided a sublime
accompaniment. One of these passages of Bergotte, the third or fourth which I had detached
from the rest, filled me with a joy to which the meagre joy I had tasted in the first pas-
sage bore no comparison, a joy that I felt I was experiencing in a deeper, vaster, more in-
tegral part of myself, from which all obstacles and partitions seemed to have been swept
away. For what had happened was that, while I recognised in this passage the same taste for
uncommon phrases, the same musical outpouring, the same idealist philosophy which had been
present in the earlier passages without my having recognised them as being the source of my
pleasure, I now had the impression of being confronted not by a particular passage in one
of Bergotte's works, tracing a purely bi-dimensional figure upon the surface of my mind, but
rather by the "ideal passage" of Bergotte, common to every one of his books, to which all. the
earlier, similar passages, now becoming merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume by
which my own understanding seemed to be enlarged.
　　　　I was not quite Bergotte's sole admirer; he was the favourite writer also of a friend
of my mother's, a. very well-read lady; while Dr du Boulbon had kept all his patients waiting
until he finished Bergotte's latest volume; and it was from his consulting room, and from a house
in a park near Combray, that some of the first seeds were scattered of that taste for Bergotte, a
rare growth in those days but now universally acclimatised, that one finds flowering everywhere
throughout Europe and America, even in the smallest villages, rare still in its refinement, but in
that alone. What my mother's friends and, it would seem, Dr du Boulbon liked above all in the
writings of Bergotte was just what I liked, the same melodic flow, the old-fashioned phrases,
and certain others quite simple and familiar, but so placed by him, so highlighted, as to hint at a
particular quality of taste on his part; and also, in the sad parts of his books, a sort of
roughness, a tone that was almost harsh. And he himself, no doubt, realised that these
were his principal attractions. For in his later books, if he had hit upon some great truth,
or upon the name of an historic cathedral, he would break off his narrative, and in an
invocation, an apostrophe, a long prayer, would give free rein to those exhalations which,
in the earlier volumes, had been immanent in his prose, discernible only in a rippling of
its surface, and perhaps even more delightful, more harmonious when they were thus
veiled, when the reader could give no precise indication of where their murmuring began
or where it died away. These passages in which he delighted were our favourites also. For my
own part I knew all of them by heart. I was disappointed when he resumed the thread of his
narrativte. Whenever he spoke of something whose beauty had until then remained hidden from
me, of pine-forests or of hailstorms, of Notre-Dame Cathedral, of Athalie or of Phedre by
some piece of imagery he would make their beauty explode into my consciousness And so,
realizing that the contained innumerable elements which my feeble senses would be powerless
to discern did he not bring them within my reach, I longed to have some opinion, some
metaphor of his, upon everything in the world, and especially upon such things
as I might some day have an opportunity of seeing for myself; and among these, more particu-
larly still upon some of the historic buildings of France, upon certain seascapes, because
the emphasis with which he referred to them in his books showed that he regarde them as
rich in significance and beauty. But alas, upon almost everything in the world his opinion
was unknown to me. I had no doubt that it would differ entirely from my own, since his came
down from an unknown sphere towards which I was striving to raise myself; convinced that my
thoughts would have seemed pure foolishness to that perfected spirit, I had so completely
obliterated them all that, if I happened to find in one of his books something which had
already occurred to my own mind, my heart would swell as though some deity had, in his in-
finite bounty, restored it to me, had pronounced it to be beautiful and right. It happened
now and then that a page of Bergotte would express precisely those ideas which I often used
to write to my grandmother and my mother at night, when I was unable to sleep, so much so
that this page of his had the appearance of a collection of epigraphs for me to set at the
head of my letters. And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and
the quality of some of my sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind,
to go on, with the undertaking, I would find the equivralent in Bergotte. But it was only
then, when I read them in hispages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who had com-
posed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my
mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to
ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing! But in fact there was no other kind of
prose, no other sort of ideas, that I really liked. My feverish and unsatisfactory attempts
were themselves a token of love, a love which brought me no pleasure but was none the less
profound. And so, when I came suddenly upon similar phrases in the writings of another, that
is to say stripped of their familiar accompaniment of scruples and repressions and self-
tormentings, I was free to indulge to the full my own appetite for such things, like a cook
who, for once having no dinner to prepare for other people, at last has the time to enjoy his
food. When, one day, I came across in a book by Bergotte some joke about an old family servant
which the writer's solemn and magnificent prose made even more comical, but which was in prin-
ciple the same joke I had often made to my grandmother about Francoise, and when, another
time, I discovered that he considered not unworthy of reflection in one of those mirrors of
absolute truth which were his writings a remark similar to one which I had had occasion to
make about our friend M. Legrandin (and moreover my remarks on Francoise and M. Legrandin
were among those which I would most resolutely have sacrificed for Bergotte's sake, in the belief
that he would find them quite withut interest). then it was suddenly revealed to me my own
humble existence and the realms of the true were less widely separated than I had supposed,
that at certain points they actually coincided, and in my new: confidence and joy I had wept
upon his printed page as in the arms of a long-lost father.
　　　　From his books I had formed an impression of Bergotte as a frail and disappointed old
man, who had lost some of his children and had never got over the loss. And so I would read,
or rather sing his sentences in my mind, with rather more dolce, rather more lento than he
himself had perhaps intended, and his simplest phrase would strike my ears with something
peculiarly gentle and loving in its intonation. More than anything else I cherished his
philosophy, and had pledged myself to it in life-long devotion. It made me impatient to
reach the age when I should be eligible for the class at school called "Philosophy." But I
did not wish to do anything else there but exist and be guided exclusively by the mind of
Bergotte, and if I had been told then that the metaphysicians to whom I was actually to
become attached there would resemble him in nothing, I should have been struck down by the
despair of a young lover who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of
the other mistresses he will have in time to come.






The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her
love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values
most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest. Even those women who
claim to judge a man by his looks alone, see in those looks the emanation of a special
way of life. That is why they fall in love with soldiers or with firemen; the uniform
makes them less particular about the face; they feel they are embracing beneath the
gleaming breastplate a heart different from the rest, more gallant, more adventurous,
more tender; and so it is that a young king or a crown prince may make the most grat-
ifying conquests in the countries that he visits, and yet lack entirely that regular
and classic profile which would be indispensable, I dare say, for a stockbroker.


　　　　While I was reading in the garden, a thing my great-aunt would never have under-
stood my doing save on a Sunday, that being the day on which it is unlawful to indulge
in any serious occupation, and on which she herself would lay aside her sewing
(on a week-day she would have said, "What! still amusing yourself with a book? It
isn't Sunday, you know!"--putting into the word "amusing" an implication of child-
ishness and waste of time), my aunt Leonie would be gossiping with Francoise until
it was time for Eulalie to arrive. She would tell her that she had just seen Mme
Goupil go by "without an umbrella, in the silk dress she had made for her the other
day at Chateaudun. If she has far to go before vespers, she may get it properly soaked."
　　　　"Maybe, maybe" (which meant "maybe not"), was the answer, for Francoise did
not wish to definitely exclude the possibility of a happier alternative
　　　　"Heavens," said my aunt, slapping herself on the forehead, "that reminds me, I
neverheard if she got to church this morning before. the Elevation. I must remember to
ask Eulalie...Francoise, just look at that black cloud behind the steeple, and how poor
the light, is on the slates. You may be certain it will rain before the day is out.
It couldn't possibly go on like that, it's been too hot. And the sooner the better, for
until the storm breaks my Vichy water won't go down," she added, since, in her mind,
the desire to accelerate the digestion of her Vichy water was of infinitely greater
importance than her fear of seeing Mme Goupil's new dress ruined,
　　　　"Maybe, maybe."
　　　　"And you know that when it rains in the Square there's none too much shelter."
Suddenly my aunt turned pale. "What, three o'clock!" she exclaimed_ "But vespers will
have begun already, and I've forgotten my pepsin! Now I know why that Vichy Water has
been lying on stomach." And pouncing on a prayer-book bound in purple velvet with gilt
clasps, out of which in her haste she let fall a shower of those pictures bordered in a
lace fringe of yellowish paper which mark the pages of feast-days, my aunt, while she
swallowed her drops,. began at full speed to mutter the words of the sacred text, its
meaning slightly clouded by the uncertainty whether the pepsin, when taken so long
after the Vichy, would still be able to catch up with it and send it down. "Three o'clock!
It's unbelievable how time flies."
　　　　A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a
plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead,
gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regularr rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous,
musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.





　　　　Had the truth been known, the Cure's visits gave my aunt no such ecstatic
pleasure as Francoise supposed, and the air of jubilation with which she felt
bound to illuminate her face whenever she had to announce his arrival did not
altogether correspond to the sentiments of her invalid. The Cure (an excellent
man, with whom I now regret not having conversed more often, for, even if he
cared nothing for the arts, he knew a great many etymologies), being in the
habit of showing distinguished visitors over his church (he had even planned
to compile a history of the Parish of Combray), used to weary her with his
endless commentaries which, incidentally, never varied in the least degree. But
when his visit synchronised exactly with Eulalie's it became frankly distasteful
to my aunt. She would have preferred to make the most of Eulalie, and not to
have the whole of her circle about her at one time. But she dared not send the
Cure away, and had to content herself with making a sign to Eulalie not to leave
when he did, so that she might have her to herself for a little after he had
gone.
　　　　"What is this I have been hearing, Father, about a painter setting up his
easel in your church, and copying one of the windows? Old as I am, I can safely
say that I have never heard of such a thing in all my life! What is the world
coming to! And the ugliest thing in the whole church, too."
　　　　"I will not go so far as to say that it's quite the ugliest, for although
there are certain things in Saint-Hilaire which are well worth a visit, there
are others that are very old now in my poor basilica, the only one in all the
diocese that has never even been restored. God knows our porch is dirty and
antiquated, but still it has a certain majesty. I'll even grant you the Esther
tapestries, which Personally I wouldn't give a brass farthing for, but which
the experts place immediately after the ones at Sens. I can quite see, too, that
apart from certain details which are--well, a trifle realistic--they show features
which testify to a genuine power of observation. But don't talk to me about the
windows. Is it common sense, I ask you, to leave up windows which shut out all
the daylight and even confuse the eyes by throwing patches of colour, to which
I should be hard put to it to give a name, on to floor in which there are not
two slabs on the same level and which they refuse to renew for me because, if
you please, those are the tombstones of the Abbots of Combray and the Lords
of Guermantes, the old Counts, you know, of Brabant, direct ancestors of the
present Duc de Guermantes and of the Duchess too since she was a Madomoiselle
de Guermantes who married her cousin?"





　　　　"I am sure that if you were to ask the Bishop," said my aunt in a resigned
tone, for she had begun to feel that she was going to be "tired," "he would never
refuse you a new window."
　　　　"You may depend upon it, Mine Octave," replied the Cure. "Why, it was his
Lordship himself who started the outcry about the window, by proving that it
represented Gilbert the Bad, a Lord of Guermantes and a direct descendant of
Genevieve de Brabant who was a daughter of the House of Guermantes, receiving
absolution from Saint Hilaire."
　　　　"But I don't see where Saint Hilaire comes in."
　　　　"Why yes, have you never noticed, in the corner of the window, a lady
in a yellow robe? Well, that's Saint Hilaire, who is also known, you will re-
member, in certain parts of the country as Saint Illiers, Saint Helier, and even,
in the Jura, Saint Ylie. But these various corruptions of Sanctus Hilarius are
by no means the most curious that have occurred in the names of the blessed.
Take, for example, my good Eulalie, the case of your own patron. Sancta Eulalia;
do you know what she has become in Burgundy? Saint Eloi, nothing more nor less!
The lady become a gentleman. Do you hear that, Eulalie--after you're dead they'll
make a man of you!"
　　　　"His Reverence will always have his little joke."
　　　　"Gilbert's brother, Charles the Stammerer, was a pious Prince, but, having early
in life lost his father, Pepin the mad, who died as a result of his mental infirm-
ity, he wielded the Supreme power with all the arrogance of a man who has not been
subjected to discipline in youth, so much so that, whenever he saw a man in a town
whose face he didn't like, he would massacre the entire population.





　　　　"But what is unquestionably the most remarkable thing about our church is the
view from the belfry, which is full of grandeur. Certainly in your case, since you
are not very strong, I should never recommend you to climb, our ninety-seven steps,
just half the number they have in the famous cathedral at Milan. It's quite tiring
enough for the most active person, especially as you have to double if you don't
wish to crack your skull, and you collect all the cobwebs off the staircase on your
clothes. In any case you should be well wrapped up," he went on, without noticing my
aunt's indignation at the mere suggestion that she could ever be capable of climbing
into his belfry, "for there's a strong breeze them the once you get to the top. Some
people even assure me that they have felt the chill of death up there. However
on Sundays there are always clubs and societies who come, often from a long a way off,
to admire our beautiful panorama, and they always go home charmed. For instance, next
Sunday if the weather holds, you'll be sure to find a lot of people there, for
Rogation-tide. No doubt about it, the view from up there is entrancing, with what
you might call vistas over the plain, which have quite a special charm of their own.
On a clear day you can see as far as Verneuil. And then another thing; you can see at
the same time places which you normally see one without the other, as for instance,
the course of the Vivonne and the irrigation ditches at Saint-Assise-les-Cornbray,
which are separated by a screen of tall trees, or again, the various canals at Jouy-
le-Vicomte, which is Gaudiacus vice comitis, as of course you know. Each time I've
been to Jouy I've seen a bit of canal in one place, and then I've turned a corner
and seen another, but when I saw the second I could no longer see the first. I tried
to put them together in my mind's eye; it was no good. But from the top of Saint-
Hilaire it's quite another matter--a regular network in which the place is enclosed.
Only you can't see any water; it's as though there were great clefts slicing up the
town so neatly that it looks like a loaf of bread which still holds together after
it has been cut up. To get it all quite perfect You would have to be in both places
at once; up at the top of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire and down there at Jouy-le-
Vicomte."
　　　　The Cure had so exhausted my aunt that no sooner had he gone than she was obliged
to send Eulalie away.
　　　　"Here, my poor Eulalie," she said in a feeble voice, drawing a coin from a small
purse which lay ready to her hand. "This is just something so that you won't forget
me in your prayers."
　　　　"Oh, but, Mme Octave, I don't think I ought to; you know very well that I don't
come here for that!" So Eulalie would answer, with the same hesitation and the same
embarrassment, every Sunday as though it were the first, and with a look of vexation
which delighted my aunt and never offended her, for if it happened that Eulalie, when
she took the money, looked a little less peevish than usual, my aunt would remark
afterwards, "I cannot think what has come over Eulalie; I gave her the same as I al-
ways give, and she did not look at all pleased."
　　　　"I don't think she has very much to complain of, all the same," Francoise would
sigh grimly, for she had a tendency to regard as petty cash all that my aunt might give
her for herself or her children, and as treasure riotously squandered on an ungrateful
wretch the little coins slipped Sunday after Sunday into Eulalie's hand, but so dis-
creetly that Francoise never managed to see them. It was not that she wanted for her-
self the money my aunt bestowed on Eulalie. She already enjoyed a sufficiency of all
that my aunt possessed, in the knowledge that the wealth of the mistress automatically
elevates and enhances the maid in the eyes of the world, and that she herself was
renowned and glorified throughout Combray, Jouy-le-Vicomte, and other places, on account
of my aunt's many farms, her frequent and prolonged visits from the Cure, and the
astonishing number of bottles of Vichy water which she consumed.





　　　　In this way life went by for my aunt Leonie, always the same, in the gentle uni-
formity of what she called, with a pretence of deprecation but with a deep tenderness,
her "little jog-trot." Respected by all and sundry, not merely in her own touse, where
every one of us, having learned the futility of recommending a healthier mode of life,
had become gradually resigned to its observance, but in the village as well, where,
three streets away, a tradesman who had to hammer nails into a packing-case would send
first to Francoise to make sure that my aunt was not resting." This "jog-trot" was none
the less brutally disturbed on one occasion that year. Like a fruit hidden among its
leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved and falls of its own accord, there came
upon us one night the kitchen-maid's confinement. Her pains were unbearable, and, as
there was no midwife in Combray, Francoise, had to set off before dawn to fetch
one from Thiberzy. My aunt was unable to rest owing to the cries of the girl, and as
Francoise, though the distance was not great, was very late in returning, her services
were greatly missed. And so, in the course of the morning, my mother said to me "Run
upstairs and see if your aunt wants anything."
　　　　I went into the first of her two rooms, and through the open door of the other saw
my aunt lying on her side asleep: I could hear her snoring gently. I was about to slip
away when the noise of my entry must have broken into her sleep and made it "change
gear," as they say of motor-cars, for the music of her snore stopped for a second and
began again on a lower note; then she awoke and half turned her face, which I could see
for the first time; a kind of horror was imprinted on it; plainly she had just escaped
from some terrifying dream. She could not see me from the position in which she was
lying, and I stood there not knowing whether I ought to go forward or withdraw: but
all at once she seemed to return to a sense of reality, and to grasp the falsehood of
the visions that had terrified her; a smile of joy, of pious thanksgiving to God who is
pleased to grant that life shall be less cruel than our dreams, feebly illumined her
face, and, with the habit she had formed of speaking to herself half-aloud when she
thought herself alone, she murmured: "God be praised! we have nothing to worry us here
but the kitchen-maids baby. And I've been dreaming that my poor Octave had come back to
life and was trying to make me take a walk every day!" She stretched out a hand towards
her rosary, which was lying on the small table, but sleep was again overcoming her,
and did not leave her the strength to reach it: she fell asleep, her mind at rest, and
I crept out of the room on tiptoe without either her or anyone else ever knowing what
I had seen and heard.
　　　　When I say that apart from such rare happenings as this confinement, my aunt's
daily routine never underwent any variation, I do not include those which. repeated
at regular intervals and in identical form, did no more than print a sort of uniform
pattern upon the greater uniformity of her life. Thus, for instance, every Saturday,
as Francoise had to go in the afternoon to market at Rousainville-le-Pin, the whole
household would have to have lunch art hour earlier. And my aunt had so thoroughly
acquired the habit of this weekly exception to her general habits, that she clung
to it as much as to the rest. She was well “routined" to it, as Francoise would
say, that if, on a Saturday, she had had to wait for her lunch until the regular
hour, it would have "upset" her as much as if on an ordinary day she had had to put
her lunch forward to its Saturday hour. Incidentally this acceleration of lunch gave
Saturday, for all of us, an individual character, kindly and rather attractive. At
the moment when ordinarily there is still an hour to be lived through before the meal-
time relaxation, we knew that in a few seconds we should see the arrival of premature
endives, a gratuitous omelette, an unmerited beefsteak. The recurrence of this asym-
metrical Saturday was one of those minor events, intra-mural, localised, almost civic,
which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national tie
and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which
can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided the ready-made
kernel for a legendary cycle, had any of us had an epic turn of mind. Early in the
morning, before we were dressed, without rhyme or reason, save for the pleasure of
proving the strength of our solidarity, we would call to one another patriotically,
good-humouredly, cordially, "Hurry up, there's no time to waste; don't forget it's
Saturday!" while my aunt, conferring with Francoise and reflecting that the day would
be even longer than usual, would say, "You might cook them a nice bit of veal seeing
that it's Saturday." If, at half-past ten, someone absent-mindedly pulled out a
watch and said, "I say, an hour-and-a-half still before lunch," everyone else would
be delighted to be able to retort at once: "Why, what are you thinking about? Have
you forgotten that it's Saturday?" And a quarter of an hour later we would still
be laughing about it and reminding ourselves to go up and tell aunt Leonie of this
absurd mistake, to amuse her. The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a change.
After lunch the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in
the zenith, and when someone, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk,
said, "What, only two o'clock!" on registering the passage of the twin strokes from
the steeple of Saint Hilaire (which as a rule met no one at that hour upon the high-
ways, deserted for the midday meal or for the nap which follows it, or on the banks
of the bright and ever flowing stream, which even the angler had abandoned, and
passed unaccompanied across the vacant sky, where only a few loitering clouds re-
mained to greet them) the whole family would respond in chorus: "Why, you're for-
getting we had lunch an hour earlier; you know very well it's Saturday."
　　　　The surprise of a "barbarian" (for so we termed everyone who was not ac-
quainted with Saturday's customs) who had called at eleven o'clock to speak to father
and had found us at table, was an event which caused Francoise as much merriment as
anything that ever happened in her life. But if she found it amusing that the non-
plussed visitor should not have known beforehand that we had our lunch an hour ear-
lier on Saturdays, it was still more irresistibly funny that my father himself (whole-
heartedly as she sympathised with the rigid chauvanism which prompted him) should
never have dreamed that the barbarian could fail to be aware of the fact, and so
had replied, with no further enlightenment of the other's surprise at seeing us al-
ready in the dining roorm "After all it's Saturday!" On reaching this point in the
story, Francoise would pause to wipe the tears merriment from her eyes, and then,
to add to her own enjoyment, would prolong the dialogue, inventing a further reply
for the visitor to whom the word "Saturday" had conveyed nothing. And so far from
our objecting to these interpolations, we would feel that the story was not yet long
enough, and would rally her with: "Oh. but surely he said something else. There was
more to it than that, the first time you told it." My great-aunt herself would lay
aside her needlework, and raise her head and look on at us over her glasses.
　　　　The day had yet another characteristic feature, namely, that during May we
used to go out Saturday evenings after dinner to the "Month of Mary" devotions.
　　　　As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil. who held very strict views on "the
deplorable slovenliness of young people, which seems to be encouraged these days," my
mother would first see that there was nothing out of order in my appearance, and then we
would set out for the church. It was in the "Month of Mary" that I rememeber having first
fallen in love with hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, where, holy ground as
it was, we had all of us a right of entry, but arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable
from the mysteries in whose celebration they participated, thrusting in among
the tapers and the sacred vessels their serried branches, tied to one another horizon-
tally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration still further embellished by the festoons
of leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clus-
ters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look at it except through my
fingers, I could sense that this formal scheme was composed of living things, and that
it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the
crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at
once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened
here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost
vaporous adornment, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer and entirely veiling
each corolla, that in following, in trying to mimic to myself the action of their
efflorescence, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head, with a
provocative glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, insouciant
and vivacious.





My mother on hearing that he composed, told him out of the kindness of her heart that,
when she came to see him, he must play her something of his own. M. Vinteuil would
have liked nothing better. but he carried politeness and consideration for others but he
to such scrupulous lengths, always putting himself in their place, that he was afraid of
boring them, or of apprng egotistical, if he carried out or even allowed them to suspect
what were his own desires. On the day when my parents had gone to pay him a visit, I
had accompanied them, but they had allowed me to remain outside, and as M. Vinteuil's
house, Montjouvain, stood at the foot of a bushy hillock where I went to hide, I had
found myself on a level with his drawing-room, upstairs, and only a few feet away from
its window. When the servant came in to tell him that my parents had arrived, I had
seen M. Vinteuil hurriedly place a sheet of music in a prominent position on the piano.
But as soon as they entered the room he had snatched it away and put it in a corner.
He was afraid, no doubt, of letting them suppose that he was glad to see them only
because it gave him a chance of playing them some of his compositions. And every
time that my mother, in the course of her visit, had returned to the subject he had
hurriedly protested: "I can't think who put that on the piano; it's not the proper place
for it at all," and had turned the conversation aside to other topics, precisely because
they were of less interest to himself.
　　　　His one and only passion was for his daughter and she, with her somewhat
boyish appearance, looked so robust that it was hard to restrain a smile when one saw
the precautions her father used to take for her health, with spare shawls always
in readiness to wrap around her shoulders. My grandmother had drawn our attention to
the gentle, delicate, almost timid expression which might be caught flitting across the
freckled face of this otherwise stolid child. Whenever she spoke, she heard her own
words with the ears of those to whom addressed them, and became alarmed at the poss-
ibiltv of a misunderstanding, and one would see in clear outline as though in a tran-
sparency, beneath the mannish face of the "good sort" that she was, the finer features
of a tearful girl.
　　　　When, before turning to leave the church, I genuflected before the altar, I was
suddenly aware of a bitter. sweet scent of almonds emanating from the hawthorn blossom,
and I then noticed on the flowers themselves little patches of a creamier colour, be-
neath which I imagined that this scent must lie concealed, as the taste an almond
cake lay beneath the burned parts, or that of Mlle Vinteuil's cheeks beneath their
freckles. Despite the motionless silence of the hawthorns, this intermittent odour
came to me like the murmuring of an intense organic life with which the whole altar
was quivering like a hedgerow explored by living antennae, of which I was reminded by
seeing some stamens, almost red in colour, which seemed to have kept the springtime
virulence, the irritant power of stinging insects now transmuted into flowers.
　　　　On leaving the church we would stay chatting for a moment with M. Vinteuil in front
of the porch. Boys would be chasing one another in the square, and he would intervene,
taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the big. If his daughter said in her gruff
voice how glad she had been to see us mmediately it would seem as though a more sensitive
sister within her had blushed at this thoughtless, schoolboyish utterance which might
have made us think that she was angling for an invitation to the house. Her father would
then arrange a cloak over her shoulders they would clamber into a little dog-cart
which she herself drove, and home they would both go to Montjouvain. As for ourselves,
the next day being Sunday, with no need to be up and stirring before high mass, if it
was a moonlight night and warm, my father, in his thirst for glory, instead of taking
us home at once would lead us on a long walk round by the Calvary, which my mother's
utter incapacity for taking her bearings, or even for knowing which road she might be
on, made her regard as a triumph of his strategic genius. Sometimes we would go as far
as the viaduct, whose long stone strides began at the railway station and to me typified
all the wretchedness of exile beyond the last outposts of civilisation, because every
year, as we came down from Paris, we were warned to take special care when we got to
Combray not to miss the station, to be ready before the train stopped, since it would
start again in two minutes and proceed across the viaduct out of the lands of Christ-
endom, of which Combray to me, represented the furthest limit. We would return by the
Boulevard de la Gare, which contained the most attractive villas in the town. In each
of their gardens the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, scattered its broken
staircases of white marble, its fountains, its iron gates temptingly ajar. Its beams had
swept away the telegraph office. All that was left of it was a column shattered
but preserving the beauty of a ruin which endures for all time. I would by now be
dragging my weary limbs and ready to drop with sleep; the balmy scent of the lime-trees
seemed a reward that could be won only at the price of great fatigue and was not worth
the effort. From gates far apart the watchdogs, awakened by our steps in the silence,
would set up an antiphonal barking such as I still hear at times of an evening, and
among which the Boulevard de la Gare (when the public gardengs of Combray were con-
structed on its site) must have take refuge, for wherever I may be, as soon as they
begin the alternate challenge and response, I can see it again with its lime-trees,
and its pavement glistening beneath the moon.
　　　　Suddenly my father would bring us to a standstill and ask my mother?"Where are we?"
Exhausted by the walk but still proud of her husband, she would lovingly confess that
she had not the least idea. He would shrug his shoulders and laugh. And then, as though
he had produced it with his latchkey from his waistcoat pocket, he would point out to
us, where it stood before our eyes, the back-gate of our own garden, which had come,
hand-in-hand with the familiar corner of the Rue du Saint-Esprit, to greet us at the
end of our wanderings over paths unknown. My mother would murmur admiringly "You re-
ally are wonderful!" And from that instant I did not have to take another step; the
ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where for so long my actions had
ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will. Habit had come to take
me in her arms and carry me all the way up to my bed like a little child.
　　　　Although Saturday, by beginning an hour earlier and by depriving her of the ser-
vices of Francoise, passed more slowly than other days for my aunt, yet the moment it
was past and a new week begun, she would look forward with impatience to its return, as
something that embodied all the novelty and distraction which her frail and disordered
body was still able to endure. This was not to say; however, that she did not long, at
times, for some greater change, that she did not experience some of those exceptional
moments when one thirsts for something other than what is and when those who, through
lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves,
cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something new, even if it is
worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when the heartstrings, which contentment has sil-
enced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however
rough, even if it should break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty won
the right to indulge without let or hindrance in its own desires and woes, would gladly
fling the reins into the hands of imperious circumstance, however cruel. Of course,
since my aunt's strength, which was completely drained by the slightest exertion, re-
turned but drop by drop into the depths of her repose, the reservoir was very slow in
filling, and months would go by be-fore she reached that slight overflow which other
people siphon off into activity of various kinds and which she was incapable of knowing
or deciding how to use. And I have no doubt that then--just as a desire to have her po-
tatoes served with bechamel sauce for a change would have fromed, ultimately, from the
pleasure she found in the daily reappearance of those mashed potatoes of which she never
"tired"----she would extract from the accumulation these monotonous days which she
treasured so much a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm, momentary in its duration
but violent enough to compel her to put into effect once for all, one of those changes
which she knew would be beneficial to her health but to which she could never make up her
mind without some such stimtulation. She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed
the luxury of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when she felt well
and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house was being destroyed by a fire
in which all the rest of us had already perished and which soon would leave not a single
stone standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have plenty of time to
escape without undue haste provided that she rose at once from her bed, must often have
haunted her dreams, as a prospect which combined with the two minor advantages of letting
her taste the full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning, and of causing
universal stupefaction in the village when she should sally forth to conduct our obsequies,
crushed but courageous, moribund but erect, the paramount and priceless boon of forcing her
at the right moment, with no time to be lost, no room for weakening hesitations, to go off
and spend the summer at her charming farm of Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall.
Inasmuch as no such event had ever occurred, though she must often have pondered its event-
uality as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable games of patience (and though it would
have plunged her in despair from the first moment of its realisation, from the first of
those little unforeseen contingencies, the first word of calamitous news, whose accents
can never afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears upon it the imprint
of actual, physcal death, so terribly different from the logical abstraction of its possi-
bility) she would fall back from time to time, to add an interest to her life upon imaginary
calamities which she would follow up with passion. She would beguile herself with a sudden
pretence that Francoise had been robbing her, that she had set a trap to make certain and
had caught her betrayer red-handed; and being in the habit, when she made up a game of cards
by herself, of playing her own and her adversary's hands at once, she would first stammer
out Francoise's awkward excuses, and then reply to them with such a fiery indignation that
any of us who happened to intrude upon her at one of these moments would find her bathed in
perspiration, her eyes blazing, her false hair askew and exposing the baldness of her brows.
Francoise must often, from the next room, have heard these mordant sarcasms levelled at her-
self, the mere framing of which in words would not have relieved my aunt's feelings suffic-
iently, had they been allowed to remain in a purely immaterial form, without the degree of
substance and reality which she added to them by muttering them half-aloud. Sometimes, however,
even these counterpane dramas would not satisfy my aunt; she must see her work staged. And so,
on a Sunday, with all the doors mysteriously closed, she would confide to Eulalie her doubts
of Francoise's integrity and her determination to be rid of her, and another time she would
confide to Francoise her suspicions of the disloyalty of Eulalie, to whom the front-door would
very soon be closed for good.





When she had to ask her anything she would hesitate for a long time over how best to go about it.
And when she had uttered her request, she would watch my aunt covertly, trying to guess from the
expression on her face what she thought of it and how she would reply. And so it was that--whereas
an artist who, reading the memoirs of the seventeenth century, and, wishing to bring himself nearer
to the great Louis, considers that he is making progress in that direction by constructing a
pedigree that traces his own descent from some historic family, or by engaging in correspondence
with one of the reigning sovereigns of Europe, is actually turning his back on what he mistakenly
seeks under identical and therefore moribund forms--an elderly provincial lady, by doing no more
than yield wholeheartedly to her own irresistible eccentricities and a cruelty born of idleness,
could see, without ever having given a thought to Louis XIV, the most trivial occupations of her
daily life, her morning toilet, her lunch, her afternoon nap, assume, by virtue of their despotic
singularity, something of the interest that was to be found in what Saint-Simon called the "me-
chanics" of life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that her silences, a
suggestion of good humour or of haughtiness on her features, would provide Francoise with
matter for a mental commentary as tense with passion and terror as did the silence, the good hu-
the haughtiness of the King when a courtier, or even hisgreatest nobles, had presented a petition
to him in an avenue at Versailles.





　　　　As M. Legrandin had passed close by us on our way from church, walking by the side of a lady,
the owner of country house in the neighbourhood, whom we knew only by. sight, and my father had
saluted him in a mannerr at once friendly and reserved, without stopping in his walk. M. Legrandin,
had barely acknowledged the courtresy, and then, with an air of surprise, as though he had not
recognised us, with that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable and
who, from the suddenly receding depths of their eyes, seem to have caught sight of you at the far
end of an interminably straight road and at so great a distance that they content themselves with
directing towards you an almost imperceptible movement of the head, commensurate with your doll-
like dimensions.




In any case my fa-ther's fears were dispelled no later than the following evening . Returning from
a long walk, we saw Legrandi.n near the Pont-Vieux (he was spending a few days more in Combray be-
cause of the holidays). He came up to us r he Outstretched hand: "Do you know, master booklover,
asked me, "this line of Paul Desjardins?

　　　　　　　　Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.

　　　　Isn't that a fine rendering of a moment like this? Perhaps you have never read Paul Desjardins.
Read him, my boy, read him; in these days he is converted, they tell me, into a preaching friar, but
he used to have th charming water-colour touch--

　　　　　　　　Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue.

May you always see a blue sky overhead, my your, friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it
has come for me now, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to
console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky." He took a cigarette from his pocket and stood
for a long time with his eyes fixed on the horizon. "Good-bye, friends!" he suddenly exclaimed, and
left us.

　　　　At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was for dinner, its prepara-
tion would already have begun, and Francoise, a commanding officer with all the forces of nature for
her subalterns, as in the fairy-tales where giants hire themselves out as scullions, would be stir-
ring the coals, putting the potatoes to steam, and, at the right moment, finishing over the fire
those culinary masterpieces which had been first got ready in some of the great array of vessels,
triumphs of the potters craft, which ranged from tubs and boilers and cauldrons and fish kettles
down to jars for game, moulds for pastry and tiny pannikins for cream, through an entire collect-
ion of pots and pans of every shape and size. I would stop by the table, where the kitchen-maid had
shelled them, to inspect the platoons of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little green
marbles, ready for a game. But what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine
and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series
of imperceptible gradations to their white feet--still stained. a little by the soil of their garden-
bed--with an iridescense that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated
the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who
through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of
earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I
should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they
played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like one of Shakespeare's fairies) at transforming my
chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.
　　　　Poor Giotto's Charity, as Swann had named her, charged by Francoise with the task of preparing
them for the table, would have them lying beside her in a basket, while she sat there with a mournful
air as though all the sorrows of the world were heaped upon her; and the light crowns of azure which
capped the asparagus shoots above their pink jackets were delicately outlined, star by star, as, in
Giotto's fresco, are the flowers encircling the brow or Patterning the basket of his Virtue at Padua.
And mean-while Francoise would be turning on the spit one of those chickens such as she alone knew how
to roast, chickens which had wafted far abroad from Combray the savour of her merits, and which, while
she was serving themdtoontiiis at table, would make the quality of sweetness P nate for the moment in
my private conception of her character, the aroma of that cooked flesh which she knew how to make so
unctuous and so tender seeming to me no nlore than the proper perfume of one of her many virtues.
　　　　But the day on which I went down to the kitchen while my father consulted the family council about
our strange meeting with Legrandin was one of those days when Giotto's Charity, still very weak and ill
after her recent confinement, had been unable to rise from her bed. Frangoise, being without assist-
ance, had fallen behind. When I went in, I saw her in the scullery which opened on to the back yard,
in the process of killing a chicken; which, by its desperate and quite natural resistance, accompanied by
Francoise, beside herself with rage as she attempted to slit its throat beneath the ear, with shrill
cries of "Filthy creature! Filthy creature!," made the saintly meekness and unction of our servant
rather less prominent than it would do, next day at dinner, when it made its appearance in a skin
gold-embroidered like a chasuble, and its precious juice was poured out drop by drop as from a pyx.
When it was dead, Francoise collected its streaming blood, which did not, however, drown her rancour,
for she gave vent to another burst of rage, and gazing down at the carcass of her enemy, uttered a final
"Filthy creature!"
　　　　I crept out of the kitchen and upstairs, trembling all over; I could have prayed, then, for the
instant dismissal of Francoise. But who would have baked me such hot rolls, made me such fragrant coffee,
and even . . . roasted me such chickens? And, as it happened, everyone else had already had to make the
same cowardly reckoning. For my aunt Leonie knew (though I was still in ignorance of this) that Francoise,
who, for her own daughter or for her nephews, would have given her life without a murmer, showed
a singular implacability in her dealings with the rest of the world. In spite of which my aunt had kept
her, for, while conscious of her cruelty, she appreciated her services. I began gradually to realise that
Francoise's kindness, her compunction, her numerous virtues concealed many of these kitchen trage-
dies, just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling
with their hands joined in prayer in the windows of churches were stained by oppression and bloodshed. I
came to recognise that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity
which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself. The tears that
flowed from her in torrents when she read in a newspaper of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her
were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more precise mental picture of the victims. One
night, shortly after her confinement, the kitchen-maid was seized with the most appalling pains; Mamma
heard her groans, and rose and awakened Frangoise, who, quite unmoved, declared that all the outcry was
mere. malingering that the girl wanted to "play the mistress." The doctor, who had been afraid of some
such attack, had left a marker in a medical dictionary which we had, at the page on which the symptoms
were described, and had told us to turn up this passage to discover the first aid to be adopted. My
mother sent Francoise to fetch the book, warning her not to let the marker drop out. An hour elapsed,
and Francoise had not returned; my mother, supposing that she had gone back to bed, grew vexed, and
told me to go myself to the library and fetch the volume. I did so and there found Francoise who, in her
curiosity to know what the marker indicated, had begun to read the clinical account of these after-pains,
and was violently sobbing, now that it was a question of a prototype patient with whom she was unacquainted.
At each painful symptom mentioned by the writer she would exclaim: "Oh, oh, Holy Virgin, is it possible
that God wishes a wretched creature to suffer so? Oh, the poor girl!"
　　　　But when I had called her, and she had returned to the bedside of Giotto's Charity, her tears at
once ceased to flow; she could find no stimulus for that pleasant sensation of tenderness and pity
with which she was familiar, having been moved to it often enough by the perusal of newspapers, nor any
other pleasure of the same kind, in her boredom and irritation at being dragged out of bed in the middle
of the night for the kitchen-maid; so that at the sight of those very sufferings the printed account of
which had moved her to tears, she relapsed into ill-tempered mutterings, mingled with bitter sarcasm,
saying, when she thought that we were out of earshot: "Well, she should have been careful not to do what
got her into this! She enjoyed it well enough, I dare say, so she'd better not put on any airs now! All
the same, he must have been a godforsaken young fellow to go with the likes of her. Dear, dear, it's just
as they used to say in my poor mother's day:

　　　　　　　　Frogs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails,
　　　　　　　　　　　And dirty sluts in plenty,
　　　　　　　　Smell sweeter than roses in young men's noses
　　　　　　　　 　　　When the heart is one-and-twenty."

　　　　Although, when her grandson had a slight cold in his head, she would set off at night, even if she
were unwell, instead of going to bed, to see whether he had everything he needed, covering ten miles on
foot before daybreak so as to be back in time for work, this same love for her own people and her desire to
establish the future greatness of her house on a solid foundation, found expression, in her policy with regard
to the other servants, in one unnvarying maxim, which was never to let any of them set foot in my aunt's room;
indeed she showed a sort of pride in not allowing anyone else to come near my aunt, preferring, when she
herself was ill, to get out of bed and to administer the Vichy water in person, rather than to concede
to the kitchen-maid the right of entry into her mistress's presence. There is a species of hymenoptera ob-
served by Fibre, the burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring
after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty,
and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill
to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functitins)
depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which she lays her eggs, will furnish the larvae, when
hatched with a docile, inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for
the larder: in the same way Francoise had adopted, to minister to her resolution to render the house un-
inhabitable to any other servant, a series of stratagems so cunning and so pitiless that, many years later,
we discovered that if we had fed on asparagus day after day throughout the summer it was because their
smell gave the poor kitchen-maid who had to prepare them such violent attacks of asthma that she was
finally obliged to leave my service.


　　　　Alas! we had definitely to alter our opinion of M. Legrandin. On one of the Sundays following our
meeting with him on the Pont-Vieux, after which my faher had been forced to confess himself mistaken,
as mass drew to an end and, with the sunshine and the noise of the outer world, something else invaded the
church, an atmosphere so far from sacred that Mme Goupil, Mme Percepied (everyone, in fact, who not so
long before, when I arrived a little late, had been sitting motionless, engrossed in their prayers, and
who I might even have thought oblivious of my entry had not their feet moved slightly to push away the
little kneeling-bench which was preventing me from getting to my chair) had begun to discuss with us out
loud all manner of utterly mundane topics as though we were already outside in the Square, we saw Legran-
din on the sunbaked threshold of the porch dominating the many-coloured tumult of the market, being in-
troduced by the husband of the lady we had seen him with on the previous occasion to the wife of another
large landed proprietor of the district. Legrandin's face wore an expression of extraordinary zeal and
animation: he made a deep bow, with a subsidiary backward movement which brought his shoulders sharply
up into a position behind their starting-point, a gesture in which he. must have been trained by the
husband of his sister, Mme de Cambremer. This rapid straightening-up caused a sort of tense muscular
wave to ripple over Legrandin's rump, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but
this undulation of pure matter. this wholly carnal fluency devoid of spiritual significance, this wave
lashed into a tempest by an obsequious alacrity of the basest sort, awoke my mind suddenly to the possi-
bility of a Legrandin altogether different from the one we knew. The lady gave him some message for her
coachman, and as he walked over to her carriage the impression of shy and respectful happiness which the
introduction had stamped upon his face still lingered there. Rapt in a sort of dream, he smiled, then be-
gan to hurry back towards the lady; as he was walking faster than usual, his shoulders swayed backwards
and forwards, right and left, in the most absurd fashion; and altogether he looked, so utterly had he
abandoned himself to it, to the exclusion of all other considerations, as though he were the passive,
wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness. Meanwhile we were coming out through the porch and were about to
pass close beside him; he was too well bred to turn his head away, but he fixed his eyes, which had sud-
denly changed to those of a seer lost in the profundity of his vision, on so distant a point of the hor-
izon that he could not see us and so had no need to acknowledge our presence. His face was as artless
as ever above his plain, single-breasted jacket, which looked as though conscious of having been led
astray and plunged willy-nilly into surroundings of detested splendour. And a spotted bow-tie, stirred by
the breezes of the Square, continued to float in front of Legrandin like the standard of his proud isolation
and his noble independence. When we reach the housemy mother discovered that the baker had forgotten to
deliver the cream tart and asked my father to go back with me and tell them to send it up at once. Near the
church, we met Legrandin coming towards us with the same lady, whom he he was escorting to her carriage.
He. brushed past and did not interrupt what he was saying to her, but gave us, out of the corner of his blue
eye, a little sign which began and ended, so to speak, inside his eyelids and which, as it did not involve the
least movement of his facial muscles, managed to pass quite unperceived by the lady; but, striving to com-
pensate by the intensity of his feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which they had to find ex-
pression, he made that blue chink which was set apart for us sparkle with all the zest of an affability
that went far beyond mere playfulness, almost touched the border-line of roguery; he subtilised the re-
finements of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a hint, a hidden meaning, a secret understanding,
all the mysteries of complicity, and finally elevated his assurances of friendship to the level of protest-
ations of affection, even of a declaration of love, lighting up for us alone, with a secret and languid
flame invisible to the chatelaine, an enamoured pupil in a countenance of ice.
　　　　Only the day before he had asked my parents to send me to dine with him on this same Sunday evening.
"Come and bear your aged friend company," he had said to me. Like the nosegay which a traveller sends us
from some land to which we shall never return, come and let me breathe from the far country of your ado-
lescence the scent of those spring flowers among which I also used to wander many years ago. Come with
the primrose, the love-vine, the buttercup; come with the stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges
of love, in the Balzacian flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning. the Easter daisy,
come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to perfume the alleys of your great aunt's
garden ere the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious silken raiment of
thelily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the polychrome hues of the pansies, but come, above all,
with the spring breeze still cooled by the last frosts of winter, wafting apart, for the two butter-
flies that have waited outside all morning, the the closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose."
　　　　The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought still to be sent to dine
with M. Legrandin. But my grandmother refused to believe that he could have been impolite.
　　　　"You admit yourself that he appears there at church quite simply dressed and all that; he hardly
looks like a man of fashion." She added that in any event, even if, as-suming the worst, he had been
intentionally rude, it was far better for us to pretend that we had noticed nothing. And indeed my fa-
ther himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the attitude which Legrandin had adopted, may still
have held in re-serve a final uncertainty asto its true meaning. It was like every attitude or action
which reveals a man's underlying character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and
we cannot confirrn our suspicions by the culprit's own testimony, for he will admit nothing; we are
reduced to the evidence of Our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and inco-
herent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination;
with the result that such attitudes, which are alone of inmportance in indicating character, are the
most apt to leave us in perplexity.
　　　　I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house by moonlight. "There is a charming quality, is
there not,"he said to me,"in this silence; for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist whom you
will read in time to come asserts that there is no remedy but silence and shadow. And see you this, my
boy, there comes in all our lives, towards which you still have far to go, when the weary eyes can en-
dure but one kind of light, the light which a fine evening like this prepares for us in the stillroom
of darkness, when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute
of silence."
　　　　I listened to M. Legrandin's words which alwav seemed to me so pleasing; but I was preoccupied by
the memory of a lady whom I had seen recently for the first time and thinking, now that I knew that
Legrandin was on friendly terms with several of the local aristocracy, that perhaps she also was among
his acquaintance, I sunmmoned up all my courage and said to him: "Tell me, sir, do you by any chance
know the lady . . . the ladies of Guermantes?" --glad, too, in pronouncing this name, to secure a sort
of power over it, by the mere act of drawing it up out of my day-dreams and giving it an objective ex-
istence in the world of spoken things.
　　　　But, at the sound of the name Guermantes, I saw in the middle of each of our friend's blue eyes
a little brown nick appear, as though they had been stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest
of the pupil reacted by secreting the azure overflow. His fringed eyelids darkened and drooped. His mouth,
set in a bitter grimace, was the first to recover, and smiled, while his eyes remained full of pain, like the
eyes of a handsome martyr whose body bristles with arrows.
　　　　"No, I don't know them," he said, but instead of vouchsafing so simple a piece of information,
so very unremarkable a reply, in the natural conversational tone, which would have been appropriate to
it, he enunciated it with special emphasis on each word, nodding his head, with at once the vehemence
which a man imparts, in order to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though the fact that
he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some strange accident of fortune) and the grandi-
loquence of man who, finding him-self unable to keep silence about whatis to him a painful situation,
chooses to proclaim it openly in order to convince his hearers that the confession he is making is one
that causes him no embarrassment, is in fact easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation itself--
in this case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family--might very well have been not forced
upon, but actually willed by him, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or my-
stical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.
　　　　"No," he went on, explaining by his words the tone in which they were uttered, "no, I don't know
them, I've never wanted to; I've always made a point of preserving complete independence; at heart, you
know, I'm a bit of a Jacobin. People are always coming to me about it, telling me I'm mistaken in not
going to Guermantes, that I make myself seem ill-bred, uncivilised, an old bear. But that's not the sort
of reputation that can frighten me; it's too true! In my heart of hearts I care for nothing in the world
now but a few churches, two or three books and pictures. and the light of the moon when the fresh breeze
of your youth wafts to my nostrils the scent of gardens whose flowers my old eyes can no longer distin-
guish."
　　　　I did not understand very clearly why, to refrain from going going to the houses of people whom one
did not know it should be necessary to cling to ones inpendenc or how this could give one the appearancee
of a sa-vage or a bear. But what I did understand was that Legrandin was not altogether truthful when he
said that he cared only for churches, moonlight and youth; he cared als,o he cared a very great deal, for
people who lived in country houses, and in their presence was so overcome by fear of incurring their dis-
pleasure that he dared not let them see that he numbered among his friends middle-class people, the sons
of solicitor and stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must come toslian that it should do so in his ab-
sence, a long way away, gheanti "by default." In a word, he was a snob. No doubt he would never have said
any of this in the poetical language which my family and I so much enjoyed. And if I asked him, "Do you
know the Guermantes family?" Legrandin the talker would reply, "No, I've never wished to know than." But
unfortunately the talker was now subordinated to another Legrandin, whom he kept carefully hid-den in
his breast, whom he would never consciously exhibit, because this other could tell compromising stories
about our own Legrandin and his snobbishness: and this other Legrandin had replied to me already in that
wounded look, that twisted smile, the undue gravity of the tone of his reply, in the thousand arrows by
which our own Legrandin had instantaneously been stabbed and prostrated like a St Sebastian of snobbery:
"Oh, how you hurt me! No, I don't know the Guermantes family. Do not remind me of the great sorrow of my
life." And since this other, irrepressible, blackmailing Legrandin, if he lacked our Legrandin's charming
vocabulary, showed an infinitely greater promptness in expressing himself, by means of what are called
"reflexes" when Leegrandin the talker attempted to silence him, he had already spoken, and however much
our friend deplored the bad impression which the revelations of his alter ego must have caused, he could
do no more than endeavour to mitigate them.
　　　　This is not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he inveighed against snobs. He
could not (from his own knowledge, at least) be aware that he himself was one, since it is only with the
passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only
be learned from them. Upon ourselves they react only indirectly, through our imagination. which substi-
tutes for our primary motives auxiliary motives, less stark and therefore more Never had Legrandin's snob-
bishness prompted him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it would encourage his
imagination to make that duchess appear. in his eyes, endowed with all the graces. He would gain acquaint-
ance with the duchess, assuring himself that he was yielding to the attractions of mind and heart which
the vile race of snobs could never under-stand. Only his fellow-snobs knew that he was of their number,
for, owing to their inability to appreciate the intervening efforts of his imagination, they saw in close
juxtaposition the social activity of Legrandin and its primary cause.
　　　　At home, meanwhile, we no longer had any illusions about M. Legrandin, and our relations with him
had become much more distant. Mamma was greatly delighted whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin
which he never admitted to, which he continued to call the unpardonable sin of snobbery. As for my father,
he found it difficult to take Legrandin's airs in so light-hearted and detached a spirit; and when there
was talk, one year, of sending me to spend the summer holidays at Balbec with my grandmother, he said:
"I simply must tell Legrandin that you're going to Balbec, to see whether he'll offer to introduce you to
his sister. He probably doesn't remember telling us that she lived within a mile of the place."
　　　　My grandmother, who held that when one went to the seaside one ought to be on the beach from morning
to night sniffing the salt breezes, and that one should not know anyone there because visits and excursions
are so much time filched from the sea air, begged him on no account to speak to Legrandin of our plans;
for already, in her mind's eye, she could see his sister, Mme de Cambremer, alighting from her carriage at
the door of our hotel just as we were on the point of going out fishing, and obliging us to remain indoors
to entertain her. But Mamma laughed at her fears, thinking to herself that the danger was not so threaten-
ing, and that Legrandin would show no undue anxiety to put us in touch with his sister. As it happened,
there was no need for any of us to introduce the subject of Balbec, for it was Legrandin himself who,
without the least suspicion that we had ever had any intention of visiting those parts, walked into the
trap uninvited one evening when we met him strolling on the banks of the Vivonne.
　　　　"There are tints in the clouds this evening, violets and blues, which are very beautiful, are they
not, my friend?" he said to my father, "a blue, especially, more floral than aerial, a cineraria blue,
which it is surprising to see in the sky. And that little pink cloud there, has it not also the tint of
some flower, a carnation or hydrangea? Nowhere, perhaps, except on the shores of the Channel, where Nor-
mandy merges into Brittany, have I observed where such copious examples of that sort of vegetable kingdom
(idle atmosphere. Down there, in that unspoiled country near Balbec, there is a charmingly quiet little
bay where the sunsets of the Auge Valley, those red-and-gold sun-sets (which, by the by, I am very far
from despising) seem commonplace and insignificant; but in that moist and gentle atmosphere these celestial
bouquets, pink and blue, will blossom all at once of an evening, incomparably lovely, and often lasting for
hours before they fade. Others shed their flowers at once, and then it is lovelier still to see the sky
strewn with their innumerable petals, sulphur or rose-pink. In that bay, which they call the Bay of Opal,
the golden sands appear more charming still from being fastened, like fair Andromeda, to those terrible
rocks of the surrounding coast, to that funereal shore, famed for the number of its wrecks, where every
winter many a brave vessel falls victim to the perils of the sea. Balbec! the most ancient bone in the geo-
logical skeleton that underlies our soil, the true Armor, the sea, the land's end, the accursed region
which Anatole France--an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to read--has so well depicted, be-
neath its eternal fogs, as though it were indeed the land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. Balbec; yes,
they are building hotels there now, superimposing them upon its ancient and charming soil which they are
powerless to alter; how delightful it is to be able to make excursions into such primitive and beautiful
regions only a step or two away!"
　　　　"Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec?" inquired my father. "As it happens, this young
man is going to spend a couple of month, there with his grandmother, and my wife too, perhaps."
　　　　Legrandin, taken unawares by the question, at a moment when he was looking directly at my father,
was unable to avert his eyes, and so fastened them with steadily increasing intensity--smiling mournfully
the while--upon the eyes of his questioner, with an air of friendliness and frankness and of not being
afraid to look him in the face, until he seemed to have penetrated my father's skull as if it had become
transparent, and to be seeing at that moment, far beyond and behind it, a brightly coloured cloud which
provided him with a mental alibi and would enable him to establish that at the moment when he was asked
whether he knew anyone at Balbec, he had been thinking of something else and so had not heard the question.
As a rule such tactics make the questioner proceed to ask, "Why, what are you thinking about?" But my fa-
ther, inquisitive, irritated and cruel, repeated: "Have you friends, then, in the neighbourhood, since you
know Balbec no well?"
　　　　In a final and desperate effort, Legrandin's smiling gaze struggled to the extreme limits of tender-
ness, vagueness, candour and abstraction; but, feeling no doubt that there was nothing left for it now but
to answer, he said to us: "I have friends wherever there are clusters of trees, stricken but not defeated,
which have come together witil touching perseverance to offer a common supplication to an inclement sky
which has no mercy upon them."
　　　　"That is is not quite what I meant " interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as merciless
as the sky. "I asked you, in case anything should happen to my mother-in-law and she wanted to feel that
she was not all alone there in an out-of-the-way place, whether you knew anyone in the neighbourhood."
　　　　"There as elsewhere, I know everyone and I know no one," replied Legrandin, who did not give in so
easily. The places I know well, the people very slightly. But the places themselves seem like people, rare
and wonderful people, of a delicate quality easily disillusioned by life. Perhaps it is a castle which you
encounter upon the cliff's edge standing there by the path where it has halted to contemplate its sor-
rows beneath an evening sky, still roseate, in which the golden moon is climbing while the homeward-bound
fishing-boats, cleaving the dappled waters, hoist its pennant at their mastheads and carry its colours. Or
perhaps it is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, plain and shy-looking but full of romance, hiding
from every eye some imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment. That land which knows not truth,"
he continued with Machiavellian subtlety, "that land of pure fiction makes bad reading for any boy, and
is certainly not what I should choose or recommend for my Young friend here, who is already so much inclin-
ed to melancholy--for a heart already predisposed to receive its impressions. Climates that breathe amorous
secrets and futile regrets may suit a disillusioned old man like myself, but they must always prove fatal
to a temperament that is still unformed. Believe me," he went on with emphasis, 'the waters of that bay--
more Breton than Norman--may exert a sedative influence, though even that is of questionable value, upon a
heart which, like mine, is no longer intact, a heart for whose wounds there is no longer anything to compen-
sate. But at your age, my boy, those waters are contra-indicated ...Good night to you, neighbours," he add-
ed, moving away from us with that evasive abruptness to which we were accustomed; and then, turning towards
us with a physicianly finger raised in warning, he resumed the consultation: "No Balbeca before fifty!" he
called out to us, "and even then it must depend on the state of the heart."
　　　　My father raised the subject again at our subsequent meetings, torturing him with questions, but it
was labour in vain: like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication of forged palimpsests a
wealth of skill and knowledge and industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed to establish him
in a more lucrative but honourable occupation, M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have
constructed a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy sooner than admit
to us that his own sister was living within a mile or two of Balbec, sooner than find himself obliged to of-
fer us a letter of introduction the prospect of which would never have inspired him with such terror had he
been absolutely certain--as from his knowledge of my grandmother's character, he really ought to have been--
that we would never have dreamed of making use of it.


　　　　We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Lionie a visit before dinner. At the
beginning of the season, when the days ended early, we would still be able to see, as we turned into the Rue
du Saint-Esprit, a reflection of the setting sun in the windows of the house and a band of crimson beyond
the timbers of the Calvary, which was mirrored further on in the pond; a fiery glow that, accompanied often
by a sharp tang in the air, would associate itself in my mind , with the glow of the fire over which, at that
very moment, was roasting the chicken that was to furnish me, in place of the poetic pleasure of the walk,
with the sensual pleasure of good feeding, warmth and rest.- But in summer, when we came back to the house,
the sun would not have set; and while we were upstairs paying our visit to aunt Lionie its rays, sinking un-
til they lay along her window-sill, would be caught and held by the large inner curtains and the loops which
tied them back to the wall, and then, split and ramified and filtered, encrusting with tiny flakes of gold
the citron-wood of the chest of drawers, would illuminate the room with a delicate, slanting, woodland glow.
But on some days, though very rarely, the chest of drawers would long since have shed its momentary incrust-
ations, there would no longer, as we turned into the Rue du Saint-Esprit, be any reflection from the western
sky lighting up the window-panes, and the pond beneath the Calvary would have lost its fiery glo, sometimes
indeed had changed already to an opalescent pallor, while a long ribbon of moonlight, gradually broadening
and splintered by every ripple upon the water's surface, would stretch across it from end to end. Then, as
we drew near the house, we would see a figure standing upon the, doorstep, and Mamma would say to me: "Good
heavens! There's Francoise looking out for us; your aunt must be anxious; that means we're late."
　　　




　　　　For there were, in the environs of Combray, two "ways" which we used to take for our walks, and they
were so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door according to the
way we had chosen: the way towards Misiglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also "Swann's way" because to get
there one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann's estate, and the "Guermantes way." Of Misiglise-la-
Vineuse, to tell the truth, I never knew anything more than the "way," and some strangers who used to come
over on Sundays to take the air in Combray, people whom, tha time, neither my aunt herself nor any of us
"knew front Adam," and whom we therefore assumed to be "people must have come over from Misiglise." As
for Guermantes, I was to know it well enough one day, but tha day had still to come; and, during the whole of
my boyhood, if Meseglise was to me something as inaccessible as the horizon, which remained hidden from
sight, however far one went, by the folds of a landscape which no 1onger bore the least resemblance to
the country round Combray, Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than the is ultimate goal, ideal
rather than real, of the Guermantes way," a sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the
Equator or the Orient. And so, to take the Guermantes way" in order to get to Meseglise, or vice-versa,
would have seemed to me as nonsensical proceeding as to turn to the east in order to reach the west.
Since my father used always to speak of the "Meseglise way" as comprising the finest view of a plain that
he knew anywhere, and of the "Guermantes way" as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them,
by conceiving them In this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belong only
to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them seemed to me a precious thing ex-
emplifying the special excellence of the whole, while beside them, before one had reached the sacred soil
of one or the other, the purely material paths amid which they were set down as the ideal view over
plain and the ideal river landscape, were no more worth the trouble of looking at than, to a keen playgoer
and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets that run past he walls of a theatre. But above all I set
between them far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance
that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those dis-
tances of the mind which not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them
on different planes. And this distinction was rendered still more absolute because the habit we had of
never going both ways on the same day, or in the course of the same walk, but the "Meseglise way"
one time and the "Guermantes way" another, shut them off, so to speak, far apart from one another
and unaware of each other's existence, in the airtight compartments of separate afternoons.
　　　　When we had decided to go the Meseglise way would start (without undue haste, and even if the sk;
were clouded over, since the walk was not very long and-did not take us too far from home), as though we
were not going anywhere in particular, from the front-door of my aunt's house, which opened on to the
Rue du Saint. Esprit. We would be greeted by the gunsmith, we would drop our letters into the box, we
would tell Theodore, from Francoise, as we passed that she had run out of oil or coffee, and we would
leave the town by the road which ran along the white fence of M. Swann's park. Before reaching it we
would be met on our way by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers. From amid
the fresh little green hearts of their foliage they raised inquisitively over the fence of the park their
plumes of white or mauve blossom, which glowed, even in the shade, with the sunlight in which they had
bathed. Some of them, half-concealed by the little tiled house known as the Archers' Lodge in which
Swann's keeper lived, over its Gothic gable with their pink minaret. The nymphs of spring would have
seemed coarse and vulgar in comparison with these young houris, who retained in this French garden the
pure and vivid colouring of a Persian miniature. Despite my desire to throw my arms about their pliant
forms and to draw down towards me the starry locks that crowned their fragrant heads, we would pass
them by without stopping, for my parents had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann's marriage, and,
so as not to appear to be looking into his park, instead of taking the path which skirted his property
and then climbed straight up to the open fields, we took another path which led in the same direction,
but circuitously, and brought us out beyond it.
　　　　One day my grandfather said to my father: "Don't you remember Swann's telling us yesterday that
his wife and daughter had gone off to Rheims and that he was taking the opportunity of spending a day
or two in Paris? We might go along by the park, since the ladies are not at home; that will make it a
little shorter."
　　　　We stopped for a moment by the fence. Lilac-time was nearly over; some of the trees still thrust
aloft, in tall mauve chandeliers, their delicate sprays of blossom, but in many parts of the foliage
which only a week before had been drenched in their fragrant foam, there remained only, a dry, hollow,
scentless froth, shrivelled and discoloured. My grandfather pointed out to my father in what respects
the appearance of the place was still the same, and how far it had altered since the walk that he
had taken with old M. Swann on the day of his wife's death; and he seized the the opportunity to tell
us once again the story of of that walk.
　　　　In front of us a path bordered wi nasturtiums ascended in the full glare of the sun towards the
house. But to our right the park stretched across level ground. Overshadowed by the tall trees which
stood close around it, an ornamental pond had been dug by Swann's parents; but even in his most art-
ificial creations, nature is the material upon which man has to work; certain places persist in re-
maining surrounding by the vassals of their own especial sovereignty, and will flaunt their immemorial
insignia in the middle of a park, just as they would have done far from any human interference, in a
solitude which everywhere return to engulf them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed
position and superimposed on the work of man's hands. And so it was that, at the foot of the path which
led down to the artificial lake, thee might be seen, in its two tiers woven of forget-me-not and peri-
winkle flowers, a natural, delicate, blue garlands encircling the water's luminous and shadowy brow,
while the iris, flourishing its sword-blades in regal profusion, stretched out over agrimony and water-
growing crowfoot the tattered fleurs-de-lis, violet and yellow, of its lacustrine sceptre.
The absence of Mlle Swann, which--since it preserved me from the terrible risk of seeing her
appear on one of the paths, and of being identified and scorned by this privileged little girl who had
Bergotte for a friend and used to go with him to visit cathedrals--made the exploration of Tansonville,
now for the first time permissible, a matter of indifference to myself, seemed on the contrary to in-
vest the property, in my grandfather's and my father's eyes, with an added attraction, a transient
charm, and (like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering) to make the day exception-
ally propitious for a walk round it; I should have liked to see their reckoning proved false, to see,
by a miracle, Mlle Swann appear with her father, so close to us that we should not have time to avoid
her, and should therefore be obliged to make her acquaintance. And so, when I suddenly noticed a straw
basket lying forgotten on the grass by the side of a fishing line whose float was bobbing in the water, I
made every effort to keep my father and grandfather looking in another direction, away from this sign
that she might, after all, be in residence. However, as Swann had told us that it was bad for him to
go away just then as he had some people staying in the house, the line might equally belong to one of
these guests. Not a footstep was to be heard on any of the paths. Quartering the topmost branches of
one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a
long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an
answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for
all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly. The sunlight fell so im-
placably from a motionless sky that one longed to escape its attentions, and even the slumbering wat-
er, whose repose was perpetually disturbed by the insects that swarmed above its surface, dreaming no
doubt of some imaginary maelstrom, intensified the uneasiness which the sight of that floating cork
had wrought in me by appearing to draw it at full speed across the silent reaches of the reflected
sky; now almost vertical, it seemed on the point of plunging down out of sight, and I had begun to
wonder whether, setting aside the longing and the terror that I had of making her acquaintance, it
was not actually my duty to warn Mlle Swann that the fish was biting--when I was obliged to run af-
ter my father and grandfather who were calling me, surprised that I had not followed them along the
little path leading up to the open fields into which they had already turned. I found the whole
path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthom-blossom. The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose
walls were no longer visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their altars;
while beneath them the sun cast a chequered light upon the ground, as though it had just passed through
a stained-glass window; and their scent swept over me, as unctuous, as circumscribed in its range,
as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and the flowers themselves adorned also, held
out each its little bunch of glittering stamens with an absent-minded air, delicate radiating veins
in the flamboyant style like those which, in the church, framed the stairway to the rood-loft or
the mullions of the windows and blossomed out into the fleshy whiteness of strawberry-flowers. How
simple and rustic by comparison would seem the dog-roses which in a few weeks' time would be climb-
ing the same path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the smooth silk of their blushing pink bod-
ices that dissolve in the first breath of wind.
　　　　But it was in vain that I lingered beside the hawthorns--breathing in their invisible and un-
changing odour, trying to fix it in my mind (which did not know what to do with it), losing it,
recapturing it, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed the flowers here and there with a
youthful light-heartedness and at intervals a: unexpected as certain intervals in music--they went
on offering me the same charm in inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve any more
deeply, like those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succesion without coming
any nearer to their secret. I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to. return to
them afresh. My eyes travelled up the bank which rose steeply to the fields beyond the hedge,
alighting on a stray poppy or a few laggard cornflowers which decorated the slope here and there
like the border of a tapestry whereon may be glimpsed sporadically the rustic theme which will
emerge triumphant in the panel itself; infrequent still, spaced out like the scattered houses
which herald the approach of a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse of waving corn be-
neath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and
holding against the breeze its scarlet ensign, over the buoy of rich black earth from which it
sprang, made my heart beat like that of a traveller who glimpses on some low-lying ground a
stranded boat which is being caulked and made sea-worthy, and cries out, although he has not yet
caught sight of it, "The Sea!"
　　　　And then I returned to the hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those
masterpieces which, one imagines, one will be better able to "take in" when one has looked away
for a moment at something else; but in vain did I make a screen with my hands, the better to con-
centrate upon the flowers, the feeling they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling
and failing to free itself, to float across and become one with them. They themselves offered me
no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to satisfy this mys-terious longing.
And then, inspiring me with that rapture Which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite painter
quite different from those we already know, or, better still, when we are shown a painting of
which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch, or when a piece of music which we
have heard only on the piano appears to us later clothed in all the colours of the orchestra, my
grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the Tansonville hedge, said to me, "You're fond
hawthorns; just look at this pink one--isn't it lovely?
　　　　And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose blossom was pink, and lovelier even than the
white. It too, was in holiday attire--for one of those days which are the only true holidays,
the holy days of religion, because they are not assigned by some arbitrary caprice, as secular
holidays are, to days which are not specially ordained for them, which,have nothing about them
that is essentially festal--but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the flowers
which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to leave no part of the tree un-
decorated, like the tassels wreathed about the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of
them "in colour," and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of Combray,
if one was to judge by the scale of prices at the "stores" in the Square, or at Camus's, where
the most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. For my own part, I set a higher
value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed straw-
berries. And these flowers had chosen precisely one of those colours of some edible and deli-
cious thing, or of some fond embellishment of a costume for a major feast, which, inasmuch as
they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to the
eyes of children, and for that reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any
other tints, even after the child's mind has realised that they offer no gratification to the
appetite and had have not been selected by the dressmaker. And indeed I felt at once, as I had
felt with the white blossom, but with even greater wonderment, that it was in no artificial man-
ner, by no device of human fabrication, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed,
but that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it. with the simplicity of a woman
from a, village shop labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some procession, by over-
loading the bush with these little rosettes, almost too ravishing in colour, this rustic pompadour.
High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jack-
ets of paper lace, whose slender shafts rose in a forest from the altar on major feast-days, a
thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at
the bottom of a bowl of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than
the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the thorn-bush which, wherever it
budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could do so in pink alone. Embedded in the hedge, but
as different from it as a young girl in festal attire among a crowd of dowdy women in everyday
clothes who are staying at home, all ready for the "Month of Mary" of which it seemed already to
form a part, it glowed there, smiling in its fresh pink garments, deliciously demure and Catholic.
　　　　The hedge afforded a glimpse, inside the park, of an alley bordered with jasmine, pansies,
and verbenas, among which the stocks held open their fresh plump purses, of a pink as fragrant
and as faded as old Spanish leather, while a long green hose, coiling across the gravel sent up
from its sprinkler a vertical and prismatic fan of multicoloured droplets. Suddenly I stood still,
unable to move, as happens when we are faced with a vision that appeals not to our eyes only but
requires a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being. A little
girl with fair, reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a spade in her
hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles. Her black eyes
gleamed, and since I did not at that time know, and indeed have never since learned, how to re-
duce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I had not, as they say, enough "power
of observation" to isolate the notion of their colour, for a long time afterwards, whenever I
thought of her, the memory of those bright eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid
azure, since her complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps if her eyes had not been quite
so black--which was what struck one most forcibly on first seeing her--I should not have been,
as I was, so especially enamoured of their imagined blue.
　　　　I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely the messenger of the eyes,
but at whose window all the senses assemble and lean out, petrified and anxious, a gaze eager
to reach, touch, capture, bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with
the body; then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and my father, catching
sight of the girl, might tear me away from her by telling me to run on in front of them) with
another, an unconsciously imploring look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me,
to see, to know me. She cast a glance forwards and sideways, so as to take stock of my grand-
father and my father, and doubtless the impression she formed was that we were all ridiculous
people, for she turned away with an indifferent and disdainful air, and stood sideways so as to spare
her face the indignity of remaining within their field of vision; and while they, continuing
to walk on without noticing her, overtook and passed me, she went on staring out of the corner
of her eye in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to see me, but
with a fixity and a half-hidden smile which I could only interpret, from the notions I had
been vouchsafed of good breeding, as a mark of infinite contempt; and her hand, at the same
time, sketched in the air an indelicate gesture for which, when it was addressed in public to
a person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which I carried in my mind
supplied only one meaning, namely, a deliberate insult.
　　　　"Gilberte, come along; what are you doing?" called out in a piercing tone of authority
a lady in white whom I had not seen until that moment, while, a little way be-yond her, a
gentleman in a suit of linen "ducks," whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes
which seemed to be starting from his head. The little girl's smile abruptly faded, and,
seizing her spade, she made off with Out turning to look again in my direction, with an
air of docility, inscrutable and sly.
　　　　Thus was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me like a talisman which
might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover the girl that its syllables had just en-
dowed with an identity, whereas the moment before she had been merely an uncertain image.
So it came to me, uttered across the heads of the stocks and jasmines, pungent and cool
as the drops which fell from the green watering-pipe; impregnating and irradiating the
zone of pure air through which it had passed--and which it set apart and isolated--with
the mystery of the life of her whom its syllables designated to the happy beings who
lived and walked and travelled in her company; unfolding beneath the arch of the pink
hawthorne, at the height of my shoulder, the quintessence of their familiarity--so
exquisitely painful to myself--with her and with the unknown world of her existence
into which I shouid never penetrate.
　　　　For a moment (as we moved away and my ther murmured; "Poor Swann, what a life they
are leading him--sending him away so that she can be alone her Charlus--for it was he,
I recognised him at once! And the child, too; at her age, to be mixed up in all that!")
the impression left on me by the despotic tone in which Gilberte's mother had spoken
to her without her answering back, by exhibiting her to me as being obliged to obey someone
else, as not being superior to the whole world, calmed my anguish somewhat, revived some
hope in me, and cooled the ardour of my love. But very soon that love surged up again in
me like a reaction by which my humiliated heart sought to rise to Gilberte's level or to
bring her down to its own. I loved her; I was sorry no to have had the time and the inspir-
ation to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. thought her so
beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist
at her and shout, "I think you're hideous, grotesque; how I loathe you!" But I walked
away, carrying with me, then and forever afterwards, as the first illustration of a type
of happiness rendered inaccessible to a little boy of my kind by certain laws of nature
which it was impossible to transgress, the picture of a little girl with reddish hair,
a freckled skin, who held a spade in her hand and smiled as she directed towards me a long,
sly, expressionless stare. And already the charm with which her narne, like a whiff of in-
cense, had imbued that archway in the pink hawthorn through which she and I had together
heard its sound, was beginning to impregnate, to overlay. to perfume everything with which
it had any association: her grandparents, whom my own had had the unutterable good fortune
to know, the sublime profession of stockbroker, the melancholy neighbourhood of the Champ-
Elysies, where she lived in Paris.





Sometimes a spell of fine weather made her a little more energetic, and she would get up
and dress; but before she had reached the outer room she would be tired again, and would
insist in returning to her bed. The process which had begun in her--and in her a little
earlier only than it must come to--was the great renunciation of old age as it prepared
for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives
that are at all prolonged; even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old
friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease
to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to
correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world. My aunt must have
been perfectly well aware that she would never see Swann again, that she would never leave
the house again, but this ultimate reclusion seemed to be made bearable to her by the
very factor which, to our minds, ought to have made it more painful; namely, that
this reclusion was forced upon her by the gradual diminution in her strength which she
was able to measure daily and which, by making every action, every movement exhausting
if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessedand re-
storing charm of repose.
　　　　My aunt did not go to see the pink hawthorn in the hedge, but at all hours of the day
I would ask the rest of my family whether she was not going to go, whether she used not,
at one time, to go often to Tansonville, trying to make them speak of Mlle. Swann’s
parents and grandparents, who appeared to me to be as great and glorious as gods. The
name, which had for me become almost mythological, of Swann when I talked with my
family I would grow sick with longing to hear them utter it; I dared not pronounce it
myself, but I would draw them into a discussion of matters which led naturally to
Gilberte and her family, in which she was involved, in speaking of which I would feel
myself not too remotely banished from her company; and I would suddenly force my father
(by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather’s business had been in
our family before his day, or that the hedge with the pink hawthorn which my aunt
Leonie wished to visit was on common ground) to correct my statements, to say, as
though in opposition to me and of his own accord: “No, no, the business belonged to
Swann’s father, that hedge is part of Swann’s park.” And then I would be obliged
to catch my breath; so suffocating was the pressure, upon that part of me where it was
for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment when I heard it, seemed to me
fuller, more portentous than any other name, because it was heavy with the weight
of all the occasions on which I had secretly uttered it in my mind. It caused me a
pleasure which I was ashamed to have dared to demand from my parents, for so great
was it that to have procured it for me must have involved them in an immensity of
effort, and with no recompense, since for them there was no pleasure in the sound.
And so I would prudently turn the conversation. And by a scruple of conscience,
also. All the singular seductions with which I had invested the name Swann, came back
to me as soon as they uttered it. And then it seemed to me suddenly that my parents
could not fail to experience the same emotions, that they must find themselves sharing
my point of view, that they perceived in their turn, that they condoned, that they even
embraced my visionary longings, and I was as wretched as though I had ravished and
corrupted the innocence of their hearts.
　　　　That year my family fixed the day of their return to Paris rather earlier than
usual. On the morning of our departure I had had my hair curled, to be ready to face
the photographer, had had a new hat carefully set upon my head, and had been buttoned
into a velvet jacket; a little later my mother, after searching everywhere for me,
found me standing in tears on the steep little path near Tansonville, bidding farewell
to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches in my arms, and, like a princess in a
tragedy, oppressed by the weight of these vain ornaments, with no gratitude towards
the importunate hand which, in curling those ringlets, had been at pains to arrange
my hair upon my forehead; trampling underfoot the curl-papers which I had torn from
my head, and my new hat with them. My mother was not at all moved by my tears, but
she could not suppress a cry at the sight of my battered headgear and my ruined jacket.
I did not, however, hear her. “Oh, my poor little hawthorns,” I was assuring them through
my sobs, “it is not you that want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you. You,
you have never done me any harm. So I shall always love you.” And, drying my eyes, I
promised them that, when I grew up, I would never copy the foolish example of other
men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring days, instead of paying calls and listening to
silly talk, I would make excursions into the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in
bloom.
　　　　Once in the fields we never left them again during the rest of our Meseglise
walk. They were perpetually traversed, as though by an invisible wanderer, by the wind,
which was to me the tutelary genius of Combray. Every year, on the day of our arrival,
in order to feel that I really was at Combray, I would climb the hill to greet it as
it swept through the furrows and swept me along in its wake. One always had the
wind for companion when one went the Meseglise way, on that gently undulating plain
where for mile after mile it met no rising ground. I knew that Mlle. Swann used often
to go and spend a few days at Laon; for all that it was many miles away, the distance
was counterbalanced by the absence of any intervening obstacle, and when, on hot
afternoons, I saw a breath of wind emerge from the farthest horizon, bowing the heads
of the corn in distant fields, pouring like a flood over all that vast expanse, and
finally come to rest, warm and rustling, among the clover and sainfoin at my feet,
that plain which was common to us both seemed then to draw us together, to unite us;
I would imagine that the same breath of wind had passed close to her, that it was
some message from her that it was whispering to me, without my being able to under-
stand it, and I would kiss it as it passed. On my left was a village called Champieu
(Campus Pagani, according to the Cure). On my right I could see across the cornfields
the two chiselled, rustic spires of Saint-Andre-des-Champs, themselves as tapering,
scaly, chequered, honeycombed, yellowing and friable as two ears of wheat.
　　　　At regular intervals, amid the inimitable ornamentation of their leaves, which
can be mistaken for those of no other fruit-tree, the apple-trees opened their broad
petals of white satin, or dangled the shy bunches their blushing buds. It was on the
Meseglise way that I first noticed the circular shadow which apple-trees cast upon
the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable threads of golden silk which the setting
sun weaves slantingly downwards from beneath their leaves, and which I used to see my
father slash through with his stick without ever making them deviate.
　　　　Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would creep up white as a cloud,
furtive, lustreless, suggesting an actress who does not have to come on for
a while, and so watches the rest of the company for a moment from the auditorium
in her ordinary clothes to, keeping in the background, not wishing to attract attention
to herself. I was glad to find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though
these works of art were very different--at least in my earlier years, before Bloch
had attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies--from those in which the moon
seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have recognised her then. It might
be, for instance, some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre, in which it is
silhouetted against the sky in the form of a silver sickle, one of those works as
naively unformed as were my own impressions, and which it enraged my grandmother's
sisters to see me admire. They held that one ought to set before children, and that
children shewed their own innate good taste in admiring, only such books and pic-
tures as they would continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature.
No doubt they regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an unclouded
vision could not fail to discern, without one's needing to nurture equivalents of
them and let them slowly ripen in one's own heart.
　　　　It was along the ‘Meseglise way,’ at Montjouvain, a house built on the edge
of a large pond, and overlooked by a steep, shrub-grown hill, that M. Vinteuil lived.
And so we used often to meet his daughter driving her dogcart at full speed along
the road. After a certain year we never saw her alone, but always accompanied by a
friend, a girl older than herself, with an evil reputation in the neighbourhood,
who in the end installed herself permanently, one day, at Montjouvain. People said:
That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded by love not to see what everyone is talking
about, and to let his daughter--a man who is horrified if you use a word in the
wrong sense--bring a woman like that to live under his roof. He says that she is
a most superior woman, with a heart of gold, and that she would have shewn extra-
ordinary musical talent if she had only been trained. He may be sure it is not
music that she is teaching his daughter.” But M. Vinteuil assured them that it
was, and indeed it is remarkable how people never fail to arouse admiration for
their moral qualities in the relatives of those with whom they are having carnal
relations. Physical passion, so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display
every vestige that is in them of kindness and self-abnegation, to such an extent
that they shine resplendent in the eyes of their immediate entourage. Dr.
Percepied, whose loud voice and bushy eyebrows enabled him to play to his heart's
content the part of ‘double-dealer,’ a part to which he was not, otherwise,
adapted, without in the least degree compromising his unassailable and quite
unmerited reputation of being a kind-hearted old curmudgeon, could make the Cure
and everyone else laugh until they cried by saying in a harsh voice: “What d'ye
say to this, now? It seems that she plays music with her friend, Mlle. Vinteuil.
That surprises you, does it? Oh, I know nothing, nothing at all. It was Papa
Vinteuil who told me all about it yesterday. After all, she has every right to
be fond of music, that girl. I should never dream of thwarting the artistic vo-
cation of a child; nor Vinteuil either, it seems. And then he plays music too,
with his daughter’s friend. Why, gracious heavens, it must be a regular musical
box, that house out there! What are you laughing at? I say they’ve been playing
too much music, those people. I met Papa Vinteuil the other day, by the cemetery.
It was all he could do to keep on his feet.”
　　　　Anyone who, like ourselves, had seen M. Vinteuil, about this time, avoiding
people whom he knew, and turning away as soon as he caught sight of them, changed
in a few months into an old man, engulfed in a sea of sorrows, incapable of any
effort not directly aimed at promoting his daughter’s happiness, spending whole
days beside his wife’s grave, could hardly have failed to realise that he was
gradually dying of a broken heart, could hardly have supposed that he paid no
attention to the rumours which were going about. He knew, perhaps he even be-
lieved, what his neighbours were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid
his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances,
living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most out-
spoken in condemning, without at first recognising it beneath the disguise which
it assumes on entering his presence, so as to wound him and to make him suffer;
the odd words, the unaccountable attitude, one evening, of a person whom he has
a thousand reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil’s sensibility it
must have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have to
resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to occur in
Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there needs to establish
itself in the security necessary to its development a vice which Nature herself
has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more than blending the virtues
of its father and mother, as she might blend the colours of their eyes. And yet
however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter’s conduct it did not
follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not pene-
trate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender
those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on
them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them;
and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without
interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either
the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician. But when M. Vinteuil
regarded his daughter and himself from the point of view of the world, and of
their reputation, when he attempted to place himself by her side in the rank
which they occupied in the general estimation of their neighbours, then he was
bound to give judgment, to utter his own and her social condemnation in pre-
cisely the terms which the inhabitant of Combray most hostile to him and his
daughter would have employed; he saw himself and her in ‘low,’ in the very
'lowest water,' inextricably stranded; and his manners had of late been tinged
with that humility, that respect for persons who ranked above him and to whom
he must now look up (however far beneath him they might hitherto have been),
that tendency to search for some means of rising again to their level, which
is an almost mechanical result of any human misfortune.
　　　　One day, when we were walking with Swann in one of the streets of Com-
bray, M. Vinteuil, turning out of another street, found himself so suddenly face to
face with us all that he had not time to escape; and Swann, with that con-
descending charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his
own moral prejudices, finds in another’s shame merely a reason for treating
him with a benevolence, the expresssion of which serves to gratify all the
more the self-esteem of the bestower because he feels that they are
all the more precious to the recipient, conversed at great length with M.
Vinteuil, with whom for a long time he had been barely on speaking terms,
and invited him, before leaving us, to send his daughter over, one day,
to play at Tansonville. It was an invitation which, two years earlier,
would have enraged M. Vinteuil, but which now filled him with so much
gratitude that he felt himself obliged to refrain from the indiscretion
of accepting. Swann’s friendly regard for his daughter seemed to him to be
in itself so honourable, so precious a support that he felt it would perhaps
be advisable not to make use of it, so as to have the wholly Platonic satis-
faction of keeping it in reserve.





　　　　Since the ‘Meseglise way’ was the shorter of the two that we used to
take for our walks round Combray, and for that reason was reserved for days
of uncertain weather, it followed that the climate of Meseglise shewed an un-
duly high rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the fringe of Roussain-
ville wood, so that we could, at any moment, run for shelter beneath its
dense thatch of leaves.
　　　　Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on
its roundness and whose edge it gilded in return. The brightness, though
not the luminosity would be expunged from a landscape in which all
life appeared to be suspended, while the little village of Roussainville
carved its white gables in relief upon the sky the with an overpowering
precision and finish. A gust of wind put up a solitary crow, which
flapped away and settled in the distance, while beneath a greying sky the
woods on the horizon assumed a deeper tone of blue, as though painted in
one of those monochromes that still decorate the overmantels of old houses.
　　　　But on other days the rain with which the barometer in the optician's
window had threatened us would begin to fall. Its drops, like migrating
birds which fly off in a body at a given moment, would come down out of
the sky in serried ranks--never drifting apart, never wandering off on
their own during their rapid course, but each one, keeping in its place,
and drawing its successor in its wake, so that the sky was more darkened
than during the swallows' exodus. We would take refuge among the trees.
And when it seemed that their flight was accomplished, a few last drops,
feebler and slower than the rest, would still come down. But we would
emerge from our shelter, for raindrops revel amidst foliage, and even
when it was almost dry again underfoot, many a stray drop, lingering in
the hollow of a leaf, would run down and hang glistening from the point
of it until suddenly it splashed on to our upturned faces from the top
of the branch.
　　　　Often, too, we would hurry for shelter, tumbling in among all its
stony saints and patriarchs, into the porch of Saint-Andre-des-Champs,
How typically French that church was! Over its door the saints, the
kings of chivalry with lilies in their hands, the wedding scenes and
funerals were carved as they might have been in the mind of Francoise.
The sculptor had also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil,
precisely as Francoise in her kitchen would break into speech about Saint
Louis as though she herself had known him, generally in order to depre-
ciate, by contrast with him, my grandparents, whom she considered less
'righteous.' One could see that the notions which the mediaeval artist
and the mediaeval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nine-
teenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, notions
whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived
not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken,
oral, distorted, unrecognisable, and alive. Another Combray person whom
I could discern also, potential and typified, in the gothic sculptures
of Saint-Andre-des-Champs was young Theodore, the assistant in Camus's
shop. And, indeed, Francoise herself was well aware that she had in him
a countryman and contemporary, for when my aunt was too ill for Francoise
to be able, unaided, to lift her in her bed or to carry her to her chair,
rather than let the kitchen-maid come upstairs and, perhaps, ‘make an
impression’ on my aunt, she would send out for Theodore. And this lad,
who was regarded, and quite rightly, in the town as a ‘bad character,’
was so abounding in that spirit which had served to decorate the porch
of Saint-Andre-des-Champs, and particularly in the feelings of respect
due, in Franchise’s eyes, to all ‘poor invalids,’ and, above all, to
her own ‘poor mistress,’ that he had, when he bent down to raise my
aunt’s head from her pillow, he wore the same naive and zealous mien
as the little angels in the bas-reliefs wear, who throng, with tapers
in their hands, about the swooning virgin, as though those carved stone,
faces, naked and grey as trees in winter, were, like them, asleep only,
storing up life and waiting to flower again in countless plebeian faces,
reverent and cunning as the face of Theodore, and glowing with the ruddy
brilliance of ripe apples.
　　　　There, too, not affixed to the stone like the little angels, but detached
from the porch, of more than human stature, erect upon her pedestal as upon
a footstool, which had been placed there to save her feet from contact with
the wet ground, stood a saint with the full cheeks, the firm breasts swell-
ing out her draperies like clusters of ripe grapes inside a sack, the
narrow forehead, short and impudent nose, deep-set eyes, and hardy, stolid,
fearless demeanour of the country-women of those parts. This similarity,
which imparted to the statue a kindliness that I had not looked to find in
it, was corroborated often by the arrival of some girl from the fields,
come, like ourselves, for shelter beneath the porch, whose presence there--
like the leaves of a climbing plant that have grown up beside some sculpted
foliage--seemed deliberately intended to enable us, by confronting it with
its type in nature, to form a critical estimate of the truth of the work of
art. Before our eyes, in the distance, a promised or an accursed land, Rou-
ssainville, within whose walls I had never penetrated, Roussainville was
now, when the rain had ceased for us, still being chastised like a village
in the Old Testament by all the slings and arrows of the storm, which beat
down obliquely upon the dwellings of its inhabitants, or else had already
received the forgiveness of the Almighty, who had restored to it the light
of his sun, which fell upon it in frayed, golden shafts, unequal in length
like the rays of a monstrance.
　　　　Sometimes, when the weather had completely broken, we were obliged
to go home and to remain shut up indoors. Here and there, in the distance, in
a landscape which, what with the failing light and saturated atmosphere, resem-
bled a seascape rather, a few solitary houses clinging to the lower slopes of
a hill whose heights were buried in a cloudy darkness shone out like little
boats which had folded their sails and would ride at anchor, all night, upon
the sea. But what mattered rain or storm? In summer, bad weather is no more
than a passing fit of superficial ill-temper on the part of the permanent, under-
lying fine weather, which, in sharp contrast to the the fluid and unstable fine
weather of winter, having firmly established itself in the soil where it has
materialized in dense masses of foliage on which the rain may drip without
weakening the endurance o their deep-seated happiness, has hoisted for the
entire season, in the very streets of the village, on the walls of its houses
and its gardens, its silken banners, violet and white. Sitting in the little
parlour, where I would pass the time until dinner with a book, I could hear
the water dripping from our chestnut-trees, but I knew that the shower would
merely burnish their leaves, and that they promised to remain there, like
pledges of summer, all through the rainy night, ensuring the continuance of
the fine weather; I knew that, however much it rained, tomorrow, over the
white fence of Tansonville, the little heart-shaped leaves would ripple, as
numerous as ever; a sea of ; and it was without the least distress that I
watched the poplar in the Rue des Perchamps praying for mercy, bowing in
desperation before the storm; without the least distress that I heard at the
bottom of the garden, the last peals of thunder growling among the lilacs.





During the long fortnight of my aunt's last illness Francoise never left her
room for an instant, never undressed, allowed no one else to do anything for
her, and did not leave her body until it was actually in its grave. Then at
last we understood that the sort of terror in which Francoise had lived of
my aunt's harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had developed in her a
feeling which we had mistaken for hatred, and which was really venration and
love. Her true mistress, whose decisions had been impossible to foresee, whose
ruses had been so difficult to foil, of whose good nature it had been so easy
to take advantage, her sovereign, her mysterious and omnipotent monarch was
no more. Compared with such a mistress we counted for very little. The time
had long passed when, on our first coming to spend our holidays at Combray,
we had been of equal importance, in Franchise’s eyes, with my aunt.
During that autumn my parents, finding the days so fully occupied with the
legal formalities that had to be gone through, and discussions with solicitors
and farmers, that they had little time for walks which, as it happened, the
weather made precarious, began to let me go, without them, along the ‘Mese-
glise way,’ wrapped up in a huge plaid which protected me from the rain, and
which I was all the more ready to throw over my shoulders because I felt that
its tartan stripes scandalised Francoise, whom it was impossible to convince
that the colour of one’s clothes had nothing whatever to do with one’s
mourning for the dead, and to whom the grief which we had shewn on my aunt's
death was wholly unsatisfactory, since we had not entertained the neighbours
to a great funeral banquet, and did not adopt a special tone when we spoke of
her, while I at times might be heard humming a tune.





　　　　And if Francoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused reflect-
ions upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to plead her inability to
rebut my theories, saying: “I don’t know how to espress myself,” I would triumph
over her with an ironical and brutal common sense worthy of Dr. Percepied;
and if she went on: “All the same she was a geological relation; there is always
the respect due to your geology,” I would shrug my shoulders and say: “It is
really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who
makes such howlers,” adopting, to deliver judgment on Francoise, the mean
and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him in
the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to copy when they are oblig-
ed to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life.
　　　　My walks, that autumn, were all the more delightful because I used to take them
after long hours spent over a book. When I was tired of reading, after a whole morn-
ing in the house, I would throw my plaid across my shoulders and set out; my body,
which in a long spell of enforced immobility had stored up an accumulation of vital
energy, now felt the need, like a spinning-top wound and let go, to expend it in every
direction. The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees of Roussainville
wood, the bushes adjoining Montjouvain, all must bear the blows of my walking-stick
or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, these being no more than expressions
of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had not achieved the repose
of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift toward an immediate out-
let rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation, Thus it is that
most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve
us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify
them. When I try to reckon up all that I owe to the ‘Meseglise way,’ all the humble
discoveries of which it was either the accidental setting or the direct inspiration and
cause, I am reminded that it was in that same autumn, on one of those walks, near
the bushy precipice which guarded Montjouvain from the rear, that I was struck for
the first time by this lack of harmony between our impressions and their normal forms
of expression. After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had struggled cheerfully,
as I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, beside a little hut with a tiled roof in
which M. Vinteuil's gardener kept his tools, the sun had just reappeared, and its golden
rays, washed clean by the shower, glittered anew in the sky, on the trees, on the wall
of the hut, and the still wet tiles of the roof, on the ridge of which a hen was strut-
ting. The wind tugged at the wild grass growing from cracks in the wall, and at the
hen's downy feathers, which floated out horizontally to their full extent with the
unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless things. The tiled roof cast upon
the pond, translucent again in the sunlight, a dappled pink reflection which I had
never observed before. And, seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall,
a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my enthusiasm,
brandishing my furled umbrella: “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!” But at the same time I
felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words,
but to endeavour to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture.
　　　　And it was at that moment, too--thanks to a peasant who went past, apparently
in a bad enough humour already, but more so when he nearly got a poke in the face
from my umbrella, and who replied somewhat cooly to my “Fine day, what! Good to be
out walking!”--that I learned that identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts
of all men simultaneously, in accordance with a pre-established order. Later on, when-
ever a long spell of reading I had put me in a mood for conversation, the friend to
whom I was longing to talk would at that moment have finished indulging himself in
the delights of conversation, and wanted to be left to read undisturbed. And if I
had just been thinking of my parentswith affection, and forming resolutions of the
kind most calculated to please them, they would have been using the same interval
of time to discover some misdeed that I had already forgotten, and would begin to
scold me severely, as I about to fling myself into their arms.
　　　　Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would be added
an alternative feeling, so that I could not be clear in my mind to which I should give
the casting vote; a feeling stimulated by the desire to see rise up before my eyes
a peasant-girl whom I might clasp in my arms. Coming abruptly, and without giving
me time to trace it accurately to its source among so many ideas of a very different
kind, the pleasure which accompanied this desire seemed only a degree superior to
what was given me by my other thoughts. I found an additional merit in everything
that was in my mind at the moment, in the pink reflection of the tiled roof, the
grass growing out of the wall, the village of Roussainville into which I had long
desired to penetrate, the trees of its wood and the steeple of its church, as a
result of this fresh emotion which made them appear more desirable only because I
thought it was they that had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear me
more swiftly towards them when it filled my sails with a potent, mysterious and
propitious breeze. But if, for me, this desire that a woman should appear added
for me something more exalting to the charms of nature, they in their turn enlarged
what I might have found too restricted, in the charms of the woman. It seemed to me
that the beauty of the trees was hers also, and that her kisses would reveal to me
the spirit of those horizons, of the village of Roussainville, of the books which I
was reading that year; and, my imagination drawing strength from contact with my
sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my
desire no longer had any bounds. Moreover--just as in moments of musing contem-
plation of nature, the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract
ideas of things set aside, we believe with the profoundest faith in the originality, in the
individual existence of the place in which we may happen to be--the passing figure
whom my desire evoked seemed to be not just any specimen of the genus ‘woman,’
but a necessary and natural product of this particular soil. For at that time
everything that was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me
more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear
to full-grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made no distinction.
I had a desire for a peasant-girl from Meseglise or Roussainville, for a fisher-girl
from Balbec, just as I had a desire for Balbec and Meseglise. The pleasure which they
might give me would have seemed less genuine, I should no longer have believed in it,
if I had modified the conditions as I pleased. To meet a fisher-girl from Balbec or
a peasant-girl from Meseglise in Paris would have been like receiving the present of
a shell which I had never seen upon the beach, or of a fern which I had never found
among the woods, would have stripped from the pleasure she might give me all those
other pleasures amidst which my imagination had enwrapped her. But to wander thus
among the woods of Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those
woods and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty. That
girl whom I invariably saw dappled with the shadows of their leaves, was to me her-
self a plant of local growth, merely of a higher species than the rest, and one whose
structure would enable me to get closer than through them to the intimate savour of
the country. I could believe this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by
which she would bring that savour to my senses would themselves be of a special kind,
yielding a pleasure which I could never derive from anyone else) since I was still,
and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the
fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted
it, when one has not yet reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them
thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the
same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated, distinct, formulated in the
consciousness, as the ultimate aim for which one seeks a woman's company, or as the
cause of the preliminary perturbation that one feels. Scarcely does one think of
it as a pleasure in store for one; rather does one call it her charm; for one does
not think of oneself, but only of escaping from oneself. Obscurely awaited, immanent
and concealed, it simply raises to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it
makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender glances, the
kisses, of the woman by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a
sort of transport of gratitude for her kindness of heart and for her touching pre-
dilection for us, which we measure by the blessings and the happiness that she
showers upon us.
　　　　Alas, it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keep of Roussainville, that
I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village, appealing to it as to
the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my earliest desire when, from the top floor
of our house at Combray, from the little room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered
out and seen nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window,
while, with the heroic misgivings of a traveller setting out on a voyage of explora-
tion, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint
with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path
which for all I knew was deadly---until the moment when a natural trail like that
left by a snail smeared the leaves of the flowering currant that drooped around me.
In vain did I call upon it now. In vain did I compress the whole landscape into my
field of vision, draining it with an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it
a female creature. I might go alone as far as the porch of Saint-Andre-des-Champs:
never did I find there the girl whom I should inevitably have met, had I been with
my grandfather, and so unable to engage her in conversation. I would fix my eyes,
without limit of time, upon the trunk of a distant tree, from behind which she must
appear and spring towards me; my closest scrutiny left the horizon barren as before;
night was falling; without any hope now I concentrated my attention, as though to
draw up from it the creatures which it must conceal, upon that sterile soil, that
stale and exhausted earth, and it was no longer with exhilaration but with sullen
rage that I aimed blows at the trees of Roussainville wood, from among which no
more living creatures emerged than if they had been trees painted on the stretched
canvas background of a panorama, when, unable to resign myself to having to return
home without having held in my arms the woman I so greatly desired, I was yet ob-
liged to retrace my steps towards Combray, and to admit to myself that the chance
of her appearing in my path grew smaller every moment. And if she had appeared,
would I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have regarded me as mad,
for I no longer thought of those desires which came to me on my walks, but were
never realized, as being shared by others, or as having any existence apart from
myself. They seemed nothing more now than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory
creatures of my temperament. They were in no way connected now with nature, with
the world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and significance,
and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, just as the action
of a novel is framed in the railway carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it
to pass the time.





　　　　She was in deep mourning, for her father had but lately died. We had not gone to
see her; my mother had not cared to go, on account of that virtue which alone in her
fixed any bounds to her benevolence--namely, modesty; but she pitied the girl from
the depths of her heart. My mother had not forgotten the sad end of M. Vinteuil’s
life, his complete absorption, first in having to play both mother and nursery-maid to
his daughter, and, later, in the suffering which she had caused him; she could see the
tortured expression which was never absent from the old man’s face in those terrible
last years; she knew that he had definitely abandoned the task of transcribing in fair
copies the whole of his later work, the poor little pieces, we imagined, of an old music-
master, a retired village organist, which, we assumed, were of little or no value in
themselves, though we did not despise them, because they were of such great value to him
and had been the chief motive of his life before he sacrificed them to his daughter;
pieces which, being mostly not even written down, but recorded only in his memory, while
the rest were scribbled on loose sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must now remain
unknown for ever. My mother thought, too, of that other and still more cruel renunci-
ation to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that of a future of honourable and respectable
happiness for his daughter; when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery
that had come upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and
shuddered to think of that other grief, so much more bitter, which Mlle. Vinteuil must
now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father. “Poor M.
Vinteuil,” my mother would say, “he lived and died for his daughter without getting
his reward. Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what form? It can only come to him
from her.”
　　　　At the far end of Mlle. Vinteuil’s sitting-room, on the mantelpiece, stood a small
photograph of her father which she went briskly to fetch, just as the sound of carriage
wheels was heard from the road outside, then flung herself down on a sofa and drew close
beside her a little table on which she placed the photograph, just as, long ago, M.
Vinteuil had ‘placed’ beside him the piece of music which he would have liked to play
over to my parents. And then her friend came in. Mlle. Vinteuil greeted her without
rising, clasping her hands behind her head, and drew her body to one side of the sofa,
as though to ‘make room.’ But no sooner had she done this than she appeared to feel
that she was perhaps suggesting a particular position to her friend, with an emphasis
which might well be regarded as importunate. She thought that her friend would prefer,
no doubt, to sit down at some distance from her, upon a chair; she felt that she had
been indiscreet; her sensitive heart took fright; stretching herself out again over the
whole of the sofa, she closed her eyes and began to yawn, so as to suggest that drowsi-
ness was the sole reason for her recumbent position. Despite the brusque and hectoring
familiarity with which she treated her companion I could recognise in her the obsequious
and reticent gestures and sudden scruples that had characterised her father. Presently
she rose and came to the window, where she pretended to be trying to close the shutters
and not succeeding.
　　　　"Leave them open," said her friend. “I'm hot.”
　　　　"But it’s too tiresome! People will see us,” Mlle. Vinteuil answered.
　　　　But then she must have guessed that her friend would think that she had uttered
these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she did
indeed wish to hear, but, from discretion, would have preferred her friend be the first
to speak. And so her face, which I could not see very clearly, I am sure that the ex-
pression must have appeared on it which my grandmother had once found so delightful,
when she hastily went on: “When I say ‘see us’ I mean, of course, see us reading.
It’s so dreadful to think that in every trivial little thing you do some one may be
overlooking you.”
　　　　With an instinctive rectitude and gentility beyond her control, she refrained
from uttering the premeditated words which she had felt to be indispensable for the
full realisation of her desire. And perpetually, in the depths of her being, a shy and
suppliant maiden entreated and reined back a rough and swaggering trooper.
　　　　"Oh, yes, it is so extremely likely that people are looking at us at this time of
night in this densely populated district!” said her friend, with bitter irony. “And
what if they are?” she went on, feeling bound to annotate with a malicious yet affect-
ionate wink these words which she was repeating, out of good nature, like a lesson
prepared beforehand which, she knew, it would please Mlle. Vinteuil to hear. “And what
if they are? All the better that they should see us.”
　　　　Mlle. Vinteuil shuddered and rose to her feet. Her sensitive and scrupulous heart
was ignorant of the words that ought to flow spontaneously from her lips to match the
scene for which her eager senses clamoured. She reached out as far as she could across
the limitations of her true nature to find the language appropriate to the vicious young
woman she longed to be thought, but the words which she imagined such a young woman might
have uttered with sincerity sounded false on her own lips. And what little she allowed
herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed
her impulse towards audacity and was interlarded with: “You're sure you aren't cold?
You aren't too hot? You don't want to sit and read by yourself? . . .
　　　　"Her ladyship's thoughts seem to be rather lubricious this evening,” she concluded,
doubtless repeating a phrase which she had heard used by her friend on some earlier occa-
sion.
　　　　In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the sting of her
friend's sudden kiss; she gave a little scream and broke away; and then they began to
chase one another about the room, scrambling over the furniture, their wide sleeves
fluttering like wings, clucking and squealing like a pair of amorous fowls. At last Mlle.
Vinteuil collapsed on the sofa with her friend lying on top of her. The latter now had
her back turned to the little table on which the old music-master’s portrait had been
arranged. Mlle. Vinteuil realised that her friend would not see it unless her attention
were drawn to it, and so exclaimed, as if she herself had just noticed it for the first
time: “Oh! there’s my father’s picture looking at us; I can’t think who can have put
it there; I'm sure I've told them twenty times, that is not the proper place for it.”
　　　　I remembered the words that M. Vinteuil had used to my parents in apologising for
an obtrusive sheet of music. This photograph was evidently in regular use for ritual
profanations, was subjected to daily profanation, for the friend replied in words which
were clearly a liturgical response: “Let him stay there. He can’t trouble us any longer.
D'you think he’d start whining, and wanting to put your overcoat on for you if he saw
you now, with the window open, the ugly old monkey?”
　　　　To which Mlle. Vinteuil replied in words of gentle reproach--"Come, come!"-- which
testified to the genuine goodness of her nature, not that it was prompted by any resentment
at hearing her father spoken of in this fashion (for that was evidently a feeling which
she had trained herself, by a long course of sophistries, to keep in close subjection at
such moments), but rather because it was the bridle which, so as to avoid all appearance
of egotism, she herself applied to the gratification which her friend was attempting to
procure for her. It may well have been, too, that the smiling moderation with which she
faced and answered these blasphemies, that this tender and hypocritical rebuke appeared
to her frank and generous nature as a particularly shameful and seductive form of that
wickedness she was striving to emulate. But she could not resist the attraction of being
treated with tenderness by a woman who had shown herself so implacable towards the def-
enceless dead, and, springing on to her friend's lap she held out a chaste brow to be
kissed precisely as a daughter would have done, with the exquisite sensation that they
would thus, between them, inflict the last turn of the screw of cruelty by robbing M.
Vinteuil, as though they were actually rifling his tomb, of the sacred rights of father-
hood. Her friend took the girl’s head in her hands and placed a kiss on her brow with a
docility prompted by the real affection she had for Mlle. Vinteuil, as well as by the
desire to bring what distraction she could into the dull and melancholy life of an orphan.
　　　　"Do you know what I should like to do to this old horror?” she said, taking up the
photograph. And she murmured in Mlle. Vinteuil’s ear something that I could not distinguish.
　　　　"Oh! You would't dare.”
　　　　"Not dare to spit on it? On that?” said the friend with studied brutality.
　　　　I heard no more, for Mlle. Vinteuil, with an air that was at once languid, awkward,
bustling, honest and rather sad, came to the window and drew the shutters close; but I knew
now what was the reward that M. Vinteuil, in return for all the suffering that he had end-
ured in his lifetime, on account of his daughter, had received from her after his death.
　　　　And yet I have since reflected that if M. Vinteuil had been able to be present at this
scene, he might still, and in spite of everything, have continued to believe in his daugh-
ter's soundness of heart, and that he might even, in so doing, have been not altogether
wrong. It was true that in all Mlle. Vinteuil’s actions the appearance of evil was so
absolut that it would have been hard to find it exhibited in such a degree of perfection
outside a convinced sadist; it is behind the footlights of a Paris theatre and not under
the homely lamp of an actual country house that one expects to see a girl encouraging a
friend on to spit upon the portrait of a father who has lived and died for her alone; and
when we find in real life a desire for melodramatic effect, it is generally saism that is
responsible for it. It is possible that, without being in the least inclined towards sad-
ism, a daughter might be guilty of equally cruel offenses as those of Mlle. Vinteuil
against the memory and the wishes of her dead father, but she would not give them delib-
erate expression in an act so crude in its symbolism, so lacking in subtlety; the criminal
element in her behaviour would have been less evident to other people, and even to herself,
since she would not have admitted to herself that she was doing wrong. But, appearances
apart, in Mlle. Vinteuil’s soul, at least in the earlier stages, the evil element was
probably not unmixed. A sadist of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked
person could not be, for in that case the evil would not have been external, it would
have seemed quite natural to her, and would not even have been distinguishable from her-
self; and as for virtue, respect for the dead, filial affection, since she would never
have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious delight in their pro-
fanation. Sadists of Mlle. Vinteuil's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so natur-
ally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerog-
ative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment to enjoy it they endea-
vour to impersonate, to identify with the wicked,and to make their partners do likewise,
in order to gain the momentary illusion of having escaped beyond the control of their
own gentle and scrupulous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. And I could under-
stand how she must have longed for such an escape when I realised that it was impossible
for her to effect it. At the moment when she wished to be thought the very antithesis of
her father, what she at once suggested to me were the mannerisms, in thought and speech,
of the poor old music-master. Indeed, his photograph was nothing; Far more than his
photography, what she really desecrated, what she subordinated to her pleasures, though
it remained between them and her and prevented her from any direct enjoyment of them, was
the likeness between her face and his, his mother’s blue eyes which he had handed down to
her like a family jewel, those gestures of courtesy and kindness which interposed between
her vice and herself a phraseology, a mentality not designed for vice, which made her
regard it as not in any way different from the numberless little social duties and cour-
tesies to which she must devote herself every day. It was not evil that gave her the idea
of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.
And as, every time that she indulged in it, pleasure came to her attended by evil thoughts
such as, ordinarily, had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to see in plea-
sure itself something diabolical, to identify it with Evil. Perhaps Mlle. Vinteuil felt
that at heart her friend was not altogether bad, not really sincere when she gave vent to
those blasphemous utterances. At any rate, she had the pleasure of receiving and returning
those kisses, those smiles, those glances, all feigned, perhaps, but akin in their base
and vicious mode of expression to those which would have been evinced not by an ordinarily
kind, suffering person, but by a cruel and wanton one. She could delude herself for a moment
into believing that she was indeed enjoying the pleasures which, with so perverted an accom-
plice, a girl might enjoy who really did harbor such barbarous towards her father’s memory.
Perhaps she would not have thought of evil as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one
in which it was so refreshing to sojourn, had she been able to discern in herself, as in
everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names
one gives it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.



　　　　If the ‘Meseglise way’ was so easy, it was a very different matter when we took the
'Guermantes way,' for that meant a long walk, and we must make sure, first, of the weather.
When we seemed to have entered upon a spell of fine days, when Francoise, in desperation that
not a drop was falling upon the ‘poor crops,’ gazing up at the sky and seeing there only an
occasional white cloud floating upon its calm, blue surface, groaned aloud and exclaimed:
"They look just like a lot of dogfish swimming about and sticking up their snouts! Ah, they
never think of making it rain a little for the poor labourers! And then when the corn is all
ripe, down it will come pitter-patter all over the place, and think no more of where it's
falling than if it was on the sea!”; when my father’s appeals to the gardener had met with
the same encouraging answer several times in succession, then some one would say, at dinner: “
To-morrow, if the weather holds, we might go the Guermantes way.” And off we would set,
immediately after lunch, through the little garden gate into the Rue des Perchamps, narrow
and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with clumps of grass amog which two or three wasps would
spend the day botanising, a street as quaint as its name, from which its odd characteristics
and its personality were, I felt, derived; a street for which one might search in vain
through the Combray of to-day, for the public school now rises upon its site. But in my
dreams of Combray (like those architects, pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, who, fancying that they
can detect, beneath a Renaissance rood-screen and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a
Romanesque choir, restore the whole church to the state in which it must have been in the
twelfth century) I leave not a stone of the modern edifice standing but pierce through it
and ‘restore’ the Rue des Perchamps. And for such reconstruction memory furnishes me with
more detailed guidance than is generally at the disposal of restorers; the pictures which it
has preserved--perhaps the last surviving in the world to-day, and soon to follow the rest
into oblivion--of what Combray looked like in my childhood’s days; pictures which, simply
because it was the old Combray that traced their outlines upon my mind before it vanished,
are as moving--if I may compare a humble landscape with those glorious works, reproductions
of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing on me--as those old engravings of the ‘
Cenacolo,’ or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they
no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark’s.
　　　　We would pass, in the Rue de l’Oiseau, before the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesche,
into whose great courtyard, once upon a time, would rumble the coaches of the Duchesses de
Montpensier, de Guermantes, and de Montmorency, when they had to come down to Combray for
some litigation with their farmers, or to receive homage from them. We would come at length
to the Mall, among whose treetops I could distinguish the steeple of Saint-Hilaire. And I
should have liked to be able to sit down and spend the whole day there reading and listen-
ing to the bells, for it was so blissful and so quiet that, when an hour struck, you would
have said not that it broke in upon the calm of the day, but that it relieved the day of its
superfluity, and that the steeple, with the indolent, painstaking exactitude of a person who
has nothing else to do, had simply--in order to squeeze out and let fall the few golden drops
which had slowly and naturally accumulated in the hot sunlight--pressed, at a given moment,
the distended surface of the silence.
　　　　The great charm of the ‘Guermantes’ way was that we had beside us, almost all the time,
the course of the Vivonne. We crossed it first, ten minutes after leaving the house, by a
foot-bridge called the Pont-Vieux. And every year, when we arrived at Combray, on Easter mor-
ning, after the sermon, if the weather was fine, I would run there to see (amid all the dis-
order that prevails on the morning of a great festival, the sumptuous preparations for which
make the everyday household utensils that they have not contrived to banish seem more sordid
than usual) the river flowing past, sky-blue already between banks still black and bare, its
only companions a clump of premature daffodils and early primroses, while here and there
burned the blue flame of a violet, its stem drooping beneath the weight of the drop of perfume
stored in its tiny horn. The Pont-Vieux led to a tow-path which at this point would be over-
hung in summer by the bluish foliage of a hazel, beneath which a fisherman in a straw hat
seemed to have taken root. At Combray, where I knew everyone, and could always detect the
blacksmith or grocer’s boy through his disguise of a beadle’s uniform or chorister's sur-
plice, this fisherman was the only person whom I was never able to identify. He must have
known my family, for he used to raise his hat when we passed; and then I would always be
just on the point of asking his name, when some one would make a sign to me to be quiet, or
I would frighten the fish. We would follow the tow-path which ran along the top of a steep
bank, several feet above the stream. The ground on the other side was lower, and stretched
in a series of broad meadows as far as the village and even to the distant railway-station.
Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of the castle of the old
Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages, had had on this side the course of the
Vivonne as a barrier and defence against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of
Martinville. Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad sur-
face of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in their day, the bowmen
had hurled down stones, the watchmen had gazed out over Novepont, Clairefontaine, Martinville-
le-Sec, Bailleau-l’Exempt, fiefs all of them of Guermantes, a ring in which Combray was
locked; but fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and commanded by
boys from the Christian Brothers’ school, who came there for study or recreation; a past
that had almost sunk into the ground, lying by the water’s edge like an idler taking the air,
yet giving me much food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not only
the little town of today but an historic city vastly different, gripping my imagination by the
remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of
buttercups. For the buttercups grew past numbering on this spot which they had chosen
for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in whole companies, yellow as
the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added lustre, I felt, because, being powerless to con-
summate with my palate the pleasure which the sight of them never failed to give me, I would
let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their golden expanse, until it became potent enough
to produce an effect of absolute, purposeless beauty; and so it had been from my earliest
childhood, when from the tow-path I had stretched out my arms towards them, before even
I could properly spell their charming name--a name fit for the Prince in some French fairy-
tale--immigrants, perhaps, from Asia centuries ago, but naturalised now for ever in the village,
satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water’s edge, faithful
to their little glimpse of the railway-station, yet keeping none the less like some of our old
paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the golden East.
　　　　I enjoyed watching the glass jars which the village boys used to lower into the Vivonne
to catch minnows, and which, filled by the stream, in which they in their turn were enclosed,
at once ‘containers’ whose transparent sides were like solidified water and ‘contents’
plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing crystal, conjured up an image of
coolness more delicious and more provoking than they would have done standing upon a table
laid for dinner, by showing it as perpetually in flight between the impalpable water in which
my hands could not grasp it, and the insoluble glass in which my palate could not enjoy it. I
made up my mind to come there again with a fishing-line; meanwhile I procured some bread
from our picnic basket; and threw pellets of it into the Vivonne which seemed to bring about
a process of super-saturation, for the water at once solidified round them in oval clusters
of emaciated tadpoles, which until then it had, no doubt, been holding in solution, invisible,
but ready and alert to enter the stage of crystallisation.
　　　　Presently the course of the Vivonne became choked with water-plants. At first they
appeared singly, a lily, for instance, which the current, across whose path it had unfor-
tunately grown, would never leave at rest for a moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechan-
ically propelled, it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally
repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would uncoil, lengthen,
reach out, strain almost to breaking-point until the current again caught it, its green
moorings swung back over their anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly
be called its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before moving
off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after another, always in the same
helpless state, suggesting certain victims of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would
have included my aunt Leonie, who present year after year the spectacle of their odd and
unaccountable habits, which they constantly imagine themselves to be on the point of shaking
off, but which they always retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies
and eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate its mechanism,
to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable and baneful dietetics. Such
as these was the water-lily, and reminiscent also of those wretches whose peculiar torments,
repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have
inquired about them at greater length and in fuller detail from the victims themselves,
had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him to hasten after him at full speed, as I must
hasten after my parents.
　　　　But farther on the current slackened, where the stream ran through a property thrown
open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of aquatic gardening, so that the
little ponds into which the Vivonne was here diverted were aflower with water-lilies. As
the banks herabouts were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a
background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we were coming home
on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen in its depths a clear, crude blue
verging on violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese cloisonne. Here and there, on the surface,
blushing like a strawberry, floated a water-lily flower with a scarlet center and white edges.
Further on the flowers were more numerous, paler, less glossy, more thickly seeded, more
tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw
floating upon the stream, as after the sad dismantling of some fete-galante, moss-roses in
loosened garlands. Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily,
of a neat pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain with housewifely
care while, a little further again, were others, pressed close together in a veritable float-
ing flower-bed, suggested garden pansies that had settled here like butterflies and were
fluttering their blue and burnished wings over the transparent depths of this watery garden
---this celestial garden too, for it gave the flowers a soil of a colour more precious, more
moving than their own, and, whether sparkling beneath the water-lilies in the afternoon,
in a kaleidoscope of silent, watchful and mobile contentment, or glowing, towards evening,
like some distant haven with the roseate dreaminess of the setting sun, ceaselessly changing
yet remaining ever in harmony, around the less mutable colours of the flowers themselves,
with all that is most profound, most evanescent, most mysterious--all that is infinite--in
the passing hour, it seemed to have made them blossom in the sky itself.
　　　　After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly. How often have I
watched, and longed to imitate, when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had
shipped his oars and lay stretched out on his back, his head down, in the bottom of his boat,
letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly above him,
showing upon his features a foretaste of happiness and peace.
　　　　We would sit down among the irises at the water’s edge. In the holiday sky an idle cloud
languorously dawdled. From time to time, opressed by bordeom, a carp, would heave itself out of
the water, with an anxious gasp. It was time for our picnic. Before starting homewards we would
sit there for a long time, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on the grass over which came to
us, faint, horizontal, but dense and metallic still, echoes of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had
not melted in the air they had traverses for so long, snd, ribbed by the successive palpitation
of all their sound waves, throbbed as they grazed the flowers at our feet.
　　　　Sometimes, at the water's edge and embedded in trees, we would come upon a house of
the kind called ‘pleasure houses,’ isolated and lost, seeing nothing of the world, save the river
which bathed its feet. A young woman, whose pensive face and fashionable veils did not suggest a
local origin, and who had doubtless come there, in the popular phrase, ‘to bury herself,’ to
taste the bitter sweetness of feeling that her name, and still more the name of him whose heart
she had once held, but had been unable to keep, were unknown there, stood framed in a window from
which she had no outlook beyond the boat that was moored beside her door. She raised her eyes
with an air of distraction when she heard, through the trees that lined the bank, the voices of
passers-by of whom, before they came in sight, she might be certain that never had they known,
nor would they know, the faithless lover, that nothing in their past lives bore his imprint,
which nothing in their future would have occasion to receive. One felt that in her renunciation
of life she had willingly abandoned those places in which she would at least have been able to
see him whom she loved, for others where he had never trod. And I watched her, as she returned
from some walk along a road where she had known that he would not appear, drawing from her sub-
missive fingers long gloves of a precious, useless charm.
　　　　Never, in the course of our walks along the ‘Guermantes way,’ might we penetrate as far as
the source of the Vivonne, of which I had often thought, which had in my mind so abstract, so ideal
an existence, that I had been as much surprised when some one told me that it was actually to be
found in the same department, and at a given number of miles from Combray, as I had been on the
day when I had learned that there was another fixed point somewhere on the earth’s surface, where,
according to the ancients, opened the jaws of Hell. Nor could we ever reach that other goal, to
which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was the residence of its pro-
prietors, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, I knew that they were real personages who did act-
ually exist, but whenever I thought about them I pictured them either in tapestry, like the Comtesse
de Guermantes in the‘Coronation of Esther’ which hung in our church, or elsein iridescent colours,
like Gilbert the Bad in the stained-glass window where he passed from cabbage green, when I was dip-
ping my fingers in the holy water stoup, to plum blue when I had reached our row of chairs, or again
altogether impalpable, like the image of Genevieve de Brabant, ancestress of the Guermantes family,
which the magic lantern sent wandering over the curtains of my room or flung aloft upon the ceiling
--in short, always wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age, and bathed, as in a sunset, in the
amber light which glowed from the resounding syllable ‘antes.’ And if, in spite of that, they were
for me, in their capacity as a duke and a duchess, real people, though of an unfamiliar kind, this
ducal personality of theirs was on the other hand enormously distended, immaterialised, so as to
encircle and contain that Guermantes of which they were duke and duchess, all that sunlit ‘Guermantes
way’ of our walks, the course of the Vivonne, its water-lilies and its overshadowing trees, and an
endless series of summer afternoons. And I knew that they bore not only the titles of Duc and Duchesse
de Guermantes, but that since the fourteenth century, when, after vain attempts to conquer its earlier
lords in battle, they had allied themselves by marriage, and so became Counts of Combray, the first
citizens, consequently, of the place, and yet the only ones among its citizens who did not reside in
it--Comtes de Combray, possessing Combray, threading it on their string of names and titles, absorbing
it in their personalities, and imbued, no doubt, with that strange and pious melancholy which was
peculiar to Combray; proprietors of the town, though not of any particular house there; dwelling,
presumably, outside, in the street, between heaven and earth, like that Gilbert de Guermantes of
whom I could see, in the stained glass of the apse of Saint-Hilaire, only the reverse side in dull
black lacquer, if I raised my eyes to look for him on my way to Camus’s for a packet of salt.
　　　　And then it happened that, along the Guermantes way, I sometimes passed beside well-watered
little enclosures, over whose hedges rose clusters of dark blossom. I would stop, hoping to gain
some precious addition to my experience, for I seemed to have before my eyes a fragment of that
fluvial country which I had longed so much to see and know since coming upon a description of it
by one of my favourite authors. And it was with that story-book land, with its imagined soil inter-
sected by a hundred bubbling watercourses, that Guermantes, changing its aspect in my mind, became
identified, after I heard Dr. Percepied speak of the flowers and the charming rivulets and fountains
that were to be seen there in the ducal park.





　　　　Suddenly, during the nuptial mass, the verger, by moving to one side, enabled me to see in one
of the chapels a fair-haired lady with a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk,
glossy and new and bright, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose. And because on the surface of
her face, which was red, as though she had been very hot, I could discern, diluted and barely percept-
ible, fragments of resemblance with the portrait that had been shown to me; because, more especially,
the particular features which I remarked in this lady, if I attempted to catalogue them, formulated
themselves in precisely the same terms--a large nose, blue eyes--as Dr. Percepied had used when des-
cribing in my presence the Duchesse de Guermantes, I said to myself: “This lady is like the Duchesse
de Guermantes.” Now the chapel from which she was following the service was that of Gilbert the Bad;
beneath the flat tombstones of which, yellowed and bulging like cells of honey in a comb, rested the
bones of the old Counts of Brabant; and I remembered having heard it said that this chapel was reserved
for the Guermantes family, whenever any of its members came to attend a ceremony at Combray; there was,
indeed, but one woman resembling the portrait of Mme. de Guermantes who on that day, the very day on
which she was expected to come there, could be sitting in that chapel: it was she! My disappointment
was immense. It arose from my not having borne in mind, when I thought of Mme. de Guermantes, that I
was picturing her to myself in the colours of a tapestry or a painted window, as living in another
century, as being of another substance than the rest of the human race. Never had it occurred to me
that she might have a red face, a mauve scarf like Mme. Sazerat; and the oval curve of her cheeks
reminded me so strongly of people whom I had seen at home that the suspicion brushed against my mind
(though it was immediately banished) that in her causal principle, in the molecules of her physical
composition, this lady was perhaps not substantially the Duchesse de Guermantes, but that her body, in
ignorance of the name that people had given it, belonged to a certain type of femininity which included
also, the wives of doctors and tradesmen. “So that's Mme. de Guermantes--that's all she is!” were the
words underlying the attentive and astonished expression with which I was gazing upon this image, which,
naturally enough, bore no resemblance to those that had so often, under the same title of ‘Mme. de
Guermantes,’ appeared to me in dreams, since it had not, like the others, been formed arbitrarily by
myself but had leapt to my eyes for the first time only a moment ago, here in church; an image which
was not of the same nature, was not colourable at will like those others that allowed themselves to be
impregnated with the amber hue of a sonorous syllable, but was so real that everything, down to the fiery
little spot at the corner of her nose, attested to her subjection to the laws of life, as in a trans-
formation scene on the stage a crease in the dress of a fairy, a quivering of her tiny finger, indicate
the material presence of a living actress before our eyes, whereas we were uncertain, till then, whether
we were not looking merely at a projection from a lantern.





　　　　And then--oh, marvellous independence of the human gaze, tied to the human face by a cord so loose,
so long, so elastic that it can stray, alone as far as it may choose--while Mme. de Guermantes sat in the
chapel above the tombs of her dead ancestors, her gaze wandered here and there, rose to the capitals of
the pillars, and even rested momentarily upon myself, like a ray of sunlight straying down the nave, but
a ray of sunlight which, at the moment when I received its caress, appeared conscious of where it fell.
As for Mme. de Guermantes herself, since she remained there motionless, sitting like a mother who affects
not to notice the rude or awkward conduct of her children who, in the course of their play, are speaking
to people whom she does not know, it was impossible for me to determine whether,in the careless detachment
of her soul, she approved or condemned the vagrancy of her eyes.





I grew indignant when I heard people saying, in the congregation round me: “She is better looking than Mme.
Sazerat” or “than Mlle. Vinteuil,” as though she had been in any way comparable with them. And my gaze
resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck, and overlooking the features which might
have reminded me of the faces of other women, I cried out within myself, as I admired this deliberately un-
finished sketch: “How lovely she is! What true nobility! it is indeed a proud Guermantes, the descendant
of Genevieve de Brabant, that I have before me!” And the care which I took to focus all my attention upon
her face succeeded in isolating it so completely that today, when I call that marriage ceremony to mind, I
find it impossible to visualise any single person who was present except her, and the beadle who answered me
in the affirmative when I inquired whether the lady was, indeed, Mme. de Guermantes. But her, I can see her
still quite clearly, especially at the moment when the procession filed into the sacristy, lighted by the
intermittent, warm sunshine of a windy and rainy day, where Mme. de Guermantes found herself in the midst of
all those Combray people whose names, even, she did not know, but whose inferiority proclaimed her own supre-
macy so loud that she must, in return, feel for them a sincerely benevolent, and whom she might count on
impressing even more forcibly by virtue of her simplicity and graciousness. And so, since she could not bring
into play the deliberate glances, charged with a definite meaning, which one directs towards people one knows,
but must allow her absent-minded thoughts to flow continuously from her eyes in a flood of blue light which she
was powerless to contain, she was anxious not to embarrass or to appear to be disdainful of those humbler mor-
tals whom it encountered on its way, on whom it was constantly falling. I can still see, above her mauve scarf,
puffed and silky, the gentle astonishment in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to address it to
anyone in particular, but so that everyone might enjoy his share of it, a rather shy smile as of a sovereign
lady who seems to be making an apology for her presence among the vassals whom she loves. This smile rested
upon myself, who had never ceased to follow her with my eyes. And I, remembering the glance which she had let
fall upon me during the service, blue as a ray of sunlight that had penetrated the window of Gilbert the Bad,
said to myself, “Of course, she is thinking about me.” I fancied that I had found favour in her sight, that
she would continue to think of me after she had left the church, and would, perhaps, grow pensive again, that
evening, at Guermantes, on my account. And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to
make us love a woman that she looks on us with contempt, as I supposed Mlle. Swann to have done, while we ima-
gine that she cannot ever be ours, it is enough, also, sometimes that she looks on us kindly, as Mme. de Guer-
mantes did then, while we think of her as almost ours already. Her eyes waxed blue as a periwinkle flower, im-
possible to pluck, yet dedicated by her to me; and the sun, bursting out again from behind a threatening cloud
and darting the full force of its rays on to the Square and into the sacristy, shed a geranium glow over the
red carpet laid down for the wedding, across which Mme. de Guermantes was smilingly advancing, and covered its
woollen texture with a nap of rosy velvet, a bloom of luminosity, that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness
in the pomp of a joyful celebration, which characterise certain pages of Lohengrin, certain paintings by Car-
paccio, and makes us understand how Baudelaire was able to apply to the sound of the trumpet the epithet "de-
licious."
　　　　How often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the ‘Guermantes way,’ and with what an inten-
sified melancholy did I reflect on my lack of qualification for a literary career, and that I must abandon all
hope of ever becoming a famous author. The regret that I felt for this, while I lingered alone to dream for a
little by myself, made me suffer so acutely that, in order not to feel it, my mind of its own accord, by a sort
of inhibition in the instant of pain, ceased entirely to think of verse-making, of fiction, of the poetic future
on which my want of talent precluded me from counting. Then, quite independently of all these literary preoccu-
pations and in no way connected with them, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight on a stone, the smell of a path
would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they appeared
to be concealing, beyond what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to come and take but which, de-
spite all my efforts I never managed to discover. Since I felt that this something was to be found in them, I
would stand there motionless, looking, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen
or smelt. And if I had then to hasten after my grandfather, to continue my walk, I would try to recapture them
by closing my eyes; I would concentrate upon recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone,
which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be bursting, ready to open, to yield up to
me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the lids. It was certainly not any impression
of this kind that could or would restore the hope I had lost of succeeding one day in becoming an author and
poet, for each of them was associated with some material object devoid of any intellectual value, and suggest-
ing no abstract truth. But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity
of mind; and in that way distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt
whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work. So urgent was the task imposed on my
conscience by these impressions of form or perfume or colour--to strive for a perception of what lay hidden
beneath them--that I was never long in seeking an excuse which would allow me to relax so strenuous an effort
and to spare myself the fatigue that it involved. As good luck would have it, my parents called me; I felt
that I had not, for the moment, the calm environment necessary for a successful pursuit of my researches, and
that it would be better to think no more of the matter until I reached home, and not to exhaust myself in the
meantime to no purpose. And so I would concern myself no longer with the mystery that lay hidden in a shape or
a perfume, quite at ease in my mind since I was taking it home with me, protected by its visible covering which
I had imprinted on my mind and beneath which I should find it still alive, like the fish which, on days when I
had been allowed to go out fishing, I used to carry back in my basket, covered by a layer of grass which kept
them cool and fresh. Having reached home I would begin to think of something else, and so my mind would become
littered (as my room was with the flowers that I had gathered on my walks, or the odds and ends that people had
given me) with a mass of disparate images--the play of sunlight on a stone, a roof, the sound of a bell, the
smell of fallen leaves--beneath which the reality I once sensed, but never had the will-power to discover and
bring to light, has long since perished. Once, however, when we had prolonged our walk far beyond its ordinary
limits, and so had been very glad to encounter, half way home, as afternoon darkened into evening, Dr. Percepied,
who drove past us at full speed in his carriage, saw and recognised us, stopped, and made us jump in beside him,
I received an impression of this sort which I did not abandon without having first subjected it to an examination
a little more thorough. I had been set on the box beside the coachman, we were going like the wind because the
Doctor had still, before returning to Combray, to call at Martinville-le-Sec, at the house of a patient, at whose
door he asked us to wait for him. At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which
bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting
sun was playing, while the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road seemed to keep them continually
changing their position; and then of a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them by
a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, appeared none the less to be standing
by their side.
　　　　In noticing and registering the shape of their spires, their shifting lines, the sunny warmth of their surfaces,
I felt that I was not penetrating to the core of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility,
that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.
　　　　The steeples appeared so distant, and we ourselves seemed to come so little nearer them, that I was aston-
ished when, a few minutes later, we drew up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for the plea-
sure which I had found in seeing them upon the horizon, and the business of trying to find out what that reason
was seemed to me irksome; I wanted to store away in my mind those shifting sunlit planes, and, for the time being,
to think of them no more. And it is probable that, had I done so, those two steeples would have gone to join the
medley of trees and roofs and scents and sounds I had noticed and set apart on account of the obscure sense of
pleasure they had given me which I had never fully explored. I got down from the box to talk to my parents while
we were waiting for the Doctor to reappear. Then it was time to start; I climbed up again to my place, turning my
head to look back, once more, at my steeples, of which, a little later, I caught a farewell glimpse at a turn in
the road. The coachman, who seemed little inclined for conversation, having barely acknowledged my remarks, I
was obliged, in default of other society, to fall back on my own, and to attempt to recapture the vision of my
steeples. And presently their outlines and their sunlit surfaces, as though they had been a sort of rind, peeled
away; something of what they had concealed from me became apparent; a thought came into my mind which had not
existed for me a moment earlier, framing itself in words in my head; and the pleasure which the first sight of
them had given me was so greatly enhanced that, overpowered by a sort of intoxication, I could no longer think of
anything else. At this point, although we had now travelled a long way from Martinville, I turned my head
and caught sight of them again, quite black this time, for the sun had meanwhile set. Every few minutes a turn
in the road would sweep them out of sight; then they showed themselves for the last time, and so I saw them no
more.





　　　　I never thought again of this page, but at the moment when, on my corner of the box-seat, where the Doctor's
coachman was in the habit of placing, in a hamper, the fowls which he had bought at Martinville market, I had
finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness, felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the
obsession of the steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I myself were a hen and had
just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.
　　　　All day long, during these walks, I had been able to muse upon the pleasure that there would be in the
friendship of the Duchesse de Guermantes, in fishing for trout, in drifting by myself in a boat on the Vivonne;
and, greedy for happiness, I asked nothing more from life, in such moments, than that it should consist always
of a series of joyous afternoons. But when, on our way home, I had caught sight of a farm, on the left of the
road, at some distance from two other farms which were themselves close together, and from which, to return to
Combray, we need only turn down an avenue of oaks, bordered on one side by a series of orchard-closes, each one
planted at regular intervals with apple-trees which cast upon the ground, when they were lit by the setting sun,
the Japanese stencil of their shadows; then, sharply, my heart would begin to beat, I would know that in half an
hour we should be at home, and that there, as was the rule on days when we had taken the ‘Guermantes way’ and
dinner was, in consequence, served later than usual, I should be sent to bed as soon as I had swallowed my soup,
so that my mother, kept at table, just as though there had been company to dinner, would not come upstairs to
say good night to me in bed. The zone of melancholy which I then entered was as distinct from the zone in which
I had been bounding with joy a moment earlier as, in certain skies, a band of pink is separated, as though by a
line invisibly ruled, from a band of green or black. You may see a bird flying across the pink; it draws near
the border-line, touches it, enters and is lost upon the black. The longings by which I had just now been ab-
sorbed--to go to Guermantes, to travel, to live a life of happiness--I was now so remote from them that their
fulfilment would have afforded me no pleasure. How readily would I have sacrificed them all, just to be able to
cry, all night long, in the arms of Mamma! Quivering with emotion, I could not take my anguished eyes from my
mother’s face, which would not appear that evening in the bedroom where I could see myself already lying, in
imagination; and wished only that I were lying dead. And this state would persist until the morrow, when, the
rays of morning leaning their bars of light, as the gardener might lean his ladder, against the wall overgrown
with nasturtiums, which clambered up it as far as my window-sill, I would leap out of bed to run down at once
into the garden, with no thought of the fact that evening must return, and with it the hour when I must leave
my mother. And so it was from the Guermantes way that I learned to distinguish between these states which
reigned alternately in my mind, during certain periods, going so far as to divide every day between them, each
one returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever and ague: contiguous, and yet so foreign
to one another, so devoid of means of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to my-
self, in one state what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the other.
　　　　So the Meseglise way and the Guermantes way remain for me linked with many of the little incidents
of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in
sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind. Doubtless it makes in us an
imperceptible progress, and the truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have opened
new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for their discovery; but that preparation was uncon-
scious; and for us those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became apparent. The flowers
which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which
surrounded their apparition still lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding
countenance; and, certainly, when they were contemplated at length by that humble passer-by, by that dreaming
child--as the face of a king is contemplated by a memorialist buried in the crowd--that piece of nature, that
corner of a garden could never suppose that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive
in all their most ephemeral details; and yet the scent of hawthorn which flits along the hedge from which, in
a little while, the dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of echoless footsteps upon a gravel path, a bubble
formed against the side of a water-plant by the current of the stream and instantly bursting-- all these my
exaltation of mind has borne along with it and kept alive through the succession of the years, while all around
them the paths have vanished and those who trod them, and even the memory of those who trod them are dead.
Sometimes the fragment of landscape thus transported into the present will detach itself in such isolation
from all associations that it floats uncertainly upon my mind like a flowering Delos, and I am unable to say
from what place, from what time--perhaps, quite simply, from what dream--it comes. But it is preeminently as
the deepest layer of my mental soil, as the firm ground on which I still stand, that I regard the Meseglise
and Guermantes ways. It is because I believed in things and people, while I walked along those paths that the
things and people they made known to me are the only ones I still take seriously and that still bring me joy.
Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the
memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.
The Meseglise way with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the Guermantes
way with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its buttercups, constituted for me for all time the
image of the landscape in which I should like to live, in which my principal requirements are that I may go
fishing, drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of Gothic fortifications, and find among the cornfields--like
Saint-Andre-des-Champs--an old church, monumental, rustic, and golden as a haystack; and the cornflowers, the
hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may still happen, when I travel, to encounter in the fields, because they
are situated at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart. And yet,
because there is an element of individuality in places, when I am seized with a desire to see again the Guer-
mantes way, it would not be satisfied were I led to the banks of a river in which were lilies as fair, or even
fairer than those in the Vivonne, any more than on my return home in the evening, at the hour when there awake-
ned in me that anguish which, later on in life, transfers itself to the passion of love, and may even become
its inseparable companion, I should have wished for any strange mother to come in and say good night to me,
though she were far more beautiful and more intelligent than my own. No: just as the one thing necessary to
send me to sleep contented--in that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to
give me, since one has doubts of them even at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess
their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart of, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation,
without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone--was that it should be my mother who came,
that she should incline towards me that face on which there was, beneath her eye, something that was, it appears,
a blemish, and which I loved as much as all the rest--so what I want to see again is the Guermantes way as I knew
it, with the farm that stood a little apart from the two neighbouring farms, pressed so close together, at the entrance
to the oak avenue; those meadows in which, when they are burnished by the sun to the luminescence of a pond, the
leaves of the apple-trees are reflected ; that whole landscape whose individuality grips me sometimes at
night, in my dreams, with a power that is almost uncanny, but of which I can discover no trace when I awake.
　　　　No doubt, by virtue of having permanently and indissolubly combined in me groups of different impressions,
for no reason save that they had made me feel several separate things at the same time, the Meseglise and Guer-
mantes ‘ways’ left me exposed, in later life, to much disillusionment, and even to many mistakes. For often
I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that person recalled to me a
hedge of hawthorns in blossom; and I have been led to believe, and to make some one else believe in an after-
math of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel. But by the same qualities, and by their
persistence in those of my impressions, to-day, to which they can find an attachment, the two ‘ways’ give to
those impressions a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm,
a significance which is for me alone. When, on a summer evening, the melodious sky growls like a tawny lion,
and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is the memory of the Meseglise way that makes me stand alone in
ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of falling rain, the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.
　　　　And so I would often lie until morning, dreaming of the old days at Combray, of my melancholy and wakeful
evenings there; of other days besides, the memory of which had been more lately restored to me by the taste--
by what would have been called at Combray the ‘perfume’--of a cup of tea; and, by an association of memories,
of a story which, many years after I had left the little place, had been told me of a love affair in which Swann
had been involved before I was born; with that accuracy of detail which it is easier, often, to obtain when we
are studying the lives of people who have been dead for centuries than when we are trying to chronicle those of
our own most intimate friends, an accuracy which it seems as impossible to attain as it seemed impossible to
speak from one town to another, before we learned of the contrivance by which that impossibility has been
overcome. All these memories, superimposed upon one another, now formed a single mass, but had not so far
coalesced that I could not discern between the thm--between my oldest, my instinctive memories, those others,
inspired more recently by a taste or ‘perfume,’ and finally those which were actually the memories of another
person from whom I had acquired them at second hand--if not real fissures, real geological faults, at least
that veining, that variegation of colouring which in certain rocks, in certain blocks of marble, point to
differences of origin, age, and formation.
　　　　It is true that, when morning drew near, I would long have settled the brief uncertainty of my waking dream,
I would know in what room I was actually lying, would have reconstructed it round about me in the darkness, and--
fixing my orientation by memory alone, or with the assistance of a feeble glimmer of light at the foot of which
I placed the curtains and the window--would have reconstructed it complete and with its furniture, as an archi-
tect and an upholsterer might do, working upon an original, discarded plan of the doors and windows; would have
replaced the mirrors and set the chest-of-drawers on its accustomed site. But scarcely had daylight itself--
and no longer the gleam from a last, dying ember on a brass curtain-rod which I had mistaken for daylight--
traced across the darkness, as with a stroke of chalk across a blackboard, its first white, correcting ray,
than the window, with its curtains, would leave the frame of the doorway, in which I had erroneously placed it,
while, to make room for it, the writing-table, which my memory had clumsily installed where the window ought to
be, would hurry off at full speed, thrusting before it the mantelpiece and sweeping aside the wall of the passage;
a little courtyard would occupy the spot where, a moment earlier, my dressing-room had lain, and the dwelling-
place which I had built up for myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings glimpsed
in the whirlpool of awakening, put to flight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted
forefinger of day.




　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 　　　　　Part Two


　　　　　 　　　　　　　　　　　 　　　SWANN IN LOVE




　　　　Now there was no connection whatsoever between the ‘little nucleus’ and the society
which Swann frequented, and a purely worldly man would have thought it hardly worth his while,
when occupying so exceptional a position in the world, to seek an introduction to the Verdurins.
But Swann was so ardent a lover that, once he had got to know almost all the women of the aris-
tocracy, once they had taught him all that there was to learn, he had ceased to regard those
naturalisation papers, almost a patent of nobility, which the Faubourg Saint-Germain had be-
stowed upon him, save as a sort of negotiable bond, a letter of credit with no intrinsic value,
which allowed him to improvise a status for himself in some little hole in the country, or in
some obscure quarter of Paris, where the good-looking daughter of a local squire or solicitor
had taken his fancy. For at such times desire, or love itself, would revive in him a feeling
of vanity from which he was now quite free in his everyday life, although it was, no doubt,
the same feeling which had originally prompted him towards that career as a man of fashion in
which he had squandered his intellectual gifts upon frivolous amusements, and had made use of
his erudition in matters of art only to advise society ladies what pictures to buy and how to
decorate their houses; and this vanity it was which made him eager to shine, in the sight of
any fair unknown who had captivated him for the moment, with a brilliance which the name of
Swann by itself did not emit. And he was most eager when the fair unknown was in humble cir-
cumstances. Just as it is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid
of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and ‘bounders’
that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-quarters of the
mental ingenuity and the mendacious boasting squandered ever since the world began by people
who are only cheapened thereby have been aimed at inferiors. And Swann, who behaved quite
simply and was at his ease when with a duchess, would tremble for fear of being despised, and
would instantly begin to pose, were he to meet her grace's maid.
　　　　Unlike so many people, who, either from lack of energy or else from a resigned sense of
the obligation laid upon them by their social grandeur to remain moored like houseboats to a
certain point on the bank of the stream of life, abstain from the pleasures which are offered
to them above and below that point, that degree in life in which they will remain fixed until
the day of their death, and are content, in the end, to describe as pleasures, for want of any
better, those mediocre distractions, that just not intolerable tedium which is enclosed there
with them; Swann would endeavour not to find charm and beauty in the women with whom he must
pass time, but to pass his time among women whom he had already found to be beautiful and
charming. And these were, as often as not, women whose beauty was of a distinctly ‘common’
type, for the physical qualities which he instinctively sought were the direct opposite of
those he admired in the women painted or sculpted by his favourite masters. Depth of charac-
ter, or a melancholy expression, would freeze his senses, which were, however, instantly
aroused at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy flesh.
　　　　If on his travels he met a family whom it would have been more correct for him to make
no attempt to know, but among whom a woman caught his eye, adorned with a special charm that
was new to him, to remain on his ‘high horse’ and to stave off the desire that she had kindled
in him, to substitute a pleasure different from that which he might have tasted in her company
by writing to invite one of his former mistresses to come and join him, would have seemed to
him as cowardly an abdication in the face of life, as stupid a renunciation of a new form of
happiness as if, instead of visiting the country where he was, he had shut himself up in his
own rooms and looked at views of Paris. He did not immure himself in the edifice of his social
relations, but had made of them, so as to be able to set it up afresh upon new foundations
wherever a woman might take his fancy, one of those collapsible tents which explorers carry
about with them. Any part of it which was not portable or could not be adapted to some fresh
pleasure he would have given away for nothing, however enviable it might appear to others. How
often had his credit with a duchess, built up of the yearly accumulation of her desire to do
him some favour for which she had never found an opportunity, been squandered in a moment by
his calling upon her, in an indiscreetly worded message, for a recommendation by telegraph
which would put him in touch at once with one of her agents whose daughter he had noticed in
the country, just as a starving man might barter a diamond for a crust of bread. Indeed he
would laugh about it later, for there was in his nature, redeemed by many rare refinements,
an element of caddishness. Then he belonged to that class of intelligent men who have led a l
ife of idleness, and who seek a consolation and perhaps an excuse in the notion that their
idleness offers to their intelligence objects as worthy of interest as any that could be
offered by art or learning, the notion that ‘Life’ contains situations more interesting
and more romantic than all the romances ever written. So, at least, he would assure and had
no difficulty in persuading the more subtle among his friends in the fashionable world, no-
tably the Baron de Charlus, whom he liked to amuse with stories of the startling adventures
that had befallen him, such as when he had met a woman in the train, and had taken her home
with him, before discovering that she was the sister of a reigning monarch, in whose hands
were gathered, at that moment, all the threads of European politics, of which he found himself
kept informed in the most delightful fashion, or when, in the complexity of circumstances, it
depended upon the choice which the Conclave was about to make whether he might or might not
become the lover of somebody’s cook.
　　　　It was not only the brilliant phalanx of virtuous dowagers, generals and academicians
with whom he was most intimately associated that Swann cynically compelled to serve him as
panders. All his friends were accustomed to receive, from time to time, letters calling on
them for a word of recommendation or introduction, with a diplomatic adroitness which,
persisting throughout all his successive love affairs and varying pretexts, revealed more
glaringly than the clumsiest indiscretion, a permanent disposition and an identical quest.
I used often to recall to myself when, many years later, I began to take an interest in his
character because of the similarities which, in wholly different respects, it offered to my
own, how, when he used to write to my grandfather (though not at the time we are now consid-
ering, for it was about the date of my own birth that Swann’s great ‘affair’ began, and
made a long interruption in his amatory practices) the latter, recognising his friend's
handwriting on the envelope, would exclaim: “Here is Swann asking for something; on guard!”
And, either from distrust or from the unconscious spirit of devilry which urges us to offer
a thing only to those who do not want it, my grandparents would meet with an obstinate
refusal the most easily satisfied of his prayers, as when he begged them for an introduction
to a girl who dined with us every Sunday, and whom they were obliged, whenever Swann men-
tioned her, to pretend that they no longer saw, although they would be wondering, all
through the week, whom they could invite to meet her, and often failed, in the end, to find
anyone, sooner than make a sign to him who would so gladly have accepted.





　　　　But when his mistress for the time being was a woman in society, or at least one whose
birth was not so lowly, nor her position so irregular that he was unable to arrange for her
reception in ‘society,’ then for her sake he would return to it, but only to the particu-
lar orbit in which she moved or into which he had drawn her. “No good depending on Swann
for this evening,” people would say; “don’t you remember, it’s his American’s night at
the Opera?” He would secure invitations for her to the most exclusive drawing-rooms, to
those houses where he himself went regularly, for weekly dinners or for poker; every eve-
ning, after a slight wave imparted to his stiff red hair had tempered with a certain soft-
ness the ardour of his bold green eyes, he would select a flower for his buttonhole and set
out to meet his mistress at the house of one or other of the women of his circle; and then,
thinking of the affection and admiration which the fashionable folk, whom he always treated
exactly as he pleased, would, when he met them there, lavish upon him in the presence of
the woman whom he loved, he would find a fresh charm in that worldly existence which had
begun to pall, but whose substance, pervaded and warmly coloured by the bright flame that
now flickered in its midst, seemed to him beautiful and rare since he had incorporated in it
a new love.
　　　　But whereas each of these liasons, or each of these flirtations had been the realisation,
more or less complete, of a dream born of the sight of a face or a body which Swann had
spontaneously, and without effort on his part, found charming, it was quite another matter
when, one day at the theatre, he was introduced to Odette de Crecy by an old friend of his
own, who had spoken of her to him as a ravishing creature with whom he might very possibly
come to an understanding; but had made her out to be harder of conquest than she actually
was, so as to appear to be conferring a special favour by the introduction. She had struck
Swann not, certainly, as being devoid of beauty, but as endowed with a style of beauty
which left him indifferent, which aroused in him no desire, which gave him, indeed, a sort
of physical repulsion; as one of those women of whom every man can cite examples, different
and each will name different examples, who are the converse of the type which our senses
demand. Her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate, her cheek-bones too prominent,
her features too tightly drawn to be attractive to him. Her eyes were beautiful, but so
large that they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and
always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood. Some time after this introduction at the
theatre she had written to ask Swann whether she might see his collections, which would
interest her so much, she, “an ignorant woman with a taste for beautiful things,” saying
that she would know him better when once she had seen him in his ‘home,’ where she imag-
ined him to be “so comfortable with his tea and his books”; although she had not conceal-
ed her surprise at his being in that part of the town, which must be so depressing, and was
“not nearly smart enough for such a very smart man.” And when he allowed her to come she
had said to him as she left how sorry she was to have stayed so short a time in a house
into which she was so glad to have found her way at last, speaking of him as though he had
meant something more to her than the rest of the people she knew, and appearing to unite
their two selves with a kind of romantic bond which had made him smile. But at the time of
life, tinged already with disenchantment, which Swann was approaching, when a man can content
himself with being in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting too much in return,
this linking of hearts, if it is no longer, as in early youth, the goal towards which love,
of necessity, tends, still is bound to love by so strong an association of ideas that it may
well become the cause of love if it presents itself first. In his younger days a man dreams
of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the
heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it
would appear--since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure--that
the taste for a woman's beauty must play the largest part in it, love may come into being,
love of the most physical kind, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life one
has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself,
obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before our passive and astonished hearts.
We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognising one of its symp-
toms we remember and re-create the rest. Since we know its song, which is engraved on our
hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains--filled
with the admiration which beauty inspires--for us to remember all that follows. And if she
begins in the middle--where hearts are joined and where it sings of our existing, hence-
forward, for one another only--we are well enough attuned to that music to be able to take
it up and follow our partner, without hesitation, at the appropriate passage.
　　　　Odette de Crecy came again to see Swann; her visits grew more frequent, and doubtless
each visit revived the sense of disappointment which he felt at the sight of a face whose
details he had somewhat forgotten in the interval, not remembering it as either so express-
ive or, in spite of her youth, so faded; he used to regret, while she was talking to him,
that her really considerable beauty was not of the kind which he spontaneously admired. It
must be remarked that Odette's face appeared thinner and sharper than it actually was,
because her forehead and the upper part of her cheeks, that smooth and almost plane surface,
were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period, drawn forward in a
fringe, raised in crimped waves and falling in stray locks over her ears; while as for her figure
--and she was admirably built--it was impossible to make out its continuity (on account of
the fashion then prevailing, and in spite of her being one of the best-dressed women in
Paris) so much did the corset, jutting out as though over an imaginary stomach, and ending
in a sharp point, beneath which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, give a woman
the appearance of being composed of different sections badly fitted together; to such an
extent did the frills, the flounces, the inner bodice follow quite independently, according
to the whim of their designer or the consistency of their material, the line which led them
to the bows, the festoons of lace, fringes of dangling jet beads, or carried them along the
busk, but nowhere attached themselves to the living creature, who, according as the archi-
tecture of these fripperies drew them towards or away from her own, found herself either
strait-laced to suffocation or else completely buried.
　　　　But, after Odette had left him, Swann would think with a smile of her telling him how
the time would drag until he allowed her to come again; he remembered the anxious, timid way
in which she had once begged him that it might not be very long, and the way she had gazed
at him then, with a look of shy entreaty, which gave her a touching air beneath the bunches
of artificial pansies fastened in the front of her round bonnet of white straw, tied with
strings of black velvet. “And won’t you,” she had ventured, “come just once and take
tea with me?” He had pleaded pressure of work, an essay--which, in reality, he had aban-
doned years ago--on Vermeer of Delft. “I know that I am quite useless,” she had replied,
“a little wild thing like me beside a learned great man like you. I should be like the
frog in the fable! And yet I should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated.
What fun it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of old papers!”
she had added, with that self-satisfied air which an elegant woman adopts when she insists
that her one desire is to undertake, without fear of soiling her fingers, to some grubby
task, such as cooking the dinner, "really getting down to it herself.” “You will only
laugh at me, but this painter who stops you from seeing me,” she meant Vermeer, “I have
never even heard of him; is he alive still? Can I see any of his things in Paris, so as to
have some idea of what is going on behind that great brow which works so hard, that head
which I feel sure is always puzzling away about things; just to be able to say ‘There,
that’s what he’s thinking about!’ What a dream it would be to be able to help you with
your work.”





　　　　Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any ob-
servation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so in any event he would
embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile
whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the
remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be pre-
pared to face the alternative, he dared not allow this smile to assert itsef positively on
his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which could
be deciphered the question that he never dared to ask: “Do you really mean that?” He was
no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself in the street, or in-
deed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting pass-
ers-by, carriages, and anything that occurred with a knowing smile which absolved his sub-
sequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved, if it should turn out unsuited to the
occasion, that he was well aware of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was
a secret of his own.
　　　　On all those points, however, where a plain question appeared to him to be permissible,
the doctor was unsparing in his endeavours to cultivate the wilderness of his ignorance and
uncertainty and to complete his education.





　　　　In telling the Verdurins that Swann was extremely ‘smart,’ Odette had alarmed them with
the prospect of another ‘bore.’ When he arrived, however, he made an excellent impression, an
indirect cause of which, though they did not know it, was his familiarity with the best society.
He had, indeed, one of those advantages which men who have lived and moved in the world enjoy
over others, even men of intelligence and refinement, who have never gone into society, namely
that they no longer see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion with which it fills the
imagination, but regard it as quite unimportant. Their good nature, freed from all taint of
snobbishness and from the fear of seeming too friendly, grown independent, in fact, has the
ease, the grace of movement of a trained gymnast each of whose supple limbs will carry out
precisely what is required without any clumsy participation by the rest of his body. The simple
and elementary gestures of a man of the world as he courteously holds out his hand to the unknown
youth who is introduced to him, or bows discreetly to the Ambassador to whom he is introduced,
had gradually pervaded the whole of Swann’s social deportment without his being conscious of it,
so that in the company of people of a lower grade than his own, such as the Verdurins and their
friends, he instinctively shewed an assiduity, and made overtures with which, by their account,
any of their ‘bores’ would have dispensed. He chilled, though for a moment only, on meeting Dr.
Cottard; for seeing him close one eye with an ambiguous smile, before they had yet spoken to one
another (a grimace which Cottard styled “letting ’em all come”), Swann supposed that the Doctor
recognised him from having met him already somewhere, probably in some house of ‘ill-fame,’
though these he himself very rarely visited, never having made a habit of indulging in the mer-
cenary sort of love. Regarding such an allusion as in bad taste, especially before Odette, whose
opinion of himself it might easily alter for the worse, Swann assumed his most icy manner. But
when he learned that the lady next to the Doctor was Mme. Cottard, he decided that so young a
husband would not deliberately, in his wife’s hearing, have made any allusion to amusements of
that order, and so ceased to interpret the Doctor’s expression in the sense which he had at
first suspected. The painter at once invited Swann to visit his studio with Odette, and Swann
found him very pleasant. “Perhaps you will be more highly favoured than I have been,” Mme.
Verdurin broke in, with mock resentment of the favour, “perhaps you will be allowed to see
Cottard’s portrait” (for which she had given the painter a commission). “Take care, Master
Biche,” she reminded the painter, whom it was a time-honoured pleasantry to address as
'Master,’ “to catch that nice look in his eyes, that witty little twinkle. You know, what I
want to have most of all is his smile; that’s what I've asked you to paint--the portrait of
his smile.” And since the phrase struck her as noteworthy, she repeated it very loud, so as
to make sure that as many as possible of her guests should hear it, and even made use of some
indefinite pretext to draw the circle closer before she uttered it again. Swann begged to be
introduced to everyone, even to an old friend of the Verdurins, called Saniette, whose shyness,
simplicity and good-nature had deprived him of all the consideration due to his skill in pal-
aeography, his large fortune, and the distinguished family to which he belonged. When he spoke,
his words came out in a burble which was delightful to hear because one felt that it indicated
not so much a defect of speech as a quality of his soul, as it were a survival from the age of
innocence which he had never wholly outgrown. All the consonants which he was unable to pronounce
seemed like harsh utterances of which his gentle lips were incapable. By asking to be made known
to M. Saniette, Swann made M. Verdurin reverse the usual form of introduction (saying, in fact,
with emphasis on the distinction: “M. Swann, pray let me present to you our friend Saniette”)
but he aroused in Saniette himself a warmth of gratitude, which, however, the Verdurins never
disclosed to Swann, since Saniette rather annoyed them, and they did not feel bound to provide
him with friends. On the other hand the Verdurins were extremely touched by Swann’s next re-
quest, for he felt that he must ask to be introduced to the pianist’s aunt. She wore a black
dress, as was her invariable custom, for she believed that a woman always looked well in black,
and that nothing could be more distinguished; but her face was exceedingly red, as it always was
for some time after a meal. She bowed to Swann with deference, but drew herself up again with
great dignity. As she was entirely uneducated, and afraid of making mistakes in grammar and
pronunciation, she used purposely to speak in an indistinct and garbling manner, thinking that
if she should make a slip it would be so buried in the surrounding confusion that no one could
be certain whether she had actually made it or not; with the result that her talk was a sort of
continuous, blurred expectoration, out of which would emerge, at rare intervals, the few sounds
and syllables of which she felt sure. Swann supposed himself entitled to poke a little mild fun
at her in conversation with M. Verdurin, who, however, was rather put out.
　　　　“She is such an excellent woman!” he rejoined. “I grant you that she is not exactly
brilliant; but I assure you that she can talk most charmingly when you are alone with her.”
　　　　“I am sure she can,” Swann hastened to conciliate him. “All I meant was that she hardly
struck me as ‘distinguished,’” he went on, isolating the epithet in the inverted commas of his
tone, “and, after all, that is something of a compliment.”
　　　　“For instance,” said M. Verdurin, “now, this will surprise you; she writes quite delight-
fully. You have never heard her nephew play? It is admirable; eh, Doctor? Would you like me to ask
him to play something, M. Swann?”
　　　　“Why it would be a joy . . . ” Swann was beginning to reply, when the Doctor broke in der-
isively. Having once heard it said, and never having forgotten that in general conversation over-
emphasis and the use of formal expressions were out of date, whenever he heard a solemn word used
seriously, as the word ‘joy’ had just been by Swann, he felt that the speaker had been guilty of
pomposity. And if, moreover, the word in question happened to occur also in what he called an old
'tag,' however common it might still be in current usage, the Doctor jumped to the conclusion that
the remark about to be made was ridiculous, and completed it ironically with the cliche he assumed
the speaker was about to perpetrate, although in reality it had never entered his mind.
　　　　"A joy forever!” he exclaimed mischievously, throwing up his arms in a grandiloquent gesture.
　　　　M. Verdurin could not help laughing.
　　　　"What are all those good people laughing at over there? There’s no sign of brooding melancholy
down in your corner,” shouted Mme. Verdurin. “You don’t suppose I find it very amusing to be stuck
up here by myself on the stool of repentance,” she went on with mock peevishness, in a babyish tone
of voice.
　　　　Mme. Verdurin was sitting upon a high Swedish chair of waxed pine-wood, which a violinist from
that country had given her, and which she kept in her drawing-room, although in appearance it suggest-
ed a school ‘form,’ and ‘swore,’ as the saying is, at the really good antique furniture which she
had besides; but she made a point of keeping on view the presents which her ‘faithful’ were in the
habit of making her from time to time, so that the donors might have the pleasure of seeing them
there when they came to the house. She tried to persuade them to confine their tributes to flowers
and sweets, which had at least the merit of mortality; but she never succeeded, and the house was
gradually filled with a collection of foot-warmers, cushions, clocks, screens, barometers and vases,
a constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects.
　　　　From this lofty perch she would take a spirited part in the conversation of the "faithful,"
and would revel in all their "drollery"; but, since the accident to her jaw, she had abandoned the
effort involved in wholehearted laughter, and had substituted a kind of symbolical dumb-show which
signified, without endangering or fatiguing her in any way, that she was "splitting her sides." At
the least witticism aimed by a member of the circle against a bore, or against a former member who
was now relegated to the limbo of bores--and to the utter despair of M. Verdurin, who had always
made out that he was just as affable as his wife, but who, since his laughter was the "real thing,"
was out of breath in a moment, and so was overtaken and vanquished by her device of a feigned but
continuous hilarity--she would utter a shrill cry, shut tight her little bird-like eyes, which were
beginning to be clouded over by a cataract, and quickly, as though she had only just time to avoid
some indecent sight or to parry a mortal blow, burying her face in her hands, which completely en-
gulfed it and hid it from view, she would appear to be struggling to suppress, to annihilate, a
laugh which, had she succumbed to it, must inevitably leave her inanimate. So, stupefied with the
gaiety of the ‘faithful,’ drunk with good-felloship, scandal and asseveration, Mme. Verdurin,
perched on her high seat like a cage-bird whose biscuit has been steeped in mulled wine, would
sit aloft and sob with affability.
　　　　Meanwhile M. Verdurin, after first asking Swann’s permission to light his pipe (“No ceremony
here, you understand; we’re all pals!”), went and begged the young musician to sit down at the piano.
　　　　“Leave him alone; don’t bother him; he hasn’t come here to be tormented,” cried Mme. Verdurin.
“I won’t have him tormented.”
　　　　“But why on earth should it bother him?” rejoined M. Verdurin. “I’m sure M. Swann has never
heard the sonata in F sharp which we discovered; he is going to play us the pianoforte arrangement.”
　　　　“No, no, no, not my sonata!” she screamed, “I don’t want to be made to cry until I get a
cold in the head, and neuralgia all down my face, like last time; thanks very much, I don’t intend
to repeat that performance; you are all very kind and considerate; it is easy to see that none of
you will have to stay in bed, for a week.”





　　　　“What charming Beauvais!” said Swann, stopping to admire the sofa before he sat down on it, and
wishing to be polite.
　　　　“Ah! I am glad you appreciate my sofa,” replied Mme. Verdurin, “and I warn you that if you expect
ever to see another like it you may as well abandon the idea at once. They never made any more like it.
And these little chairs, too, are perfect marvels. You can look at them in a moment. The emblems in
each of the bronze mouldings correspond to the subject of the tapestry on the chair; you know, you com-
bine amusement with instruction when you look at them; ? I can promise you a delightful time, I assure
you. Just look at the little friezes around the edges; here, look, the little vine on a red background
in this one, the Bear and the Grapes. Isn’t it well drawn? What do you say? I think they knew a thing
or two about drawing! Doesn’t it make your mouth water, that vine? My husband makes out that I am not
fond of fruit, because I eat less than he does. But not a bit of it, I am greedier than any of you, but
I have no need to fill my mouth with them when I can feed on them with my eyes. What are you all laugh-
ing at now, pray? Ask the Doctor; he will tell you that those grapes act on me like a regular purge.
Some people go to Fontainebleau for cures; I take my own little Beauvais cure here. But, M. Swann, you
mustn’t run away without feeling the little bronze mouldings on the backs. Isn’t it an exquisite sur-
face? No, no, not with your whole hand like that; feel them property!”
　　　　“If Mme. Verdurin is going to start playing about with her bronzes,” said the painter, “we
shan’t get any music tonight.”
　　　　“Be quiet, you wretch! And yet we poor women,” she went on, turning towards Swann,“are forbidden
pleasures far less voluptuous than this. There is no flesh in the world to compare with it. None. When M.
Verdurin did me the honour of being madly jealous . . . come, you might at least be polite. Don’t say
that you never have been jealous!”
　　　　“But, my dear, I have said absolutely nothing. Look here, Doctor, I call you as a witness; did I
utter a word?”
　　　　Swann had begun, out of politeness, to finger the bronzes, and did not like to stop.
　　　　“Come along; you can caress them later; now it is you that are going to be caressed, caressed
aurally. You’ll like that, I think. Here’s the young gentleman who will take charge of that.”
　　　　After the pianist had played, Swann felt and showed more interest in him than in any of the other
guests, for the following reason:
　　　　The year before, at an evening party, he had heard a piece of music played on the piano and violin.
At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted.
And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but
robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part,
beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet rest-
less, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But
then at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what
was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony--he did not know which
--that had just been played, and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses,
wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one's nostrils. Perhaps it was owing to his
own ignorance of music that he had been able to receive so confused an impression, one of those that are,
notwithstanding, our only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and ir-
reducible into any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, an
sine materia. Doubtless the notes which we hear at such moments tend, according to their pitch and
volume to spread out before our eyes, over surfaces of varying dimensions, to trace arabesques, to
give us the sensation of breadth or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished
before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the succee-
ding or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this impression would continue
to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely
discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure
which they instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable--did not our memory, like a la-
bourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, by fashioning for
us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow.
And so, scarcely had the exquisite sensation, which Swann had experienced, died away, than his memory had
furnished him with an immediate transcript, sketchy, it is true, and provisional, which he had been able
to glance at while the piece continued, so that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no
longer impossible to grasp. He could picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its nota-
tion, its expressive value; he had before him something that was no longer pure music, but rather design,
architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished
quite clearly a phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had at once held out to
him a world of inexpressible delights, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into
which he felt that nothing else could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new
and strange desire.
　　　　With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him first this way, then that, everywhere, towards a state of
happiness that was noble, unintelligible and yet precise. And then suddenly, having reached a certain point
from which he was prepared to follow it, after a momentary pause, abruptly it changed its direction, and in
a fresh movement, more rapid, fragile, melancholy, incessant, sweet, it bore him off with it towards new
vistas. Then it vanished. He hoped, with a passionate longing, that he might find it again, a third time.
And reappear it did, though without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a pleasure less
profound. But when he returned home he felt the need of it: he was like a man into whose life a woman whom
he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought the image of a new beauty, which deepens his own sensibi-
lity, although he does not even know her name or whether he will ever see her again.
　　　　Indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, in the first few months, to be bringing into Swann's
life the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation. He had so long since ceased to direct his course towards
any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of ephemeral satisfactions, that he had come to be-
lieve, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself, that he would remain all his life in
that condition, which death alone could alter. More than this, since his mind no longer entertained any lofty
ideals, he had ceased to believe in (although he could not have expressly denied) their reality. He had grown
also into the habit of taking refuge in trivial considerations, which allowed him to set on one side matters
of fundamental importance. Just as he had never stopped to ask himself whether he would not have done better
by not going into society, knowing very well that if he had accepted an invitation he must put in an appearance,
and that afterwards, if he did not actually call, he must at least leave cards upon his hostess; so in his con-
versation he took care never to express with any warmth a personal opinion about a thing, but instead would
supply facts and details which had a value of a sort in themselves, and excused him from showing how much he
really knew. He would be extremely precise about the recipe for a dish, the dates of a painter’s birth and
death, and the titles of his works. Sometimes, in spite of himself, he would let himself go so far as to utter
a criticism of a work of art, or of some one’s interpretation of life, but then he would cloak his words in a
tone of irony, as though he did not altogether associate himself with what he was saying. But now, like a con-
firmed invalid whom, all of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or, as
sometimes happens, an organic change in himself, spontaneous and unaccountable, seems to have so far recovered
from his malady that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead be-
latedly a wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard, in
certain other sonatas which he had made people play to him to see whether he might not perhaps discover his
phrase therein, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, and to
which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of recreative
influence, he was conscious once again of a desire and almost the strength to consecrate his life. But, never
having managed to find out whose work it was that he had heard played that evening, he had been unable to pro-
cure a copy, and finally had forgotten the quest. He had indeed, in the course of the next few days, encount-
ered several of the people who had been at the party with him, and had questioned them; but most of them had
either arrived after or left before the piece was played; some had indeed been in the house, but had gone into
another room to talk, and those who had stayed to listen had no clearer impression than the rest. As for his
hosts, they knew that it was a recently published work which the musicians whom they had engaged for the eve-
ning had asked to be allowed to play; but, as these last were now on tour somewhere, Swann could learn nothing
further. He had, of course, a number of musical friends, but, vividly as he could recall the exquisite and
inexpressible pleasure which the little phrase had given him, and could see in his mind's eye the forms
that it had traced, he was quite incapable of humming it to them. And so, at last, he ceased to think of it.
　　　　But that night, at Mme. Verdurin's, scarcely had the little pianist begun to play than suddenly, after
a high note sustained through two whole bars, Swann sensed its approaching, stealing forth from beneath that
long-drawn sonority, stretched like a curtain of sound, to veil the mystery of its incubation and recognised,
secret, murmuring, detached, the airy and perfumed phrase that he had loved. And it was so peculiarly itself,
it had so individual, so irreplaceable a charm, that Swann felt as though he had met, in a friend’s drawing-
room, a woman whom he had seen and admired in the street, and had despaired of ever seeing again. Finally
the phrase receded, diligently guiding its successors through the ramifications of its fragrance, leaving on
Swann's features the reflection of its smile. But now, at last, he could ask the name of his fair unknown (and
was told that it was the andante of Vinteuil's sonata for the piano and violin), he held it safe, could have
it again to himself, at home, as often as he would, could study its language and acquire its secret.





　　　　The painter understood that Vinteuil was seriously ill at the moment, and that Dr. Potain despaired of
his life.
　　　　“What!” cried Mme. Verdurin, “Do people still call in Potain?”
　　　　“Ah! Mme. Verdurin,” Cottard simpered, “you forget that you are speaking of one of my colleagues ?
I should say, one of my masters.”
　　　　The painter had heard, somewhere, that Vinteuil was threatened with the loss of his reason. And he
insisted that signs of this could be detected in certain passages in the sonata. This remark did not strike
Swann as ridiculous; rather, it puzzled him. For, since a purely musical work contains none of those logical
sequences, the interruption or confusion of which, in spoken or written language, is a proof of insanity, so
insanity diagnosed in a sonata seemed to him as mysterious a thing as the insanity of a dog or a horse,
although instances may be observed of these.
　　　　“Don’t speak to me about ‘your masters’; you know ten times as much as he does!” Mme. Verdurin
answered Dr. Cottard, in the tone of a woman who has the courage of her convictions, and is quite ready to
stand up to anyone who disagrees with her. “Anyhow, you don’t kill your patients!”
　　　　“But, Madame, he is in the Academy.” replied the doctor with heavy irony. “If a sick person prefers
to die at the hands of one of the Princes of Science . . . It's much smarter to be able to say, ‘Yes, I
have Potain.’”
　　　　“Oh, indeed! Smarter, is it?” said Mme. Verdurin. “So there are fashions, nowadays, in illness, are
there? I didn’t know that. . . . Oh, you do make me laugh!” she screamed, suddenly, burying her face
in her hands. “And here was I, poor thing, talking quite seriously, and never realizing that you were pulling
my leg.”
　　　　As for M. Verdurin, finding it rather a strain to raise a laugh for so little, he was content with puff-
ing out a cloud of smoke from his pipe, while he reflected sadly that he could never again hope to keep pace
with his wife in her Atalanta-flights across the field of mirth.





　　　　But Swann said to himself that, if he could make Odette feel (by consenting to meet her only after
dinner) that there were other pleasures which he preferred to that of her company, then the desire that she
felt for his would be all the longer in reaching the point of satiety. Besides, as he infinitely preferred
to Odette’s style of beauty that of a young seamstress as fresh and plump as a rose, with whom he hap-
pened to be simultaneously in love, he preferred to spend the first part of the evening with her, knowing
that he was sure to see Odette later on. For the same reason, he would never allow Odette to call for him at
his house, to take him on to the Verdurins’. The little girl used to wait, not far from his door, at a street
corner; Remi, his coachman, knew where to stop; she would jump in beside him, and hold him in her arms until
the carriage drew up at the Verdurins’. He would enter the drawing-room; and there, while Mme. Verdurin,
pointing to the roses which he had sent her that morning, said: “I am furious with you!” and sent him to
the place kept for him, by the side of Odette, the pianist would play to them--for their two selves, and for
no one else--the little phrase by Vinteuil which was, so to speak, the national anthem of their love. He
would begin with the sustained tremolos of the violin part which for several bars were heard alone, filling
the whole foreground; until suddenly they seemed to draw aside, and--as in those interiors by Pieter de Hooch
which are deepened by the narrow frame of a half-opened door, in the far distance, of a different colour,
velvety with the radiance of some intervening light--the little phrase appeared, dancing, pastoral, inter-
polated, episodic, belonging to another world. It rippled pass, simple and immortal, scattering on every
side the bounties of its grace, with the same ineffable smile; but Swann thought that he could now discern
in it some disenchantment. It seemed to be aware how vain, how hollow was the happiness to which it showed
the way. In its airy grace there was the sense of something over and done with, like the mood of philosophic
detachment which follows an outburst of vain regret. But little did that matter to him; he looked upon the
sonata less in its own light--as what it might express, had, in fact, expressed to a certain musician,
ignorant that any Swann or Odette, anywhere in the world, existed, when he composed it, and would express
to all those who should hear it played in centuries to come--than as a pledge, a token of his love, which
made even the Verdurins and their little pianist think of Odette and, at the same time, of himself--which
bound her to him by a lasting tie; and at that point he had (whimsically entreated by Odette) abandoned the
idea of getting some ‘professional’ to play over to him the whole sonata, of which he still knew no more
than this one passage. “Why do you want the rest?” she had asked him. “Our little bit; that’s all we
need.” He went farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so near and yet
so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret,
almost, that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to themselves, just
as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we
find fault with the ‘water’ of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are not fashioned
exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of a particular person.





　　　　But he never went into her house. Twice only had he done so to take part in the ceremony--of such vital
importance in her life--of ‘afternoon tea.’ The loneliness and emptiness of those short streets (consisting,
almost entirely, of low-roofed houses, self-contained but not detached, their monotony interrupted here and
there by the dark intrusion of some sinister workshop, at once an historical witness to and a sordid survival
from the days when the district was still one of ill repute), the snow which still clung to the garden-beds
and the branches of the trees, the unkemptness of the season, the proximity of nature, had all combined to
add an element of mystery to the warmth, the flowers, the luxury which he had found inside.
　　　　Passing by (on his left-hand side, and on what, although raised some way above the street, was the
ground floor of the house) Odette’s bedroom, which looked out to the back over another little street running
parallel with her own, he had climbed a staircase that went straight up between dark painted walls, from which
hung Oriental draperies, strings of Turkish beads, and a huge Japanese lantern, suspended by a silken cord
from the ceiling (which last, however, so that her visitors should not have to complain of the want of any of
the latest comforts of Western civilisation, was lighted by a gas-jet inside), to the two drawing-rooms, large
and small. These were entered through a narrow lobby, the wall of which, chequered with the lozenges of a woo-
den trellis such as you see on garden walls, only gilded, was lined from end to end by a long rectangular box in
which bloomed, as though in a hothouse, a row of large chrysanthemums, at that time still uncommon, though by
no means so large as the mammoth blossoms which horticulturists have since succeeded in making grow. Swann was
irritated, as a rule, by the sight of these flowers, which had then been fashionable in Paris for about a year,
but it had pleased him, on this occasion, to see the gloom of the vestibule shot with rays of pink and gold and
white by the fragrant petals of these ephemeral stars, which kindle their cold fires in the murky atmosphere of
winter afternoons. Odette had received him in a tea-gown of pink silk, which left her neck and arms bare. She
had made him sit down beside her in one of the many mysterious little retreats which had been contrived in the
various recesses of the room, sheltered by enormous palmtrees growing out of pots of Chinese porcelain, or by
screens upon which were fastened photographs and fans and bows of ribbon. She had said at once, “You’re not
comfortable there; wait a minute, I'll arrange things for you,” and with a little simpering laugh, which implied that
some little invention of her own was being brought into play, she had installed behind his head and beneath his
feet great cushions of Japanese silk, which she pummelled and buffeted as though as though to prove that she
was prodigal of these riches, regardless of their value. But when her footman came into the room, bringing, one
after another, the innumerable lamps which (contained, mostly, in porcelain vases) burned singly or in pairs upon
the different pieces of furniture as upon so many altars, rekindling in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of this
winter afternoon, the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate, more human--filling, perhaps, with romantic
wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover, wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before the
mystery of the human presence which those lighted windows at once revealed and screened from sight--she had
kept an eye sharply fixed on the servant, to see whether he set each of the lamps down in the place appointed it.
She felt that, if he were to put even one of them where it ought not to be, the general effect of her drawing-
room would be destroyed, and that her portrait, which rested upon a sloping easel draped with plush, would not
catch the light. And so, with feverish impatience, she followed the man’s clumsy movements, scolding him se-
verely when he passed too close to a pair of beaupots, which she made a point of always tidying herself, in case
the plants should be knocked over, and went across to them now to make sure that he had not broken off any
of the flowers. She found something ‘quaint’ in the shape of each of her Chinese ornaments, and also in her
orchids, the cattleyas especially--these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers--because they had
the supreme merit of not looking like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of silk or satin. "This one
looks just as though it had been cut out of the lining of my cloak," she said to Swann, pointing to an orchid, with
a shade of respect in her voice for so "chic" a flower, for this elegant, unexpected sister whom nature had be-
stowed upon her, so far removed from her in the scale of existence, and yet so delicate, so refined, so much more
worthy than many real women of admission to her drawing-room. As she drew his attention, now to the fiery-
tongued dragons painted upon a bowl or stitched upon a fire-screen, now to a fleshy cluster of orchids, now to a
dromedary of inlaid silverwork with ruby eyes, which kept company, upon her mantelpiece, with a toad carved in jade,
she would pretend now to be shrinking from the ferocity of the monsters or laughing at their absurdity, now blush-
ing at the indecency of the flowers, now carried away by an irresistible desire to run across and kiss the toad
and dromedary, calling them ‘darlings.’ And these affectations were in sharp contrast to the sincerity of
some of her attitudes, notably her devotion to Our Lady of the Laghetto who had once, when Odette was living
at Nice, cured her of a mortal illness, and whose medal, in gold, she always carried on her person, attribut-
ing to it unlimited powers. She poured out Swann’s tea, inquired “Lemon or cream?” and, on his answering
“Cream, please,” went on, smiling, “A cloud!” And as he pronounced it excellent, “You see, I know just
how you like it.” This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her, something precious, and love
is so far obliged to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of its duration in pleasures which, on
the contrary, would have no existence apart from love and must cease with its passing, that when he left her,
at seven o’clock, to go and dress for the evening, all the way home, sitting bolt upright in his brougham,
unable to repress the happiness with which the afternoon’s adventure had filled him, he kept on repeating to
himself: “What fun it would be to have a little woman like that in a place where one could always be certain
of finding, what one never can be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea.” An hour or so later he re-
ceived a note from Odette, and at once recognised that large handwriting in which an affectation of British
stiffness imposed an apparent discipline upon its ill-formed characters, suggestive, perhaps, to less biased
eyes than his, of an untidiness of mind, a fragmentary education, a want of sincerity and will-power. Swann
had left his cigarette-case at her house. “If only,” she wrote, “you had also forgetten your heart! I
should never have let you have that back.”
　　　　More important, perhaps, was a second visit which he paid her, a little later. On his way to the house,
as always when he knew that they were to meet, he formed a picture of her in his mind; and the necessity, if
he was to find any beauty in her face, of concentrating on the fresh and rosy cheekbones, to the exclusion of
rest of her cheeks which were so often drawn and sallow, and sometimes mottled with little red spots, distressed
him as proving that the ideal is unattainable and happiness mediocre. He was taking her an engraving which she
had to see. She was not very well, and received him in a dressing-gown of mauve crepe de Chine, drawing its
richly embroidered material over her bosom like a cloak. Standing there beside him, her loosened hair flowing
down her cheeks, bending one knee in a slightly balletic pose, in order to be able to lean without effort
over the picture at which she was gazing, her head on one side with those great eyes of hers which seemed
so tired and sullen when there was nothing to animate her, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure
of Zipporah, Jethro’s Daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes. He had always found a
peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general characteristics
of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible of generalisa-
tion, the individual features of men and women whom he knew: as, for instance, in a bust of the Doge Loredan
by Antonio Rizzo, the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own
coachman Remi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M. de Palancy; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the
invasion of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of
Dr. du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always regretted, in his heart, that he had confined his attention to
the social side of life, had talked, always, rather than acted, he felt that he might find a sort of indul-
gence bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his perception of the fact that they also had regarded with
pleasure and had admitted into the canon of their works such types of physiognomy as give those works the
strongest possible certificate of reality and trueness to life; a modern, almost a topical savour; perhaps,
also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the necessity
of finding in an old masterpiece some such obvious and refreshing allusion to a person about whom jokes could
be made and repeated and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had retained enough of the artistic
temperament to be able to find a genuine satisfaction in watching these individual features take on a more
general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in the abstract idea of similarity between
an historic portrait and a modern original, whom it was not intended to represent. However that might be--
and perhaps because the abundance of impressions which he had been receiving for some time past, even though
they had come to him rather through the channel of his appreciation of music, had enriched his appetite for
painting as well--it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect
upon him, that Swann remarked Odette’s resemblance to the Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano, to people
more willingly give his popular surname, Botticelli, now that it suggests not so much the actual work of the
Master as that false and banal conception of it which has of late obtained common currency. He no longer based
his estimate of the merit of Odette's face on the doubtful quality of her cheeks, and the purely fleshy soft-
ness which he supposed would greet his lips there should he ever hazard a kiss, but rather regarded it as a
skein of beautiful, delicate lines which his eyes unravelled, following their curves and convolutions, relat-
ing the rhythm of the neck to the effusion of the hair and the droop of the eyelids, as though in a portrait
of her in which her type was made clearly intelligible.
　　　　He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and limbs, and these he tried
incessantly, afterwards, to recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was only thinking of her in
her absence; and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine masterpiece was probably based upon his discovery
that it had been reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and rendered her more precious
in his sight. Swann reproached himself with his failure, hitherto, to estimate at her true worth a creature
whom the great Sandro would have adored, and counted himself fortunate that his pleasure in the contemplation
of Odette found a justification in his own system of aesthetic. He told himself that, in choosing the thought
of Odette as the inspiration of his dreams of ideal happiness, he was not, as he had until then supposed,
falling back, merely, upon an expedient of doubtful and certainly inadequate value, since she contained in
herself what satisfied the utmost refinement of his taste in art. He failed to observe that this quality would
not naturally avail to bring Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, simply because his
desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste. The words ‘Florentine painting’ were invaluable to
Swann. They enabled him, like a title, to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies
which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form. And
whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her
face, her body, the whole of her beauty, cooled the ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept away and
that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of aesthetic prin-
ciple; while the kiss, the physical possession which would have seemed natural and but moderately attractive,
had they been granted him by a creature of somewhat blemished flesh and sluggish blood, coming, as they
now came, to crown his adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, must, it seemed, prove supernaturally delicious.
　　　　And when he was tempted to regret that, for months past, he had done nothing but visit Odette, he would
assure himself that he was not unreasonable in giving up much of his time to an inestimably precious work of
art, cast for once in a new, a different, an especially delectable metal, in an unmatched exemplar which he
would contemplate at one moment with the humble, spiritual, disinterested mind of an artist, at another with
the pride, the selfishness, the sensual thrill of a collector.
　　　　He placed on his study table, as if it were a photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro's Daughter.
He would gaze in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the imperfection of the skin
might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair that fell along her tired cheeks; and, adapting to the idea
of a living woman what he had until then felt to be beautiful on aesthetic grounds, he converted it into a
series of physical merits which he was gratified to find assembled in the person of one whom he might ulti-
mately possess. The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts one to a work of art, now that he knew the
original in flesh and blood of Jethro’s Daughter, became a desire which more than compensated, thenceforward,
for the desire which Odette’s physical charms had at first failed to inspire him. When he had sat for a long
time gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli, who seemed even lovelier still,
and as he drew towards him the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette against
his heart.





　　　　Even as he drew near to the Verdurins' door, and caught sight of the great lamp-lit spaces of the drawing-
room windows, whose shutters were never closed, he would begin to melt at the thought of the charming creature
whom he would see, as he entered the room, basking in that golden light. Here and there the figures of the
guests stood out in silhouette, slender and black, between lamp and window, like those little pictures which
one sees round a translucent lampshade, the other panes of which are simply naked light. He would try to make
out Odette. And then, when he was once inside, without thinking, his eyes sparkled suddenly with such radiant
happiness that M. Verdurin said to the painter: “Hm. Seems to be warming up.” Indeed, her presence gave
the house what none of the other houses that he visited seemed to possess: a sort of nervous system, a sensory
network which ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his heart.





　　　　But one evening, when, irritated by the thought of that inevitable dark drive together, he had taken his
other ‘little girl’ all the way to the Bois, so as to delay as long as possible the moment of his appearance
at the Verdurins’, he was so late in reaching them that Odette, supposing that he did not intend to come, had
already left. Seeing the room bare of her, Swann felt a sudden stab at the heart; he trembled at the thought
of being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he was able for the first time to gauge, having always, hither-
to, had that certainty of finding it whenever he would, which (as in the case of all our pleasures) reduced,
if it did not altogether blind him to its dimensions.





　　　　“She would have told me,” answered Mme. Verdurin with dignity. “I may say that she tells me everything.
As she has no one else at present, I told her that she ought to live with him. She makes out that she can’t;
she admits, she was immensely attracted by him, at first; but he’s always shy with her, and that makes her shy
with him. Besides, she doesn’t care for him in that way, she says; it’s an ideal love, ‘Platonic,’ you know;
she’s afraid of rubbing the bloom off--oh, I don’t know half the things she says, how should I? And yet he's
exactly the sort of man she wants.”
　　　　“I beg to differ from you,” M. Verdurin courteously interrupted. “I am only half satisfied with the
gentleman. I feel that he puts on airs.”
　　　　Mme. Verdurin’s whole body stiffened, and her eyes stared blankly as though she had suddenly been turned
into a statue; a device which enabled her to appear not to have caught the sound of that unutterable phrase
which seemed to imply that it was possible for people to ‘puts on airs’ in their house, in other words, to
consider themselves "superior" to them.





　　　　On the landing Swann had run into the Verdurins’ butler, who had been somewhere else a moment earlier,
when he arrived, and who had been asked by Odette to tell Swann (but that was at least an hour ago) that she
would probably stop to drink a cup of chocolate at Prevost’s on her way home. Swann set off at once for
Prevost’s, but every few yards his carriage was held up by others, or by people crossing the street, loath-
some obstacles each of which he would gladly have crushed beneath his wheels, were it not that a policeman
fumbling with a note-book would delay him even longer than the actual passage of the pedestrian. He counted
the minutes feverishly, adding a few seconds to each so as to be quite certain that he had not given himself
short measure, and so, possibly, exaggerated whatever chance there might actually be of his arriving at
Prevost’s in time, and of finding her still there. And then, in a moment of illumination, like a man in a
fever who awakes from sleep and is conscious of the absurdity of the dream-shapes among which his mind has
been wandering without any clear distinction between himself and them, Swann suddenly perceived how foreign
to his nature were the thoughts which he had been revolving in his mind ever since he had heard at the Ver-
durins' that Odette had left, how novel the heartache from which he was suffering, but of which he was only
now conscious, as though he had just woken up. What! all this disturbance simply because he would not see
Odette, now, till tomorrow, exactly what he had been hoping, not an hour before, as he drove toward Mme.
Verdurin’s. He was obliged to admit also that now, as he sat in the same carriage and drove to Prevost's,
he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone even--that a new personality was there beside him, ad-
hering to him, amalgamated with him, a person whom he might, perhaps, be unable to shake off, whom he might
have to treat with circumspection, like a master or a malady. And yet, from the moment in which he had begun
to feel that another, a fresh personality was thus conjoined with his own, life had seemed, somehow, more
interesting.
　　　　He gave scarcely a thought to the likelihood that this possible meeting at Prevost's (the tension of
waiting for which so ravished and stripped bare the intervening moments that he could find nothing, not one
idea, not one memory in his mind behind which his troubled spirit might take shelter and repose) would pro-
bably, after all, should it take place, be much the same as all their meetings, of no great importance. As
on every other evening, once he was in Odette’s company, once he had begun to cast furtive glances at her
changing countenance, and instantly to withdraw his eyes lest she should read in them the first symbols of
desire and believe no more in his indifference, he would cease to be able even to think of her, so busy
would he be in the search for pretexts which would enable him not to leave her immediately, and to assure
himself, without betraying his concern, that he would find her again, next evening, at the Verdurins';
pretexts, that is to say, which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day
more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come to him with the vain presence of
this woman, whom he might approach, yet never dared embrace.





　　　　Meanwhile the restaurants were closing, and their lights began to go out. Under the trees of the
boulevards there were still a few people strolling to and fro, barely distinguishable in the gathering
darkness. From time to time the shadowy figure of a woman gliding up to Swann, murmuring a few words in his
ear, asking him to take her home, would make him start. Anxiously he clutched at all these dim forms, as though,
among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.
　　　　Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that
blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverous agitation that sweeps over us from time
to time. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her
fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she
should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or even as much as others. All that is necessary is that
our taste for her should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when--in this moment of depri-
vation--the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced an anxious tor-
turing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world
make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage--the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusi-
vely.





　　　　She had so little expected to see him that she started back in alarm. As for him, he had ransacked
the streets of Paris, not that he supposed it possible that he should find her, but because he would have
suffered even more cruelly by abandoning the attempt. But this happiness which his reason had never ceased
to regard as unattainable, that evening at least, now seemed doubly real; for, since he himself had contri-
buted nothing to it by anticipating probabilities, it remained external to himself; there was no need for
him to think it into existence--it was from itself that there emanated, it was itself that projected to-
wards him, that truth whose radiance dispelled like a bad dream the loneliness he had so dreaded, that
truth on which his happy musings now dwelt unthinkingly. So will a traveller, arriving in glorious weather
at the Mediterranean shore, no longer certain of the existence of the lands he has left behind, let his
eyes be dazzled by the radiance streaming towards him from the luminous and unfading azure of the sea.
　　　　He climbed after her into the carriage which she had kept waiting, and ordered his own to follow.
　　　　She was holding in her hand a bunch of cattleyas, and Swann could see, beneath the film of lace
that covered her head, more of the same flowers fastened to a swansdown plume. She was dressed, beneath
her cloak, in a flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on one side so as to reveal a large triangle of
white silk skirt, and with a yoke, also of white silk, in the cleft of the low-necked bodice, in which
were fastened a few more cattleyas. She had scarcely recovered from the shock which the sight of Swann
had given her, when some obstacle made the horse start to one side. They were thrown forward in their
seats; she uttered a cry, and fell back quivering and breathless.
　　　　“It’s all right,” he assured her, “don’t be frightened.” And he slipped his arm round her
shoulder, supporting her body against his own; then went on: “Whatever you do, don’t utter a word;
just make a sign, yes or no, or you’ll be out of breath again. You won’t mind if I put the flowers
straight on your bodice; the jolt has loosened them. I’m afraid of their dropping out; I’m just going
to fasten them a little more securely.”
　　　　She was not used to being treated with so much formality by men, and smiled as she answered: “No,
not at all; I don’t mind in the least.”
　　　　But he, daunted a little by her answer, and also, perhaps, to bear out the pretence that he had been
sincere in adopting the stratagem, or even because he was already beginning to believe that he had been,
exclaimed: “No, no; you mustn’t speak. You will be out of breath again. You can easily answer in signs;
I shall understand. Really and truly now, you don’t mind my doing this? Look, there is a little--I think
it must be pollen, spilt over your dress,--may I brush it off with my hand? That’s not too hard; I'm not
hurting you, am I? I’m tickling you, perhaps, a little; but I don’t want to touch the velvet in case I
rub it the wrong way. But, don’t you see, I really had to fasten the flowers; they would have fallen out
if I hadn’t. Like that, now; if I just push them a little farther down. . . . Seriously, I’m not annoying
you, am I? And if I just sniff them to see whether they’ve really lost all their scent? I don’t believe
I ever smelt any before; may I? Tell the truth, now.”
　　　　Still smiling, she shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly, as who should say, “You’re quite mad;
you know very well that I like it.”
　　　　He ran his other hand upwards along Odette's cheek; she gazed at him fixedly, with that languishing
and solemn air which marks the women of the Florentine master, in whose faces he had found a resemblence
with hers; swimming at the brink of the eyelids, her brilliant eyes, wide and slender like theirs, seemed
on the verge of welling out like two great tears. She bent her neck, as all their necks may be seen to bend,
in the pagan scenes as well as in the religious pictures. And in an attitude that was doubtless habitual to
her, one which she knew to be appropriate to such moments, and was careful not to forget to assume, she
seemed to need all her strength to hold her face back, as though some invisible force were drawing it to-
wards Swann's. And it was Swann who, before she allowed it, as though in spite herself, to fall upon his
lips, held it back for a moment longer, at a little distance, between his hands. He had wanted to leave
time for his mind to catch up with him, to recognise the dream which it had so long cherished and to assist
at its realisation, like a relative invited as a spectator when a prize is given to a child of whom she has
been especially fond. Perhaps, too, he was fixing upon these face of an Odette not yet possessed, not even
kissed by him, which he was seeing for the last time, the comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his
departure, a traveller hopees to bear away with him in memory a landscape he is leaving forever.
　　　　But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which had begun by his arranging her
cattleyas and had ended in her complete surrender, whether from fear of chilling her, or from reluctance
to appear, even retrospectively, to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked the audacity to formulate a
more urgent requirement than this (which could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the
first occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If she had any cattleyas pinned
to her bodice, he would say: “It is most unfortunate; the cattleyas don't need tucking in this evening;
they've not been disturbed as they were the other night; I think, though, that this one isn’t quite
straight. May I see if they have more scent than the others?” Or else, if she had none: “Oh! no cattleyas
this evening; then there's no chance of my indulging in my little rearrangements.” So that for some time
there was no change in the procedure which he had followed on that first evening, starting with fumblings
with fingers first and lips at Odette's bosom, and it was thus that his caresses still began. And long after-
wards, when the rearrangement (or, rather, the ritual pretence of a rearrangement) of her cattleyas had
quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor “Do a cattleya,” transmuted into a simple verb which they
would employ without a thinking when they wished to refer to the act of physical possession (in which,
paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing), survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long-
forgotten custom from which it sprang. And perhaps this particular manner of saying “to make love” did not
mean the same thing as its synonyms. However jaded we may be about women, however much we may regard
the possession of the most divergent types as a repetitive and predictable experience, it nonetheless becomes
a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women concerned are--or are thought by us to be--so difficult as to
oblige us to make it spring from some unrehearsed incident in our relations with them, as had originally been
for Swann the arrangement of the cattleyas. He tremblingly hoped, that evening, (but Odette, he told himself,
if she was deceived by his stratagem, could not guess his intention) that it was the possession of this woman
that would emerge for him from their large mauve petals; and the pleasure which he had already felt, and which
Odette tolerated, he thought, perhaps only because she had not recognized it herself, seemed to him for that
reason--as it might have seemed to the first man when he enjoyed it amid the flowers of the earthly paradise--
a pleasure which had never before existed, which he was striving now to create, a pleasure--and the special
name which he gave it was to certifty--entirely individual and new.





No one ever received a letter from him now demanding an introduction to a woman. He had ceased to pay any
attention to women, and kept away from the places in which they were ordinarily to be met. In a restaurant,
or in the country, his manner was deliberately and directly the opposite of that by which, only a few days
earlier, his friends would have recognised him, that manner which had seemed permanently and unalterably his
own. To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not
only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates the signs by which that character has
hitherto been discernible. On the other hand, there was one thing that was, now, invariable, namely that
wherever Swann might be spending the evening, he never failed to go on afterwards to Odette. The interval of
space separating her from him was one which he must as inevitably traverse as he must descend, by an irre-
sistible gravitation, the steep slope of life itself. To be frank, as often as not, when he had stayed late
at a party, he would have preferred to return home at once, without going so far out of his way, and to post-
pone their meeting until the morrow; but the very fact of his putting himself to such inconvenience at an
abnormal hour in order to visit her, while he guessed that his friends, as he left them, were saying to one
another: “He is tied hand and foot; there must certainly be a woman somewhere who insists on his going to
her at all hours,” made him feel that he was leading the life of the class of men whose existence is col-
oured by a love-affair, and in whom the perpetual sacrifice which they are making of their comfort and of
their practical interests has engendered a spiritual charm. Then, though he may not consciously have taken
this into consideration, the certainty that she was waiting for him, that she was not elsewhere with others,
that he would see her before he went home, drew the sting from that anguish, forgotten but latent and ever
ready to be reawakened, which he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins’ before his
arrival, an anguish the present assuagement of which was so agreeable that it might almost be called happi-
ness. Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that he owed the importance which Odette had since assumed in
his life. Other people as a rule mean so little to us that, when we have invested one of them with the power
to cause us so much suffering or happiness, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is
surrounded with poetry, makes of ones life a sort of stirring arena, in which he or she will be more or less
close to one. Swann could not without anxiety ask himself what Odette would mean to him in the years that
were to come. Sometimes, as he looked up from his victoria on those fine and frosty nights, and saw the bright
moonbeams fall between his eyes and the deserted streets, he would think of that other face, gleaming and
faintly roseate like the moon's, which had, one day, risen on the horizon of his mind and since then had shed
upon the world the mysterious light in which he saw it bathed. If he arrived after the hour at which Odette
sent her servants to bed, before ringing the bell at the gate of her little garden, he would go round first
into the other street, over which, at the ground-level, among the windows (all exactly alike, but darkened)
of the adjoining houses, shone the solitary lighted window of her room. He would rap upon the pane, and she
would hear the signal, and answer, before running to meet him at the gate. He would find, lying open on the
piano, some of her favourite music, the Valse des Roses, the Pauvre Fou of Tagliafico (which, according to the
instructions embodied in her will, was to be played at her funeral); but he would ask her, instead, to give him
the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the fairest impres-
sion that remains in our minds of a favourite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck
by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The little phrase was associated still, in Swann’s mind, with his
love for Odette. He felt clearly that this love was something to which there were no corresponding external
signs, whose meaning could not be proved by any but himself; he realised, too, that Odette’s qualities were not
such as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in her company. And often, when the cold
government of reason stood unchallenged in his mind, he would readily have ceased to sacrifice so many of his
intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But the little phrase, as soon as it struck his
ear, had the power to liberate in him the space that was needed to contain it; the proportions of Swann's soul
were altered; a margin was left for an enjoyment that corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any
external object and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely individual, but assumed for him a sort
of reality superior to that of concrete things. This thirst for an unknown delight was awakened in him by the
little phrase, but without bringing him any precise gratification to assuage it. With the result that those parts
of Swann's soul in which the little phrase had obliterated all care for material interests, those human consid-
erations which affect all men alike, were left vacant by it, blank pages on which he was at liberty to inscribe
the name of Odette. Moreover, in so far as Odette’s affection might seem a little abrupt and disappointing, the
little phrase would come to supplement it, to blend with it its own mysterious essence. Watching Swann's face
while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he was inhaling an anaesthetic which allowed him to
breathe more freely. And the pleasure which the music gave him, which was shortly to create in him a real need,
was in fact akin, at such moments, to the pleasure which he would have derived from experimenting with perfumes,
from entering into contract with a world for which we men were not made, which appears to us formless because
our eyes cannot perceive it, meaningless because it eludes our understanding, to which we may attain by way of
one sense only. There was a deep repose, a mysterious refreshment for Swann--whose eyes, although delicate
interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible
imprint of the barrenness of his life--in feeling himself transformed into a creature estranged from humanity,
blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the
world through his hearing alone. And since he sought in the little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence
could not descend, with what a strange frenzy of intoxication did he strip bare his innermost soul of the whole
armour of reason and make it pass unattended, through the dark filter of sound! He began to realise how much that
was painful, perhaps even how much secret and unappeased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the phrase; and yet to
him it brought no suffering. What matter though the phrase repeated that love is frail and fleeting, when his love
was so strong! He played with the melancholy which the phrase diffused, he felt it stealing over him, but like a
caress which only deepened and sweetened his sense of his own happiness. He would make Odette play it over to
him again and again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, as she did so, she must never stop kissing him. Every
kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. So closely,
in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an
hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May. Then she would pretend to stop, saying: “How do you expect me
to play when you keep on holding me? I can’t do everything at once. Make up your mind what you want; am I to play
the phrase or do you want to play with me?” Then he would become annoyed, and she would burst out with a laugh
which, was transformed, as it left her lips, and descended upon him in a shower of kisses. Or else she would look
at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face worthy to figure in Botticelli’s 'Life of Moses'; he would
place it there, giving to Odette’s neck the necessary inclination; and when he had finished her portrait in tempera,
in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine, the idea that she was none the less in the room with him still,
by the piano, at that very moment, ready to be kissed and enjoyed, the idea of her material existence, would sweep
over him with so violent an intoxication that, with eyes starting from his head and jaws tensed as though to devour
her, he would fling himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks. And then, once as he had left
her, not without returning to kiss her once again, because he had forgotten to take away with him the memory of
some detail of her fragrance or of her features, as he drove home in his victoria he blessed Odette for allowing him
these daily visits which could not, he felt, bring any great joy to her but which, by keeping him immune from the fever
of jealousy--by removing from him any possibility of a fresh outbreak of the heart-sickness which had afflicted him on
the evening, when he had failed to find her at the Verdurins'--would help him to arrive, without any recurrence of
those crises, of which the first had been so distressing that it must also be the last, at the end of this strange
period of his life, of these hours, enchanted almost, like those in which he drove through Paris by moonlight. And,
noticing as he drove home that the moon had now changed its position relatively to his own and was almost touching
the horizon, feeling that his love, also, was obedient to these immutable laws of nature, he asked himself whether
this period, upon which he had entered, was to last much longer, whether presently his mind’s eye would cease to
behold that dear countenance, save as occupying a distant and diminished position, and on the verge of ceasing to
shed on him the radiance of its charm.





　　　　On certain days, however, though these came seldom, she would call upon him in the afternoon, to interrupt his
musings or the essay on Vermeer to which he had latterly returned. His servant would come in to say that Mme. de
Crecy was in the small drawing-room. He would go in search of her, and, when he opened the door, on Odette’s rosy
face, as soon as she caught sight of Swann, would appear--changing the curve of her lips, the look in her eyes, the
moulding of her cheeks--an all-absorbing smile. Once he was left alone he would see that smile again, and also her
smile of the day before, and another with which she had greeted him sometime else, and the smile which had been her
answer, in the carriage that night, when he had asked her whether she objected to his rearranging her cattleyas; and
the life of Odette at all other times, since he knew nothing of it, appeared to him, on a neutral and colourless back-
ground, like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon which one sees here and there, at every corner and at various
angles, traced in three colours upon the buff paper, innumerable smiles. But, once in a while, illuminating a chink
of that existence which Swann still saw as a complete blank, even if his mind assured him that it was not, because
he was unable to visualize it, some friend who knew them both, and suspecting that they were in love, had not dared
to tell him anything about her that was of the least importance, would describe how he had glimpsed Odette that very
morning, walking up the Rue Abbattucci, in a cape trimmed with skunk, a Rembrandt hat, and a bunch of violets in her
bosom. Swann would be bowled over by this simple sketch because it suddenly made him realize that Odette had an exist-
ence which was not wholly subordinated to his own; he longed to know whom she had been seeking to impress by this cos-
tume in which he had never seen her, and he made up his mind to ask her where she had been going at that intercepted
moment, as though, in all the colourless life of his mistress--a life almost nonexistent, since it was invisible to
him--there had been but a single incident apart from all those smiles directed towards himself: namely, her walking
abroad beneath a Rembrandt hat, with a bunch of violets in her bosom.
　　　　Except when he asked her for Vinteuil’s little phrase instead of the Valse des Roses, Swann made no effort to
induce her to play the things that he himself preferred, nor, in literature any more than in music, to correct the
manifold errors of her taste. He fully realised that she was not intelligent. When she said how much she would like
him to tell her about the great poets, she had imagined that she would suddenly get to know whole pages of romantic
and heroic verse, in the style of the Vicomte de Borelli, only even more moving. As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked
whether he had been made to suffer by a woman, if it was a woman that had inspired him, and once Swann had told her
that no one knew, she had lost all interest in that painter. She would often say: “I’m sure, poetry; well, of course,
there’d be nothing like it if it was all true, if the poets really believed the things they said. But as often as not
you’ll find there’s no one so mean and calculating as those fellows. I know something about poetry. I had a friend,
once, who was in love with a poet of sorts. In his verses he never spoke of anything but love, and heaven, and the
stars. Oh! she was properly taken in! He had more than three hundred thousand francs out of her before he’d finished.”
If, then, Swann tried to shew her in what artistic beauty consisted, how one ought to appreciate poetry or painting,
after a minute or two she would cease to listen, saying: “Yes . . . I never thought it would be like that.” And he
felt that her disappointment was so great that he preferred to lie to her, assuring her that what he had said was
nothing, that he had only touched the surface, that he had not time to go into it all properly, that there was more
in it than that. Then she would interrupt with a brisk, “More in it? What? . . . Do tell me!”, but he did not tell
her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different from what she had expected, less sensational
and less touching; he was afraid, too, lest, disillusioned in the matter of art, she might at the same time be disillu-
sioned in the greater matter of love.
　　　　With the result that she found Swann inferior, intellectually, to what she had supposed. “You’re always so
reserved; I can’t make you out.” She marvelled increasingly at his indifference to money, at his courtesy to every-
one alike, at the delicacy of his mind. And indeed it happens, often enough, to a greater man than Swann ever was,
to a scientist or artist, when he is not wholly misunderstood by the people among whom he lives, that the feeling in
them which proves that they have been convinced of the superiority of his intellect is created not by any admiration
for his ideas--for those are entirely beyond them--but by their respect for what they term his good qualities.





　　　　Feeling that, often, he could not give her in reality the pleasures of which she dreamed, he tried at least to
ensure that she should be happy in his company, tried not to contradict those vulgar ideas, that bad taste which she
displayed on every possible occasion, which all the same he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came
from her, which even fascinated him, for were they not so many more of those characteristic features, by virtue of
which the essential qualities of the woman emerged, and were made visible? And so, when she was in a happy mood be-
cause she was going to see the Reine Topaze, or when her eyes grew serious, troubled, petulant, if she was afraid of
missing the flower-show, or merely of not being in time for tea, with muffins and toast, at the Rue Royale tea-rooms,
where she believed that regular attendance was indispensable, and set the seal upon a woman’s certificate of 'smart-
ness,' Swann, enraptured, as all of us are, at times, by the natural behaviour of a child, or by the likeness of a
portrait, which appears to be on the point of speaking, would feel so distinctly the soul of his mistress rising to
fill the outlines of her face that he could not refrain from going across and welcoming it with his lips. “Oh, then,
so little Odette wants us to take her to the flower-show, does she? she wants to be admired, does she? very well, we
will take her there, we can but obey her wishes.” As Swann’s sight was beginning to fail, he had to resign himself
to a pair of spectacles, which he wore at home, when working, while to face the world he adopted a single eyeglass,
as being less disfiguring. The first time that she saw it in his eye, she could not contain herself for joy: “I real-
ly do think--for a man, that is to say--it is tremendously smart! How nice you look with it! Every inch a gentleman.
All you want now is a title!” she concluded, with a tinge of regret in her voice. He liked Odette to say these things,
just as, if he had been in love with a Breton girl, he would have enjoyed seeing her in her coif and hearing her say
that she believed in ghosts. Always until then, as is common among men whose taste for the arts develops independently
of their sensuality, a weird disparity had existed between the satisfactions which he would accord to both simultane-
ously; yield-ing to the seductions of more and more rarefied works of art in the company of more and more vulgar women,
taking a little servant-girl to a screened box at the theatre for the performance of a decadent piece which he particu-
larly wanted to see, or to an exhibition of Impressionist painting, convinced, moreover, that a cultivated society woman
would have understood them no better, but would not have managed to remain so prettily silent.





　　　　And as the qualities which he supposed to be an intrinsic part of the Verdurin character were no more, really,
than their superficial reflection of the pleasure which had been enjoyed in their society by his love for Odette, those
qualities became more serious, more profound, more vital, as that pleasure increased. Since Mme. Verdurin gave Swann,
now and then, what alone could constitute his happiness; since, on an evening when he felt anxious because Odette had
talked rather more to one of the party than to another, and, in a spasm of irritation, would not take the initiative by
asking her whether she was coming home, Mme. Verdurin brought peace and joy to his troubled spirit by the spontaneous
exclamation: “Odette! You’ll see M. Swann home, won’t you?”; since, when the summer holidays came, and after he had
asked himself uneasily whether Odette might not leave Paris without him, whether he would still be able to see her every
day, Mme. Verdurin was going to invite them both to spend the summer with her in the country; Swann, unconsciously allow-
ing gratitude and self-interest to filter into his intelligence and to influence his ideas, went so far as to proclaim
that Mme. Verdurin was “a great and noble soul.” Should any of his old fellow-pupils in the Louvre school of painting
speak to him of some rare or eminent artist, “I’d a hundred times rather,” he would reply, “have the Verdurins.”
And, with a solemnity of diction which was new in him: “They are magnanimous creatures, and magnanimity is, after all,
the one thing that matters, the one thing that gives us distinction here on earth. Look you, there are only two classes
of men, the magnanimous, and the rest; and I have reached an age when one has to take sides, to de-cide once and for all
whom one is going to like and dislike, to stick to the people one likes, and, to make up for the time one has wasted with
the others, never to leave them again as long as one lives. And so,” he went on, with the slight thrill of emotion which
a man feels when, even without being fully aware of it, he says something not because it is true but because he enjoys
saying it, and listens to his own voice uttering the words as though they came from some one else, “the die is now cast;
I have elected to love none but magnanimous souls, and to live only in an atmosphere of magnanimity. You ask me whether
Mme. Verdurin is really intelligent. I can assure you that she has given me proofs of a nobility of heart, of a lofti-
ness of soul, to which no one could possibly attain without a corresponding loftiness of mind. Without question, she has
a profound understanding of art. But it is not, perhaps, in that that she is most admirable; every little action, ingeni-
ously, exquisitely kind, which she has performed for my sake, every thoughtful attention, every little gesture, quite do-
mestic and yet quite sublime, reveal a more profound comprehension of existence than all your textbooks of philosophy.”





　　　　And so there was probably not, in the whole of the Verdurin circle, a single one of the ‘faithful’ who loved them,
or believed that he loved them, as dearly as did Swann. And yet, when M. Verdurin said that he was not satisfied with
Swann, he had not only expressed his own sentiments, he had unwittingly discovered his wife’s. Doubtless Swann had too
particular an affection for Odette, as to which he had failed to take Mme. Verdurin daily into his confidence; doubtless
the very discretion with which he availed himself of the Verdurins’ hospitality, refraining, often, from coming to dine
with them for a reason which they never suspected, and in place of which they saw only an anxiety on his part not to have
to decline an invitation to the house of some "bore" or other; doubtless, also, and despite all the precautions which he
had taken to keep it from them, the gradual discovery which they were making of his brilliant position in society--doubt-
less all these things contributed to their general annoyance with Swann. But the real, the fundamental reason was quite
different. The fact was that they had quickly sensed in him a locked door, a reserved, impenetrable chamber in which he
still professed silently to himself that the Princesse de Sagan was not grotesque, and that Cottard’s jokes were not a-
musing, in a word, for all that he never deviated from his affability or revolted against their dogmas, an impermeability
to those dogmas, a resistance to complete conversion, the like of which they had never come across in anyone before.





　　　　"I think I heard the Doctor speak of that old termagant, Blanche of Castile, if I may so express myself. Am I not
right, Madame?” Brichot appealed to Mme. Verdurin, who, swooning with merriment, her eyes tightly closed, had buried her
face in her two hands, from behind which, muffled screams could be heard.





　　　　A sort of wit like Brichot’s would have been regarded as out-and-out stupidity by the people among whom Swann had
spent his early life, for all that it is quite compatible with real intelligence. And the intelligence of the Professor's
vigorous and well-nourished brain might easily have been envied by many of the people in society who seemed witty enough
to Swann. But these last had so thoroughly inculcated into him their likes and dislikes, at least in everything that per-
tained to their ordinary social existence, including that annex to social existence which belongs, strictly speaking, to
the domain of intelligence, namely, conversation, that Swann could not but find Brichot's pleasantries pedantic, vulgar,
and nauseating. He was shocked, too, being accustomed to good manners, by the rude, almost barrack-room tone the pug-
nacious academic adopted, no matter to whom he was speaking. Finally, perhaps, he had lost all patience that evening as
he watched Mme. Verdurin welcoming, with such unnecessary warmth, this Forcheville fellow, whom it had been Odette's
unaccountable idea to bring to the house. Feeling a little awkward, with Swann there also, she had asked him on her ar-
rival: “What do you think of my guest?”
　　　　And he, suddenly realising for the first time that Forcheville, whom he had known for years, could actually attract
a woman, and was quite a good specimen of a man, had retorted: “Unspeakable!” He had, certainly, no idea of being jea-
lous of Odette, but did not feel quite so happy as usual, and when Brichot, having begun to tell them the story of Blanche
of Cas-tile's mother, who, according to him, “had been with Henry Plantagenet for years before they were married,”
tried to prompt Swann to beg him to continue the story, by interjecting “Isn't that so, M. Swann?" in the martial accents
people use in order to put themselves on a level with a country bumpkin or to put the fear of God into a trooper, Swann cut
his story short, to the intense fury of their hostess, by begging to be excused for taking so little interest in Blanche
of Castile, as he had some-thing that he wished to ask the painter. He, it appeared, had been that afternoon to an exhibi-
tion of the work of another artist, also a friend of Mme. Verdurin, who had recently died, and Swann wished to find out
from him (for he valued his discrimination) whether there had really been anything more in this later work than the vir-
tuosity which had struck people so forcibly in his earlier exhibitions.
　　　　“From that point of view it was extraordinary, but it did not seem to me to be a form of art which you could call
'elevated,'" said Swann with a smile.
　　　　“Elevated . . . to the purple!” interrupted Cottard, raising his arms with mock solemnity. The whole table burst
out laughing.
　　　　"What did I tell you?” said Mme. Verdurin to Forcheville. “It’s simply impossible to be serious with him. When
you least expect it, out he comes with a joke.”
　　　　But she observed that Swann alone had not unbent. For one thing he was none too well pleased with Cottard for
having secured a laugh at his expense in front of Forcheville. But the painter, instead of replying in a way that might have
interested Swann, as he would probably have done had they been alone together, preferred to win the easy admiration of
the rest with a witty dissertation upon the deceased master.
　　　　"I went up to one of them,” he began, “just to see how it was done. I stuck my nose into it. Well, it's just not
true! Impossible to say whether it was done with glue, with rubies, with soap, with sunshine, with leaven, with cack!”
　　　　"And one make twelve!” shouted the Doctor, wittily, but just too late, for no one saw the point of his interruption.
　　　　"It looks as though it were done with nothing at all,” resumed the painter. “No more chance of discovering the trick
than there is in the ‘Night Watch,’ or the ‘Regents,’ and it’s even bigger work than either Rembrandt or Hals ever
did. It's all there,--and yet, no, I’ll take my oath it isn’t.”
　　　　Then, just as singers who have reached the highest note in their compass continue in a head voice, piano, he pro-
ceeded to murmur, laughing the while, as if, after all, there had been something irresistibly absurd in the sheer beauty of
the paint-ing: “It smells good, it makes your head whirl; it takes your breath away; you feel ticklish all over--and not
the faintest clue to how it’s done. The man's a sorcerer; the thing’s a conjuring-trick, a miracle,” bursting into out-
right laughter, "it's almost dishonest!” And stopping, solemnly raising his head, pitching his voice on a bass profundo
note which he struggled to bring into harmony, he concluded, “And it’s so sincere!”





　　　　"You will think me dreadfully provincial, sir,” said Mme. Cottard to Swann, “but, do you know, I haven’t been
yet to this famous Francillon that everybody’s talking about. The Doctor has been (I remember now, he told me what a
very great pleasure it had been to him to spend the evening with you there) and I must confess, I don’t see much sense
in spending money on seats for him to take me, when he's seen the play already. Of course an evening at the Theatre-
Francais is never wasted, really; the acting’s so good there always; but we have some very nice friends,” (Mme. Cottard
would hardly ever utter a proper name, but restricted herself to “some friends of ours” or “one of my friends,” as
being more ‘distinguished,’ speaking in an affected tone and with all the importance of a person who need give names
only when she chooses) “who often have a box, and are kind enough to take us to all the new pieces that are worth going
to, and so I'm cer-tain to see this Francillon sooner or later, and then I shall know what to think. But I do feel such
a fool about it, I must confess, for, whenever I pay a call anywhere, I find everybody talking ? it’s only natural ?
about that wretched Japanese salad. Really and truly, one's beginning to get just a little tired of hearing about it,"
she went on, seeing that Swann seemed less interested than she had hoped in so burning a topic. “I must admit, though,
that it’s some-times quite amusing, the way they joke about it: I’ve got a friend, now, who is most original, though
she’s really a beautiful woman, most popular in society, goes everywhere, and she tells me that she got her cook to make
one of these Japanese salads, put-ting in everything that young M. Dumas says you’re to put in, in the play. Then she
asked just a few friends to come and taste it. I was not among the favoured few, I’m sorry to say. But she told us all
about it on her next ‘day’; it seems it was quite horr-ible, she made us all laugh till we cried. I don’t know; perhaps
it was the way she told it,” Mme. Cottard added doubtfully, seeing that Swann still looked grave.
　　　　And, imagining that it was, perhaps, because he had not been amused by Francillon: “Well, I daresay I shall be
disappointed with it, after all. I don’t suppose it’s as good as the piece Mme. de Crecy worships, Serge Panine.
There's a play, if you like; so deep, makes you think! But just fancy giving a receipt for a salad on the stage of the
Theatre-Francais! Now, Serge Panine ?! But then, it’s like ever-ything that comes from the pen of M. Georges Ohnet,
it's so well written. I wonder if you know the Maitre des Forges, which I like even better than Serge Panine.”
　　　　"Forgive me,” said Swann with polite irony, “but I must confess that my want of admiration is almost equally
divided between those masterpieces.”





　　　　"Do you see much of M. Swann?” asked Mme. Verdurin.
　　　　"Oh dear, no!” he answered, and then, thinking that if he made himself pleasant to Swann he might find favour
with Odette, he decided to take this opportunity of flattering him by speaking of his fashionable friends, but speaking
as a man of the world himself, in a tone of good-natured criticism, and not as though he were congratulating Swann upon
some undeserved good fortune: “Isn't that so, Swann? I never see anything of you, do I?--But then, where on earth is
one to see him? The creature spends all his time ensconced with the La Tremoilles, with the Laumes and all that lot!”
The imputation would have been false at any time, and was all the more so, now that for at least a year Swann had given
up going to almost any house but the Verdurins'. But the mere names of families whom the Verdurins did not know were
received by them in a reproachful silence. M. Verdurin, dreading the painful impression which the mention of these
‘bores,’ especially when flung at her in this tactless fashion, and in front of all the ‘faithful,’ was bound to
make on his wife, cast a covert glance at her, instinct with anxious solicitude. He saw then that in her fixed resolu-
tion to take no notice, to have escaped contact, altogether, with the news which had just been addressed to her, not
merely to remain dumb but to have been deaf as well, as we pre-tend to be when a friend who has been in the wrong at-
tempts to slip into his conversation some excuse which we should appear to be accepting, should we appear to have heard
it without protesting, or when some one utters the name of an enemy, the very mention of whom in our presence is for-
bidden; Mme. Verdurin, so that her silence should have the appearance, not of consent but of the unconscious silence
of inanimate objects, had suddenly emptied her face of all life, of all mobility; her domed forehead was no more than
an exquisite piece of sculpture in the round, which the name of those La Tremoilles, with whom Swann was always "en-
sconsed" had failed to penetrate; her nose, just perceptibly wrin-kled in a frown, exposed to view two dark cavities
that seemed modelled from life. You would have said that her half-opened lips were just about to speak. It was all no
more, however, than a wax cast, a plaster mask, a maquette for a monument, a bust for the Palace of Industry, in front
of which the public would most certainly gather and marvel to see how the sculptor, in expressing the unchallengeable
dignity of the Verdurins, as opposed to that of the La Tremoilles or Laumes, whose equals (if not, indeed, their bet-
ters) they were, and the equals and betters of all other ‘bores’ upon the face of the earth, had contrived to impart
with an almost papal majesty to the whiteness and rigidity of the stone. But the marble at last came to life and let
it be understood that it didn’t do to be at all squeamish if one went to that house, since the wife was always drunk
and the husband so uneducated that he called a corridor a ‘collidor'!
　　　　"You'd need to pay me a lot of money before I’d let any of that lot set foot inside my house,” Mme. Verdurin
concluded, gazing imperially down on Swann.
　　　　She could scarcely have expected him to capitulate so completely as to echo the holy simplicity of the pianist's
aunt, who at once exclaimed: "To think of that, now! What surprises me is that they can get anybody to go near them;
I'm sure I should be afraid; one can't be too careful. How can people be so common as to go running after them?”But
he might, at least, have replied, like Forcheville: “Gad, she's a duchess; there are still plenty of people who are
impressed by that sort of thing,” which would at least have permitted Mme. Verdurin the retort, “And a lot of good
may it do them!” Instead of which, Swann merely smiled, in a manner which intimated that he could not, of course,
take such an outrageous statement seriously. M. Verdurin, who was still casting furtive glances at his wife, saw with
regret and understood only too well that she was now inflamed with the passion of a Grand Inquisitor who has failed
to stamp out heresy; and so, in the hope of bringing Swann round to a recantation (for the courage of one’s opinions
is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the ‘other side’), challenged him: "Tell us frankly, now,
what you think of them yourself. We shan’t repeat it to them, you may be sure.”
　　　　To which Swann answered: “Why, I’m not in the least afraid of the Duchess (if it is of the La Tremoilles that
you're speaking). I can assure you that everyone likes going to see her. I don't go so far as to say that she’s at
all ‘deep' ? ” he pronounced the word as if it meant something ridiculous, for his speech kept the traces of certain
mental habits which the recent change in his life, a rejuvenation illustrated by his passion for music, had inclined
him temporarily to discard, so that at times he would actually state his views with considerable warmth ? “but I am
quite sincere when I say that she is intelligent, while her husband is positively a bookworm. They are charming people.”
　　　　Whereupon Mme. Verdurin, realising that this one infidel would prevent her ‘little nucleus’ from achieving com-
plete unanimity, and was unable to restrain herself, in her fury at the obstinacy of this wretch who could not see what
anguish his words were causing her, from screaming at him from the depths of her tortured heart, “You may think so if
you wish, but at least you need not say so to us.”
　　　　"It all depends upon what you call intelligence.” Forcheville felt that it was his turn to be brilliant. “Come
now, Swann, tell us what you mean by intelligence.”
　　　　"There,” cried Odette, “that’s one of the big things I beg him to tell me about, and he never will.”
　　　　"Oh, but . . . ” protested Swann.
　　　　"Oh, but nonsense!” said Odette.
　　　　"A water-butt?” asked the Doctor.
　　　　"To you,” pursued Forcheville, “does intelligence mean what they call clever talk; you know, the sort of people
who worm their way into society?"
　　　　"Finish your sweet, so that they can take your plate away!” said Mme. Verdurin sourly to Saniette, who was lost
in thought and had stopped eating. And then, perhaps a little ashamed of her rudeness, “It doesn’t matter; take your
time about it; there's no hurry; I only reminded you because of the others, you know; it keeps the servants back.”
　　　　"There is,” began Brichot, hammering out every syllable, “a rather curious definition of intelligence by that
gentle old anarchist Fenelon . . . ”
　　　　"Just listen to this!” Mme. Verdurin rallied Forcheville and the Doctor. “He’s going to give us Fenelon's def-
inition of intelligence. That's interesting. It’s not often you get a chance of hearing that!”
　　　　But Brichot was keeping Fenelon’s definition until Swann should have given his. Swann remained silent, and, by
this fresh act of recreancy, spoiled the brilliant dialectical contest which Mme. Verdurin was rejoicing at being able
to offer to Forcheville.
　　　　"You see, it’s just the same as with me!” Odette was peevish. “I’m not at all sorry to see that I’m not the
only one he doesn't find quite up to his level.”
　　　　"These de La Tremouailles whom Mme. Verdurin has exhibited to us as so little to be desired,” inquired Brichot,
articulating vigorously, “are they, by any chance, descended from the couple whom that worthy old snob, Sevigne, said
she was delighted to know, because it was so good for her peasants? True, the Marquise had another reason, which in her
case probably came first, for she was a thorough journalist at heart, and always on the look-out for ‘copy.’ And, in
the journal which she used to send regularly to her daughter, it was Mme. de La Tremouaille, kept well-informed through
all her grand connections, who supplied the foreign politics.”
　　　　"No, no. I don't think theyre the same family,” hazarded Mme. Verdurin.
　　　　Saniette who, ever since he had surrendered his untouched plate to the butler, had been plunged once more in silent
meditation, emerged finally to tell them, with a nervous laugh, the story of a dinner he had once had with the Duc de La
Tremoille, from which it transpired that the Duke did not know that George Sand was the pseudonym of a woman. Swann,
who really liked Saniette, felt bound to supply him with a few facts illustrative of the Duke's cul-ture proving that such
ignorance on his part was literally impossible; but suddenly he stopped short, realising that Saniette needed no proof,
but knew already that the story was untrue for the simple reason that he had just invented it. The worthy man suffered
acutely from the Verdurins' always finding him so boring; and as he was conscious of having been more than ordinarily
dull this eve-ning, he had made up his mind that he would succeed in being amusing at least once before the end of dinner.
He capitulated so quickly, looked so wretched at the sight of his castle in ruins, and replied in so craven a tone to
Swann, appealing to him not to persist in a refutation which was already superfluous--"All right; all right; anyhow, even
if I'm mistaken it's not a crime, I hope,"--that Swann longed to be able to console him by insisting that the story was
indubitably true and exquisitely funny. The Doctor, who had been listening, had an idea that it was the right moment to
interject “Se non e vero,” but he was not quite certain of the words, and was afraid of being caught out.
　　　　After dinner, Forcheville went up to the Doctor.
　　　　“She can’t have been at all bad looking, Mme. Verdurin; anyhow, she’s a woman you can really talk to; that’s all I
want. Of course she’s getting a bit broad in the beam. But Mme. de Crecy! There’s a little woman who knows what's what,
all right. Upon my word and soul, you can see at a glance she’s got the American eye, that girl has. We are speaking of
Mme. de Crecy,” he explained, as M. Verdurin joined them, his pipe in his mouth. “I should say that, as a specimen of the
female form ? ”
　　　　"I’d rather have it in my bed than a slap with a wet fish!” the words came tumbling from Cottard, who had for
some time been waiting in vain for Forcheville to pause for breath, so that he might get in his hoary old joke, for
which there might not be another cue if the conversation should take a different turn and which he now produced with
that excessive spontaneity and confidence that seeks to cover up the coldness and the anxiety inseparable from a pre-
pared recitation. Forcheville knew and saw the joke, and was thoroughly amused. As for M. Verdurin, he was unsparing of
his merriment, hav-ing recently discovered a way of expressing it by a convention that was different from his wife's,
but equally simple and obvious. Scarcely had he begun the movement of head and shoulders of a man shaking with laughter
than he would begin at once to cough, as though, in laughing too violently, he had swallowed a mouthful of pipe-smoke.
And by keeping the pipe firmly in his mouth he could prolong indefinitely the dumb-show of suffocation and hilarity.
Thus he and Mme. Verdurin (who, at the other side of the room, where the painter was telling her a story, was shutting
her eyes preparatory to flinging her face into her hands) resembled two masks in a theatre, each representing Comedy,
but in a different way.





　　　　Then they were silent; beneath the restless tremolos of the violin-part which protected it with their throbbing
sostenuto two octaves above it--and as in a mountainous country, behind the seeming immobility of a vertiginous waterfall,
one descries, two hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley--the little phrase had just appeared,
distant, graceful, protected by the long, gradual unfurling of its transparent, incessant and sonorous curtain. And Swann,
in his heart of hearts, turned to it as to a confidant of his love, as to a friend of Odette who would surely tell her to
pay no attention to this Forcheville.
　　　　"Ah! you’ve come too late!” Mme. Verdurin greeted one of the ‘faithful,’ whose invitation had been only "to look
in after dinner,"“we've been having a simply incomparable Brichot! You never heard such eloquence! But he's gone. Isn't
that so, M. Swann? I believe it’s the first time you've met him,” she went on, to emphasize the fact that it was to her
that Swann owed the introduction. “Isn't that so; wasn't he delicious, our Brichot?”Swann bowed politely.
　　　　"No? You weren’t interested?” she asked dryly.
　　　　"Oh, but I assure you, I was quite enthralled. He is perhaps a little too peremptory, a little too jovial for my
taste. I should like to see him a little less confident at times, a little more tolerant, but one feels that he knows a
great deal, and on the whole he seems a very sound fellow.”





　　　　"I don't mind saying that I thought him extremely stupid.”
　　　　M. Verdurin took it up. “He’s not sincere. He’s a crafty customer, always trying to run with the hares and hunt
with the hounds. What a difference between him and Forcheville. There, at least, you have a man who tells you straight out
what he thinks. Either you agree with him or you don’t. Not like the other fellow, who’s never definitely fish or fowl.
Did you notice, by the way, that Odette seemed all for Forcheville, and I don’t blame her, either. And besides, if Swann
wants to come the man of fashion over us, the champion of distressed Duchesses, at any rate the other man has got a title
--he's always Comte de Forcheville!” he concluded with an air of discriminatino, as though, familiar with every page of
the history of that dignity, he were making a scrupulously exact estimate of its value, in relation to others of the sort.
　　　　"I may tell you,” Mme. Verdurin went on, “that he saw fit to utter some venomous and quite absurd insinuations
against Brichot. Naturally, once he saw that Brichot was popular in this house, it was a way of hitting back at us, of
spoiling our party. I know his sort, the dear, good friend of the family, who pulls you all to pieces on the stairs as
he's going away.”
　　　　"Didn't I say so?” retorted her husband. “He's simply a failure, one of those small-minded individuals who are
envious of anything that’s at all big.”
　　　　In reality there was not one of the "faithful" who was not infinitely more malicious than Swann; but they all took
the precaution of tempering their calumnies with obvious pleasantries, with little sparks of emotion and cordiality;
while the least indication of reserve on Swann’s part, undraped in any such conventional formula as “Of course, I
don't mean to be unkind" to which he would have deigned to stoop, appeared to them a deliberate act of treachery.





　　　　Often she was plagued by money troubles, and under pressure from a creditor would appeal to him for assistance.
He enjoyed this, as he enjoyed anything that might impress Odette with his love for her, or merely with his influence,
with the extent to which he could be of use to her. Probably if anyone had said to him, at the beginning, “It’s your
position that attracts her,” or at this stage, “It’s your money that she’s really in love with,” he would not have
believed the suggestion, nor would he have been greatly distressed by the thought that people supposed her to be attach-
ed to him, that people felt them, to be united by any ties so binding as those of snobbishness or wealth. But even if he
had accepted the possibility, it might not have caused him any suffering to discover that Odette’s love for him was
based on a foundation more lasting than mere affection, or any attractive qualities which she might have found in him;
on a sound, commercial interest; an interest which would postpone for ever the fatal day on which she might be tempted
to bring their rel-ations to an end. For the moment, while he lavished presents upon her, and performed all manner of
services, he could rely on advantages not contained in his person, or in his intellect, could forego the endless, kill-
ing effort to make himself attractive. And the pleasure of being a lover, of living by love alone, the reality of which
he was sometimes inclined to doubt, was enhanced in his eyes, as a dilettante of intangible sensations, by the price he
was paying for it--as one sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are real-
ly enjoyable become convinced that they are--as convinced also of the rare quality and absolute detachment of their own
taste--when they have agreed to pay several pounds a day for a room in an hotel from which that sight and that sound may
be enjoyed.
　　　　One day, when reflections of this sort had brought him back to the memory of the time when some one had spoken
to him of Odette as of a kept woman, and he was amusing himself once again with contrasting that strange personification,
the kept woman--an iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities, embroidered, as in some fantasy of Gustave
Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers interwoven with precious jewels--with that Odette upon whose face he had watched
the passage of the same expressions of pity for a sufferer, resentment of an act of injustice, gratitude for an act of
kindness, which he had seen, in earlier days, on his own mother’s face, and on the faces of friends; that Odette, whose
conversation had so frequently turned on the things that he himself knew better than anyone, his collections, his room,
his old servant, his banker, who kept all his title-deeds and bonds, the thought of the banker reminded him that he
must call on him shortly, to draw some money. And indeed, if, during the current month, he were to come less liberally
to the aid of Odette in her financial difficulties than in the month before, when he had given her five thousand francs,
if he refrained from offering her a diamond neck-lace for which she longed, he would be allowing her admiration for his
generosity to decline, that gratitude which had made him so happy, and would even be running the risk of her imagining
that his love for her (as she saw its visible manifestations grow fewer) had itself diminished. And then, suddenly, he
asked himself whether that was not precisely what was implied by ‘keeping’ a woman (as if, in fact, that idea of
‘keeping’ could be derived from elements not at all mysterious nor perverse, but belonging to the intimate routine of
his daily life, such as that thousand-franc note, a familiar and domestic object, torn in places and mended with gummed
paper, which his valet, after paying the household accounts and the rent, had locked up in a drawer in the old writing-
desk whence he had extracted it to send it, with four others, to Odette) and whether it was not possible to apply to
Odette, since he had known her (for he never imagined for a moment that she could ever have taken a penny from anyone
else, before), that title, which he had believed so wholly inapplicable to her, of ‘kept’ woman. He could not explore
the idea further, for a sudden access of that mental lethargy which was, with him, congenital, intermittent and provi-
dential, happened at that moment, to extinguish every particle of light in his brain, as instantaneously as, at a later
period, when electric lighting had been everywhere installed, it became possible to cut off all the supply of light from a
house. His mind fumbled for a moment in the darkness, he took off his spectacles, wiped the glasses, drew his hand
across his eyes, and only saw light again when he found himself face to face with a wholly different idea, the realisation
that he must endeavour, in the coming month, to send Odette six or seven thousand-franc notes instead of five, simply as
a surprise for her and to give her pleasure.





Besides, his long inurement to luxury and society had given him a need as well as contempt for them, with the result
that, by the time he had come to regard the humblest lodgings as precisely on a par with the most princely mansions,
his senses were so thoroughly accustomed to the latter that he could not enter the former without a feeling of acute
discomfort. He had the same regard--to a degree of identity which they would never have suspected--for the little
families with small incomes who asked him to dances in their flats (“straight upstairs to the fifth floor, and the
door on the left”) as for the Princesse de Parme, who gave the most splendid parties in Paris; but he did not have
the feeling of being actually at the party when he found himself herded with the fathers of families in the bedroom
of the lady of the house, while the spectacle of washstands covered over with towels, and of beds converted into
cloak-rooms, with a mass of hats and greatcoats sprawling over their counterpanes, gave him the same stifling sen-
sation that, nowadays, people who have been used for half a lifetime to electric light derive from a smoking lamp
or a candle that needs to be snuffed.
　　　　If he was dining out, he would order his carriage for half-past seven. While he changed his clothes, he would
be wondering, all the time, about Odette, and in this way was never alone, for the constant thought of Odette gave
to the moments in which he was separated from her the same peculiar charm as to those in which she was at his side.
He would get into his carriage and drive off, but he knew that this thought had jumped in after him and had settled
down on his lap, like a pet animal which he might take everywhere, and would keep with him at the dinner-table, un-
beknown to his fellow-guests. He would stroke and fondle it, warm himself with it, and, overcome with a sort of lan-
guor, would give way to a slight shuddering which contracted his throat and nostrils--a new experience, this--as he
fastened the bunch of columbines in his buttonhole. He had for some time been feeling neither well nor happy, espe-
cially since Odette had brought Forcheville to the Verdurins’, and he would have liked to go away for a while to
rest in the country. But he could never summon up courage to leave Paris, even for a day, while Odette was there.
The weather was warm; it was the finest part of the spring. And for all that he was driving through a city of stone
to immure himself in a house without grass or garden, what was incessantly before his eyes was a park which he own-
ed, near Combray, where, at four in the afternoon, before coming to the asparagus-bed, thanks to the breeze that
was wafted across the fields from Meseglise, one could enjoy the fragrant coolness of the air beneath an arbour
in the garden as by the bank of the pond as much as by the edge of the pond fringed with forget-me-nots and iris,
and where, when he sat down to dinner, the table ran riot with the roses and the flowering currant trained and
twined by his gardener’s skilful hand.





　　　　And although Swann had never yet taken offence, at all seriously, at Odette’s demonstrations of friendship
for one or other of the ‘faithful,’ he felt an exquisite pleasure on hearing her thus avow, before them all, with
that calm immodesty, the fact that they saw each other regularly every evening, his privileged position in her
house, and her own preference for him which it implied. It was true that Swann had often reflected that Odette
was in no way a remarkable woman; and in the supremacy which he wielded over a creature so distinctly inferior
to himself there was nothing that especially flattered him when he heard it proclaimed to all the ‘faithful’;
but since he had observed that to many other men than besides himself Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable
woman, the attraction which her body held for them had aroused in him a painful longing to secure the absolute
mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart. And he had begun to attach an incalculable value to those
moments passed in her house in the evenings, when he held her upon his knee, made her tell him what she thought
about this or that, and counted over that treasure to which, alone of all his earthly possessions, he still
clung. And so, after this dinner, drawing her aside, he took care to thank her effusively, seeking to indicate
to her by the extent of his gratitude the corresponding intensity of the pleasures which it was in her power to
bestow on him, the supreme pleasure being to guarantee him immunity, for as long as his love should last and he
remain vulnerable, from the assaults of jealousy.
　　　　When he came away from his banquet, the next evening, it was pouring rain, and he had nothing but his
victoria. A friend offered to take him home in a closed carriage, and as Odette, by the fact of her having in-
vited him to come, had given him an assurance that she was expecting no one else, he could, with a quiet mind
and an untroubled heart, rather than set off thus in the rain, have gone home and to bed. But perhaps, if she
saw that he seemed not to adhere to his resolution to end every evening, without exception, in her company, she
might grow careless, and fail to keep free for him just the one evening on which he particularly desired it.
　　　　It was after eleven when he reached her door, and as he made his apology for having been unable to come
away earlier, she complained that it was indeed very late; the storm had made her unwell, her head ached, and
she warned him that she would not let him stay longer than half an hour, that at midnight she would send him
away; a little while later she felt tired and wished to sleep.
　　　　"No cattleya, then, tonight?・ he asked, "and I've been looking forward so to a nice little cattleya."
　　　　She seemed peevish and on edge and replied, "No, dear, no cattleya tonight. Can't you see, I'm not well?"
　　　　"It might have done you good, but I won't bother you."
　　　　She asked him to put out the light before he went; he drew the curtains close round her bed and left her.
But, when he was in his own house again, the idea suddenly struck him that, perhaps, Odette was expecting some
one else that evening, that she had merely pretended to be tired, that she had asked him to put the light out
only so that he should suppose that she was going to sleep, that the moment he had left the house she had light-
ed it again, and had reopened her door to the stranger who was to be her guest for the night. He looked at his
watch. It was about an hour and a half since he had left her; he went out, took a cab, and stopped it close to
her house, in a little street running at right angles to that other street, which lay at the back of her house,
and along which he used to go, sometimes, to tap upon her bedroom window, for her to let him in. He left his cab;
the streets were all deserted and dark; he walked a few yards and came out almost opposite her house. Amid the
glimmering blackness of the row of windows in which the lights had long since been put out, he saw one, and only
one, from which percolated--between the slats of its shutters, closed like a wine-press over its mysterious
golden juice--the light that filled the room within, a light which on so many evenings, as soon as he saw it
from afar as he turned into the street, had rejoiced his heart with its message: ・She is there--expecting you,"
and now tortured him with: "She is there with the man she was expecting." He must know who; he tiptoed
along by the wall until he reached the window, but between the slanting bars of the shutters he could see no-
thing, could only hear, in the silence of the night, the murmur of conversation.
　　　　Certainly he suffered as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere, behind the closed sash, stir-
red the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had
crept in after his own departure, the perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at that moment tasting
with the stranger. And yet he was not sorry that he had come; the torment which had forced him to leave his own
house had become less acute now that it had become less vague, now that Odette's other life, of which he had
had, at that first moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was definitely there, in the full glare of the lamp-light,
almost within his grasp, an unwitting prisoner in that room into which, when he chose, he would force his way to
seize it unawares; or rather he would tap upon the shutters, as he had often done when he had come there very
late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn that he knew, that he had seen the light and had heard the
voices; while he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing at him, as sharing with that other
the knowledge of how effectively he had been tricked, now it was he that saw them, confident and persistent in
their error, tricked and trapped by none other than himself, whom they believed to be a mile away, but who was
there, in person, there with a plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to tap upon
the shutter. And perhaps the almost pleasurable sensation he felt at that moment was something more than the
assuagement of a doubt and of a pain: was an intellectual pleasure. If, since he had fallen in love, things had
recovered a little of the delightful interest that they had had for him long ago--though only insofar as they
were illuminated by the thought or the memory of Odette--now it was another of the faculties of his studious
youth that his jealousy revived, the passion for truth, but for a truth which, too, was interposed between
himself and his mistress, receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the sole object of
which (an infinitely precious object, and one almost disinterested in its beauty) was Odette's life, her acti-
ons, her environment, her plans, and her past. At every other period in his life, the little everyday words and
actions of another person had always seemed wholly valueless to Swann; if gossip about such things were repeated
to him, he would dismiss it as insignificant, and while he listened it was only the lowest, the most commonplace
part of his mind that was interested; at such moments he felt utterly dull and uninspired. But in this strange
phase of love the personality of another person becomes so enlarged, so deepened, that the curiosity which he
now felt stirring inside him to know the least details of a woman・s daily occupation, was the same thirst for
knowledge with which he had once studied history. And all manner of actions, from which, until now, he would
have recoiled in shame, such as spying, to-night, outside a window, to-morrow, for all he knew, putting adroit-
ly provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening at doors, seemed to him, now, to be
precisely on a level with the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation of old
monuments, that was to say, so many different methods of scientific investigation, each one having a definite
intellectual value and being legitimately employable in the search for truth.
　　　　As his hand stole out towards the shutters he felt a pang of shame at the thought that Odette would now
know that he had suspected her, that he had returned, that he had posted himself outside her window. She had
often told him what a horror she had of jealous men, of lovers who spied. What he was going to do would be ex-
tremely awkward, and she would detest him for ever after, whereas now, for the moment, for so long as he re-
frained from knocking, perhaps even in the act of infidelity, she loved him still. How often is not the pros-
pect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification. But
his desire to know the truth was stronger, and seemed to him nobler. He knew that the reality of certain cir-
cumstances which he would have given his life to be able to reconstruct accurately and in full, was to be read
behind that window, streaked with bars of light, as within the illuminated, golden boards of one of those pre-
cious manuscripts by whose artistic wealth itself the scholar who consults them cannot remain unmoved. He felt
a voluptuous pleasure in learning the truth which he passionately sought him in that unique, ephemeral and pre-
cious transcript, on that translucent page, so warm, so beautiful. And besides, the advantage which he felt--
which he so desperately wanted to feel--that he had over them, lay perhaps not so much in knowing as in being
able to shew them that he knew. He drew himself up on tiptoe. He knocked. They had not heard; he knocked again;
louder; their conversation ceased. A man’s voice--he strained his ears to distinguish whose, among such of
Odette's friends as he knew, the voice could be--asked:
　　　　"Who's that?"
　　　　He could not be certain of the voice. He knocked once again. The window first, then the shutters were
thrown open. It was too late, now, to retire, and since she must know all, so as not to seem too contemptible,
too jealous and inquisitive, he called out in a careless, hearty, welcoming tone:
　　　　"Please don’t bother; I just happened to be passing, and saw the light. I wanted to know if you were
feeling better."
　　　　He looked up. Two old gentlemen stood facing him, in the window, one of them with a lamp in his hand;
and beyond them he could see into the room, a room that he had never seen before. Having fallen into the habit,
When he came late to Odette, of identifying her window by the fact that it was the only one still lighted in
a row of windows otherwise all alike, he had been misled, this time, by the light, and had knocked at the win-
dow beyond hers, in the adjoining house. He made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the
satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in
Odette's company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof
of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the
obligation to love the other enough.
　　　　He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he ceased even to think of it himself. But now and then his
thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into
life, thrust it forward into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, deep-rooted pain. As though
it were a bodily pain, Swann's mind was powerless to alleviate it; but at least, in the case of bodily pain,
since it is independent of the mind, the mind can dwell upon it, can note that it has diminished, that it has
momentarily ceased. But in this case the mind, merely by recalling the pain, created it afresh. To determine
not to think of it was to think of it still, to suffer from it still. And when, in conversation with his
friends, he forgot about it, suddenly a word casually uttered would make him change countenance like a wounded
man when a clumsy hand has touched his aching limb. When he came away from Odette, he was happy, he felt calm,
he recalled her smiles of gentle mockery when speaking of this or that other person, of tenderness for himself;
he recalled the gravity of her head which she seemed to have lifted from its axis to let it droop and fall,
as though in spite of herself, upon his lips, as she had done on the first evening in the carriage; the lan-
guishing looks she had given him as she lay in his arms, nestling her head against her shoulders as though
shrinking from the cold.
　　　　But then at once his jealousy, as it were the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with
the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening--and which now, perversely,
mocked Swann and shone with love for another--of that droop of the head, now sinking on to other lips, of all
the marks of affection (now given to another) that she had shown to him. And all the voluptuous memories
which he bore away from her house were, so to speak, but so many sketches, rough plans those which a decorater
submits to one, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes, aflame or faint with passion, which
she might adopt for others. With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her com-
pany, every new caress of which he had been so imprudent as to point out to her the delights it was, every
fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they would go to enrich the collection of
instruments in his torture-chamber.
　　　　A fresh turn was given to the screw when Swann recalled a sudden expression which he had intercepted,
a few days earlier, and for the first time, in Odette’s eyes. It was after dinner at the Verdurins’. Whether
it was because Forcheville, aware that Saniette, his brother-in-law, was not in favour with them, had decided
to make a butt of him, and to shine at his expense, or because he had been annoyed by some awkward remark
which Saniette had made to him, although it had passed unnoticed by the rest of the party who knew nothing of
whatever tactless allusion it might conceal, or possibly because he had been for some time looking out for an
opportunity of securing the expulsion from the house of a fellow-guest who knew rather too much about him,
and whom he knew to be so nice-minded that he himself could not help feeling embarrassed at times merely by
his presence in the room, Forcheville replied to Saniette's tactless utterance with such a volley of abuse,
going out of his way to insult him, emboldened, the louder he shouted, by the fear, the pain, the entreaties
of his victim, that the poor creature, after asking Mme. Verdurin whether he should stay and receiving no
answer, had left the house in stammering confusion and with tears in his eyes. Odette had watched this scene
impassively, but when the door had closed behind Saniette, she had forced the normal expression of her face
down, so to speak, by several pegs, in order to bring herself on to the same level of baseness as Forcheville;
her eyes had sparkled with a malicious smile of congratulation upon his audacity, of ironical pity for the
poor wretch who had been its victim, she had darted at him a look of complicity in the crime, which so clearly
implied: "That's finished him off, or I'm very much mistaken. Did you see how pathetic he looked? He was
actually crying," that Forcheville, when his eyes met hers, sobering instantaneously from the anger, or sim-
ulated anger, with which he was still flushed, smiled as he explained: "He need only have made himself plea-
sant and he'd have been here still; a good dressing-down does a man no harm, at any age."





After waiting for an hour, he returned. He found her at home; she told him that she had been in the house
when he rang, but had been asleep; the bell had awakened her; she had guessed that it must be Swann, and had
run out to meet him, but he had already gone. She had, of course, heard him knocking at the window. Swann
could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by sur-
prise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent,
thinking that it can be safely incorporated, and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude. It
was true that, when Odette had just done something which she did not wish to disclose, she would take pains
to conceal it in a secret place in her heart. But as soon as she found herself face to face with the man
to whom she was obliged to lie, she became uneasy, all her ideas melted like wax before a flame, her inven-
tive and her reasoning faculties were paralysed, she might ransack her brain but could find only a void; yet
she must say something, and there lay within her reach precisely the fact which she had wished to conceal
and which, being the truth, was the one thing that had remained. She broke off from it a tiny fragment, of
no importance in itself, assuring herself that, after all, it was the best thing to do, since it was a ver-
ifiable detail of the truth, and less dangerous, therefore, than a ficititous one. "At any rate, that's
true," she said to herself, "which is something to the good; he may make inquiries and he'll see that it's
true, so at least it won't be that that gives me away.” But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she
had failed to realize that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges which could not be made to
fit in, except with those contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it,
edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would continue to show, by their
overlapping angles and by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was elsewhere.
　　　　"She admits that she heard me ring, and then knock, that she knew it was myself, that she wanted to
see me,” Swann thought to himself. “But that doesn’t correspond with the fact that she did not let me
in.”
　　　　He did not, however, draw her attention to this inconsistency, for he thought that, if left to herself,
Odette might perhaps produce some falsehood which would give him a faint indication of the truth. She went
on speaking and he did not interrupt her, but gathered up, with an eager and sorrowful piety, the words
that fell from her lips, feeling (and rightly feeling, since she was hiding the truth behind them as she
spoke) that, like the sacred veil, they retained a vague imprint, traced a faint outline of that infinite-
ly precious and, alas, undiscoverable reality--what she had been doing that afternoon at three o'clock
when he had called--of which he would never possess any more than these falsifications, illegible and di-
vine traces, and which would exist henceforward only in the secretive memory of this woman, who would
contemplate it in utter ignorance of its value, but would never yield it up to him. Of course it occurred
to him from time to time that Odette’s daily activities were not in themselves passionately interesting,
and that such relations as she might have with other men did not exhale naturally, universally and for
every rational being a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting with fever or of inciting to suicide.
He realised, at such moments, that that interest, that gloom, existed in him only as a malady might exist,
and that, once he was cured of the malady, the actions of Odette, the kisses that she might have bestowed,
would become once again as innocuous as those of countless other women. But the consciousness that the
painful curiosity with which Swann now studied them had its origin only in himself was not enough to make
him decide that it was unreasonable to regard that curiosity as important, and to take every possible step
to satisfy it. Swann had, in fact, reached an age the philosophy of which--supported, in his case, by the
current philosophy of the day, as well as by that of the circle in which he had spent most of his life, the
group that surrounded the Princesse des Laumes, in which one's intelligence was in direct ratio to the
degree of scepticism and nothing was considered real and incontestable except the individual tastes of
each person--is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the philosophy of
men who, instead of exteriorising the objects of their aspirations, endeavour to extract from the accum-
ulation of the years already spent a definite residue of habits and passions which they can regard as
characteristic and permanent, and with which they will deliberately arrange, before anything else, that
the kind of existence which they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious. Swann deemed it wise to
make allowance in his life for the suffering which he derived from not knowing what Odette had done, just
as he made allowance for the impetus which a damp climate always gave to his eczema; to anticipate in his
budget the expenditure of a considerable sum on procuring, with regard to the daily occupations of Odette,
information the lack of which would make him unhappy, just as he reserved a margin for the gratification of
other tastes from which he knew that pleasure was to be expected (at least, before he had fallen in love)
such as his taste for collecting things, or for good cooking.
　　　　When he proposed to take leave of Odette, and to return home, she begged him to stay a little longer,
and even detained him forcibly, seizing him by the arm as he was opening the door to go. But he gave no
thought to that, for, among the crowd of gestures and speeches and other little incidents which go to make
up a conversation, it is inevitable that we should pass (without noticing anything that arouses our inter-
est) by those that hide a truth for which our suspicions are blindly searching, whereas we stop to examine
others beneath which nothing lies concealed. She kept on saying: “What a dreadful pity; you never by any
chance come in the afternoon, and the one time you do come then I miss you.” He knew very well that she
was not sufficiently in love with him to be so keenly distressed merely at having missed his visit, but as
she was a good-natured woman, anxious to give him pleasure, and often sorry when she had done anything that
annoyed him, he found it quite natural that she should be sorry, on this occasion, that she had deprived
him of that pleasure of spending an hour in her company, which was so very great a pleasure, if not to her-
self, at any rate to him. All the same, it was a matter of so little importance that her air of unrelieved
sorrow began at length to bewilder him. She reminded him, even more than was usual, of the faces of some of
the women created by the painter of the Primavera.’ She had at this moment their downcast, heartbroken
expression, which seems ready to succumb beneath the burden of a grief too heavy to be borne when they are
merely allowing the Infant Jesus to play with a pomegranate, or watching Moses pour water into a trough.





　　　　After that he read the whole letter; at the end she apologised for having treated Forcheville with so
little ceremony, and reminded him that he had left his cigarette-case at her house, precisely what she had
written to Swann after one of his first visits. But to Swann she had added: "Why did you not forget your
heart also? I should never have let you have that back.” To Forcheville nothing of that sort; no allusion
that could suggest any intrigue between them. And, really, he was obliged to admit that in all this business
Forcheville had been worse treated than himself, since Odette was writing to him to make him believe that her
visitor had been an uncle. From which it followed that he, Swann, was the man to whom she attached importance,
and for whose sake she had sent the other away. And yet, if there had been nothing between Odette and Forche-
ville, why not have opened the door at once, why have said, "I was right to open the door; it was my uncle."
If she was doing nothing wrong at that moment how could Forcheville possibly have accounted for her not open-
ing the door? For a time Swann stood still there, disconsolate, bewildered, and yet happy, gazing at this
envelope which Odette had handed to him without a qualm, so absolute was her trust in his honour, but through
the transparent screen of which had been disclosed to him, with the secret history of an incident which he
had despaired of ever being able to learn, a fragment of Odette's life, like a luminous section cut out of
the unknown. Then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent
existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of every thing that would feed its vitality, even at the expense
of Swann himself. Now it had something to feed on, and Swann could begin to worry every day about the visits
that Odette had received about five o'clock, could seek to discover where Forcheville had been at that hour.
For Swann's affection for Odette still preserved the form which had been imposed on it from the beginning by
his ignorance of how she spent her days and by the mental lethargy which prevented him from supplementing
that ignorance by imagination. He was not jealous, at first, of the whole of Odette's life, but of those
moments only in which an incident, which he had perhaps misinterpreted, had led him to suppose that Odette
might have played him false. His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and fi-
nally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon,
then to another, then to another again. But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only
the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.





　　　　He could hear the jokes that Mme. Verdurin would make after dinner, jokes which, whoever the 'bore'
might be at whom they were aimed, had always amused him because he could watch Odette laughing at them,
laughing with him, her laughter almost a part of his. Now he felt that it was possibly at him that they
would make Odette laugh. "What fetid humour!" he exclaimed, twisting his mouth into an expression of dis-
gust so violent that he could feel the muscles of his throat stiffen against his collar. "How, in God's
name, can a creature made in his image find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms? The least
sensitive nose must turn away in horror from such stale exhalations. It's really impossible to believe that
a human being can fail to understand that, in allowing herself to smile at the expense of a fellow-creature
who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is sinking into a mire from which it will be impossible, with
the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I inhabit a plane so infinitely far above the sewers in which
these filthy vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by
the witticisms of a Verdurin!" he shouted, tossing up his head and proudlly throwing back his shoulders. "God
knows I've honestly tried to pull Odette out of that quagmire, and to teach her to breathe a nobler and a
purer air. But human patience has its limits, and mine is at an end,” he concluded, as though this sacred
mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from longer than a few minutes ago, as though
he had not undertaken it only since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms might, perchance, be directed
at himself, and might have the effect of detaching Odette from him.
　　　　He could see the pianist sitting down to play the Moonlight Sonata, and the grimaces of Mme. Verdurin,
in terrified anticipation of the wrecking of her nerves by Beethoven’s music. "Idiot, liar!" he shouted,"
and a creature like that imagines that she's fond of Art!” She would say to Odette, after deftly insinuating
a few words of praise for Forcheville, as she had so often done for himself: “You can make room for M. de
Forcheville there, can’t you, Odette?"..."'In the dark!'" (he remembered the painter's words) "filthy old
procuress!” ...'Procuress' was the name he applied also to the music which would invite them to sit in silence,
to dream together, to gaze in each other’s eyes, to feel for each other’s hands. He felt that there was much
to be said, after all, for a sternly censorous attitude towards the arts, such as Plato adopted, and Bossuet,
and the old school of education in France.
　　　　In a word, the life which they led at the Verdurins’, which he had so often described as ‘genuine,’
seemed to him now the worst possible form of life, and their ‘little nucleus’ the most degraded class of soc-
iety. “It really is,” he repeated, “beneath the lowest rung of the social ladder, the nethermost circle of
Dante. Beyond a doubt, the august words of the Florentine refer to the Verdurins! When one comes to think of it,
surely people ‘in society’ (and, though one may find fault with them now and then, still, after all they are
a very different matter from that gang of blackmailers) shew a profound sagacity in refusing to know them, or
even to dirty the tips of their fingers with them. What a sound intuition there is in that ‘Noli me tangere'
motto of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.”
　　　　He had long since emerged from the paths and avenues of the Bois, he had almost reached his own house, and
still, having not yet shaken off the intoxication of his misery and pain and the inspired insincerity which the
counterfeit tones and artificial sonority of his own voice raised to ever more exhilarating heights, he contin-
ued to perorate aloud in the silence of the night: "Society people have their failings, as no one knows better
than I; but there are certain things they simply wouldn't stoop to. So-and-so" (a fashionable woman whom he had
known) "was far from being perfect, but she did after all have a fundamental decency, a sense of honor in her
dealings which would have made her incapable, whatever happened, of any sort of treachery and which puts a vast
gulf between her and an old hag like Verdurin. Verdurin! What a name! Oh, it must be said they are perfect spec-
imens of their disgusting kind! Thank God, it was high time that I stopped condescending to promiscuous inter-
course with such infamy, such dung.”





　　　　"I swear to you," he told her, shortly before she was to leave for the theatre, "that, in asking you not to go,
I should hope, were I a selfish man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thousand other
things to do this evening, and I shall feel that I have been tricked and trapped myself, and shall be thoroughly
annoyed, if, after all, you tell me that you are not going. But my occupations, my pleasures are not everything;
I must think of you also. A day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to
reproach me with not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I felt that I was going to pass judgment on
you, one of those stern judgments which love cannot long resist. You see, your Nuit de Cleopatre (what a title!)
has no bearing on the point. What I must know is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest
grade of mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of foregoing a plea-
sure. And if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a clearly defined entity,
imperfect but at least perceptible. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that offers itself,
a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash it-
self a hundred times a day against a glass wall, always mistaking it for water. Do you realise that your answer
will have the effect--I won't say of making me cease loving you immediately, of course, but of making you less
attractive in my eyes when I realise that you are not a person, that you are beneath everything in the world and
are incapable of raising yourself one inch higher? Obviously, I should have preferred to ask you, as though it
had been a matter of little or no importance, to give up your Nuit de Cleopatre (since you compel me to sully my
lips with so abject a name), in the hope that you would go to it none the less. But, since I had resolved to
weigh you in the balance, to make so grave an issue depend upon your answer, I considered it more honourable to
give you due warning.”
　　　　Meanwhile, Odette had shown signs of increasing emotion and uncertainty. Although the meaning of his speech
was beyond her, she grasped that it was to be included in the category of "harangues" the scenes of reproach or
supplication, which her familiarity with the ways of men enabled her, without paying any heed to the words that
were uttered, to conclude that they would not make unless they were in love, and that since they were in love,
it was unnecessary to obey them, as they would only be more in love later on. And so, she would have heard Swann
out with the utmost tranquillity had she not noticed that it was growing late, and that if he went on speaking
for any length of time she would “never” as she told him with a fond smile, obstinate but slightly abashed,
"get there in time for the Overture."





　　　　Physically, she was passing through an unfortunate phase; she was growing stouter, and the expressive,
sorrowful charm, the surprised, wistful expressions which she had formerly had, seemed to have vanished with
her first youth, with the result that she became most precious to Swann at the very moment when he found her
distinctly less good-looking. He would gaze at her for hours on end, trying to recapture the charm which he
had once seen in her and could not find again. And yet the knowledge that, within this new and strange chrysalis
it was still Odette who lurked, still the same fleeting, shy, elusive will, was enough to keep Swann seeking
as passionately as ever to capture her. Then he would look at photographs of her, taken two years before, and
would remember how exquisite she had been. And that would console him, a little, for all the sufferings that he
voluntarily endured on her account.





　　　　"To think that she could visit really historic buildings with me, who have spent ten years in the study of
architecture, who am constantly bombarded, by people who really count, to take them over Beauvais or Saint-Loup-
de-Naud, and refuse to take anyone but her; and instead of that she trundles off with the most abject brutes to
go into ecstasies over the excrements of Louis-Philippe and Viollet-le-Duc! One hardly needs much knowledge of
art, I should say, to do that; surely, even without any particularly refined sense of smell, one doesn't deli-
berately choose to spend a holiday in the latrines so as to be within range of their fragrant exhalations."
　　　　But when she had set off for Dreux or Pierrefonds--alas, without allowing him to appear there, as though by
accident, at her side, for, as she said, that would "create a dreadful impression,"--he would plunge into the
most intoxicating romance in the lover's library, the railway timetable, from which he learned the ways of join-
ing her there in the afternoon, in the evening, even that very morning. The ways? More than that, the authority,
the right to join her. For, after all, the time-table, and the trains themselves, were not meant for dogs. If
the public were carefully informed, by means of printed advertisements, that at eight o’clock in the morning
a train started for Pierrefonds which arrived there at ten, that could only be because going to Pierrefonds was
a lawful act, for which permission from Odette would be superfluous; an act, moreover, which might be performed
from a motive altogether different from the desire to see Odette, since persons who had never even heard of her
performed it daily, and in such numbers as justified the trouble of stoking the engines.





　　　　He had had the sudden idea, so as to contrive to visit Compiegne and Pierrefonds without letting it be
supposed that his object was to meet Odette, of securing an invitation from one of his friends, the Marquis de
Forestelle, who had a country house in that neighbourhood. This friend, to whom Swann suggested the plan without
disclosing its ulterior purpose, was beside himself with joy; he did not conceal his astonishment at Swann's
consenting at last, after fifteen years, to come down and visit his property, and since he did not (he told him)
wish to stay there, promised to spend some days, at least, in taking him for walks and excursions in the district.
Swann imagined himself down there already with M. de Forestelle. Even before he saw Odette, even if he did not
succeed in seeing her there, what a joy it would be to set foot on that soil where, not knowing the exact spot
in which, at any moment, she was to be found, he would feel all around him the thrilling possibility of her sud-
den apparition: in the courtyard of the Chateau, now beautiful in his eyes since it was on her account that he
had gone to visit it; in all the streets of the town, which struck him as romantic; down every ride of the forest,
roseate with the deep and tender glow of sunset--innumerable and alternative sanctuaries in which, in the uncertain
ubiquity of his hopes, his happy, vagabond and divided heart would simultaneously take refuge.





　　　　As a matter of fact, she had never given him a thought. And such moments as these, in which she forgot
Swann's very existence, were of more value to Odette, did more to attach him to her, than all her infidelities.
For in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had once before been effective in making
his interest blossom into love, on the night when he had failed to find Odette at the Verdurins’ and had hunted
for her all evening. And he did not have (as I had, afterwards, at Combray in my childhood) happy days in which
to forget the sufferings that would return with the night. For his days, Swann must pass them without Odette; and
as he told himself, now and then, to allow so pretty a woman to go out by herself in Paris was just as rash as to
leave a case filled with jewels in the middle of the street. Then he would rail against the passers-by, as though
they were so many pickpockets. But their faces--a collective and formless mass--escaped the grasp of his imagin-
ation, and failed to feed the flame of his jealousy. The effort exhausted Swann’s brain, until, putting his hand
over his eyes, he cried out: “Heaven help me!” as people, after lashing themselves into an intellectual frenzy
in their endeavours to master the problem of the reality of the external world or the immortality of the soul,
afford relief to their weary brains by an unreasoning act of faith. But the thought of his absent one was incess-
antly, indissolubly blended with all the simplest actions of Swann’s daily life--when he took his meals, opened
his letters, went for a walk or to bed--by the very sadness he felt at having to perform those actions without her;




　　　　And Swann was, perhaps, even more touched by the spectacle of her addressing him thus, in front of Forcheville,
not only in these tender words of predilection, but also with certain criticisms, such as: “I feel sure you haven't
written yet to your friends, about dining with them on Sunday. You needn’t go if you don’t want to, but you might
at least be polite,” or “Now, have you left your essay on Vermeer here, so that you can do a little more to it to-
morrow? What a lazy-bones! I’m going to make you work, I can tell you,” which proved that Odette kept herself in
touch with his social engagements and his literary work, that they had indeed a life in common. And as she spoke
she bestowed on him a smile which he interpreted as meaning that she was entirely his.
　　　　At such moments as these, while she was making them some orangeade, suddenly, just as when an ill-adjusted re-
flector begins by casting huge, fantastic shadows on an object on the wall which then contract and merge into it,
all the terrible and shifting ideas which he had formed about Odette melted away and vanished into the charming
creature who stood there before his eyes. He had the sudden suspicion that this hour spent in Odette's house, in
the lamp-light, was perhaps, after all, not an artificial hour, invented for his special use (with the object of
concealing that frightening and delicious thing which was incessantly in his thoughts without his ever being able
to form a satisfactory impression of it, an hour of Odette’s real life, of her life when he was not there,) with
theatrical properties and pasteboard fruits, but was perhaps a genuine hour of Odette's life; that, if he himself
had not been there, she would have pulled forward the same armchair for Forcheville, would have poured out for him,
not some unknown brew, but precisely this same orangeade; that the world inhabited by Odette was not that other
fearful and supernatural world in which he spent his time in placing her--and which existed, perhaps, only in his
imagination, but the real world, exhaling no special atmosphere of gloom, comprising that table at which he might
sit down presently and write, and this drink which he was now being permitted to taste, all the objects which he
contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude--for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had deli-
vered him from them, they themselves, in turn, had been enriched by them, they showed him the palpable realisation
of his fancies, and they impressed themselves upon his mind, took shape and grew solid before his eyes, at the
same time as they soothed his troubled heart. Ah! had fate but allowed him to share a single dwelling with Odette,
so that in her house he should be in his own; if, when asking his servant what there would be for luncheon, it had
been Odette’s bill of fare that he had learned from the reply; if, when Odette wished to go for a walk, in the
morning, along the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne, his duty as a good husband had obliged him, though he had no desire
to go out, to accompany her, carrying her cloak when she was too warm; and in the evening, after dinner, if she
wished to stay at home, and not to dress, if he had been forced to stay beside her, to do what she asked; then
how completely would all the trivial details of Swann's life which seemed to him now so melancholy have taken on,
for the very reason that they would at the same time have formed part of Odette's life--like this lamp, this
orangeade, this armchair, which had absorbed so much of his dreams, which materialised so much of his longing--
a sort of superabundant sweetness and a mysterious density!





　　　　The very next day, her letter came. She wrote that the Verdurins and their friends had expressed a desire
to be present at these performances of Wagner, and that, if he would be so good as to send her the money, she
would be able at last, after going so often to their house, to have the pleasure of entertaining the Verdurins
in hers. Of him she said not a word; it was to be taken for granted that their presence at Bayreuth would be a
bar to his.
　　　　Then he had the pleasure of sending round to her that annihilating answer, every word of which he had care-
fully rehearsed overnight, without venturing to hope that it could ever be used, he had the satisfaction of hav-
ing it conveyed to her. Alas! he felt only too certain that with the money which she had, or could easily procure,
she would be able, all the same, to take a house at Bayreuth, since she wished to do so, she who was incapable of
distinguishing between Bach and Clapisson. Let her take it, then; she would have to live in it more frugally, that
was all. No means (as there would have been if he had replied by sending her several thousand-franc notes) of or-
ganising, each evening, in her hired castle, those exquisite little suppers, after which she might perhaps be
seized by the whim (which, it was possible, had never yet seized her) of falling into the arms of Forcheville. At
any rate, this loathsome expedition, it would not be Swann who had to pay for it. Ah! if he could only manage to
prevent it, if she could sprain her ankle before starting, if the driver of the carriage which was to take her to
the station would consent (no matter how great the bribe) to smuggle her to some place where she could be kept for
a time in seclusion, that perfidious woman, her eyes tinselled with a smile of complicity for Forcheville, which
was what Odette had become for Swann in the last forty-eight hours.
　　　　But she was never that for very long. After a few days the shining, crafty eyes lost their brightness and
their duplicity, that picture of a hateful Odette saying to Forcheville: "Look how furious he is" began to fade
and dissolve. Then gradually the face of the other Odette would reappear and rise before him, softly radiant--
that Odette who also turned with a smile to Forcheville, but with a smile in which there was nothing but tender-
ness for Swann, when she said: “You mustn't stay long because this gentleman doesn't much like my having visit-
ors when he’s here. Oh! if you only knew the creature as I know him!” that same smile with which she used to
thank Swann for some instance of his courtesy which she prized so highly, for some advice for which she had ask-
ed him in one of those grave crises in her life, when she could turn to him alone.





　　　　And if--instead of letting her go off thus, at cross-purposes with him, without having seen him again--he
were to send her this money, if he were to encourage her to take this journey, and to go out of his way to make
it comfortable and pleasant for her, she would come running to him, happy, grateful, and he would have the joy
of seeing her which he had not known for nearly a week, a joy which none other could replace. For the moment that
Swann was able to form a picture of her without revulsion, that he could see once again the friendliness in her
smile, and that the desire to tear her away from every rival was no longer imposed by his jealousy upon his love,
that love became once again, more than anything, a taste for the sensations which Odette's person gave him, for
the pleasure he took in admiring as a spectacle, or in examining as a phenomenon, the dawn of one of her glances,
the formation of one of her smiles, the emission of a particular vocal cadence. And this pleasure, different from
every other, had in the end created in him a need of her, which she alone by her presence or by her letters, could
assuage, almost as disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse, as another need which characterised this new
period in Swann's life, when the sereness, the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a sort of
spiritual overflowing, without his knowing to what he owed this unlooked-for enrichment of his inner life, any
more than a person in delicate health who from a certain moment grows stronger, puts on flesh, and seems for a
time to be on the road to a complete recovery. This other need, which, too, developed in him independently of the
visible, material world, was the need to listen to music and to learn to know it.
　　　　And so, through the chemical action of his malady, after he had created jealousy out of his love, he began again
to manufacture tenderness and pity for Odette. She had become once more the old Odette, charming and kind. He was
full of remorse for having treated her harshly. He wished her to come to him, and, before she came, he wished to have
already procured for her some pleasure, so as to watch her gratitude taking shape in her face and moulding her
smile.





　　　　Sometimes several days had elapsed, during which she had caused him no fresh anxiety; and as, from the next
few visits which he would pay her, he knew that he was likely to derive not any great pleasure, but, more probably,
some annoyance which would put an end to the state of calm in which he found himself, he wrote to her that he was
very busy, and would not be able to see her on any of the days that he had suggested. Meanwhile, a letter from her,
crossing his, asked him to postpone one of those very meetings. He asked himself, why; his suspicions, his grief,
again took hold of him. He could no longer abide, in the new state of agitation into which he found himself plunged,
by the arrangements which he had made in his preceding state of comparative calm; he would run to find her, and
would insist upon seeing her on each of the following days. And even if she had not written first, if she merely
acknowledged his letter, it was enough to make him unable to rest without seeing her. For, upsetting all Swann's
calculations, Odette's acceptance had entirely changed his attitude. Like everyone who possesses something precious,
so as to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it, he had detached the precious object from
his mind, leaving, as he thought, everything else in the same state as when it was there. But the absence of one
part from a whole is not only that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a derangement of all the other parts,
a new state which it was impossible to foresee in the old.
　　　　But at other times--when Odette was on the point of going away for a holiday--it was after some trifling
quarrel for which he had chosen the pretext, that he decided not to write to her and not to see her until her
return, giving the appearance (and expecting the reward) of a serious rupture, which she would perhaps regard as
final, to a separation, the greater part of which was inevitable, since she was going away, which, in fact, he was
merely allowing to start a little sooner than it must. At once he could imagine Odette, puzzled, anxious, dist-
ressed at having received neither visit nor letter from him and this picture of her, by calming his jealousy, made
it easy for him to break himself of the habit of seeing her. At odd moments, no doubt, in the furthest recesses of
his brain, where his determination had thrust it away, and thanks to the length of the interval, the three weeks'
separation to which he had agreed, it was with pleasure that he would consider the idea that he would see Odette
again on her return; but it was also with so little impatience that he began to ask himself whether he would not
readily consent to the doubling of the period of so easy an abstinence. It had lasted, so far, but three days, a
much shorter time than he had often, before, passed without seeing Odette, and without having, as on this occasion
he had, premeditated a separation. And yet, there and then, some tiny trace of contrariety in his mind, or of weak-
ness in his body,--by inciting him to regard the present as an exceptional moment, one not to be governed by the
rules, one in which prudence itself would allow him to take advantage of the soothing effects of a pleasure and to
give his will (until the time should come when its efforts might serve any purpose) a holiday ? suspended the action
of his will, which ceased to exert its inhibitive control; or, without that even, the thought of some information
for which he had forgotten to ask Odette, such as if she had decided in what colour she would have her carriage re-
painted, or, with regard to some investment, whether they were ‘ordinary’ or ‘preference’ shares that she wished
him to buy (for it was all very well to shew her that he could live without seeing her, but if, after that, the car-
riage had to be painted over again, if the shares produced no dividend, a fine lot of good he would have done)--
and suddenly, like a stretched piece of elastic which is let go, or the air in a pneumatic machine which is ripped
open, the idea of seeing her again sprang back from the distant depths in which it lay dormant into the field of
the present and of immediate possibilities.
　　　　It sprang back thus without meeting any further resistance, so irresistible, in fact, that Swann had found it
far less painful to watch the fortnight he was to spend separated from Odette creeping by day by day than to wait
the ten minutes it took his coachman to bring round the carriage which was to take him to her, minutes which he
passed in transports of impatience and joy, in which he recaptured a thousand times over, to lavish on it all the
wealth of his affection, that idea of meeting her again, which, by so abrupt a reversal, at a moment when he sup-
posed it so remote, was once more present and on the very surface of his consciousness. The fact was that this idea
no longer found, as an obstacle in its course, the desire to contrive without further delay to resist its coming,
which had ceased to have any place in Swann’s mind since, having proved to himself--or so, at least, he believed--
that he was so easily capable of resisting it, he no longer saw any inconvenience in postponing a plan of separa-
tion which he was now certain of being able to put into operation whenever he would. Furthermore, this idea of
seeing her again came back to him adorned with a novelty, a seductiveness, armed with a virulence, which long habit
had dulled but which had been retempered during this privation, not of three days but of a fortnight (for a period
of abstinence may be calculated, by anticipation, as having lasted already until the final date assigned to it),
and had converted what had been, until then, a pleasure in store, which could easily be sacrificed, into an unlook-
ed-for happiness which he was powerless to resist. Finally, the idea returned to him with its beauty enhanced by
his own ignorance of what Odette might have thought, might, perhaps, have done on finding that he showed no sign
of life, with the result that he was going now to meet with the entrancing revelation of an Odette almost unknown.





　　　　Certainly, of the extent of this love Swann had no direct knowledge. When he sought to measure it, it happ-
ened sometimes that he found it diminished, shrunken almost to nothing; for instance, the very moderate liking,
amounting almost to dislike, which, in the days before he was in love with Odette, he had felt for her expressive
features, her faded complexion, returned on certain days. “Really, I am making distinct headway,” he would tell
himself on the morrow, “when I come to think it over carefully, I find out that I got hardly any pleasure, last
night, out of being in bed with her; it’s an odd thing, but I actually thought her ugly.” And certainly he was
sincere, but his love extended a long way beyond the province of physical desire. Odette’s person, indeed, no long-
er held any great place in it. When his eyes fell upon the photograph of Odette on his table, or when she came to
see him, he had difficulty in identifying her face, either in the flesh or on the pasteboard, with the painful and
continuous anxiety which dwelt in his mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, “It is she!” as
when suddenly some one shews us in a detached, externalised form one of our own maladies, and we find in it no
resemblance to what we are suffering. "She"--he tried to ask himself what that meant; for it is a point of resem-
blance between love and death, far more striking than those which are usually pointed out, that they make us probe
deeper, in the fear that its reality may elude us, into the mystery of personality. And this malady which Swann's
love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his
thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable
from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons
say, his love was no longer operable.





　　　　My uncle advised Swann not to see Odette for some days, after which she would love him all the more; he advised
Odette to let Swann meet he; everywhere, and as often as he pleased. A few days later Odette told Swann that she had
just had a rude awakening; she had discovered that my uncle was the same as other men; he had tried to take her by
assault. She calmed Swann, who, at first, was for rushing out to challenge my uncle to a duel, but he refused to
shake hands with him when they met again. He regretted this rupture all the more because he had hoped, if he had met
my uncle Adolphe again sometimes and had contrived to talk things over with him in strict confidence, to be able to
get him to throw a light on certain rumours with regard to the life that Odette had led, in the old days, at Nice.
For my uncle Adolphe used to spend the winter there, and Swann thought that it might indeed have been there, perhaps,
that he had first known Odette. The few words which some one had let fall, in his hearing, about a man who, it appear-
ed, had been Odette’s lover, had left Swann dumbfounded. But the very things which he would, before knowing them,
have regarded as the most terrible to learn and the most impossible to believe, were, once he knew them, absorbed
for ever into the general mass of his gloom; he accerted them, he could no longer have understood their not exist-
ing. Only, each one of them added a new and indelible touch to the picture he had formed of his mistress. At one
time indeed he was given to understand that this moral laxity of which he would never have suspected Odette was
fairly well known, and that at Baden or Nice, when she used to go to spend several months in one or the other place,
she had enjoyed a sort of amorous notoriety. He attempted, in order to question them, to get into touch again with
certain men of that stamp; but these were aware that he knew Odette, and, besides, he was afraid of putting the
thought of her into their heads, of setting them once more upon her track. But he, to whom, up till then, nothing
could have seemed so tedious as was all that pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, now that he
learned that Odette had, perhaps, led a ‘gay’ life once in those pleasure-cities, although he could never find
out whether it had been solely to satisfy a want of money which, thanks to himself, she no longer felt, or from
some capricious instinct which might, at any moment, revive in her, now leaned in impotent, blind, dizzy anguish
over the bottomless abyss in which those years of MacMahon's Presidency had been engulfed, years during which one
spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer beneath the limes of Baden, and would find in them a
painful but magnificent profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; indeed he would have devoted to the
reconstruction of all the petty details of social life on the Cote d'Azur in those days, if it could have helped
him to understand something of Odette's smile and the look in her eyes--candid and simple though they were--as much
passion as the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence in order to penetrate further
into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli.
　　　　Often he would sit, without saying a word, gazing at her dreamily, and she would say: "You do look sad!" It was
not very long since he had switched from the idea that she was a really good person, comparable to the nicest he had
known, to that of her being a kept woman; and yet already, by an inverse process, he had returned from the Odette de
Crecy, perhaps too well known to the holiday-makers, to the ‘ladies’ men’ of Nice and Baden, to this face, the
expression on which was so often gentle, to this nature so eminently human. He would ask himself: “What does it
mean, after all, to say that everyone at Nice knows who Odette de Crecy is? Reputations of that sort, even when
they're true, are always based upon other people's ideas"; he would reflect that this legend--even if it was auth-
entic--was something extraneous to Odette, was not an innate, pernicious and ineradicable part of her personality;
that the creature who might have been led astray was a woman with frank eyes, a heart full of pity for the sufferings
of others, a docile body which he had clasped in his arms and explored with his fingers, a woman whom he might one
day come to possess absolutely, if he succeeded in making himself indispensable to her.
　　　　She would sit there, often tired, her face momentarily drained of that eager, febrile preoccupation with the
unknown things that made Swann suffer; she would push back her hair with both hands, and her forehead, her whole face
would seem to grow larger; then, suddenly, some ordinary human thought, some kindly sentiment such as is to be found
in all individuals when, in a moment of rest or reclusion, they are free to express their true selves, would flash
from her eyes like a ray of gold. And immediately the whole of her face would light up like a grey landscape swathed
in clouds which are suddenly swept aside, leaving it transfigured by the setting sun. The life which occupied Odette
at such times, even the future which she seemed to be dreamily contemplating, Swann could have shared with her; no
evil disturbance seemed to have left its residue there. Rare though they became, those moments did not occur in vain.
By the process of memory, Swann joined the fragments together, abolished the intervals between them, cast, as in
molten gold, the image of an Odette compact of kindness and tranquillity, for whom he was to make, later on (as we
shall see in the second part of this story) sacrifices which the other Odette would never have won from him. But how
rare those moments were, and how seldom he now saw her! Even in regard to their evening meetings, she would never
tell him until the last minute whether she would be able to see him, for, reckoning on his being always free, she
wished first to be certain that no one else would offer to come to her. She would plead that she was obliged to wait
for an answer which was of the very greatest importance, and if, even after she had allowed Swann to come, any of her
friends asked her, half-way through the evening, to join them at some theatre, or at supper afterwards, she would jump
for joy and dress with all speed. As her toilet progressed, every movement she made brought Swann nearer to the moment
when he would have to part from her, when she would fly off with irresistible zest; and when at length she was ready,
and, peering into her mirror for the last time with eyes tense and bright with anxiety to look well, added a touch of
lipstick, fixed a stray lock of hair over her brow, and called for her cloak of sky-blue silk with golden tassels,
Swann looked so wretched that she would be unable to restrain a gesture of impatience as she flung at him: "So that's
how you thank me for keeping you here till the last minute! And I thought I was being so nice to you. Well, I shall
know better another time!”





　　　　Swann was relieved. So often had it happened to him, when chatting with chance acquaintences to whom
he was hardly listening, to hear certain detached sentences (as, for instance, "I saw Mme. de Crecy yester-
day with a man I didn’t know."), sentences which dropped into his heart and turned at once into a solid
state, grew hard as stalagmites, and seared and tore him as they lay there irremovable, that the words
"She didn't know a soul, she never spoke to a soul" were, by way of contrast, a soothing balm. How freely
they coursed through him, how fluid they were, how vaporous, how easy to breathe! And yet, a moment later,
he was telling himself that Odette must find him very dull if those were the pleasures that she preferred
to his company. And their very insignificance, though it reassured him, pained him as if her enjoyment of
them had been an act of treachery.
　　　　Even when he could not discover where she had gone, it would have sufficed to alleviate the anguish
that he then felt, for which Odette’s presence, the charm of her company, was the sole specific (a speci-
fic which in the long run served, like many other remedies, to aggravate the disease, but at least brought
temporary relief to his sufferings), it would have sufficed, had Odette only permitted him to remain in her
house while she was out, to wait there until that hour of her return, into whose stillness and peace would
flow, to be mingled and lost there, all memory of those intervening hours which some sorcery, some cursed
spell had made him imagine as, somehow, different from the rest. But she would not; he must return home;
he forced himself, on the way, to form various plans, ceased to think of Odette; he even succeeded, while
he undressed, in turning over some quite happy ideas in his mind; and it was with a light heart, buoyed
with the anticipation of going to see some favourite work of art the next day, that he got into bed and
turned out the light; but no sooner, in preparing for sleep, did he relax the self-control of which he
was not even conscious so habitual had it become, than an icy shudder convulsed him and he began to sob.
He did not even wish to know why, but wiped his eyes and said, to himself with a smile: "This is delight-
ful; I'm getting neurotic." After which he felt a profound lassitude at the thought that, next day, he
must begin afresh his attempt to find out what Odette had been doing, must use all his influence to con-
trive to see her. This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result, was
so cruel a scourge that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the
thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with
anything further, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the
not-distant end.





　　　　And yet he would have wished to live until the time came when he no longer loved her, when she would
have no reason for lying to him, when at length he might learn from her whether, on the day when he had
gone to see her in the afternoon, she had or had not been in the arms of Forcheville. Often for several
days on end the suspicion that she was in love with some one else would distract his mind from the quest-
ion of Forcheville, making it almost immaterial to him, like those new developments of a continuous state
of ill-health which seem for a little time to have delivered us from their predecessors. There were even
days when he was not tormented by any suspicion. He fancied that he was cured. But next morning, when he
awoke, he felt in the same place the same pain, the sensation which, the day before, he had, as it were,
diluted in the stream of different daytime impressions. But it had not stirred from its place. Indeed,
it was the sharpness of this pain that had awakened him.
　　　　Since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly important matters which took up so
much of her time every day (albeit he had lived long enough in the world to know that such matters are
never anything else than pleasures) he could not sustain for any length of time the effort to imagine
them; his brain would become a void; then he would draw a finger over his tired eyelids as he might have
wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogether to think. There emerged, however, from this terra incog-
nita, certain landmarks which reappeared from time to time, vaguely connected by Odette with some obli-
gation towards distant relatives or old friends who, inasmuch as they were the only people whom she was
in the habit of mentioning as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to compose the necessary,
unalterable setting of her life. Because of the tone in which she referred, from time to time, to "the
day when I go with my friend to the races," if, having suddenly felt unwell and had thought, "Perhaps
Odette would be kind and come to see me," he remembered, suddenly, that it was one of those very days,
he would correct himself with an "Oh, no! There's no point in asking her to come; I should have thought
of it before, this is the day when she goes with her friend to the races. We must confine ourselves to
what is possible; no use wasting our time proposing things that are ipso facto unacceptable.” And this
duty incumbent upon Odette of going to the races, to which Swann thus gave way, seemed to him to be not
merely ineluctable in itself, but the mark of necessity with which it was stamped seemed to make plau-
sible and legitimate everything that was even remotely connected with it.





　　　　This new manner, indifferent, offhand, irritable, which Odette now adopted with Swann, undoubtedly
made him suffer; but he did not realise how much he suffered; since it was only gradually, day after day,
that Odette had cooled towards him, it was only by directly contrasting what she was today with what she
had been at first that he could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place. But this
change was his deep, secret wound, which tormented him day and night, and whenever he felt that his thoughts
were straying too near it, he would quickly turn them into another channel for fear of suffering too much.
He might say to himself in a vague way: “There was a time when Odette loved me more,” but he never formed
any definite picture of that time. Just as he had in his study a cupboard at which he contrived never to
look, which he turned aside to avoid passing whenever he entered or left the room, because in one of its
drawers he had locked away the chrysanthemum which she had given him on one of those first evenings when
he had taken her home in his carriage, and the letters in which she said: "Why did you not forget your
heart also? I should never have let you have that back," and "At whatever hour of the day or night you
may need me, just send me a word, and dispose of me as you please," so there was a place in his heart to
which he would never allow his thoughts to trespass, forcing them, if need be, into a long divagation so
that they should not have to pass within reach of it; the place in which lingered his memories of happy days.





　　　　The Baron promised to go and do as Swann wished as soon as he had deposited him at the door of the
Saint-Euverte house, where he arrived soothed by the thought that M. de Charlus would be spending the
evening in the Rue La Perouse, but in a state of melancholy indifference to everything that did not involve
Odette, and in particular to the details of fashionable life, a state which invested them with the charm
that is to be found in anything which, being no longer an object of our desire, appears to us in its own
guise. On alighting from his carriage, in the foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic exist-
ence which hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions, and in which they shew a
great regard for accuracy of costume and setting, Swann was amused to discover the heirs and successors of
Balzac's ‘tigers’-- now ‘grooms’--who normally followed their mistress when she walked abroad, but now,
hatted and booted, were posted out of doors, in front of the house on the gravelled drive, or outside the
stables, as gardeners might be drawn up for inspection at the ends of their several flower-beds. The pecul-
iar tendency which he had always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in gall-
eries reasserted itself here, but in a more positive and more general form; it was society as a whole, now
that he was detached from it, which presented itself to him in a series of pictures. In the cloak-room,
into which, in the old days, when he was still a man of fashion, he would have gone in his overcoat, to
emerge from it in evening dress, but without any impression of what had occurred there, his mind having been,
during the minute or two that he had spent in it, either still at the party which he had just left, or al-
ready at the party into which he was just about to be ushered, he now noticed, for the first time, roused by
the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest, the scattered pack of splendid effortless animals, the enormous
footmen who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests, until, pointing their noble greyhound pro-
files, they towered upon their feet and gathered in a circle round about him.
　　　　One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance
pictures which represent executions, tortures, and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take
his things. But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves,
so that, as he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and
the most tender regard for his hat. He took it with a care to which the precision of his movements imparted
something that was almost over-fastidious, and with a delicacy that was rendered almost touching by the
evidence of his splendid strength. Then he passed it to one of his satellites, a novice and timid, who
was expressing the panic that overpowered him by casting furious glances in every direction, and displayed
all the dumb agitation of a wild animal in the first hours of its captivity.
　　　　A few feet away, a strapping great fellow in livery stood musing, motionless, statuesque, useless, like
that purely decorative warrior whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings, lost in thought,
leaning upon his shield, while the people around him are rushing about slaughtering one another; detached
from the group of his companions who were thronging about Swann, he seemed as determined to remain aloof from
that scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel, glaucous eyes, as if it had been the Massacre of the
Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint James. He seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race--if,
indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno and the frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had
come in contact with it, and where it still dreams--fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue by one
of the Master's Paduan models, or an Albert Duerer Saxon. And the locks of his reddish hair, crinkled by
nature but glued to his head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that Greek sculpture which
the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, and which, if in its creator's purpose it represents but man,
manages at least to extract from man's simple outlines such a variety of richness, borrowed, as it were, from
the whole of animate nature, that a head of hair, by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls,
or in the superimposition of the florid triple diadem of its tresses, can suggest at once a bunch of seaweed,
a brood of fledgling doves, a bed of hyacinths and a coil of snakes.
　　　　Others again, no less colossal, were disposed upon the steps of a monumental staircase which, by their
decorative presence and marmorean immobility, was made worthy to be named, like that god-crowned ascent in the
Palace of the Doges, the ‘Staircase of the Giants,’ and on which Swann now set foot, saddened by the thought
that Odette had never climbed it. Ah, with what joy would he, on the other hand, have raced up the dark, evil-
smelling, breakneck flights to the little dressmaker's, in whose attic he would so gladly have paid the price
of a weekly stage-box at the Opera for the right to spend the evening there when Odette came, and other days
too, for the privilege of talking about her, of living among people whom she was in the habit of seeing when
he was not there, and who, on that account, seemed to be possessed of some part of the life of his mistress
that was more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious than anything that he knew. Whereas upon that pest-
ilential but longed-for staircase to the old dressmaker's, since there was no other, no service stair in the
building, one saw in the evening outside every door an empty, unwashed milk-can set out upon the door-mat in
readiness for the morning round, on the splendid but despised staircase which Swann was now climbing, on either
side of him, at different levels, before each anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter's
lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor service which they controlled,
and doing homage for them to the guests, a gate-keeper, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest
of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shopkeepers, and
might tomorrow lapse to the plebeian service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in
observing to the letter all the instructions they had been given before they were allowed to don the brilliant
livery which they wore only at long intervals, and in which they did not feel altogether at their ease, stood
each in the arcade of his doorway with a pompous splendour tempered by democratic good-fellowship, like saints
in their niches while a gigantic usher, dressed Swiss Guard fashion like the beadle in a church, struck the
pavement with his staff as each fresh arrival passed him. Coming to the top of the staircase, up which he had
been followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like
one of Goya's sacristans or a tabellion in an old play, Swann passed in front of a desk at which the lackeys
seated like notaries before their massive registers rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name. He next
crossed a little hall which--likd certain rooms that are arranged by their owners to serve as the setting for a
single work of art (from which they take their name), and, in their studied bareness, contain nothing else--
displayed at its entrance, like some priceless effigy by Benvenuto Cellini of an armed watchman, a young foot-
man, his body slightly bent forward, rearing above his crimson gorget an even more crimson face from which
gushed torrents of fire, timidity and zeal, who, as he pierced with his impetuous, vigilant, desperate gaze
the Aubusson tapestries screening the door of the room in which the music was being given appeared, with a
soldierly impassibility or a supernatural faith--an allegory of alarums, incarnation of alertness, commemor-
ation of the call to arms--to be watching, angel or sentinel, from the tower of a castle or cathedral, for
the approach of the enemy or for the hour of Judgment. Swann had now only to enter the concert-room, the doors
of which were thrown open to him by an usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as though tendering
to him the keys of a conquered city. But he thought of the house in which at that very moment he might have
been if Odette had only permitted it, and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a door-mat wrung
his heart.
　　　　Swann speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness of the human male when, on the other side of
the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of the servants gave place to that of the guests. But even this ugliness
of faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new and uncanny, now that their fea-
tures--instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who
until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after, boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies
to be acknowledged--were at rest, measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their curves
and angles. And in these men by whom Swann now found himself surrounded, there was nothing (even to the monocle
which many of them wore, and which, previously, would, at the most, have enabled Swann to say that so-and-so
wore a monocle) that, no longer restricted to the general connotation of a habit, the same in all of them, did
not now strike him with a sense of individuality in each. Perhaps because he regarded General de Froberville
and the Marquis de Breaute, who were talking to each other just inside the door, simply as two figures in a
picture, whereas they were the old and useful friends who had put him up for the Jockey Club and had supported
him in duels, the General’s monocle, stuck between his eyelids like a shell-splinter in his vulgar, scarred
and overbearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it dominated like the single eye of the Cyclops,
appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious to receive but which it was indecent
to expose, while that which M. de Breaute sported, as a festive badge, with his pearl-grey gloves, his crush
hat and white tie, substituting it for the familiar pair of glasses (as Swann himself did) when he went society
functions, bore, glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the microscope, an infinite-
simal gaze that swarmed with affability and never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of ceilings, the delight-
fulness of parties, the interestingness of programmes and the excellence of refreshments.
　　　　"Hallo! you here! why, it’s ages since I've seen you," the General greeted Swann and, noticing the look
of strain on his face and concluding that it was perhaps a serious illness that had kept him away, went on,
"You're looking well, old man!" while M. de Breaute turned with, “My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing
here?" to a society novelist who had just fitted into the angle of eyebrow and cheek his own monocle, the sole
instrument that he used in his psychological investigations and remorseless analyses of character, and who now
replied, with an air of mystery and importance, rolling the "r":? "I am observing!"
　　　　The Marquis de Forestelle's monocle was minute and rimless, and, by enforcing an incessant and painful
contraction of the eye in which it was embedded like a superfluous cartilage, the presence of which is inexpl-
icable and its substance unimaginable, gave to his face a melancholy refinement, and led women to suppose him
capable of suffering greatly from the pangs of love. But that of M. de Saint-Cande, encircled, like Saturn,
with an enormous ring, was the centre of gravity of a face which adjusted itself constantly in relation to it,
a face whose quivering red nose and swollen sarcastic lips endeavoured by their grimaces to keep up with the
running fire of wit that sparkled in the polished disc, and saw itself preferred to the most handsome looks
in the world by snobbish and depraved young women whom it set dreaming of artificial charms and a refinement
of sensual bliss. Meanwhile, behind him, M. de Palancy, who with his huge carp's head and goggling eyes moved
slowly through the festive gathering, periodically unclenching his mandibles as though in search of his orien-
tation, had the air of carrying about upon his person only an accidental and perhaps purely symbolical fragment
of the glass wall of his aquarium, a part intended to suggest the whole, which recalled to Swann, a fervent
admirer of Giotto's Vices and Virtues at Padua, that figure representing Injustice by whose side a leafy bough
evokes the idea of the forests that enshroud his secret lair.
　　　　Swann had gone forward into the room, under pressure from Mme. de Saint-Euverte and in order to listen to
an aria from Orfeo which was being rendered on the flute, and had taken up a position in a corner from which,
unfortunately, his horizon was bounded by two ladies of ‘uncertain’ age, seated side by side, the Marquise de
Cambremer and the Vicomtesse de Franquetot, who, because they were cousins, used to spend their time at parties
in wandering through the rooms, each clutching her bag and followed by her daughter, hunting for one another
like people at a railway station, and could never be at rest until they had reserved, by marking them with
their fans or handkerchiefs, two adjacent chairs; Mme. de Cambremer, since she knew scarcely anyone, being all
the more glad of a companion, while Mme. de Franquetot, who, on the contrary, was extremely popular, thought
it effective and original to show all her fine friends that she preferred to their company that of an obscure
country cousin with whom she had childish memories in common. Filled with melancholy irony, Swann watched
them as they listened to the pianoforte intermezzo (Liszt's 'Saint Francis preaching to the birds') which
had succeeded the flute and followed the virtuoso in his dizzy flight, Mme. de Franquetot anxiously, her eyes
starting from her head as though the keys over which his fingers skipped with such agility were a series of
trapezes from any one of which he might come crashing a hundred feet to the ground, stealing now and then
a glance of astonishment and unbelief at her companion, as who should say: "It isn’t possible, I'd never
have believed that a human being could do that!"; Mme. de Cambremer, as a woman who had received a sound
musical education, beating time with her head, transformed for the nonce into the pendulum of a metronome,
the sweep and rapidity of whose oscillations from one shoulder to the other (performed with that look of wild
abandonment in her eye which a sufferer shows when he has lost control of himself and is no longer able to
master his pain, saying merely "I can’t help it") so increased that at every moment her diamond earrings
caught in the trimming of her bodice, and she was obliged to straighten the bunch of black grapes which she
had in her hair, though without any interruption of her constantly accelerated motion. On the other side
(and a little way in front) of Mme. de Franquetot, was the Marquise de Gallardon, absorbed in her favourite
meditation, namely upon her own kinship with the Guermantes family, from which she derived both publicly
and in private a good deal of glory no unmingled with shame, the most brilliant ornaments of that house
remaining somewhat aloof from her, perhaps because she was boring, or because she was disagreeable, or
because she came of an inferior branch of the family, or very possibly for no reason at all. When she found
herself seated next to some one whom she did not know, as she was at this moment next to Mme. de Franquetot,
she suffered acutely from the feeling that her own consciousness of her Guermantes connection could not be
made externally manifest in visible characterer like those which, in the mosaics in Byzantine churches, placed
one beneath another, inscribe in a vertical column by the side of some Sacred Personage the words which he is
supposed to be uttering. At this moment she was pondering the fact that she had never received an invitation,
or even call, from her young cousin the Princesse des Laumes, during the six years that had already elapsed
since the latter’s marriage. The thought filled her with anger--and with pride; for, by virtue of having
told everyone who expressed surprise at never seeing her at Mme. des Laumes’s, that it was because of the
risk of meeting the Princesse Mathilde there--a degradation which her own family, the truest and bluest of
Legitimists, would never have forgiven her, she had come gradually to believe that this actually was the
reason for her not visiting her young cousin. She remembered, it is true, that she had several times in-
quired of Mme. des Laumes how they might contrive to meet, but she remembered it only in a confused way,
and besides did more than neutralise this slightly humiliating reminiscence by murmuring, "After all, it
isn't for me to take the first step; I am at least twenty years older than she is." And fortified by
these unspoken words she flung her shoulders proudly back until they seemed to part company with her bust,
while her head, which lay almost horizontally upon them, was reminiscent of the "detachable" head of a phea-
sant which is brought to the table regally adorned with its feathers. Not that she in the least degree re-
sembled a pheasant, having been endowed by nature with a short and squat and masculine figure; but succes-
sive mortifications had given her a backward tilt, such as one may observe in trees which have taken root
on the very edge of a precipice and are forced to grow backwards to preserve their balance. Since she was
obliged, in order to console herself for not being quite on a level with the rest of the Guermantes, to
repeat to herself incessantly that it was owing to the uncompromising rigidity of her principles and pride
that she saw so little of them, the constant iteration had gradually remoulded her body, and had given her
a sort of presence which was accepted by the bourgeois ladies as a sign of breeding, and even kindled at
times a momentary spark in the jaded eyes of old clubmen.





　　　　As it happened, the Princesse des Laumes, who had not been expected to appear at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's
that evening, did in fact arrive. To show that she did not wish any special attention, in a house to which she
had come by an act of condescension, to be paid to her superior rank, she had entered the room with her arms
pressed close to her sides, even when there was no crowd to be squeezed through, no one attempting to get past
her; staying purposely at the back, with the air of being in her proper place, like a king who stands in the
waiting procession at the doors of a theatre where the management have not been warned of his coming; and strict-
ly limiting her field of vision--so as not to seem to be advertising her presence and claiming the consideration
that was her due--to the study of a pattern in the carpet or of her own skirt, she stood there on the spot which
had struck her as the most modest (and from which, as she very well knew, a cry of rapture from Mme. de Saint-Eu-
verte would extricate her as soon as her presence there was noticed), next to Mme. de Cambremer, whom, however,
she did not know. She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but
she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes
in Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the act of politeness
to her hostess which she had performed by coming might, so to speak, ‘count double’) to show herself as friendly
and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called ‘exaggerating,’ and always made a point
of letting people see that she ‘simply must not’ indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with
the tone of the circle in which she moved, although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by
virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons, by
contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether
these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played,
a piece which, it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before; and
whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy
towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory
inclinations in turn, at one moment she would confine herself to straightening her shoulder-straps or feeling in
her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds, which formed its
simple but charming ornament, scrutinising her impassioned neighbour with cold curiosity the while, and at the
next would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, against the rhythm.
The pianist having finished the Liszt Intermezzo and begun a Prelude by Chopin, Mme. de Cambremer turned to Mme.
de Franquetot with a fond smile of knowing satisfaction and allusion to the past. She had learned in her girl-
hood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin
by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point
which one might have expected their notes to reach, and which divert themselves in those byways of fantasy only
to return more deliberately--with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that
reverberates to the point of making you cry out--to strike at your heart.





　　　　"No, she’s a little Mme. de Cambremer," replied the Princess carelessly, and then, with more animation:
"I am only repeating what I heard just now, myself; I haven't the faintest notion who said it, it was some one
behind me who said that they were neighbours of Mme. de Saint-Euverte in the country, but I don't believe anyone
knows them, really. They must be ‘country cousins’! By the way, I don't know whether you're particularly famil-
iar with the brilliant society which we see before us, because I've no idea who all these astonishing people can
be. What do you suppose they do with themselves when they're not at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's parties? She must
have ordered them along with the musicians and the chairs and the food. ‘Universal providers,’ you know. You
must admit they're rather splendid, General. But can she really have the courage to hire the same ‘supers’
every week? It isn’t possible!”
　　　　"Oh, but Cambremer is quite a good name; old, too,” protested the General.
　　　　"I see no objection to its being old," the Princess answered dryly, "but whatever else it is it's not
euphonious," she went on, isolating the word euphonious as though between inverted commas, a little affectation
to which the Guermantes set were addicted.
　　　　"You think not, eh! She’s a regular little peach, though," said the General, whose eyes never strayed from
Mme. de Cambremer. "Don't you agree with me, Princess?"
　　　　"She thrusts herself forward too much; I think, in so young a woman, that's not very nice--for I don't
suppose she's my generation,” replied Mme. des Laumes (the last word being common, it appeared, to Gallardon
and Guermantes). And then, seeing that M. de Froberville was still gazing at Mme. de Cambremer, she added, half
out of malice towards the lady, half wishing to oblige the General: “Not very nice . . . for her husband! I am
sorry that I do not know her, since she seems to attract you so much; I might have introduced you to her,"
said the Princess, who, if she had known the young woman, would most probably have done nothing of the sort.
"And now I must say good night, because one of my friends is having a birthday party, and I must go and wish her
many happy returns,” she explained, modestly and with truth, reducing the fashionable gathering to which she
was going to the simple proportions of a ceremony which would be boring in the extreme, but at which she was
obliged to be present, and there would be something touching about her appearance. “Besides, I must pick up
Basin. While I've been here, he's gone to see those friends of his--you know them too I believe--who are called
after a bridge--oh, yes, the Ienas."
　　　　"It was a victory before it was a bridge, Princess," said the General. "I mean to say, to an old soldier
like me," he went on, wiping his monocle and replacing it, as though he were laying a fresh dressing on the raw
wound underneath, while the Princess instinctively looked away, "that Empire nobility, well, of course, it's not
the same thing, but, after all, taking it as it is, it's very fine of its kind; they were people who really did
fight like heroes."
　　　　"But I have the deepest respect for heroes," the Princess assented with a faint trace of irony. "If I don't
go with Basin to see this Princesse d'Iena, it isn't for that, at all; it's simply because I don't know them.
Basin knows them; he worships them. Oh, no, it's not what you think; he's not in love with her. I've nothing
to set my face against! Besides, what good has it ever done when I have set my face against them?” she queried
sadly, for the whole world knew that, ever since the day upon which the Prince des Laumes had married his fascin-
ating cousin, he had been consistently unfaithful to her. “Anyhow, it isn’t that at all. They’re people he has
known for ever so long, they do him very well, and that suits me down to the ground. But I must tell you what
he's told me about their house; it’s quite enough. Can you imagine it, all their furniture is ‘Empire’!”
　　　　"But, my dear Princess, that’s only natural; it belonged to their grandparents.”
　　　　"I don’t quite say it didn’t, but that doesn’t make it any less ugly. I quite understand that people
can't always have nice things, but at least they needn’t have things that are merely grotesque. What do you say?
I can think of nothing more devastating, more utterly smug than that hideous style--cabinets covered all over
with swans' heads, like bath-taps!”
　　　　"But I believe, all the same, that they’ve got some lovely things; why, they must have that famous mosaic
table on which the Treaty of . . . ”
　　　　“Oh, I don’t deny, they may have things that are interesting enough from the historic point of view. But
things like that can’t, ever, be beautiful . . . because they’re simply horrible! I’ve got things like that
myself, that came to Basin from the Montesquious. Only, they’re up in the attics at Guermantes, where nobody
ever sees them. But, after all, that’s not the point, I would fly to see them, with Basin; I would even go to
see them among all their sphinxes and brasses, if I knew them, but ? I don’t know them! D’you know, I was
always taught, when I was a little girl, that it was not polite to call on people one didn’t know.” She
assumed a tone of childish gravity. "And so I'm just doing what I was taught to do. Can't you see those good
people, with a totally strange woman bursting into their house? Why, I might get a most hostile reception.”
　　　　And she coquettishly enhanced the charm of the smile which that suppostition had brought to her lips, by
giving to her blue eyes, which were fixed on the General, a gentle, dreamy expression.
　　　　"My dear Princess, you know that they’d be simply wild with joy."
　　　　"No, why?” she inquired, with the utmost vivacity, either so as to seem unaware that it would be because
she was one of the first ladies in France, or so as to have the pleasure of hearing the General tell her so.
"Why? How can you tell? Perhaps they would think it the most unpleasant thing that could possibly happen. I
know nothing about them, but if they're anything like me, I find it quite boring enough to see the people I
do know; I'm sure if I had to see people I didn't know as well, even if they had ‘fought like heroes,’ I
should go stark mad. Besides, except when it's an old friend like you, whom one knows quite apart from that,
I'm not sure that ‘heroism’ takes one very far in society. It's often quite boring enough to have to give
a dinner-party, but if one had to offer one's arm to Spartacus to go into dinner . . .! Really, no; it would
never be Vercingetorix I should send for, to make a fourteenth. I feel sure, I should keep him for really
grand receptions. And as I never give any . . . "
　　　　"Ah! Princess, it’s easy to see you're not a Guermantes for nothing. You have your share of it, all
right, the wit of the Guermantes!"
　　　　"But people always talk about the wit of the Guermantes in the plural. I never could make out why. Do
you really know any others who have it?” she rallied him, with a rippling flow of laughter, her features
concentrated, yoked to the service of her animation, her eyes sparkling, blazing with a radiant sunshine of
gaiety which could be kindled only by such observations--even if the Princess had to make them herself--as
were in praise of her wit or of her beauty. “Look, there’s Swann talking to your Cambremer woman; over there,
beside old Saint-Euverte, don’t you see him? Ask him to introduce you. But hurry up, he seems to be just
going!”
　　　　"Did you notice how dreadfully ill he’s looking?” asked the General.
　　　　"My precious Charles? Ah, he’s coming at last; I was beginning to think he didn’t want to see me!”
　　　　Swann was extremely fond of the Princesse des Laumes, and the sight of her recalled to him Guermantes,
a property close to Combray, and all that country which he so dearly loved and had ceased to visit, so as
not to be separated from Odette. Slipping into the manner, half-artistic, half-amorous, with which he could
always manage to amuse the Princess--a manner which came to him quite naturally whenever he dipped for a
moment into the old social atmosphere--and wishing also to express in words, for his own satisfaction, the
longing that he felt for the country:
　　　　"Ah!" he began in a declamatory tone, so as to be audible at once to Mme. de Saint-Euverte, to whom he
was speaking, and to Mme. des Laumes, for whom he was speaking, "Behold our charming Princess! Look, she has
come up on purpose from Guermantes to hear Saint Francis preach to the birds, and has only just had time,
like a dear little titmouse, to go and pick a few little hips and haws and put them in her hair; there are
even some drops of dew upon them still, a little of the hoar-frost which must be making the Duchess shiver.
It's very pretty indeed, my dear Princess."





　　　　"No, not the Cambremers; her own people. She was a Legrandin, and used to come to Combray. I don't know
whether you are aware that you are Comtesse de Combray, and that the Chapter owes you a due.”
　　　　"I don’t know what the Chapter owes me, but I do know that I'm touched for a hundred francs every year
by the Cure, which is a due that I could very well do without. But surely these Cambremers have rather a
startling name. It ends just in time, but it ends badly!” she said with a laugh.
　　　　"It begins no better.” Swann took the point.
　　　　"Yes; that double abbreviation!”
　　　　"Some one very angry and very proper who didn’t dare to finish the first word."
　　　　"But since he couldn’t stop himself beginning the second, he’d have done better to finish the first
and be done with it. We are indulging in the most refined form of humour, my dear Charles, in the very best
of taste...but how tiresome it is that I never see you now,” she went on in a coaxing tone, “I do so love
talking to you. Just imagine, I could not make that idiot Froberville see that there was anything funny
about the name Cambremer. Do agree that life is a dreadful business. It’s only when I see you that I stop
feeling bored.”
　　　　Which was probably not true. But Swann and the Princess had the same way of looking at the little things
of life, the effect--if not the cause--of which was a close analogy between their modes of expression and
even of pronunciation. This similarity was not striking because no two things could have been more unlike
than their voices. But if one took the trouble to imagine Swann's utterances divested of the sonority that
enwrapped them, of the moustache from under which they emerged, one realized that they were the same phrases,
the same inflexions, that they had the style of the Guermantes set. On important matters, Swann and the Prin-
cess had not an idea in common. But since Swann had become so melancholy, and was always in that tremulous
condition which precedes the onset of tears, he felt the same need to speak about his grief as a murderer to
speak about his crime. And when he heard the Princess say that life was a dreadful business, it gave him a
feeling of solace as if she had spoken to him of Odette.





　　　　"Poor Swann," said Mme. des Laumes that night to her husband; " he's as charming as ever, but he does
look so dreadfully unhappy. You'll see for yourself, as he has promised to dine with us one of these days.
I do feel it's absurd that a man of his intelligence should let himself suffer for a woman of that sort,
and one who isn't even interesting, for they tell me, she's an absolute idiot!" she added with the wisdom
invariably shown by people who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy
about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend
to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the common bacillus.
　　　　Swann now wished to go home, but, just as he was making his escape, General de Froberville caught
him and asked for an introduction to Mme. de Cambremer, and he was obliged to go back into the room to
look for her.
　　　　"I say, Swann, I'd rather be married to that little woman than slaughtered by savages, what do you
say?"
　　　　The words "slaughtered by savages" pierced Swann's aching heart; and at once he felt the need to
continue the conversation. "Ah!" he began, "some fine lives have been lost in that way . . . There was,
you remember, that explorer whose remains Dumont d'Urville brought back, La Perouse . . . " (and he was
at once happy again, as though he had named Odette). "He was a fine character, and interests me very much,
does La Perouse,” he added with a melancholy air.





　　　　Meanwhile the concert had begun again, and Swann saw that he could not now go before the end of the
new number. He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities
wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of
taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act
of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself a-
lone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at
which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this
place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which
she was entirely absent.
　　　　But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition was so agonizingly painful that
his hand clutched at his heart. The violin had risen to a series of high notes on which it rested as
though awaiting something, holding on to them in a prolonged expectancy, in the exaltation of already
seeing the object of its expectation approaching, and with a desperate effort to last out until its
arrival, to welcome it before itself expiring, to keep the way open for a moment longer, with all its
remaining strength, so that the stranger might pass, as one holds a door open that would otherwise auto-
matically close. And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening and to say to himself:
"It's the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata--I mustn't listen!", all his memories of the days when
Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded until that moment in keeping invisible in the
depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love whose sun, they supposed,
had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his
ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.
　　　　In place of the abstract expressions "the time when I was happy," "the time when I was loved,"
which he had often used before then without suffering too much since his intelligence had not embodied
in them anything of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the reality, he now re-
covered everything that had fixed unalterably the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness;
he could see it all; the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she had tossed after him into
his carriage, which he had kept pressed to his lips--the address "Maison Doree," embossed on the note-
paper on which he had read “My hand trembles so as I write to you"-- the contraction of her eyebrows
when she said pleadingly: "You won't let it be very long before you send for me?"; he could smell the
heated iron of the barber whom he used to have singe his hair while Loredan went to fetch the little
seamstress; could feel the showers which fell so often that spring, the ice-cold homeward drive in his
victoria, by moonlight; all the network of mental habits, of seasonable impressions, of sensory react-
ions, which had extended over a series of weeks its uniform meshes in which his body found itself
inextricably caught. At that time he had been satisfying a sensual curiosity in discovering the pleas-
ures of those who live for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he would not be
obliged to learn their sorrows also; yet how small a thing the actual charm of Odette was now in com-
parison with the fearsome terror which extended it like a cloudy halo all around her, the immense
anguish of not knowing at every hour of the day and night what she had been doing, of not possessing
her wholly, always and everywhere! Alas, he recalled the accents in which she had exclaimed: “But I
can see you at any time; I am always free!"--she, who was never free now; the interest, the curio-
sity that she had shewn in his life, her passionate desire that he should do her the favour--of which
it was he who, then, had felt suspicious, as of a possibly tedious waste of his time and disturbance
of his arrangements--of granting her access to his study; how she had been obliged to beg that he
would let her take him to the Verdurins’; and, when he did allow her to come to him once a month,
how she had first, before he would let himself be swayed, had to repeat what a joy it would be to
her, that custom of their seeing each other daily, for which she had longed at a time when to him it
had seemed only a tiresome distraction, for which, since that time, she had conceived a distaste and
had definitely broken herself of it, while it had become for him so insatiable, so dolorous a need.
Little had he suspected how truly he spoke when, on their third meeting, as she repeated: "But why
don't you let me come to you oftener?" he had told her, laughing, and in a vein of gallantry, that
it was for fear of forming a hopeless passion. Now, alas, it still happened at times that she wrote
to him from a restaurant or hotel, on paper which bore a printed address, but printed in letters of
fire that seared his heart. "Written from the Hotel Vouillemont. What on earth can she have gone
there for? With whom? What happened there?" He remembered the gas-jets being extinguished along the
Boulevard des Italiens when he had met her against all expectations among the errant shades on that
night which had seemed to him almost supernatural and which indeed--a night from a period when he
had not even to ask himself whether he would be annoying her by looking for her and by finding her,
so certain was he that she knew no greater happiness than to see him and to let him take her home--
belonged to a mysterious world to which one never may return again once its doors are closed. And
Swann could distinguish, standing motionless before that scene of remembered happiness, a wretched
figure which filled him with such pity, because he did not at first recognise who it was, that he
had to lower his eyes lest anyone should observe that they were filled with tears. It was himself.
　　　　When he had realised this, his pity ceased; he was jealous, now, of that other self whom she
had loved, he was jealous of those men of whom he had so often said, without much suffering: "Per-
haps she loves them,” now that he had exchanged the vague idea of loving, in which there is no
love, for the petals of the chrysanthemum and the letterhead of the Maison d'Or which were full it.
And then, his anguish becoming too intense, he drew his hand across his forehead, let the monocle
drop from his eye, and wiped its glass. And doubtless, if he had caught sight of himself at that
moment, he would have added, to the collection of the those which he had already identified, this
monocle which he removed like an importunate, worrying thought and from whose misty surface, with
his handkerchief, he sought to obliterate his cares.
　　　　There are in the music of the violin --if one does not see the instrument itself, and so can-
not relate what one hears to its form, which modifies the tone--accents which are so closely akin
to those of certain contralto voices that one has the illusion that a singer has taken her place
amid the orchestra. One raises one's eyes, and sees only the wooden case, delicate as a Chinese
box, but, at moments, one is still tricked by the siren's deceiving call; at times, too, one
thinks one is listening to a captive genie, struggling in the darkness of the sapient, quivering
and enchanted box, a box ment, like a devil immersed in a stoup of holy water; sometimes, again,
it is in the air, at large, like a pure and supernatural being that unfolds its invisible message
as it goes by.
　　　　 As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little phrase as performing the
rites on which it insisted before it would consent to appear, and proceeding to utter the incanta-
tions necessary to procure, and to prolong for a few moments, the miracle of its apparition, Swann,
who was no more able to see it than if it had belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, who ex-
perienced something like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with
which he was struck as he approached it, Swann felt its presence like that of a protective goddess,
a confidant of his love, who, in order to be able to come to him through the crowd and to draw him
aside to speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And as she passed,
light, soothing, murmurous as the perfume of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word
of which he closely scanned, regretful to see them fly away so fast, he made involuntarily with his
lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him, the harmonious, fleeting form. He felt that he was
no longer in exile and alone since she, who addressed herself to him, was whispering to him of O-
dette. For he had no longer, as of old, the impression that Odette and he were unknown to the lit-
tle phrase. Had it not often been the witness of their joys? True that, as often, it had warned
him of their frailty. And indeed, whereas in that distant time he had divined an element of suf-
fering in its smile, in its limpid, disenchanted tones, tonight he found there rather the grace
of a resignation that was almost gay. Of those sorrows which the little phrase foreshadowed to
him then, which, without being affected by them himself, he had seen it carry past him, smiling,
on its sinuous and rapid course, of those sorrows which had now become his own, without his hav-
ing any hope of being ever delivered from them, it seemed to say to him, as once it had said of
his happiness: "What does it all matter; it means nothing." And Swann's thoughts were borne for
the first time on a wave of pity and tenderness towards Vinteuil, towards that unknown, exalted
brother who must also have suffered so greatly. What could his life have been? From the depths
of what well of sorrow could he have drawn that god-like strength, that unlimited power of crea-
tion?
　　　　 When it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his sufferings, Swann found a sweet-
ness in that very wisdom which, but a little while back, had seemed to him intolerable when he thought that
he could read it on the faces of indifferent strangers, who would regard his love as a digression that was
without importance. For the little phrase, unlike them, whatever opinion it might hold on the short duration
of these states of the soul, saw in them something not, as everyone else saw, less serious than the
events of everyday life, but, on the contrary, so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worth while
expressing. It was the charms of an intimate sadness that it sought to imitate, to recreate, and their
very essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and in appearing trivial to everyone except
him who experiences them, had been captured and made visible by the little phrase. So much so that it
caused their value to be acknowledged, their divine sweetness savoured, by all those same onlookers,
if they were at all musical--who then would fail to recognise them in real life, in every individual love
that came into being beneath their eyes. Doubtless the form in which it had codified those charms could
not be resolved into rational discourse. But ever since, more than a year before, discovering to him many
of the riches of his own soul, the love of music had, for a time at least, been born in him, Swann had
regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows,
unknown, impenetrable to the human mind, but none the less were perfectly distinct one from another,
unequal among themselves in value and in significance. When, after that first evening at the Verdur-
ins', he had had the little phrase played over to him again, and had sought to disentangle from his con-
fused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had ob-
served that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the
constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid and withdrawn sweetness; but
inreality he knew that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon certain
equivalents, substituted (for his mind’s convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become
aware, before ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the first time he had heard the
sonata played. He knew that his memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he
saw the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an im-
measurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown), on which, here and there only, separated by the
thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion,
of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs
from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us
the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what var-
iety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take
to be an impenetratable void. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians. In his little phrase, although it
might present a clouded surface to the eye of reason, one sensed a content so solid, so consistent, so
explicit, to which it gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the
memory of it on an equal footing with the ideas of the intellect. Swann would repair to it as to a con-
ception of love and happiness, of which at once he knew as well in what respects it was peculiar as he
would know of the Princesse de Cleves, or of Rene, should either of those titles occur to him. Even when
he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind on the same footing way as cer-
tain other notions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective,
of physical pleasure, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps
we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothingness. But so long as we are
alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with
regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just
been lit, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which even the memory of the
darkness has vanished. In that way Vinteuil’s phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which repre-
sents to us also a certain emotional accretion, had espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of
humanity that was peculiarly affecting. Its destiny was linked to the future, to the reality of the
human soul, of which it was one of the most special and distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being
that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases
of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall per-
ish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their
company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.
　　　　 So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as
it was from this point of view, it yet belonged to an order of supernatural beings whom we have never
seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the un-
seen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to
shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours. This was what Vinteuil had done for the little
phrase. Swann felt that the composer had been content (with the musical instruments at his disposal)
to unveil it, to make it visible, following and respecting its outlines with a hand so loving, so
prudent, so deli-cate and so sure that the sound altered at every moment, softening and blurring to
indicate a shadow, springing back into life when it must follow the curve of some bolder projection.
And one proof that Swann was not mistaken when he believed in the real existence of this phrase, was
that anyone with theleast discernment would at once have detected the imposture had Vinteuil, endowed
with less power to see and to render its forms, sought to dissemble by adding a counterfeit touch here
and there, the flaws in his vision or the deficiencies of his hand.
　　　　 The phrase had disappeared. Swann knew that it would come again at the end of the last movement,
after a long passage which Mme. Verdurin's pianist always 'skipped.' There were in this passage some
admirable ideas which Swann had not distinguished on first hearing the sonata, and which he now per-
ceived, as if they had, in the cloakroom of his memory, divested themselves of their uniform disguise
of novelty. Swann listened to all the scattered themes which entered into the composition of the phrase,
as its pr-emises enter into the inevitable conclusion of a syllogism; he was assisting at the mystery of
its birth."Audacity," he exclaimed to himself, "as inspired, perhaps, as a Lavoisier's or an Ampere's,
the audacity of a Vinteuil making experiment, discovering the secret laws that govern an unknown force,
driving across a region unexplored towards the one possible goal the invisible team in which he has placed
his trust and which he never may discern!" How beautiful the dialogue which Swann now heard between piano
and violin, at the beginning of the last passage. The suppression of human speech, so far from letting
fancy reign there uncontrolled (as one might have thought), had eliminated it altogether; never was spoken
language so inexorably determined, never had it known questions so pertinent, such irrefutable replies. At
first the piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as
from a neighbouring tree. It was as at the first beginning of the world, as if there were not yet but
these twain upon the earth, or rather in this world closed against all the rest, so fashioned by the logic
of its creator that in it there should never be any but themselves; the world of this sonata. Was it a
bird, was it the soul, not yet made perfect, of the little phrase, was it a fairy, invisibly somewhere
lamenting, whose plaint the piano heard and tenderly repeated? Its cries were so sudden that the violinist
must snatch up his bow and race to catch them as they came. Marvellous bird! The violinist seemed to wish
to charm, to tame, towoo, to win it. Already it had passed into his soul, already the little phrase which
it evoked shook like a medium's the body of the violinist, 'possessed' indeed. Swann knew that the phrase
was going to speak to him once again. And his personality was now so divided that the strain of waiting
for the imminent moment when he would find himself face to face, once more, with the phrase, convulsed him
in one of those sobs which a fine line of poetry or a piece of alarming news will wring from us, not when
we are alone, but when we repeat one or the other to a friend, in whom we see ourselves reflected, like a
third person, whose probable emotion softens him. It reappeared, but this time to remain poised in the air,
and to sport there for a moment only, as though immobile, and shortly to expire. And so Swann lost nothing
of the precious time for which it lingered. It was still there, like an iridescent bubble that floats for
a while unbroken. As a rainbow whose brightness is fading seems to subside, then soars again and, before
it is extinguished, shines forth with greater splendour than it has ever shown; so to the two colours which
the phrase had hitherto allowed to appear it added others now, chords shot with every hue in the prism, and
made them sing. Swann dared not move, and would have liked to compel all the other people in the room to
remain still also, as if the slightest movement might imperil the magic presence, supernatural, delicious,
frail, that was so soon to vanish. But no one, as it happened, dreamed of speaking. The ineffable utterance
of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil was still alive), breathed
out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and
made of that stage on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which a superna-
tural ceremony could be performed. It followed that, when the phrase at last was finished, and only its
fragmentary echoes floated among the subsequent themes which had already taken its place, if Swann at first
was annoyed to see the Comtesse de Monteriender, famed for her imbecilities, lean over towards him to confide
in him her impressions, before even the sonata had come to an end; he could not refrain from smiling, and
perhaps also found an underlying sense, which she was incapable of perceiving, in the words that she used.
Dazzled by the virtuosity of the performers, the Comtesse exclaimed to Swann: "It's astonishing! I have never
seen anything to beat it..." But a scrupulous regard for accuracy making her correct her first assertion, she
added the reservation: "anything to beat it... since the table-turning!"





　　　　　Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, since she was out of doors, in the
streets, crossing busy thoroughfares, from morning to night. And as she always returned safe and sound, he
marvelled at the strength and the suppleness of the human body, which was able continually to hold at bay,
to outwit all the perils that beset it (which to Swann seemed innumerable since his own secret desire had
strewn them in her path), and so allowed its mankind to abandon itself, day after day, and almost with impu-
nity, to its career of mendacity, to the pursuit of pleasure. And Swann felt a very cordial sympathy with that
Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he admired, who, on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of
his wives, stabbed her to death, in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly relates, to recover his peace
of mind. Then he would be ashamed of thinking thus only of himself, and his own sufferings would seem to de-
serve no pity now that he himself was disposing so cheaply of Odette's very life.
　　　　　Unable to cut himself off from her irrevocably, if at least he had seen her continuously and without
separations his grief would ultimately have been assuaged, and his love would, perhaps, have died. And from
the moment when she did not wish to leave Paris for ever he had hoped that she would never go. As he knew
that her one prolonged absence, every year, was in August and September, at least he had abundant opportunity,
several months in advance, to dissolve the bitter thought of it in all the Time to come which he stored up
inside himself in anticipation, and which, composed of days identical with those of the present, flowed through
his mind, transparent and cold, nourished his sadness without causing him any intolerable pain. But that inner
future, that colourless and free-flowing stream, was suddenly convlused by a single remark from Odette which,
penetrating Swann's defences, immobilised it like a block of ice, congealed its fluidity, froze it altogether;
and Swann felt himself suddenly filled with an enormous and infrangible mass which pressed on the inner walls
of his being until it almost burst asunder; for Odette had said casually, watching him with a malicious smile:
"Forcheville's going on a fine trip at Whitsuntide. He's going to Egypt!" and Swann had at once understood
this to mean: "I am going to Egypt at Whitsuntide with Forcheville." And, in fact, a few days later, Swann
said to her: "About that trip you told me you were going to take with Forcheville," she would answer care-
lessly: "Yes, my dear boy, we're starting on the 19th; we'll send you a view of the Pyramids." Then he was
determined to know whether she was Forcheville's mistress, to ask her point-blank, to insist upon her tell-
ing him. He knew that there were some perjuries which, being so superstitious, she would not commit, and be-
sides, the fear, which had hitherto restrained his curiosity, of making Odette angry if he questioned her,
of making himself odious, had ceased to exist now that he had lost all hope of ever being loved by her.





　　　　　As for the actual contents of the letter, they did not disturb him; for in not one of the charges which
it formulated against Odette could he see the least vestige of fact. Like many other men, Swann had a naturally
lazy mind, and was slow in invention. He knew quite well as a general truth, that human life is full of con-
trasts, but in the case of any one human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was
not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in
the light of what was revealed. At such times as he spent with Odette, if their conversation turned upon an
indelicate act committed, or an indelicate sentiment expressed by some third person, she would condemn them by
virtue of the same moral principles which Swann had always heard expressed by his own parents, and to which he
himself had remained loyal; and then, she would arrange her flowers, would sip her tea, would inquire about his
work. So Swann extended those habits to fill the rest of her life, and reconstructed those actions when he wish-
ed to form a picture of the moments in which he and she were apart. If anyone had portrayed her to him as she
was, or rather as she had been for so long with himself, but had substituted some other man, he would have been
distressed, for such a portrait would have struck him as lifelike. But to suppose that she went to procuresses,
that she indulged in orgies with other women, that she led the crapulous existence of the most abject, the most
contemptible of mortals--would be an insane wandering aberration, for the realisation of which, thank heaven,
the remembered chrysanthemums, the daily cups of tea, the virtuous indignation left neither time nor place! Only,
now and again, he gave Odette to understand that people maliciously kept him informed of everything that she did;
and making opportune use of some detail--insignificant but true--which he had accidentally learned, as though it
were the sole fragment which he would allow, in spite of himself, to pass his lips, out of the numberless other
fragments of that complete reconstruction of her daily life which he carried secretly in his mind, he led her to
suppose that he was perfectly informed upon matters, which, in reality, he neither knew nor suspected, for if he
often adjured Odette never to swerve from or make alteration of the truth, that was only, whether he realised it
or no, in order that Odette should tell him everything that she did. No doubt, as he used to assure Odette, he
loved sincerity, but only as he might love a pimp who could keep him in touch with the daily life of his mist-
ress. Moreover, his love of sincerity, not being disinterested, had not improved his character. The truth which
he cherished was that which Odette would tell him; but he himself, in order to extract that truth from her, was
not afraid to have recourse to falsehood, that very falsehood which he never ceased to depict to Odette as lead-
ing every human creature down to utter degradation. In a word, he lied as much as did Odette, because, while
more unhappy than she, he was no less egotistical. And she, when she heard him repeating thus to her the things
that she had done, would stare at him with a look of distrust and, at all hazards, of indignation, so as not to
appear to be humiliated, and to be blushing for her actions.





　　　　 The name of Beuzeval had suggested to him that of another place in the same district, Beuzeville, which car-
ried also, bound to it by a hyphen, a second name, to wit Breaute, which he had often seen on maps, but without
ever previously remarking that it was the same name as that borne by his friend M. de Breaute, whom the anonymous
letter accused of having been Odette's lover. After all, when it came to M. de Breaute, there was nothing improb-
able in the charge; but so far as Mme. Verdurin was concerned, it was a sheer impossibility. From the fact that
Odette did occasionally tell a lie, it was not fair to conclude that she never, by any chance, told the truth, and
in these bantering conversations with Mme. Verdurin which she herself had repeated to Swann, he could recognize
those meaningless and dangerous pleasantries which, in their inexperience of life and ignorance of vice, women
often utter (thereby certifying their own innocence), who--as, for instance, Odette,--are least likely to cherish
impassioned feelings for another of their sex. Whereas, on the other hand, the indignation with which she
had scattered the suspicions which she had unintentionally brought into being, for a moment, in his mind by her
story, fitted in with everything that he knew of the tastes, the temperament of his mistress. But now, by one of
those inspirations of jealousy analogous to the inspiration which reveals to a poet or a philosopher, who has
nothing, so far, but an odd pair of rhymes or a detached observation, the idea or the natural law which will give
him the power he needs mastery to his work, Swann recalled for the first time a remark which Odette had made to
him, at least two years before: "Oh, Mme. Verdurin, she won't hear of anyone just now but me. I'm a 'love,' if
you please, and she kisses me, and wants me to go with her everywhere, and call her tu." So far from seeing in
these expressions any connection with the absurd insinuations, intended to create an atmosphere of vice, which
Odette had since repeated to him, he had welcomed them as a proof of Mme. Verdurin's warm-hearted and generous
friendship. But now this old memory of her affection for Odette had coalesced suddenly with his more recent me-
mory of her unseemly conversation. He could no longer separate them in his mind, and he saw them blended in
reality, the affection imparting a certain seriousness and importance to the pleasantries which, in return, rob-
bed the affection of its innocence. He went to see Odette. He sat down, keeping at a distance from her. He did
not dare to embrace her, not knowing whether in her, in himself, it would be affection or anger that a kiss would
provoke. He sat there silent, watching their love expire. Suddenly he made up his mind.
　　　　 "Odette, my darling," he began, "I know, I am being simply odious, but I must ask you a few questions. You
remember what I once thought about you and Mme. Verdurin? Tell me, was it true? Have you, with her or anyone else,
ever?"
　　　　 She shook her head, pursing her lips together; a sign which people commonly employ to signify that they are
not going, because it would bore them to go, when some one has asked, "Are you coming to watch the procession go
by?", or "Will you be at the review?". But this shake of the head, which is thus commonly used to decline parti-
cipation in an event that has yet to come, imparts for that reason an element of uncertainty to the denial of
participation in an event that is past. Furthermore, it suggests reasons of personal convenience, rather than
any definite repudiation, any moral impossibility. When he saw Odette thus make him a sign that the insinuation
was false, he realised that it was quite possibly true.
　　　　 "I have told you, I never did; you know quite well," she added, seeming angry and uncomfortable.
　　　　 "Yes, I know all that; but are you quite sure? Don't say to me, 'You know quite well'; say, 'I have never
done anything of that sort with any woman.'"
　　　　 She repeated his words like a lesson learned by rote, in a sarcastic tone, and as though she hoped, thereby,
to be rid of him: "I have never done anything of that sort with any woman."
　　　　 "Can you swear it to me on your Laghetto medal?"
　　　　 Swann knew that Odette would never perjure herself on that.
　　　　 "Oh, you do make me so miserable," she cried, with a jerk of her body as though to shake herself free of
the constraint of his question. "Have you nearly done? What is the matter with you to-day? You seem to have made
up your mind that I am to be forced to hate you, to curse you! Look, I was anxious to be friends with you again,
for us to have a nice time together, like the old days; and this is all the thanks I get!"
However, he would not let her go, but sat there like a surgeon who waits for a spasm to subside that has
interrupted his operation but need not make him abandon it.
　　　　 "You are quite wrong in supposing that I bear you the least ill-will in the world, Odette," he began with
a persuasive and deceitful gentleness. "I never speak to you except of what I already know, and I always know a
great deal more than I say. But you alone can mollify by your confession what makes me hate you so long as it
has been reported to me only by other people. My anger with you is never due to your actions--I can and do for-
give you everything because I love you--but to your untruthfulness, the ridiculous untruthfulness which makes
you persist in denying things which I know to be true. How can you expect that I shall continue to love you,
when I see you maintain, when I hear you swear to me a thing which I know to be false? Odette, do not prolong
this moment which is torturing us both. If you are willing to end it at once, you shall be free of it for ever.
Tell me, upon your medal, yes or no, whether you have ever done those things."
　　　　 "How on earth can I tell?" she was furious. "Perhaps I have, ever so long ago, when I didn't know what I
was doing, perhaps two or three times."
　　　　 Swann had prepared himself for all possibilities. Reality must, therefore, be something which bears no
relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one's body bears to the gradual movement of the
clouds overhead, since those words "two or three times" carved, as it were, a cross upon the living tissues of
his heart. A strange thing, indeed, that those words, "two or three times," nothing more than words, words ut-
tered in the air, at a distance, could so lacerate a man's heart, as if they had actually pierced it, could make
a man ill, like a poison he has drunk. Instinctively Swann thought of the remark that he had heard at Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's: "I have never seen anything to beat it since the table-turning." The agony that he now suffered
in no way resembled what he had supposed. Not only because, in the hours when he most entirely mistrusted her,
he had rarely imagined such an extremity of evil, but because, even when he did try to imagine this thing, it
remained vague, uncertain, was not clothed in the particular horror which had sprung from the words "perhaps
two or three times," was not armed with that specific cruelty, as different from anything that he had known as
a new malady by which one is attacked for the first time. And yet this Odette, from whom all this evil sprang,
was no less dear to him, was, on the contrary, more precious, as if, in proportion as his sufferings increased,
there increased at the same time the price of the sedative, of the antidote which this woman alone possessed.
He wished to pay her more attention, as one attends to a disease which one discovers, suddenly, to have grown
more serious. He wished that the horrible thing which, she had told him, she had done "two or three times"
might be prevented from occurring again. To ensure that, he must watch over Odette. People often say that, by
pointing out to a man the faults of his mistress, you succeed only in strengthening his attachment to her,
because he does not believe you; yet how much more so if he does! But, Swann asked himself, how could he man-
age to protect her? He might perhaps be able to preserve her from the contamination of any one woman, but
there were hundreds of other women; and he realised how insane had been his ambition when he had begun (on
the evening when he had failed to find Odette at the Verdurins') to desire the possession--as if that were
ever possible--of another person. Happily for Swann, beneath the mass of new sufferings which had entered
his soul like an invading horde, there lay a natural foundation, older, more placid, and silently industr-
ious, like the cells of an injured organ which at once set to work to repair the damaged tissues, or the
muscles of a paralysed limb which tend to recover their former movements. These older, more autochthonous
inhabitants of his soul absorbed all Swann's strength, for a while, in that obscure task of reparation which
gives one an illusory sense of repose during convalescence, or after an operation. This time it was not so
much--as it ordinarily was--in Swann's brain that the slackening of tension due to exhaustion took effect,
it was rather in his heart. But all the things in life that have once existed tend to recur, and like a
dying animal stirred once more by the throes of a convulsion which seemed to have ended, upon Swann's
heart, spared for a moment only, the same agony returned of its own accord to trace the same cross. He
remembered those moonlit evenings, when, leaning back in the victoria that was taking him to the Rue La
Perouse, he would wallow voluptuously in the emotions of a man in love, oblivious of the poisoned fruit
that such emotions must inevitably bear. But all those thoughts lasted for no more than a second, the
time that it took him to press his hand to his heart, to draw breath again and to contrive to smile, in
order to hide his torment. Already he had begun to put further questions. For his jealousy, which had
taken more pains than any enemy would have done to strike him this savage blow, to make him forcibly
acquainted with the most cruel suffering he had ever known, his jealousy was not satisfied that he had
yet suffered enough, and sought to expose him to an even deeper wound. Thus, like an evil deity, his jea-
lousy inspired Swann, driving him on towards his ruin. It was not his fault, but Odette's alone, if at
first his punishment was not exacerbated.
　　　　 "My darling," he began again, "it's all over now; was it with anyone I know?"
　　　　 "No, I swear it wasn't; besides, I think I exaggerated, I never really went as far as that."
　　　　 He smiled, and resumed with: "Just as you like. It doesn't really matter, but it's unfortunate that
you can't give me any name. If I were able to form an idea of the person that would prevent my ever think-
ing of her again. I say it for your own sake, because then I shouldn't bother you any more about it. It's
so soothing to be able to form a clear picture of things in one's mind. What is really terrible is what one
cannot imagine. But you've been so sweet to me; I don't want to tire you. I do thank you, with all my heart,
for all the good that you have done me. I've quite finished now. Only one word more: how many times?"
　　　　 "Oh, Charles! can't you see, you're killing me? It's all ever so long ago. I've never given it a thought.
Anyone would say that you were positively trying to put those ideas into my head again. And then you'd be a
lot better off!" she concluded, with unconscious stupidity but with intentional malice.
　　　　 "I only wished to know whether it had been since I knew you. It's only natural. Did it happen here,
ever? You can't give me any particular evening, so that I can remind myself what I was doing at the time?
You understand, surely, that it's not possible that you don't remember with whom, Odette, my love."
　　　　 "But I don't know; really, I don't. I think it was in the Bois, one evening when you came to meet us
on the Island. You had been dining with the Princesse des Laumes," she added, happy to be able to furnish
him with an exact detail, which testified to her veracity. "At the next table there was a woman whom I
hadn't seen for ever so long. She said to me, 'Come along round behind the rock, there, and look at the
moonlight on the water!' At first I just yawned, and said, 'No, I'm too tired, and I'm quite happy where
I am, thank you.' She assured me there'd never been any moonlight to touch. 'I've heard that tale before,'
I said to her; I knew quite well what she was after."
　　　　 Odette narrated this episode almost as if it were a joke, either because it appeared to her to be quite
natural, or because she thought that she was thereby minimising its importance, or else so as not to appear
ashamed. But, catching sight of Swann's face, she changed her tone:
　　　　 "You are a fiend!" she flung at him, "you enjoy tormenting me, making me tell you lies, just so that
you'll leave me in peace."
　　　　 This second blow was even more terrible for Swann than the first. Never had he supposed it to have
been so recent an affair, hidden from his eyes that had been too innocent to discern it, not in a past
which he had never known, but in evenings which he so well remembered, which he had lived through with
Odette, of which he had supposed himself to have such an intimate, such an exhaustive knowledge, and
which now assumed, retrospectively, an aspect of ugliness and deceit. In the midst of them, suddenly, a
gaping chasm had opened: that moment on the Island in the Bois de Boulogne. Without being intelligent,
Odette had the charm of naturalness. She had recounted, she had acted the little scene with so much sim-
plicity that Swann, as he gasped for breath, could vividly see it: Odette yawning, the "rock there,"...
He could hear her answer--alas, how gaily--"I've heard that tale before!" He felt that she would tell
him nothing more that evening, that no further revelation was to be expected for the present. He was
silent for a time, then said to her:
　　　　 "My poor darling, you must forgive me; I know, I am hurting you dreadfully, but it's all over now;
I shall never think of it again."
　　　　 But she saw that his eyes remained fixed upon the things that he did not know, and on that past era
of their love, monotonous and soothing in his memory because it was vague, and now rent, as with a gaping
wound, by that momentt on the Island in the Bois, by moonlight, after his dinner with the Princesse des
Laumes. But he was so imbued with the habit of finding life interesting--of marvelling at the strange
discoveries that there were to be made in it--that even while he was suffering so acutely that he did not
believe he could bear such agony much longer, he was saying to himself: "Life is really astonishing, and
holds some fine surprises; it appears that vice is far more common than one has been led to believe. Here
is a woman I trusted, who seems so simple, so straightforward, who, in any case, even allowing that her
morals are not strict, seemed quite normal and healthy in her tastes and inclinations. I receive a most
improbable accusation, I question her, and the little that she admits reveals far more than I could ever
have suspected." But he could not confine himself to these detached observations. He sought to form an
exact estimate of the importance of what she had just told him, so as to know whether he might conclude
that she had done these things often, and was likely to do them again. He repeated her words to himself:
"I knew quite well what she was after." "Two or three times." "I've heard that tale before." But they did
not reappear in his memory unarmed; each of them still held its knife with which it stabbed him anew. For
a long time, like a sick man who cannot restrain himself from attempting, every minute, to make the move-
ment that, he knows, will hurt him, he kept on murmuring to himself: "I'm quite happy where I am, thank
you," "I've heard that tale before," but the pain was so intense that he was obliged to stop. He was
amazed to find that actions which he had always hitherto judged so lightly, had dismissed, indeed, with
a laugh, should have become as serious to him as a disease which might easily prove fatal. He knew any
number of women whom he could ask to keep an eye on Odette, but how was he to expect them to adjust them-
selves to his new point of view, and not to remain at that which for so long had been his own, which had
always guided him in his voluptuous existence; not to say to him with a smile: "You jealous monster, want-
ing to rob other people of their pleasure!" By what trap-door, suddenly lowered, had he (who had never
found, in the old days, in his love for Odette, any but the most refined of pleasures) been precipitated
into this new circle of hell from which he could not see how he was ever to escape. Poor Odette! He wish-
ed her no harm. She was but half to blame. Had he not been told that it was her own mother who had sold
her, when she was still little more than a child, at Nice, to a wealthy Englishman? But what an agonising
truth was now contained for him in those lines of Alfred de Vigny's Journal d'un Poete which he had pre-
viously read without emotion: "When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to
oneself, 'What are 'her surroundings? What has been her life?' All one's future happiness lies in the
answer." Swann was astonished that such simple sentences, spelt over in his mind as, "I've heard that
tale before," or "I knew quite well what she was after," could cause him so much pain. But he realised
that what he had thought of as simple phrases were in fact components of the framework which still en-
closed, and could inflict on him again, the anguish he had felt while Odette was telling her story.
For it was indeed the same anguish that he now was feeling anew. For all that he now knew--for all that,
as time went on, he might even have partly forgotten and forgiven the offence--whenever he repeated her
words his old anguish refashioned him as he had been before Odette had spoken: ignorant, trustful; his
merciless jealousy placed him once again, so that he might be pierced by Odette's admission, in the pos-
ition of a man who does not yet know; and after several months this old story would still shatter him
like a sudden revelation. He marvelled at the terrible re-creative power of his memory. It was only by
the weakening of that generative force, whose fecundity diminishes with age, that he could hope for a
relaxation of his torments. But, as soon as the power that any one of Odette's sentences had to make
Swann suffer seemed to be nearly exhausted, lo and behold another, one of those to which he had hithe-
rto paid least attention, almost a new sentence, came to relieve the first, and to strike at him with
undiminished force. The memory of the evening on which he had dined with the Princesse des Laumes was
painful to him, but it was no more than the centre, the core of his pain, which radiated vaguely round
about it, overflowing into all the preceding and following days. And on whatever point in it his memory
sought to linger, it was the whole of that season, during which the Verdurins had so often gone to dine
upon the Island in the Bois, that racked him. So violently that by slow degrees the curiosity which his
jealousy aroused in him was neutralised by his fear of the fresh tortures he would be inflicting upon
himself were he to satisfy it. He recognised that the entire period of Odette's life which had elapsed
before she first met him, a period of which he had never sought to form a picture in his mind, was not
the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had consisted of so many definite, dated y
ears, each crowded with concrete incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest that past
of hers, colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible and monstrous form, an individual
and diabolical countenance. And he continued to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not any longer
now from laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering. He hoped that, some day, he might be able to hear
the Island in the Bois, or the Princesse des Laumes mentioned without feeling any twinge of that old
rending pain; meanwhile he thought it imprudent to provoke Odette into furnishing him with fresh sent-
ences, with the names of more places and people and of different events, which, when his malady was
still scarcely healed, would make it break out again in another form.
　　　　 But, often enough, the things that he did not know, that he dreaded, now, to
learn, it was Odette herself who, spontaneously and without thought of what she did,
revealed them to him; for the gap which her vices made between her actual life and
the comparatively innocent life which Swann had believed, and often still believed
his mistress to lead, was far wider than she knew. A vicious person, always affecting
the same air of virtue before people whom he is anxious to keep from having any sus-
picion of his vices, has no gauge at hand from which he may ascertain how far those
vices, whose continuous growth is imperceptible to himself, have gradually segregated
him from the normal ways of life. In the course of their cohabitation, in Odette's
mind, side by side with the memory of those of her actions which she concealed from
Swann, others were gradually coloured, infected by these, without her being able to
detect anything strange in them, without their causing any jarring note in the part-
icular surroundings which they occupied in her inner world; but if she related them
to Swann, he was shattered by the revelation of the duplicity to which they pointed.
One day, he was trying--without hurting Odette--to discover from her whether she had
ever had any dealings with procuresses. He was, as a matter of fact, convinced that
she had not; the anonymous letter had put the idea into his mind, but in a purely
mechanical way; it had been received there with no credulity, but it had, for all
that, remained there, and Swann, wishing to be rid of the burden?a dead weight, but
none the less disturbing?of this suspicion, hoped that Odette would now extirpate
it for ever.
　　　　 "Oh dear, no! Not that they don't simply persecute me to go to them," her smile
revealed a gratified vanity which she no longer saw that it was impossible should
appear legitimate to Swann. "There was one of them waited more than two hours for
me yesterday, said she would give me any money I asked. It seems, there's an Ambass-
ador who said to her, 'I'll kill myself if you don't bring her to me'--meaning me!
They told her I'd gone out, but she waited and waited, and in the end I had to go
myself and speak to her, before she'd go away. I do wish you could have seen the
way I tackled her; my maid was in the next room, listening, and told me I shouted
fit to bring the house down: 'But when you hear me say that I don't want to! The
idea of such a thing, I don't like it at all! I should hope I'm still free to do
as I please and when I please and where I please! If I needed the money, I could
understand...' The porter has orders not to let her in again; he will tell her that
I am out of town. Oh, I do wish I could have had you hidden somewhere in the room
while I was talking to her. I know, you'd have been pleased, my dear. There's some
good in your little Odette, you see, after all, though people do say such dreadful
things about her."
　　　　 Besides, her very admissions--when she made any--of faults which she supposed
him to have discovered, rather served Swann as a starting-point for fresh doubts
than they put an end to the old. For her admissions never exactly coincided with
his doubts. In vain might Odette expurgate her confession of all its essentials,
there would remain in the accessories something which Swann had never yet imagined,
which crushed him anew, and would enable him to alter the terms of the problem of
his jealousy. And these admissions he could never forget. His soul carried them
along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bosom, like corpses in a
river. And they poisoned it.
　　　　 She spoke to him once of a visit that Forcheville had paid her on the day of
the Paris-Murcie Fete. "What! you knew him as long ago as that? Oh, yes, of course
you did," he corrected himself, so as not to shew that he had been ignorant of the
fact. And suddenly he began to tremble at the thought that, on the day of the Paris-
Murcie Fete, when he had received that letter which he had so carefully preserved,
she had been having luncheon, perhaps, with Forcheville at the Maison d'Or. She
swore that she had not. "Still, the Maison d'Or reminds me of something or other
which, I knew at the time, wasn't true," he pursued, hoping to frighten her. "Yes
that I hadn't been there at all that evening when I told you I had just come from
there, and you had been looking for me at Prevost's," she replied (judging by his
manner that he knew) with a firmness that was based not so much upon cynicism as u-
pon timidity, a fear of crossing Swann, which her own self-respect made her anxious
to conceal, and a desire to shew him that she could be perfectly frank if she chose.
And so she struck him with all the sharpness and force of a headsman wielding his
axe, and yet could not be charged with cruelty, since she was quite unconscious of
hurting him; she even began to laugh, though this may perhaps, it is true, have been
chiefly to keep him from thinking that she was ashamed, at all, or confused. "It's
quite true, I hadn't been to the Maison Doree. I was coming away from Forcheville's.
I had, really, been to Prevost's--that wasn't a story?and he met me there and asked me
to come in and look at his prints. But some one else came to see him. I told you that
I was coming from the Maison d'Or because I was afraid you might be angry with me. It
was rather nice of me, really, don't you see? I admit, I did wrong, but at least I'm
telling you all about it now, a'n't I? What have I to gain by not telling you, straight,
that I lunched with him on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fete, if it were true? Especial-
ly as at that time we didn't know one another quite so well as we do now, did we, dear?"
　　　　 He smiled back at her with the sudden, craven weakness of the shattered creature
which these crushing words had made of him. And so, even in the months of which he
had never dared to think again, because they had been too happy, in those months when
she had loved him, she was already lying to him! Besides that moment (that first evening
on which they had "done a cattleya") when she had told him that she was coming from the
Maison Doree, how many others must there have been, each of them covering a falsehood of
which Swann had had no suspicion. He recalled how she had said to him once: "I need only
tell Mme. Verdurin that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There is always
some excuse." From himself too, probably, many times when she had glibly uttered such
words as explain a delay or justify an alteration of the hour fixed for a meeting, those
moments must have hidden, without his having the least inkling of it at the time, an
engagement that she had had with some other man, some man to whom she had said: "I need
only tell Swann that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There is always
some excuse." And beneath all his most tender memories, beneath the simplest words that
Odette had ever spoken to him in those old days, words which he had believed as though
they were the words Gospel, beneath her daily actions which she had recounted to him,
beneath the most ordinary places, her dressmaker's flat, the Avenue du Bois, the race-
course, he could feel (dissembled by virtue of that temporal superfluity which, even in
days that have been most circumstantially accounted for, still leaves a margin of room,
that may serve as a hiding place for certain unconfessed actions), he could feel the
insinuation of a possible undercurrent of falsehood which rendered ignoble all that had
remained most precious to him (his happiest evenings, the Rue La Perouse itself, which
Odette must constantly have been leaving at other hours than those of which she told him)
everywhere disseminating something of the shadowy horror that had gripped him when he
had heard her admission with regard to the Maison Doree, and, like the obscene creatures
in the 'Desolation of Nineveh,' shattering, stone by stone, the whole edifice of his past
.... If, now, he turned aside whenever his memory repeated the cruel name of the Maison
Doree it was because that name recalled to him, no longer, as, such a little time since,
at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's party, the good fortune which he long had lost, but a misfor-
tune of which he was now first aware. Then it befell the Maison Doree, as it had befallen
the Island in the Bois, that gradually its name ceased to trouble him. For what we suppose
to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and individual passion. It
is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is
ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of
continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann's love, the fidelity of his jealousy,
were formed of death, the infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of
which had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time without seeing
her, those that died would not have been replaced by others. But the presence of Odette
continued to sow in Swann's heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion.
On certain evenings she would suddenly resume towards him an amenity of which she
would warn him sternly that he must take immediate advantage, under penalty of not seeing
it repeated for years to come; he must instantly accompany her home, to "do a cattleya,"
and the desire which she claimed to have for him was so sudden, so inexplicable, so imper-
ious, the caresses which she lavished on him were so demonstrative and so unwonted, that
this brutal and improbable fondness made Swann just as unhappy as any lie or unkindness.
One evening when he had thus, in obedience to her command, gone home with her, and while
she was interspersing her kisses with passionate words, in strange contrast to her habitual
coldness, he suddenly thought he heard a sound; he rose, searched everywhere and found no-
body, but he hadn't the heart to return to his place by her side; whereupon, in the height
of fury, she broke a vase and said to him "One can never do anything right with you!" And
he was left uncertain whether she had not actually had some man concealed in the room, whose
jealousy she had wished to exacerbate, or his senses to inflame .





　　　　 To counterbalance the morbid feelings that Swann had for Odette, Mme. Cottard, a wiser
physician, in this case, than ever her husband would have been, had grafted among them others
more normal, feelings of gratitude, of friendship, which in Swann's mind were to make Odette
seem again more human (more like other women, since other women could inspire the same feel-
ings in him), were to hasten her final transformation back into that Odette, loved with an
undisturbed affection, who had taken him home one evening after a revel at the painter's, to
drink orangeade with Forcheville, that Odette with whom Swann had calculated that he might
live in happiness.
　　　　 In former times, having often thought with terror that a day must come when he would
cease to be in love with Odette, he had determined to keep a sharp look-out, and as soon as
he felt that love was beginning to escape him, to cling tightly to it and to hold it back.
But now, to the faintness of his love there corresponded a simultaneous faintness in his
desire to remain her lover. For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person,
while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be. Occasionally
the name, if it caught his eye in a newspaper, of one of the men whom he supposed to have
been Odette's lovers, reawakened his jealousy. But it was very mild, and, inasmuch as it
proved to him that he had not completely emerged from that period in which he had so great-
ly suffered--but in which he had also known so voluptuous a way of feeling--and that the
hazards of the road ahead might still enable him to catch an occasional furtive, distant
glimpse of its beauties, this jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable thrill, as, to
the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to return to France, a last mosquito
proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this particular
period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not to remain in
it, at least to obtain, while still he might, an uninterrupted view of it, he discovered
that already it was too late; he would have liked to glimpse, as though it were a landscape
that was about to disappear, that love from which he had departed, but it is so difficult
to enter into a state of complete duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle
of a feeling which one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering in his
brain, he could see nothing at all, abandoned the attempt, took the glasses from his nose
and wiped them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there
would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with as little curiosity,
with as much torpor as the drowsy traveller who pulls his cap down over his eyes so as to
get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster and faster,
out of the country in which he has lived for so long, and which he vowed that he would not
allow to slip away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell. Indeed, like
the same traveller, if he does not awake until he has crossed the frontier and is again in
France, when Swann happened to alight, close at hand, upon something which proved that
Forcheville had been Odette's lover, he discovered that it caused him no pain, that love
was now utterly remote, and he regretted that he had had no warning of the moment in which
he had emerged from it for ever. And just as, before kissing Odette for the first time, he
had sought to imprint upon his memory the face that for so long had been familiar, before
it was altered by the additional memory of their kiss, so he could have wished--in thought
at least--to have been in a position to bid farewell, while she still existed, to that
Odette who had inspired love in him and jealousy, to that Odette who had caused him so to
suffer, and whom now he would never see again.
　　　　 He was mistaken. He was destined to see her once again, a few weeks later. It was while
he was asleep, in the twilight of a dream. He was walking with Mme. Verdurin, Dr. Cottard,
a young man in a fez whom he failed to identify, the painter, Odette, Napoleon III and my
grandfather, along a path which followed the line of the coast, and overhung the sea, now
at a great height, now by a few feet only, so that they were continually going up and down;
those of the party who had reached the downward slope were no longer visible to those who
were still climbing; what little daylight yet remained was failing, and it seemed as though
they were about to be shrouded in darkness. From time to time the waves dashed against the
edge, and Swann could feel on his cheek a shower of freezing spray. Odette told him to wipe
this off, but he could not, and felt confused and helpless in her company, as well as because
he was in his nightshirt. He hoped that, in the darkness, this might pass unnoticed; Mme.
Verdurin, however, fixed her astonished gaze upon him for an endless moment, during which he
saw her face change its shape, her nose grow longer, while beneath it there sprouted a heavy
moustache. He turned away to look at Odette; her cheeks were pale, with little red spots,
her features drawn and ringed with shadows; but she looked back at him with eyes welling
with affection, ready to detach themselves like tears and to fall upon his face, and he felt
that he loved her so much that he would have liked to carry her off with him at once. Sud-
denly Odette turned her wrist, glanced at a tiny watch, and said: "I must go." She took
leave of everyone, in the same formal manner, without taking Swann aside, without telling
him where they were to meet that evening, or next day. He dared not ask, he would have liked
to follow her, he was obliged, without turning back in her direction, to answer with a smile
some question by Mme. Verdurin; but his heart was frantically beating, he felt that he now
hated Odette, he would gladly have gouged out those eyes which, a moment ago, he had loved
so much, have crushed those flaccid cheeks. He continued to climb with Mme. Verdurin, that
is to say that each step took him farther from Odette, who was going downhill, and in the
other direction. A second passed and it was many hours since she had left him. The
painter remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had eclipsed himself immediately after Odette.
"They had obviously arranged it between them," he added; "they must have agreed to meet at
the foot of the cliff, but they wouldn't say good-bye together; it might have looked odd.
She is his mistress." The strange young man burst into tears. Swann endeavoured to console
him. "After all, she is quite right," he said to the young man, drying his eyes for him and
taking off the fez to make him feel more at ease. "I've advised her to do that, myself, a do-
zen times. Why be so distressed? He was obviously the man to understand her." So Swann reas-
oned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at first, to identify, was himself
also; like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters,
him who was the 'first person' in the dream, and another whom he saw before him, capped with
a fez.
　　　　 As for Napoleon III, it was to Forcheville that some vague association of ideas, then a
certain modification of the Baron's usual physiognomy, and lastly the broad ribbon of the
Legion of Honour across his breast, had made Swann give that name; but actually, and in ever-
ything that the person who appeared in his dream represented and recalled to him, it was
indeed Forcheville. For, from an incomplete and changing set of images, Swann in his sleep
drew false deductions, enjoying at the same time, momentarily, such a creative power that he
was able to reproduce himself by a simple act of division, like certain lower organisms; with
the warmth that he felt in his own palm he modelled the hollow of a strange hand which he
thought that he was clasping, and out of feelings and impressions of which he was not yet
conscious he brought about sudden vicissitudes which, by a chain of logical sequences, would
produce, at specific points in his dream, the person required to receive his love or to star-
tle him awake. In an instant night grew black about him; an tocsin sounded, people ran past
him, escaping from their blazing houses; he could hear the thunder of the surging waves, and
also of his own heart, which with equal violence was anxiously beating in his breast. Suddenly
the speed of these palpitations redoubled, he felt an inexplicable pain and nausea, A peasant,
dreadfully burned, flung at him as he passed: "Come and ask Charlus where Odette spent the
night with her friend. He used to go about with her, and she tells him everything. It was they
that started the fire." It was his valet, come to awaken him, and saying:
"Sir, it is eight o'clock, and the barber is here. I have told him to call again in an hour."
　　　　 But these words, as they plunged through the waves of sleep in which Swann was submerged,
did not reach his consciousness without undergoing that refraction which turns a ray of light
in the depths of water into another sun; just as, a moment earlier, the sound of the door-bell,
swelling in the depths of his abyss of sleep into the clangour of a tocsin, had engendered the
episode of the fire. Meanwhile the scenery of his dream-stage scattered into dust, he opened
his eyes, and heard for the last time the boom of a wave in the sea, now distant. He touched
his cheek. It was dry. And yet he remembered the sting of the cold spray, and the taste of salt
on his lips. He rose, and dressed himself. He had made the barber come early because he had
written, the day before, to my grandfather, to say that he was going, that afternoon, to Combray,
having learned that Mme. de Cambremer--Mlle. Legrandin that had been--was spending a few days there.
The association in his memory of her young and charming face with a place in the country which
he had not visited for so long, offered him a combined attraction which had made him decide at
last to leave Paris for a while. As the different changes and chances that bring us into the co-
mpany of certain other people in this life do not coincide with the periods in which we are in
love with those people, but, overlapping them, may occur before love has begun, and may be re-
peated after love is ended, the earliest appearances, in our life, of a creature who is destined
to afford us pleasure later on, assume retrospectively in our eyes a certain value as an indica-
tion, a warning, a presage. It was in this fashion that Swann had often carried back his mind to
the image of Odette, encountered in the theatre, on that first evening when he had no thought of
ever seeing her again--and that he now recalled the party at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's, at which he
had introduced General de Frober-ville to Mme. de Cambremer. So manifold are our interests in life
that it is not uncommon that, on a single occasion, the foundations of a happiness which does not
yet exist are laid down simultaneously with aggravations of a grief from which we are still suffer-
ing. And, no doubt, that might have occurred to Swann elsewhere than at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's.
Who, indeed, can say whether, in the event of his having gone, that evening, somewhere else, other
happinesses, other griefs would not have come to him, which, later, would have appeared to have
been inevitable? But what did seem to him to have been inevitable was what had indeed taken place,
and he was not far short of seeing something providential in the fact that he had at last decided
to go to Mme. de Saint-Euverte's that evening, because his mind, anxious to admire the richness of
invention that life shews, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for any length of time, such
as to discover what, actually, had been most to be wished for, came to the conclusion that the suf-
ferings through which he had passed that evening, and the pleasures, at that time unsuspected, which
were already being brought to birth,--the exact balance between which was too difficult to establish
--were linked by a sort of concatenation of necessity.
　　　　 But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions to the barber, so that his
stiffly brushed hair should not become disarranged on the journey, he thought again of his dream,
and saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette's pallid complexion, her too thin
cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which--in the course of those successive
bursts of affection which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the first
impression that he had formed of her--he had ceased to notice since the early days of their intimacy,
days to which, doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek their exact sensation.
And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared in him now that he was no longer unhappy,
and lowered, at the same time, the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: "To
think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that I've experienced my
greatest love for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not even my type!"




　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 　　　PLACE-NAMES: THE NAME




　　　　 Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during my long nights of sleep-
lessness, there was none that differed more utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with
the motes of an atmosphere granular, pollinated, edible and devout, than my room in the Grand Hotel
de la Plage, at Balbec, the ripolin-painted walls of which enclosed, like the polished sides of a ba-
thing-pool in which the water glows blue, a finer air, pure, azure-tinted, saline. The Bavarian uphol-
sterer who had been entrusted with the furnishing of this hotel had varied his scheme of decoration in
different rooms, and in that which I found myself occupying had set against the walls, on three sides
of it, a series of low book-cases with glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by a law
of nature which he had, perhaps, forgotten to take into account, was reflected this or that section of
the ever-changing view of the sea, so that the walls were lined with a frieze of seascapes, interrupted
only by the polished mahogany of the actual shelves. And so effective was this that the whole room had
the appearance of one of those model bedrooms which you see nowadays in Housing Exhibitions, decorated
with works of art which are calculated by their designer to refresh the eyes of whoever may ultimately
have to sleep in the rooms, the subjects being kept in some degree of harmony with the locality and sur-
roundings of the houses for which the rooms are planned.
　　　　 And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real Balbec than that other
Balbec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy days, when the wind was so strong that Francoise, as she
took me to the Champs-Elysees, would advise me not to walk too near the side of the street, or I might
have my head knocked off by a falling slate, and would recount to me, with many a groan, the terrible
disasters and shipwrecks that were reported in the newspaper. I longed for nothing more than to behold
a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or
rather there were for me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be not artificially composed
for my entertainment, but necessary and unalterable--the beauty of landscapes or of great works of art.
I was curious and eager to know only what I believed to be more real than myself, what had for me the
supreme merit of showing me a fragment of the mind of a great genius, or of the force or the grace of
nature as it appeared when left entirely to itself, without human interference. Just as the lovely
sound of her voice, reproduced, all by itself, upon the phonograph, could never console a man for the
loss of his mother, so a mechanical imitation of a storm would have left me as cold as did the illum-
inated fountains at the Exhibition. I required also, if the storm was to be absolutely genuine, that
the shore from which I watched it should be a natural shore, not an embankment recently constructed by
a municipality. Besides, nature, by virtue of all the feelings that it aroused in me, seemed to me the
thing most diametrically opposed to the mechanical inventions of mankind. The less it bore their imprint,
the more room it offered for the expansion of my heart. And, as it happened, I had preserved the name of
Balbec, which Legrandin had cited to us, as that of a seaside place in the very midst of "that funereal
coast, famed for the number of its wrecks, swathed, for six months in the year, in a shroud of fog and
flying foam from the waves.
　　　　 "You feel, there, below your feet still," he had told me, "far more even than at Finistere (and even
though hotels are now being superimposed upon it, without power, however, to modify that oldest ossature
of the earth) you feel there that you are actually at the land's end of France, of Europe, of the Old
World. And it is the ultimate encampment of the fishermen, the heirs of all the fishermen who have lived
since the world's beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of the sea-fogs and shadows of the night."
　　　　 One day when, at Combray, I had spoken of this coast, this Balbec, before M. Swann, hoping to learn
from him whether it was the best point to select for seeing the most violent storms, he had replied: "I
should think I did know Balbec! The church at Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and
still half romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman gothic, and so ex-
ceptional that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspiration."
　　　　 And that region which, until then, had seemed to me to be nothing else than a part of immemorial
nature, that had remained contemporaneous with the great phenomena of geology--and as remote from human
history as the Ocean itself or the Great Bear, with its wild race of fishermen for whom no more than for
their whales had there been any Middle Ages--it had been a great joy to me to see it suddenly take its
place in the order of the centuries, with a stored consciousness of the Romanesque epoch, and to know
that the gothic trefoil had come to diversify those wild rocks too at the appointed time, like those
frail but hardy plants which in the Polar regions, when spring returns, scatter their stars about the
eternal snows. And if gothic art brought to those places and people an identification which they other-
wise lacked, they too conferred one upon it in return. I tried to picture how those fishermen had lived,
the timid and undreamt-of experiment in social relations which they had attempted there, clustered upon
a promontory of the shores of Hell, at the foot of the cliffs of death; and Gothic art seemed to me a
more living thing now that, detached from the towns in which until then I had always imagined it, I
could see how, in a particular instance, upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until
it flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the most famous of the statues at
Balbec--the shaggy, snub-nosed Apostles, the Virgin from the porch--and I could scarcely breathe for
joy at the thought that I might myself, one day, stand out in relief against the eternal briny fog.
Thereafter, on delightful, stormy February nights, the wind--breathing into my heart, which it shook no
less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the project of a visit to Balbec--blended in me the de-
sire for Gothic architecture as well as for a storm upon the sea.
　　　　 I should have liked to take, the very next day, the fine, generous 1.22 train, whose hour of depar-
ture I could never read without a palpitating heart on the railway company's bills or in advertisements
for circular tours: it seemed to me to cut, at a precise point in every afternoon, a delectable groove,
a mysterious mark, from which the diverted hours still led, of course, towards evening, towards tomorrow
morning, but an evening and morning which one would behold, not in Paris, but in one of those towns
through which the train passed and among which it allowed one to choose; for it stopped at Bayeux, at
Coutances, at Vitre, at Questambert, at Pontorson, at Balbec, at Lannion, at Lamballe, at Benodet, at
Pont-Aven, at Quimperle, and progressed magnificently overloaded with proffered names among which I did
not know which to choose, so impossible was it to sacrifice any. But even without waiting for the train
next day, I could, by rising and dressing myself with all speed, leave Paris that very evening, should
my parents permit, and arrive at Balbec as dawn spread westward over the raging sea, from whose driven
foam I would seek shelter in that church in the Persian style. But at the approach of the Easter holidays,
when my parents had promised to let me spend them, for once, in the North of Italy, suddenly, in place of
those dreams of tempests by which I had been entirely possessed, not wishing to see anything but waves
dashing in from all sides, mounting ever higher, upon the wildest of coasts, beside churches as rugged
and precipitous as cliffs, in whose towers the sea-birds would be wailing, suddenly, effacing them, tak-
ing away all their charm, excluding them because they were its opposite and could only have weakened its
effect, was substituted in me the converse dream of the most colourful of springs, not the spring of Com-
bray, still pricked sharply with all the needle-points of the winter's frost, but that which already cov-
ered the meadows of Fiesole with lilies and anemones, and gave Florence a dazzling golden background like
those in Fra Angelico's pictures. From that moment onwards, only sunlight, perfumes, colours, seemed to
me of any worth; for this alternation of images had effected a change of front in my desire, and--as abr-
upt as those that occur sometimes in music--a complete change of key in my sensibility. Then it came about
that a simple atmospheric variation would be sufficient to provoke in me that modulation, without there
being any need for me to await the return of a season. For often in one we find a day that has strayed
from another, that makes us live in that other, summons at once into our presence and makes us long for
its particular pleasures, and interrupts the dreams that we were in process of weaving, by inserting,
out of its turn, too early or too late, this leaf torn from another chapter in the interpolated calendar
of Happiness. But soon it happened that, like those natural phenomena from which our comfort or our health
can derive but an accidental and all too modest benefit, until the day when science takes control of them,
and, producing them at will, places in our hands the power to order their appearance, free from the
tutelage and independent of the mandate of chance; similarly the production of these dreams of the Atlantic
and of Italy ceased to depend entirely upon the changes of the seasons and of the weather. I need only, to
make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually
accumulated all the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring, to come in
a book upon the name of Balbec sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for the Norman
gothic; even on a stormy day the name of Florence or of Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for
lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore.
　　　　 But if their names thus permanently absorbed the image that I had formed of these towns, it was only
by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in con-
sequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the
towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagina-
tion, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified
the idea that I formed of certain points on the earth's surface, making them more special, and in conse-
quence more real. I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, historic buildings, as more or
less attractive pictures, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked
on each of them as on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which my soul thirsted
and which if would profit from knowing. How much more individual still was the character that they assumed
from being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper names such as people have!
Words present to us little pictures of things, clear and familiar, like the pictures hung on the walls of
schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an ant-hill,
things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us--of persons and of
towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons--a confused picture, which
draws from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour in which it is uniformly painted,
like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed
by the process used in their reproduction, or by a whim on the designer's part, are blue or red not only
the sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets. The name of Parma, one of
the towns that I most longed to visit, after reading the Chartreuse, seeming to me compact, smooth, violet-
tinted and soft, if anyone were to speak of such or such a house in Parma, in which I should be lodged, he
would give me the pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact, smooth, violet-
tinted and soft, that bore no relation to the houses in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it
only by the aid of that heavy first syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air stirs, and of
all that I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness and the reflected hue of violets. And when I thought
of Florence, it was of a town miraculously embalmed, and flower-like, since it was called the City of the
Lilies, and its Cathedral, Our Lady of the Flower. As for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as
on an old piece of Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which it was fashioned, one
sees depicted still the representation of some long-abolished custom, of some feudal right, of the former
status of some locality, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language which had shaped and wedded its
incongruous syllables and which I never doubted that I should find spoken there even by the inn-keeper who
would serve me coffee on my arrival, taking me down to watch the turbulent sea in front of the church, and
to whom I would ascribe the disputatious, solemn and mediaeval aspect of some character in one of the old
romances.
　　　　 Had my health definitely improved, had my parents allowed me, if not actually to go down to stay at
Balbec, at least to take, just once, so as to become acquainted with the architecture and landscapes of
Normandy or of Brittany, that 1:22 train into which I had so often clambered in imagination, I should
have preferred to stop, and to alight from it, at the most beautiful of its towns; but in vain might I
compare and contrast them; how was one to choose, any more than between individual people, who are not
interchangeable, between Bayeux, so lofty in its noble coronet of russet lacework, whose pinnacle was illu-
mined by the old gold of its second syllable; Vitre, whose acute accent barred its ancient glass with wooden
lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman
Cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with a tower of butter; Lannion with the
rumbling noise, in the silence of its village street, of a coach with a fly buzzing after it; Questambert,
Pontorson, ridiculous and naive, white feathers and yellow beaks strewn along the road to those well-watered
and poetic spots; Benodet, a name scarcely moored that the river seemed to be striving to drag down into the
tangle of its algae; Pont-Aven, pink-white flash of the wing of a lightly posed coif, tremulously reflected
in the greenish waters of a canal; Quimperle, more firmly anchored, ever since the Middle Ages, among its
babbling rivulets threading their pearls in a grey iridescence like the pattern made, through the cobwebs
on a window, by rays of sunlight changed into blunted points of tarnished silver?
　　　　 These images were false for another reason also; namely, that they were necessarily much simplified. Doubt-
less whatever it was that my imagination aspired to, which my senses took in only incompletely and without
any immediate pleasure, I had committed to the safe custody of names; doubtless because I had accumulated
there a store of dreams, those names now magnetised my desires; but names themselves are not very compre-
hensive; the most that I could do was to include in each of them two or three of the principal "curiosities"
of the town, which would lie there side by side, without intermediary; in the name of Balbec, as in the mag-
nifying glasses set in those penholders which one buys at sea-side places, I could distinguish waves surging
round a church built in the Persian style. Perhaps, indeed, the enforced simplicity of these images was one
of the reasons for the hold that they had over me. When my father had decided, one year, that we should go
for the Easter holidays to Florence and Venice, not finding room to introduce into the name of Florence the
elements that ordinarily constitute a town, I was obliged to evolve a supernatural city from the impregnation
by certain vernal scents of what I supposed to be, in its essentials, the genius of Giotto. At most--and be-
cause one cannot make a name extend much further in time than in space?like some of Giotto's paintings them-
selves which shew us at two separate moments the same person engaged in different actions, here lying on his
bed, there just about to mount his horse, the name of Florence was divided into two compartments. In one, be-
neath an architectural canopy, I gazed at a fresco over which was partly drawn a curtain of morning sunlight,
dusty, oblique, and gradually spreading; in the other (for, since I thought of names not as an inaccessible
ideal but as a real and enveloping atmosphere into which I was about to plunge, the life not yet lived, the
life intact and pure which I enclosed in them, gave to the most material pleasures, to the simplest scenes,
the same attraction that they have in the works of the Primitives), I moved swiftly--the quicker to arrive
at the lunch-table that was spread for me with fruit and a flask of Chianti--across a Ponte Vecchio heaped
with jonquils, narcissi and anemones. That (for all that I was still in Paris) was what I saw, and not what
was actually round about me. Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries for which
we long occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our true life than the country in which we may
happen to be. Doubtless, if, at that time, I had paid more attention to what was in my mind when I pronounced
the words "going to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice," I should have realised that what I saw was in no
sense a town, but something as different from anything that I knew, something as delicious, as might be, for
a human race whose whole existence had passed in a series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel,
a morning in spring. These images, unreal, fixed, always alike, filling all my nights and days, differentiated
this period in my life from those which had gone before it (and might easily have been confused with it by an
observer who saw things only from without, that is to say, who saw nothing), as in an opera a fresh melody
introduces a novel atmosphere which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than read the li-
bretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre, counting only the minutes as they passed. And
besides, even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not all equal. To get through
each day, natures that are at all highly strung, as was mine, are equipped, like motor-cars, with different
gears. There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-slop-
ing days, which one descend full tilt, singing as one goes. During this month--in which I went laboriously
over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which
the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love,
love for another person--I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself,
and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a Christian in the primi-
tive age of faith on the eve of his entry into Paradise. Thus, without my paying any heed to the contradic-
tion that there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with the organs of my senses what had been ela-
borated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all--though all the more tempting to
them, in consequence, more different from anything that they knew--it was that which recalled to me the
reality of these visions, which inflamed my desire all the more by seeming to hint a promise that my de-
sire should be satisfied. And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for aesthetic
enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again than the
guide-books, the railway time-tables. What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I could see,
so near and yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the tract which separated it from me, in myself, was
not one that I might cross, could yet be reached by a circuit, by a digression, were I to take the plain,
terrestrial path. When I repeated to myself, giving thus a special value to what I was going to see, that
Venice was the "School of Giorgione, the home of Titian, the most complete museum of the domestic archi-
tecture of the Middle Ages," I felt happy. But I was happier still when, on one of my walks, as I stepped
out briskly on account of the weather, which, after several days of a precocious spring, had relapsed into
winter (like the weather that we had invariably found awaiting us at Combray, in Holy Week)--seeing on the
boulevards that the chestnut-trees, though plunged in a glacial atmosphere that soaked through them like
water, were none the less beginning, punctual guests, arrayed already for the party and admitting no dis-
couragement, to shape and chisel and curve in its frozen lumps the irrepressible verdure whose steady growth
the abortive power of the cold might hinder but could not succeed in restraining--I reflected that already
the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of hyacinths and anemones, and that the spring sunshine
was already tinging the waters of the Grand Canal with so deep an azure and such noble emeralds that when
they washed against the foot of a Titian painting they could vie with it in the richness of their colouring.
I could no longer contain my joy when my father, in the intervals of tapping the barometer and complaining
of the cold, began to look out which were the best trains, and when I understood that by making one's way
after luncheon into the coal-grimed laboratory, the wizard's cell that undertook to contrive a complete
transmutation of its surroundings, one could wake up next morning in the city of marble and gold, "its walls
embellished with jasper and its streets paved with emeralds." So that it and the City of the Lilies were not
just artificial scenes which I could set up at will in front of my imagination, but existed a certain dis-
tance from Paris which must inevitably be traversed if I wished to see them, at a particular place on the
earth's surface, and at no other--in a word, were entirely real. They became even more real to me when my
father, by saying: "Well, you can stay in Venice from the 20th to the 29th, and reach Florence on Easter
morning," made them both emerge, no longer only from the abstraction of Space, but from that imaginary
Time in which we place not one journey at a time but others simultaneously, without too much agitation
since they are only possibilities--that Time which reconstructs itself so effectively that one can spend
it again in one town after one has already spent it in another--and assigned to them some of those actual,
calendar days which are the certificates of authenticity of the objects on which they are spent, for these
unique days are consumed by being used, they do not return, one cannot live them again here when one has
lived them there; I felt that it was towards the week that would begin with the Monday on which the laun-
dress was to bring back the white waistcoat that I had stained with ink that they were hastening to absorb
themselves, on emerging from that ideal Time in which they did not yet exist, those two queens of cities of
which I was soon to be able, by the most thrilling kind of geometry, to inscribe the domes and towers on a
page of my own life. But I was still on the way, only, to the supreme pinnacle of happiness; I reached it
finally (for not until then did the revelation burst upon me that on the clattering streets, reddened by
the light reflected from Giorgione's frescoes, it was not, as I had continued to imagine, despite so many
admonitions, men "majestic and terrible as the sea, bearing armour that gleamed with bronze beneath the
folds of their blood-red cloaks," who would be walking in Venice next week, on Easter eve, but that I my-
self might be the minute personage whom, in an enlarged photograph of St. Mark's that had been lent to me,
the illustrator had portrayed, in a bowler hat, in front of the portico), when I heard my father say: "It
must be pretty cold, still, on the Grand Canal; whatever you do, don't forget to pack your winter great-
coat and your thick suit." At these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy; I felt myself--something I
had until then deemed impossible--to be penetrating indeed between those "rocks of amethyst, like a reef
in the Indian Ocean"; by a supreme muscular effort, far in excess of my real strength, divesting myself,
as of a shell that served no purpose, of the air in my own room which surrounded me, I replaced it by an
equal quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere, indescribable and peculiar as the atmosphere of
the dreams, which my imagination had secreted in the name of Venice; I could feel at work within me a
miraculous disincarnation; it was at once accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels when
one has a very sore throat; and they had to put me to bed with a fever so persistent that the doctor not
only assured my parents that a visit, that spring, to Florence and Venice was absolutely out of the ques-
tion, but warned their that, even when I should have completely recovered, I must, for at least a year,
give up all idea of travelling, and be kept from anything that was liable to excite me.





　　　　 One day, as I was weary of our usual place, beside the wooden horses, Francoise had taken me for an
excursion--across the frontier guarded at regular intervals by the little bastions of the barley-sugar
women--into those neighbouring but foreign regions, where the faces of the passers-by were strange, where
the goat-carriage went past; then she had gone away to lay down her things on a chair that stood with its
back to a shrubbery of laurels; while I waited for her I was pacing the broad lawn, of meagre close-crop-
ped grass already faded by the sun, dominated, at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in
front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing with a shuttlecock; when, from the path, ano-
ther little girl, who was putting on her cloak and covering up her battledore, called out sharply: "Good-
bye, Gilberte, I'm going home now; don't forget, we're coming to you this evening, after dinner." The name
Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcibly the girl whom it labelled in that it did not
merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed
thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and
the proximity of its target--carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impressions concerning
her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called it out, everything that,
as she uttered the words, she recalled, or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of
the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible,
all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let
it brush past me without my being able to penetrate it, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry--
wafting through the air the equisite emanation which it had distilled, by touching them with utmost pre-
cision, from certain invisible points in Mlle Swann's life, from the evening to come, just as it would be,
after dinner, at her home--forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their
nursemaids, a little cloud, delicately coloured, resembling one of those clouds that, billowing over a
Poussin landscape, reflect minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with chariots and horses, some
apparition of the life of the gods--casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot where it was at
one and the same time a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair battledore player
(who continued to launch and retrieve her shuttlecock until a governess with a blue feather in her hat
had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, the colour of heliotrope, impalpable as a reflect-
ion and superimposed like a carpet on which I could not help but drag my lingering, nostalgic and dese-
crating feet, while Francoise shouted: "Come on, button up your coat, look, and let's get away!" and I
remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.





　　　　 And so, if the sky was overcast, from early morning I would not cease to interrogate them, obser-
ving all the omens. If I saw the lady opposite, just inside her window, putting on her hat, I would say to
myself: "That lady is going out; it must, therefore, be weather in which one can go out. Why should not
Gilberte do the same as that lady?" But the day grew dark. My mother said that it might clear again, that
one burst of sunshine would be enough, but that more probably it would rain; and if it rained, of what use
would it be to go to the Champs-Elysses? And so, from breakfast-time, my anxious eyes never left the uncer-
tain, clouded sky. It remained dark: Outside the window, the balcony was grey. Suddenly, on its sullen
stone, I would not exactly see a less leaden colour, but I would feel as it were a striving towards a less
leaden colour, the pulsation of a hesitant ray that struggled to discharge its light. A moment later the
balcony was as pale and luminous as a pool at dawn, and a thousand shadows from the iron-work of its balu-
strade had alighted on it. A breath of wind would disperse them, and the stone darkened again, but, as
thought they had been tamed, they would return; imperceptibly the stone whitened once more, and as in one
of those uninterrupted crescendos which, in music, at the end of an overture, carry a single note to the
supreme fortissimo by making it pass rapidly through all the intermediate stages, I would see it reach
that fixed, unalterable gold of fine days, on which the clear cut shadow of the wrought iron of the balu-
strade was outlined in black like some capricious vegetation, with a delicacy in the delineation of its
smallest details that seemed to indicate a deliberate application, an artist's satisfaction, and with so
much relief, so velvety a bloom in the restfulness of its dark and felicitous masses that in truth those
broad and leafy reflections on that lake of sunshine seemed aware that they were pledges of tranquility
and happiness.
　　　　 Brief, fading ivy, climbing, fugitive flora!--the most colourless, the most depressing, to many
minds, of all that creep on walls or decorate windows; to me the dearest of them all ever since the day
when it appeared upon our balcony, like the very shadow of the presence of Gilberte, who was perhaps
already in the Champs-Elysses, and as soon as I arrived there would greet me with: "Let's begin at once.
You are on my side." Frail, swept away by a breath, but at the same time in harmony, not with the season,
with the hour; a promise of that immediate pleasure which the day will deny or fulfil, and thereby of the
one paramount immediate happiness, the happiness of love; softer, warmer on the stone than even moss;
robust, a ray of sunlight sufficing for it to spring into life and blossom into joy, even in the heart of
winter.
　　　　 And even on those days when all other vegetation had disappeared, when the fine green hide which co-
vered the trunks of the old trees was hidden beneath the snow; after the snow had ceased to fall, but
when the sky was still too much overcast for me to hope that Gilberte would venture out, then suddenly--
inspiring my mother to say: "Look, it's quite fine now; I think you might perhaps try going to the
Champs-Elysees after all"--on the mantle of snow that swathed the balcony, the sun would appear and weave
a tracery of golden threads and black shadows. That day we found no one there, or else a solitary girl,
on the point of departure, who assured me that Gilberte was not coming. The chairs, deserted by the im-
posing but uninspiring company of governesses, stood empty. Only, near the grass, was sitting a lady of
uncertain age who came in all weathers, dressed always in an identical style, splendid and sombre, to
make whose acquaintance I would have, at that period, sacrificed, had it lain in my power, all the great-
est opportunities in my life to come. For Gilberte went up every day to speak to her; she used to ask
Gilberte for news of her "dearest mother" and it struck me that, if I had known her, I should have been
for Gilberte some one wholly different, some one who knew people in her parents' world. While her grand-
children played together at a little distance, she would sit and read the Debats, which she called "My
old Debats," as, with an aristocratic familiarity, she would say, speaking of the police-sergeant or the
woman who let the chairs, "My old friend the police-sergeant," or "The chair-keeper and I, who are old
friends."





　　　　 The first of these days--to which the snow, a symbol of the powers that were able to deprive me of the
sight of Gilberte, imparted the sadness of a day of separation, almost the aspect of a day of departure,
because it changed the outward form and almost forbade the use of the customary scene of our only encount-
ers, now altered, covered, as it were, in dust-sheets--that day, none the less, marked a stage in the pro-
gress of my love, for it was, in a sense, the first sorrow that she was to share with me. There were only
our two selves of our little company, and to be thus alone with her was not merely like a beginning of
intimacy, but also on her part--as though she had come there solely to please me, and in such weather--it
seemed to me as touching as if, on one of those days on which she had been invited to a party, she had
given it up in order to come to me in the Champs-Elysses; I acquired more confidence in the vitality, in
the future of a friendship which could remain so much alive amid the torpor, the solitude, the decay of
our surroundings; and while she stuffed snowballs down my neck, I smiled lovingly at what seemed to
me at once a predilection that she showed for me in thus tolerating me as her travelling companion in this
new, this wintry land, and a sort of loyalty to me which she preserved through evil times. Presently, one
after another, like shyly bopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow. We got ready to
play and, since this day which had begun so sadly was destined to end in joy, as I went up, before the
game started, to the friend with the sharp voice whom I had heard, that first day, calling Gilberte by
name, she said to me: "No, no, I'm sure you'd much rather be in Gilberte's camp; besides, look, she's sig-
nalling to you." She was in fact summoning me to cross the snowy lawn to her camp, to 'take the field,'
which the sun, by casting over it a rosy gleam, the metallic lustre of old and worn brocades, had turned
into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.





　　　　 But when I arrived at the Champs-Elysses--and, as at first sight it appeared, was in a position to confront
my love, so as to make it undergo the necessary modifications, with its living and independent cause--as
soon as I was in the presence of that Gilberte Swann on the sight of whom I had counted to revive the imag-
es that my tired memory had lost and could not find again, of that Gilberte Swann with whom I had been play-
ing the day before, and whom I had just been prompted to greet, and then to recognise, by a blind instinct
like that which, when we are walking, sets one foot before the other, without giving us time to think what
we are doing, then at once it became as though she and the little girl who had inspired my dreams had been
two different people. If, for instance, I had retained in my memory overnight two fiery eyes above plump
and rosy cheeks, Gilberte's face would now offer me (and with emphasis) something that I distinctly had not
remembered, a certain sharpening and prolongation of the nose which, instantaneously associating itself with
certain others of her features, assumed the importance of those characteristics which, in natural history,
are used to define a species, and transformed her into a little girl of the kind that have pointed snouts.
While I was getting ready to take advantage of this longed-for moment, and to surrender myself to the im-
pression of Gilberte which I had prepared beforehand but could no longer find in my head, to an extent
which would enable me, during the long hours which I must spend alone, to be certain that it was indeed
herself whom I had in mind, that it was indeed my love for her that I was gradually putting together, as one
composes a book, she threw me a ball; and, like the idealist philosopher whose body takes account of the
external world in the reality of which his intellect declines to believe, the same self which had made me
salute her before I had identified her now urged me to catch the ball that she tossed to me (as though
she had been a companion, with whom I had come to play, and not a sister-soul with whom I had come
to be united), made me, out of politeness, until the time came when she had to I go, address a thousand
polite and trivial remarks to her, and so prevented me both from keeping a silence in which I might at last
have laid my hand upon the indispensable, escaped idea, and from uttering the words which might have made
that definite progress in the course of our love on which I was always obliged to count only for the follow-
ing afternoon.
　　　　 There was, however, an occasional development. One day, we had gone with Gilberte to the stall of our
own special vendor, who was always particularly nice to us, since it was to her that M. Swann used to send
for his gingerbread, of which, for reasons of health (he suffered from a ethnic eczema, and from the consti-
pation of the prophets), he consumed a great quantity--Gilberte pointed out to me with a laugh two little
boys who were like the little artist and the little naturalist in the children's storybooks. For one of them
would not have a red stick of barley sugar because he preferred the purple, while the other, with tears in
his eyes, refused a plum which his nurse was buying for him, because, as he finally explained in passionate
tones: "I want the other plum; it's got a worm in it!" I purchased two ha'penny marbles. With admiring eyes
I gazed at the agate marbles, luminous and imprisoned in a bowl apart, which seemed precious to me because
they were as fair and smiling as little girls, and because they cost sixpence each. Gilberte, who was given
a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked me which I thought the prettiest. They had the trans-
parency and mellowness of life itself. I would not have had her sacrifice a single one of them. I should
have liked her to be able to buy them, to liberate them all. Still, I pointed out one that had the same
colour as her eyes. Gilberte took it, turned it round until it shone with a ray of gold, fondled it, paid
its ransom, but at once handed me her captive, saying: "Here, it's for you. Keep it as a souvenir."
　　　　 Another time, being still obsessed by the desire to hear Berma in classic drama, I had asked her whe-
ther she had not a copy of a pamphlet in which Bergotte spoke of Racine, and which was now out of print.
She had told me to let her know the exact title of it, and that evening I had sent her a little telegram,
writing on its envelope the name, Gilberte Swann, which I had so often, traced in my exercise-books. Next
day she brought me in a parcel tied with pink bows and sealed with white wax, the pamphlet, a copy of which
she had managed to find. "You see, it is what you asked me for," she said, taking from her muff the telegram
that I had sent her. But in the address on the pneumatic message--which, only yesterday, was nothing, was
merely a 'little blue' that I had written, and, after a messenger had delivered it to Gilberte's porter and
a servant had taken it to her in her room, had become a thing without value or distinction, one of the 'lit-
tle blues' that she had received in the course of the day--I had difficulty in recognising the futile, strag-
gling lines of my own handwriting beneath the circles stamped on it at the post-office, the inscriptions add-
ed in pencil by a postman, signs of effectual realisation, seals of the external world, violet bands symboli-
cal of life itself, which for the first time came to espouse, to maintain, to raise, to rejoice my dream.
　　　　 And there was another day on which she said to me: "You know, you may call me 'Gilberte'; in any case,
I'm going to call you by your first name. It's too silly not to." Yet she continued for a while to address
me by the more formal 'vous,' and, when I drew her attention to this, smiled, and composing, constructing a
phrase like those that are put into the grammar-books of foreign languages with no other object than to teach
us to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name. Recalling, some time later, what I had felt at
the time, I distinguished the impression of having been held for a moment in her mouth, myself, naked, without
any of the social attributes which belonged equally to her other playmates and, when she used my surname, to
my parents, accessories of which her lips--by the effort she made, a little after her father's manner, to ar-
ticulate the words to which she wished to give a special emphasis--had the air of stripping, of divesting me,
like the skin from a fruit of which one can only swallow the pulp, while her glance, adapting itself to the
same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly and testified to the consciousness,
the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt by accompanying itself with a smile.
　　　　 But at that actual moment, I was not able to appreciate the worth of these new pleasures. They were
given, not by the little girl whom I loved, to me who loved her, but by the other, her with whom I used to play, to
my other self, who possessed neither the memory of the true Gilberte, nor the fixed heart which alone could
have known the value of a happiness for which it alone had longed. Even after I had returned home I did not
taste them, since, every day, the necessity which made me hope that on the morrow I should arrive at the clear,
calm, happy contemplation of Gilberte, that she would at last confess her love for me, explaining to me the
reasons by which she had been obliged, hitherto, to conceal it, that same necessity forced me to regard the
past as of no account, to look ahead of me only, to consider the little advantages that she had given me not
in themselves and as if they were self-sufficient, but like fresh rungs of the ladder on which I might set my
feet, which were going to allow me to advance a step further and finally to attain the happiness which I had
not yet encountered.
　　　　 If at times she showed me these marks of her affection, she troubled me also by seeming not to be
pleased to see me, and this happened often on the very days on which I had most counted for the realisation
of my hopes. I was sure that Gilberte was coming to the Champs-Elysses, and I felt an elation which seemed
merely the anticipation of a great happiness when--going into the drawing-room in the morning to kiss Mamma,
who was already dressed to go out, the coils of her black hair elaborately built up, and her beautiful plump
whiteh hands fragrant still with soap--I had been apprised, on seeing a column of dust standing up by itself
in the air above the piano, and on hearing a barrel-organ playing beneath the window En revenant de la revue,
that the winter had received, until nightfall, an unexpected, radiant visit from a day of spring. While we sat
at luncheon, the lady opposite, by opening her window, had sent packing in the twinkling of an eye from beside
my chair--sweeping at one bound over the whole width of our dining-room--a sunbeam which had settled down there
for its midday rest and returned to continue it there a moment later. At school, during the one o'clock lesson,
the sun made me sick with impatience and boredom as it trailed a golden glow across my desk, like an invitation
to the feast at which I could not myself arrive before three o'clock, until the moment when Francoise came to
fetch me at the school-gate, and we made our way towards the Champs-Elysses through streets bejewelled with
sunlight, dense with people, over which the balconies, detached by the sun and made vaporous, seemed to float in
front of the houses like clouds of gold. Alas! in the Champs-Elysses I found no Gilberte; she had not yet arriv-
ed. Motionless on the lawn nurtured by the invisible sun which, here and there, kindled to a flame the point of
a blade of grass, while the pigeons that had alighted upon it had the appearance of ancient sculptures which the
gardener's pick had heaved to the surface of a hallowed soil, I stood with my eyes fixed on the horizon, expect-
ing at every moment to see appear the form of Gilberte following that of her governess, behind the statue that
seemed to be holding out the child, which it had in its arms, and which glistened in the stream of light, to
receive benediction from the sun. The old lady who read the Debats was sitting on her chair, in her invariable
place, and had just accosted a park-keeper, with a friendly wave of her hands towards him as she exclaimed "What
a lovely day!" And when the chair-woman came up to collect her penny, with an infinity of simperings and affecta-
tions she folded the ticket away inside her glove, as though it had been a posy of flowers, for which she had
sought, in gratitude to the donor, the most becoming place upon her person. When she had found it, she performed
a circular movement with her neck, straightened her boa, and fastened upon the collector, as she shewed her the
end of yellow paper that stuck out over her bare wrist, the bewitching smile with which a woman says to a young
man, pointing to her bosom: "You see, I'm wearing your roses!"





　　　　 He responded politely to the salutations of Gilberte's companions, even to mine, for all that he was no
longer on good terms with my family, but without appearing to know who I was. (This reminded me that he had con-
stantly seen me in the country; a memory which I had retained, but kept out of sight, because, since I had seen
Gilberte again, Swann had become to me pre-eminently her father, and no longer the Combray Swann; as the ideas
which, nowadays, I made his name connote were different from the ideas in the system of which it was formerly
comprised, which I utilised not at all now when I had occasion to think of him, he had become a new, another
person; still I attached him by an artificial, secondary, and transversal thread to our former guest; and as
nothing had any longer any value for me save in the extent to which my love might profit by it, it was with a
spasm of shame and of regret at not being able to erase them from my memory that I recaptured the years in
which, in the eyes of this same Swann who was at this moment before me in the Champs-Elys馥s, and to whom, for-
tunately, Gilberte had perhaps not mentioned my name, I had so often, in the evenings, made myself ridiculous
by sending to ask Mamma to come upstairs to my room to say good-night to me, while she was drinking coffee with
him and my father and my grandparents at the table in the garden.) He told Gilberte that she might play one
game; he could wait for a quarter of an hour; and, sitting down, just like anyone else, on an iron chair, paid
for his ticket with that hand which Philippe VII had so often held in his own, while we began our game upon the
lawn, scattering the pigeons, whose beautiful, iridescent bodies (shaped like hearts and, as it werer, the li-
lacs of the feathered kingdom) took refuge as in so many sanctuaries, one on the great basin of stone, to which
its beak, as it disappeared below the rim, imparted the gesture and assigned the purpose of offering in abun-
dance the fruit or grain at which it appeared to be pecking, another on the head of the statue, which it appear-
ed to crown with one of those enamelled objects whose polychrome varies the monotony of the stone in certain
classical works, and with an attribute which, when the goddess bears it, earns her a particular epithet and
makes of her, as a different Christian name makes of a mortal, a new divinity.





　　　　 I repeated to myself, stifling my sobs, the words in which Gilberte had given utterance to her joy at the
prospect of not coming back, for a long time, to the Champs-Elysses. But already the charm with which, by the
mere act of thinking, my mind was filled as soon as it thought of her, and the special, unique position, however
painful, in which I was inevitably placed in relation to Gilberte by the inner constraint of a mental habit, had
begun to lend a romantic aura even to that mark of her indifference, and in the midst of my tears my lips shaped
themselves in a smile which was simply the timid adumbration of a kiss. And when the time came for the postman I
said to myself, that evening as on every other: "I am going to have a letter from Gilberte, she is going to tell
me, at last, that she has never ceased to love me, and to explain to me the mysterious reason by which she has
been forced to conceal her love from me until now, to put on the appearance of being able to be happy without
seeing me; the reason for which she has assumed the form of the other Gilberte, who is simply a companion."
Every evening I would beguile myself into imagining this letter, believing that I was actually reading it,
reciting each of its sentences in turn. Suddenly I would stop, in alarm. I had realised that, if I was to receive
a letter from Gilberte, it could not, in any case, be this letter, since it was I myself who had just composed it.
And from that moment I would strive to keep my thoughts clear of the words which I should have liked her to write
to me, from fear lest, by first selecting them myself, I should be excluding just those identical words--the dear-
est, the most desired--from the field of possible events. Even if, by an almost impossible coincidence, it had been
precisely the letter of my invention that Gilberte had addressed to me of her own accord, recognising my own work
in it I should not have had the impression that I was receiving something that had not originated in myself, some-
thing real, something new, a happiness external to my mind, independent of my will, a gift indeed from love.
　　　　 While I waited I read over again a page which, although it had not been written to me by Gilberte, came to me,
none the less, from her, that page by Bergotte upon the beauty of the old myths from which Racine drew his inspira-
tion, which (with the agate marble) I always kept within reach. I was touched by my friend's kindness in having
procured the book for me; and as everyone is obliged to find some reason for his passion, so much so that he is
glad to find in the creature whom he loves qualities which (he has learned by reading or in conversation) are wor-
thy to excite a man's love, that he assimilates them by imitation and makes out of them fresh reasons for his love,
even although these qualities be diametrically opposed to those for which his love would have sought, so long as it
was spontaneous--as Swann, before my day, had sought to establish the aesthetic basis of Odette's beauty--I, who
had at first loved Gilberte, in Combray days, on account of all the unknown element in her life into which I would fain
have plunged headlong, have undergone reincarnation, discarding my own separate existence as a thing that no longer
mattered, I thought now, as of an inestimable advantage, that of this, my own, my too familiar, my contemptible
existence Gilberte might one day become the humble servant, the kindly, the comforting collaborator, who in the
evenings, helping me in my work, would collate for me the texts of rare pamphlets. As for Bergotte, that infinitely
wise, almost divine old man, because of whom I had first, before I had even seen her, loved Gilberte, now it was
for Gilberte's sake, chiefly, that I loved him. With as much pleasure as the pages that he had written about Racine,
I studied the wrapper, folded under the great white seals of wax tied with festoons of mauve ribbon in which she
had brought them to me. I kissed the agate marble, which was the better part of my love's heart, the part that was
not frivolous but faithful, and, for all that it was adorned with the mysterious charm of Gilberte's life, dwelt
close beside me, inhabited my room, shared my bed. But the beauty of that stone, and the beauty also of those pages
of Bergotte which I was glad to associate with the idea of my love for Gilberte, as if, in the moments when it
seemed no more than a void, they gave it a kind of consistency, were, I perceived, anterior to that love and in no
way resembled it; their elements had been determined by the writer's talent or the laws of mineralogy, before ever
Gilberte had known me, nothing in book or stone would have been different if Gilberte had not loved me, and there
was nothing, consequently, that authorised me to read in them a message of happiness. And while my love, incessantly
waiting for the morrow to bring the avowal of Gilberte's for me, destroyed, unravelled every evening the ill-done
work of the day, in some shadowed part of my being an unknown seamstress refused to abandon the discarded
threads, but collected and rearranged them, without any thought of pleasing me or of toiling for my happiness, in
the different order which she gave to all her handiwork. Showing no special interest in my love, not beginning by
deciding that I was loved, she gathered those of Gilberte's actions that had seemed to me inexplicable and her
faults which I had excused. Then, one and all, they took on a meaning. It seemed to tell me, this new arrangement,
that when I saw Gilberte, instead of coming to me in the Champs-Elysses, going to a party, or on errands with her
governess, when I saw her prepared for an absence that would extend over the New Year holidays, I was wrong in
thinking, in saying: "It is because she is frivolous," or "easily lead." For she would have ceased to be either if
she had loved me, and if she had been forced to obey it would have been with the same despair in her heart that I
felt on the days when I did not see her. It shewed me further, this new arrangement, that I ought, after all, to
know what it was to love, since I loved Gilberte; it drew my attention to the constant anxiety that I had to 'show
off' before her, by reason of which I tried to persuade my mother to get for Francoise a waterproof coat and a hat
with a blue feather, or, better still, to stop sending with me to the Champs-Elysses an attendant with whom I blush-
ed to be seen (to all of which my mother replied that I was not fair to Francoise, that she was an excellent woman
and devoted to us all) and also that sole, exclusive need to see Gilberte, the result of which was that, months in
advance, I could think of nothing but how to find out at what date she would be leaving Paris and where she was going,
feeling that the most attractive country in the world would be but a place of exile if she were not to be there, and
asking only to be allowed to stay for ever in Paris, so long as I might see her in the Champs-Elysses; and it had lit-
tle difficulty in making me see that neither my anxiety nor my need could be justified by anything in Gilberte's conduct.
She, on the contrary, was genuinely fond of her governess, without troubling herself over what I might choose to think
about it. It seemed quite natural to her not to come to the Champs-Elysess if she had to go shopping with Mademoiselle,
delightful if she had to go out somewhere with her mother. And even supposing that she would ever have allowed me to
spend my holidays in the same place as herself, when it came to choosing that place she considered her parents' wishes,
a thousand different amusements of which she had been told, and not at all that it should be the place to which my fam-
ily were proposing to send me. When she assured me (as sometimes happened) that she liked me less than some other of her
friends, less than she had liked me the day before, because by my clumsiness I had made her side lose a game, I would beg
her pardon, I would beg her to tell me what I must do in order that she should begin again to like me as much as, or more
than the rest; I hoped to hear her say that that was already my position; I besought her; as though she had been able to
modify her affection for me as she or I chose, to give me pleasure, merely by the words that she would utter, as my good
or bad conduct should deserve. Was I, then, not yet aware that what I felt, myself, for her, depended neither upon her
actions nor upon my desires?
　　　　 It showed me finally, the new arrangement planned by the invisible seamstress, that, if we find ourselves hoping
that the actions of a person who has hitherto caused us anxiety may prove not to have been sincere, they shed in their
wake a light which our hopes are powerless to extinguish, a light to which, rather than to our hopes, we must put the
question, what will be that person's actions on the morrow.





　　　　 "Oh, now I know whom you mean," cried my mother, while I felt myself grow red all over with shame. "On guard! on
guard!--as your grandfather says. And so it's she that you think so wonderful? Why, she's perfectly horrible, and always
has been. She's the widow of a bailiff. You can't remember, when you were little, all the trouble I used to have to avoid
her at your gymnastic lessons, where she was always trying to get hold of me--I didn't know the woman, of course--to tell
me that you were 'much too nice-looking for a boy.' She has always had an insane desire to get to know people, and she
must be quite insane, as I have always thought, if she really does know Mme. Swann. For even if she does come of very
common people, I have never heard anything said against her character. But she must always be forcing herself upon strang-
ers. She is, really, a horrible woman, frightfully vulgar, and besides, she is always creating awkward situations."
　　　　 As for Swann, in my attempts to resemble him, I spent the whole time, when I was at table, in drawing my finger along my
nose and in rubbing my eyes. My father would exclaim: "The child's a perfect idiot, he's becoming quite impossible." More than
all else I should have liked to be as bald as Swann. He appeared to me to be a creature so extraordinary that I found it impos-
sible to believe that people whom I knew and often saw knew him also, and that in the course of the day anyone might run a-
gainst him. And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she
had done that afternoon, merely by the words: "By the way, guess whom I saw at the Trois Quartiers--at the umbrella count-
er--Swann!" brought forth in the midst of her narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom. What a melancholy pleasure
to learn that Swann, that very afternoon, his supernatural form silhouetted against the crowd, had gone to buy an umbrella.
Among the events of the day, great and small, but all equally insignificant, that one alone aroused in me those peculiar vi-
brations by which my love for Gilberte was perpetually stirred. My father complained that I took no interest in anything,
because I did not listen while he was speaking of the political developments that might follow the visit of King Theodosius,
at that moment in France as the nation's guest and (it was hinted) ally. And yet how intensely interested I was to know whe-
ther Swann had been wearing his hooded cape!





　　　　 Nor did either she or my father seem to find, in speaking of Swann's family, or the title of honorary stockbroker, a
pleasure that surpassed all others. My imagination had isolated and hallowed in social Paris a certain family, just as it had
set apart in structural Paris a certain house, whose entrance it had sculpted and its windows bejewelled. But these ornaments
I alone had eyes to see. Just as my father and mother looked upon the house in which Swann lived as one that closely resem-
bled the other houses built at the same period in the neighbourhood of the Bois, so Swann's family seemed to them to be in the
same category as many other families of stockbrokers. Their judgment was more or less favourable according to the extent to
which the family in question shared in merits that were common to the rest of the universe, and there was about it nothing that
they could call unique. What, on the other hand, they did appreciate in the Swanns they found in equal, if not in greater measure
elsewhere. And so, after admitting that the house was in a good position, they would go on to speak of some other house that
was in a better, but had nothing to do with Gilberte, or of financiers on a larger scale than her grandfather had been; and if they
had appeared, for a moment, to be of my opinion, that was a mistake which was very soon corrected. For in order to distinguish
in all Gilberte's surroundings an indefinable quality analogous, in the scale of emotions, to what in the scale of colours is called
infra-red, a supplementary sense of perception was required, with which love, for the time being, had endowed me; and this my
parents lacked.
　　　　 On the days when Gilberte had warned me that she would not be coming to the Champs-Elysses, I would try to arrange my
walks so that I should be brought into some kind of contact with her. Sometimes I would lead Francoise on a pilgrimage to the
house in which the Swanns lived, making her repeat to me unendingly all that she had learned from the governess with regard to
Mme. Swann. "It seems, she puts great faith in medals. She would never think of starting on a journey if she had heard an owl
hoot, or the death-watch in the wall, or if she had seen a cat at midnight, or if the furniture had creaked. Oh yes! she's a most
religious lady, she is!" I was so madly in love with Gilberte that if, on our way, I caught sight of their old butler taking the dog out,
my emotion would bring me to a standstill, I would fasten on his white whiskers eyes that melted with passion. And Francoise
would rouse me with: "What's wrong with you now, child?" and we would continue on our way until we reached their gate, where a
porter, different from every other porter in the world, and saturated, even to the braid on his livery, with the same melancholy
charm that I had felt to be latent in the name of Gilberte, looked at me as though he knew that I was one of those whose natural
unworthiness would for ever prevent them from penetrating into the mysteries of the life inside, which it was his duty to guard,
and over which the ground-floor windows appeared conscious of being protectingly closed, with far less resemblance, between the
nobly sweeping arches of their muslin curtains, to any other windows in the world than to Gilberte's glancing eyes. On other days
we would go along the boulevards, and I would post myself at the corner of the Rue Duphot; I had heard that Swann was often to be
seen passing there, on his way to the dentist's; and my imagination so far differentiated Gilberte's father from the rest of huma-
nity, his presence in the midst of a crowd of real people introduced among them so miraculous an element, that even before we
reached the Madeleine I would be trembling with emotion at the thought that I was approaching a street from which that supernatur-
al apparition might at any moment burst upon me unawares.
　　　　 But most often of all, on days when I was not to see Gilberte, as I had heard that Mme. Swann walked almost every day along
the Allee des Acacias, round the big lake, and in the Allee de la Reine Marguerite, I would lead Francoise to the Bois de Boulogne.
It was to me like one of those zoological gardens in which one sees assembled together a variety of flora and contrasted land-
scapes, where from a hill one passes to a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a pit, another hill, a marsh, but knows that they are
there only to enable the hippopotamus, zebra, crocodile, albino rabbit, bear and heron to disport themselves in a natural or a pictur-
esque setting; it, the Bois, equally complex, uniting a multitude of little worlds, distinct and separate--alternating a plantation
of redwood trees, American oaks, like an experimental forest in Virginia, next to a fir-wood by the edge of the lake, or a grove
from which would suddenly emerge, in her raiment of soft fur, with the large, appealing eyes of a dumb animal, a hastening walker--
was the Garden of Woman; and like the myrtle-alley in the Aeneid, planted for their delight with trees of one kind only, the Allee
des Acacias was thronged by the famous beauties of the day. As, from a long way off, the sight of the jutting crag from which it
dives into the pool thrills with joy the children who know that they are going to see the seal, so, long before I reached the
acacias, their fragrance which, radiating all around, made one aware of the approach and the singularity of a vegetable personality
at once powerful and soft, then, as I drew near, the glimpsed summit of their lightly tossing foliage, in its easy grace, its co-
quettish outline, its delicate fabric, on which hundreds of flowers had swooped, like winged and throbbing colonies of precious
insects, and finally their name itself, feminine, indolent, dulcet, made my heart beat, but with a social longing, like those
waltzes which remind us only of the names of the fair dancers, called aloud as they entered the ballroom. I had been told that I
should see in the alley certain women of fashion, who, in spite of their not all having husbands, were constantly mentioned in
conjunction with Mme. Swann, but most often by their professional names;?their new names, when they had any, being but a sort of
incognito, a veil which those who would speak of them were careful to draw aside, so as to make themselves understood. Thinking
that Beauty--in the order of feminine elegance--was governed by occult laws into the knowledge of which they had been initiated,
and that they had the power to realise it, I accepted before seeing them, like the truth of a coming revelation, the appearance
of their clothes, of their carriages and horses, of a thousand details among which I placed my faith as in an inner soul which
gave the cohesion of a work of art to that ephemeral and shifting pageant. But it was Mme. Swann whom I wished to see, and I
waited for her to go past, as deeply moved as though she were Gilberte, whose parents, saturated, like everything in her envir-
onment, with her own special charm, excited in me as keen a passion as she did herself, indeed a still more painful disturbance
(since their point of contact with her was that intimate, that internal part of her life which was hidden from me), and further-
more, for I very soon learned, as we shall see in due course, that they did not like my playing with her, that feeling of venera-
tion which we always have for those who hold, and exercise without restraint, the power to do us an injury.
　　　　 I assigned the first place, in the order of aesthetic merit and of social grandeur, to simplicity, when I saw Mme. Swann on
foot, in a 'polonaise' of plain cloth, a little toque on her head trimmed with a pheasant's wing, a bunch of violets in her bosom,
hastening along the Allee des Acacias as if it had been merely the shortest way back to her own house, and acknowledging with a
rapid glance the courtesy of the gentlemen in carriages, who, recognising her figure at a distance, were raising their hats to her
and saying to one another that there was never anyone so well turned out as she. But instead of simplicity it was to ostentation
that I must assign the first place if, after I had compelled Francoise, who could hold out no longer, and complained that her legs
were 'giving' beneath her, to stroll up and down with me for another hour, I saw at length, emerging from the Porte Dauphine,
figuring for me a royal dignity, the passage of a sovereign, an impression such as no real Queen has ever since been able to give
me, because my notion of their power has been less vague, and more founded upon experience--borne along by the flight of a pair
of fiery horses, slender and shapely as one sees them in the drawings of Constantin Guys, carrying on its box an enormous
coachman, furred like a cossack, and by his side a diminutive groom like "the late Beaudenord's tiger," I saw--or rather I felt its
outlines engraved upon my heart by a clean and poignant wound--a matchless victoria, built rather high, and hinting, through the
extreme modernity of its appointments, at the forms of an earlier day, in the depths of which Mme Swann negligently reclined, her
hair, now blonde with one grey lock, encircled with a narrow band of flowers, usually violets, from which floated down long veils, a
lilac parasol in her hand, on her lips an ambiguous smile in which I read only the benign condescension of Majesty, though it was
pre-eminently the provocative smile of the courtesan, which she graciously bestowed upon the men who greeted her. That smile
was, in reality, saying to one: "Oh yes, I remember very well; it was wonderful!" to another: "How I should have loved to! It was bad
luck!", to a third: "Yes, if you like! I must just follow in the procession for a minute, then as soon as I can I'll break away."
When strangers passed a lazy smile still played about her lips, as though in expectation or remembrance of some friend, which made
people say: "What a lovely woman!". And for certain men only she had a sour, strained, shy, cold smile which meant: "Yes, you old
goat, I know that you've got a tongue like a viper, that you can't keep quiet for a moment. But do you suppose that I care what
you say?" Coquelin passed, talking, in a group of listening friends, and with a sweeping wave of his hand bade a theatrical good
day to the people in the carriages. But I thought only of Mme. Swann, and pretended to have not yet seen her, for I knew that,
when she reached the pigeon-shooting ground, she would tell her coachman to 'break away' and to stop the carriage, so that she
might come back on foot. And on days when I felt that I had the courage to pass close by her I would drag Francoise off in that
direction; until the moment came when I saw Mme. Swann, letting trail behind her the long train of her lilac skirt, dressed, as
the populace imagine queens to be dressed, in rich attire such as no other woman might wear, lowering her eyes now and then to
study the handle of her parasol, paying scant attention to the passers-by, as though the important thing for her, her one object
in being there, was to take exercise, without thinking that she was seen, and that every head was turned towards her. Sometimes,
however, when she had looked back to call her dog to her, she would cast, almost imperceptibly, a sweeping glance round about her.





　　　　 That complexity of the Bois de Boulogne which made it an artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of
the word, a Garden, I captured again, this year, as I crossed it on my way to Trianon, on one of those mornings, early in Nov-
ember, when in Paris, if we stay indoors, being so near and yet prevented from witnessing the transformation scene of autumn,
which is drawing so rapidly to a close without our witnessing it, we feel a veritable fever of yearning for the fallen leaves
that can go so far as to keep us awake at night. Into my closed room they had been drifting already for a month, summoned there
by my desire to see them, slipping between my thoughts and the object, whatever it might be, upon which I was trying to concen-
trate them, whirling in front of me like those brown spots that sometimes, whatever we may be looking at, will seem to be dancing
or swimming before our eyes. And on that morning, no longer hearing the splash of the rain as on the preceding days, seeing the
smile of fine weather at the corners of my drawn curtains, as at the corners of closed lips betraying the secret of their happi-
ness, I had felt that I might be able to look at those yellow leaves with the light shining through them, in their supreme beau-
ty; and being no more able to restrain myself from going to look at the trees than, in my childhood's days, when the wind howled
in the chimney, I had been able to resist the longing to visit the sea, I had risen and left the house to go to Trianon, passing
through the Bois de Boulogne. It was the hour and the season in which the Bois seems, perhaps, most multiform, not only because
it is the most subdivided, but because it is subdivided in a different way. Even in the unwooded parts, where the horizon is
large, here and there against the background of a dark and distant mass of trees, now leafless or still keeping their summer fol-
iage unchanged, a double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed, as in a picture just begun, to be the only thing painted so far by
an artist who had not yet laid any colour on the rest, and to be offering their cloister, in full daylight, for the casual exer-
cise of the human figures that would be added to the picture later on.
　　　　 Further off, at a place where the trees were still all green, one alone, small, stunted, lopped, but stubborn in its resist-
ance, was tossing in the breeze an ugly mane of red. Elsewhere, again, might be seen the first awakening of this Maytime of the
leaves, and those of an ampelopsis, a smiling miracle, like a red hawthorn flowering in winter, had that very morning all 'come
out,' so to speak, in blossom. And the Bois had the temporary, unfinished, artificial look of a nursery garden or a park in which,
either for some botanic purpose or in preparation for a festival, there have been embedded among the trees of commoner growth,
which have not yet been uprooted and transplanted elsewhere, a few rare specimens, with fantastic foliage, which seem to be
clearing all round themselves an empty space, making room, giving air, diffusing light. Thus it was the time of year at which the
Bois de Boulogne displays more separate characteristics, assembles more distinct elements in a composite whole than at any other.
It was also the time of day. In places where the trees still kept their leaves, they seemed to have undergone an alteration of
their substance from the point at which they were touched by the sun's light, still, at this hour in the morning, almost hori-
zontal, as it would be again, a few hours later, at the moment when in the gathering dusk it flames up like a lamp, projects afar
over the leaves a warm and artificial glow, and set ablaze the few topmost boughs of a tree that itself remains unchanged, a sombre
incombustible candelabrum beneath its flaming crest. At one point it thickened the leaves of the chestnut-trees as it were like
bricks, and, like a piece of yellow Persian masonry patterned in blue, cemented them upon the sky; at another, it detached them
from the sky, towards which they stretched out their curling, golden fingers. Half-way up the trunk of a tree draped with Virginia
creeper, it had grafted and brought to blossom, too dazzling to be clearly distinguished, an enormous bouquet as of red flowers,
perhaps of a new variety of carnation. The different parts of the Bois, so easily confounded in summer in the density and monotony
of their universal green, were now clearly divided. Open spaces made visible the apporach to almost every one of them, or else a
splendid mass of foliage stood out before it like an oriflamme. I could make out, as on a coloured map, Armenonville, the Pre
Catalan, Madrid, the Race Course and the shore of the lake. Here and there would appear some meaningless erection, a sham grotto,
a mill for which the trees made room by standing aside from it, or which was borne upon the soft green platform of a grassy lawn.
One sensed that the Bois was not only a wood, that it existed for a purpose alien to the life of its trees; the exaltation that I
felt was due not only to admiration of the autumn tints but to an obscure desire--wellspring of a joy which the heart feels at
first without being conscious of its cause, without understanding that it results from no external impulse. Thus I gazed at the
trees with an unsatisfied longing which went beyond them and, without my knowledge, directed itself towards that masterpiece of
beautiful strolling women which the trees enframed for a few hours every day. I walked towards the Allee des Acacias. I passed
through groves in which the morning light, breaking them into new sections, lopped and trimmed the trees, united different trunks
in marriage, made nosegays of their branches. It would skilfully draw towards it a pair of trees; making deft use of the sharp
chisel of light and shade, it would cut away from each of them half of its trunk and branches, and, weaving together the two
halves that remained, would make of them either a single pillar of shade, defined by the surrounding sunlight, or a single lum-
inous phantom whose artificial, quivering contour was encompassed in a network of inky shadows. When a ray of sunshine gilded
the highest branches, they seemed, soaked and still dripping with a sparkling moisture, to have emerged alone from the liquid,
emerald-green atmosphere in which the whole grove was plunged as though beneath the sea. For the trees continued to live by
their own vitality, which, when they had no longer any leaves, gleamed more brightly still on the nap of green velvet that carpeted
their trunks, or in the white enamel of the globes of mistletoe that were scattered among the topmost branches of the poplars,
rounded as are the sun and moon in Michelangelo's 'Creation.' But, forced for so many years now, by a sort of grafting process,
to share the life of feminine humanity, they called to my mind the figure of the dryad, the fair worldling, swiftly walking,
brightly coloured, whom they shelter with their branches as she passes beneath them, and obliged to acknowledge, as they them-
selves acknowledged, the power of the season; they recalled to me the happy days when I was young and had faith, when I would
hasten eagerly to the spots where masterpieces of female elegance would be incarnate for a few moments beneath the unconscious,
accommodating boughs. But the beauty for which the firs and acacias of the Bois de Boulogne made me long, more disquieting in
that respect than the chestnuts and lilacs of Trianon which I was about to see, was not fixed somewhere outside myself in the
relics of an historical period, in works of art, in a little temple of love at whose door was piled an oblation of autumn leaves
ribbed with gold. I reached the shore of the lake; I walked on as far as the pigeon-shooting ground. The idea of perfection which
I had within me I had bestowed, in that other time, upon the height of a victoria, upon the raking thinness of those horses,
frenzied and light as wasps on the wing, with bloodshot eyes like the cruel steeds of Diomed, which now, smitten by a desire to
sea again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me, many years before, along the same paths, I wished
to see renewed before my eyes at the moment when Mme. Swann's enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his
fist, and as infantile as Saint George in the picture, endeavoured to curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which
they thundered along the ground. Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars driven each by a moustached mechanic, with a tall
footman towering by his side. I wished to hold before my bodily eyes, that I might know whether they were indeed as charming as
they appeared to the eyes of memory, little hats, so low-crowned as to seem no more than garlands about the brows of women. All
the hats now were immense; covered with fruits and flowers and all manner of birds. In place of the lovely gowns in which Mme.
Swann walked like a Queen, appeared Greco-Saxon tunics, with Tanagra folds, or sometimes, in the Directoire style, 'Liberty
chiffons' sprinkled with flowers like sheets of wallpaper. On the heads of the gentlemen who might have been eligible to stroll
with Mme. Swann in the Allee de la Reine Marguerite, I found not the grey 'tile' hats of old, nor any other kind. They walked
the Bois bare-headed. And seeing all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the faith which, applied to them,
would have given them consistency, unity, life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without reality, con-
taining in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have endeavoured as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in a
picture. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief
vanishes, there survives it--more and more vigorously, so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting
reality to new things--a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in
ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause--the death of the gods.
　　　　 How horrible! I exclaimed to myself. Can anyone find these motor-cars are as elegant as the old carriage-and-pair? I dare
say I am too old now--but I was not intended for a world in which women shackle themselves in garments that are not even made
of cloth. To what purpose shall I walk among these trees if there is nothing left now of the assembly that used to gather beneath
this delicate tracery of reddening leaves, if vulgarity and folly have supplanted the exquisite thing that their branches once
framed? How horrible! My consolation is to think of the women whom I have known, in the past, now that there is no standard
left of elegance. But how can the people who watch these dreadful creatures hobble by, beneath hats on which have been heaped
the spoils of aviary or garden-bed, how could they even imagine the charm that there was in the sight of Mme. Swann in a simple
mauve bonnet, or a little hat with a single iris sticking up out of it? Could I even have made them understand the emotion that
I used to feel on winter mornings, when I met Mme. Swann on foot, in an otter-skin coat, with a woollen cap from which stuck out
two blade-like partridge-feathers, but enveloped also in the artificial warmth of her own house, which was suggested by nothing
more than the bunch of violets crushed into her bosom, whose flowering, vivid and blue against the grey sky, the freezing air,
the naked boughs, had the same charming effect of using the season and the weather merely as a setting, and of living actually
in a human atmosphere, in the atmosphere of this woman, as had in the vases and jardinieres of her drawing-room, beside the
blazing fire, in front of the silk-covered settee, the flowers that looked out through closed windows at the falling snow? But
it would not have sufficed me that the costumes alone should still have been the same as in those distant years. Because of the
solidarity that binds together the different parts of a general impression, parts that our memory keeps in a balanced whole, of
which we are not permitted to subtract or to decline any fraction, I should have liked to be able to pass the rest of the day
with one of those women, over a cup of tea, in an apartment with dark-painted walls (as Mme. Swann's were still in the year af-
ter that in which the first part of this story ends) against which would glow the orange flame, the red combustion, the pink
and white flickering of her chrysanthemums in the twilight of a November evening, in moments similar to those in which (as we
shall see) I had not managed to discover the pleasures for which I longed. But now, albeit they had led to nothing, those mo-
ments struck me as having been charming enough in themselves. I sought to find them again as I remembered them. Alas! there
was nothing now but flats decorated in the Louis XVI style, all white paint, with hortensias in blue enamel. Moreover, people
did not return to Paris, now, until much later. Mme. Swann would have written to me, from a country house, that she would not
be in town before February, had I asked her to reconstruct for me the elements of that memory which I felt to belong to a dis-
tant era, to a date in time towards which it was forbidden me to ascend again the fatal slope, the elements of that longing
which had become, itself, as inaccessible as the pleasure that it had once vainly pursued. And I should have required also
that they be the same women, those whose costume interested me because, at a time when I still had faith, my imagination had
individualised them and had provided each of them with a legend. Alas! in the acacia-avenue--the myrtle-alley--I did see some
of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what they had once been, wandering, desperately searching for hea-
ven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The
sun had gone. Nature was resuming its reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Ely-
sian Garden of Woman; above the gimcrack windmill the real sky was grey; the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in
little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds flew swiftly over the Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries perched,
one after another, on the great oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with Dodonaic majesty, seemed to proclaim the
inhuman emptiness of this deconsecrated forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the
pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from
their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme Swann did not
appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places we have known belong do not
belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the
contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular
moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.