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Title: Swann's Way

Author: Marcel Proust

Translator: C. K. Scott-Moncrieff

Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7178]
Most recently updated: May 1, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7178

Credits: Eric Eldred and David Widger

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SWANN'S WAY

Remembrance Of Things Past, Volume One

By Marcel Proust

Translated From The French By C. K. Scott Moncrieff

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1922

Contents

OVERTURE
COMBRAY
SWANN IN LOVE
PLACE-NAMES: THE
NAME

OVERTURE
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out
my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say
"I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to
go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I
imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been
thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading,
but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed
actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the
rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for
some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it 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 former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the
subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to
choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight
would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of
darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps,
for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a
matter dark indeed.
I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of
trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like
the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted
countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the
nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory
by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual
things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an
unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night;
and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.
I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my
pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood. Or I would
strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an
invalid, who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange

hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of
daylight shewing under his bedroom door. Oh, joy of joys! it is morning.
The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and some one will come
to look after him. The thought of being made comfortable 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; some one has turned out the gas; the last servant has gone to
bed, and he must lie all night in agony with no one to bring him any help.
I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches
only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to
open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour,
in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy upon the
furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed but an
insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to
share. Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had returned without the least effort
to an earlier stage 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—on which they were finally cropped from my
head. I had forgotten that event during my sleep; I remembered it again
immediately I had succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my
great-uncle's fingers; still, 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, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman
would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some
strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the
point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification.
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 remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a
moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her kiss, my body bent beneath
the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance
of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon
myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a
journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed
to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their

fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish,
until I had forgotten the maiden 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 host. Instinctively,
when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own
position on the earth's surface and the amount of 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 gets drowsy in some even more abnormal
position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will fall
topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed
through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine
that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country. But for
me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely
to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I
had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was,
I could not 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 of human qualities than the cave-
dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of
various other 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 and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a
half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-
down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts 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, and by
the immobility of our conceptions 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 would be moving round me through the
darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move,

would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an
orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall
lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the
house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its
ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which
it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing,
adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it
remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my
brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what
they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to
identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession
what the bed was like, where the doors were, how 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 had found there when I awoke. The stiffened side
underneath my body 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 gone to sleep after all, and
Mamma never came to say good night!" for I was in the country with my
grandfather, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was
lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind
should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering
flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn
and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble
in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant
days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly
penned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly
awake.
Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid away
in another direction; I was in my room in Mme. 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 Mme. 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 existence at Tansonville now with
Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of pleasure that I now 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; while the
bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep instead of dressing for
dinner, from afar off I can see it, 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 spell of uncertainty as to where
I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty
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, built up 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 an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with
the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole;
rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel 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 savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break
out again in flame: in 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 ran across
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 evening, 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 keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or
sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really
unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns
which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate
where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that 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
my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses,
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; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which
stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked
to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that
room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its
moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the
room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so
many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes
staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my
heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the
clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of
the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering
grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom!
that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for
weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all
that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would
never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
Certainly I was now well awake; my body had turned about 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 it was no good my knowing that I was not in any of
those houses of which, in the stupid moment of waking, if I had not caught
sight exactly, I could still believe in their possible presence; for memory
was now 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, Doncières,
Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the places and people that 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 up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my
mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my
melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had 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: in the manner 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 transitory
window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of
lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary
impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but
for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For
now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a
room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived,
by train, for the first time.
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design,
issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the slope
of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the castle
of poor Geneviève 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
Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation, 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 an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a
moment and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by my 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 the
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
all material obstacles—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking
each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the door-handle,
for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float invincibly his
red cloak or his pale face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never
shewing any sign of trouble at such a transubstantiation.

And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which
seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed around
me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the
discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room
which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no
more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of custom being
destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things. The
door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other
doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open 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 run 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 Geneviève 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 is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the
country," and used to carry on endless discussions 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 character 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 Françoise had rushed
indoors with the precious wicker armchairs, so that they should not get
soaked—you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed
by the storm, pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might
be more free to imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would
say, "At last one can breathe!" and would run up and down the soaking

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
morning if the weather were going to improve—with her keen, jerky little
step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the
intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of my
education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that
was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the spots of
mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which always
provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh despair.
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: that was if (at
one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her, 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 from drinking brandy!" For, simply to tease her (she had
brought so foreign a type of mind into my father's family that everyone
made a joke of it), 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 become annoyed and swallow his few drops all the same, and she
would go out again sad and discouraged, but still smiling, for she was so
humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others, and her continual
subordination of herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face
blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces,
had no trace in it 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
yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted
on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of
her in her weakness conquered before she began, but still making the futile
endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass—all these were
things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well accustomed
as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a happy determination
which deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting; 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 from 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, I 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 occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude;
reading or dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire. Alas! I little knew
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 breach of the rules by her husband, during those endless
perambulations, afternoon and evening, in which we used to see passing up
and down, obliquely raised towards the heavens, her handsome face with its
brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with age had acquired almost the purple
hue of tilled fields in autumn, covered, if she were walking abroad, by a
half-lifted veil, while upon them either the cold or some sad reflection
invariably 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 keenest sorrow. So
much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it
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 again," 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 me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my
father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to
try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all,
which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my
asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the
threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed all the sense of

tranquillity she had brought me a moment before, when she bent her loving
face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host, for an act of
Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of 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 guests to dinner, and therefore she did not come at
all. Our 'guests' were practically 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 beneath the big chestnut-tree and round the iron
table, we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the large and noisy rattle
which heralded and deafened as he approached with its ferruginous,
interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who had put it out
of action by coming in 'without ringing,' but the double peal—timid, oval,
gilded—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 unpleasant for 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 would be
sent out as a scout, always happy to find an excuse for an additional turn in
the garden, which she would utilise 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, after the
barber had smoothed it down, to make it stick out properly round his head.
And there we would all stay, hanging on the words which would fall
from my grandmother's lips when she brought us back her report of the
enemy, as though there had been some uncertainty among a vast number of
possible invaders, and then, soon after, my grandfather would say: "I can
hear 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, dressed 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 as though not going for

anything in particular, to tell them to bring out the syrups; 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 much attached to
my grandfather, who had been an intimate friend, in his time, of Swann's
father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing
would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current
of his thoughts. 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, "Oh, 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 glum as a night-cap. Don't you feel this little
breeze? Ah! whatever you may say, it's good to be alive all the same, my
dear Amédée!" 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, dried his eyes, and wiped his glasses. And he
could never be consoled for the loss of his wife, but used to say to my
grandfather, during the two years for which he survived her, "It's a funny
thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her
very much at any one time." "Often, but a little at a time, like poor old
Swann," became one of my grandfather's favourite phrases, which he would
apply to all kinds of things. And 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, "But, after all, he had a heart of gold."

For many years, albeit—and especially before his marriage—M. Swann
the younger came often to see them at Combray, my great-aunt and
grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the kind
of society which his family had frequented, or 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 honest innkeepers
who have in their midst some distinguished highwayman and never know it
—one of the smartest 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 part which Swann was playing in the
world of fashion was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and
discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people 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 nothing, except
the chance of a brilliant career or of a 'good' marriage, could extract you
from that station or admit you to a superior caste. M. Swann, the father, had
been a stockbroker; and so 'young Swann' found himself immured for life in
a caste where one's fortune, as in a list of taxpayers, varied between such
and such limits of income. We knew the people with whom his father had
associated, and so we 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 the family, like my
relatives, shut their eyes all the more good-naturedly that 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, had he met them while he was walking with ourselves. Had
there been such a thing as a determination to apply to Swann a social
coefficient 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, leading a very simple life, and having always
had a craze for 'antiques' and pictures, he now lived and piled up his
collections in an old house which my grandmother longed to visit, but
which stood on the Quai d'Orléans, a neighbourhood in which my great-
aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered. "Are you really a

connoisseur, now?" she would say to him; "I ask for your own sake, as you
are likely to have 'fakes' palmed off on you by the dealers," for she did not,
in fact, endow him with any critical faculty, and had no great opinion of the
intelligence of a man who, in conversation, would avoid serious topics and
shewed a very dull preciseness, not only when he gave us kitchen recipes,
going into the most minute details, but even when my grandmother's sisters
were talking to him about art. When challenged by them to give an opinion,
or to express his admiration for some picture, he would remain almost
impolitely silent, and would then make amends by furnishing (if he could)
some fact or other about the gallery in which the picture was hung, or the
date at which it had been painted. But as a rule he would content himself
with trying to amuse us by telling us the story of his latest adventure—and
he would have a fresh story for us on every occasion—with some one
whom we ourselves knew, such as the Combray chemist, or our cook, or
our coachman. These stories certainly used to make my great-aunt laugh,
but she could never tell whether that was on account of the absurd parts
which Swann invariably made himself play in the adventures, or of the wit
that he shewed in telling us of them. "It is easy to see that you are a regular
'character,' M. Swann!"
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, if he had wished to, have lived
in the Boulevard Haussmann or the Avenue de l'Opéra, 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 glacés, 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 Vaults, 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 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 'upper middle class,' the most respected barristers and solicitors
of Paris (though he was perhaps a trifle inclined to let this hereditary
privilege go into abeyance), 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 drawing-room on whose like no
stockbroker or associate of stockbrokers 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, of
knowing that he would, when he had finished his conversation with her,
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 found himself
alone and unobserved, would make his way into the cave, resplendent with
its unsuspected treasures.
One day when he had come to see us after dinner in Paris, and had
begged pardon for being in evening clothes, Françoise, when he had gone,
told us that she had got it from his coachman that he had been dining "with
a princess." "A pretty sort of princess," drawled my aunt; "I know them,"
and she shrugged her shoulders without raising her eyes from her knitting,
serenely ironical.
Altogether, my aunt used to treat 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 to him whenever we wanted a
recipe for some special sauce or for a pineapple salad for one of our big
dinner-parties, to which he himself would not be invited, not seeming of
sufficient importance 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 play
accompaniments and turn over music on evenings when my grandmother's
sister sang; manipulating this creature, so rare and refined at other times and
in other places, with the rough simplicity of a child who will play with

some curio from the cabinet no more carefully than if it were a penny toy.
Certainly the Swann who was a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days
differed hugely from, the Swann created in my great-aunt's mind when, of
an evening, in our little garden at Combray, after the two shy peals had
sounded from the gate, she would vitalise, by injecting into it everything
she had ever heard about the Swann family, the vague and unrecognisable
shape which began to appear, with my grandmother in its wake, against a
background of shadows, and could at last be identified by the sound of its
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 created by the thoughts of other
people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we
know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical
outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed
about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our
minds those ideas 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 that
these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we
see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise
and to which we listen. And so, no doubt, from the Swann they had built up
for their own purposes my family had left out, in their ignorance, a whole
crowd of the details of his daily life in the world of fashion, details by
means of which other people, when they met him, saw all the Graces
enthroned in his face and stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a
natural frontier; but they contrived also to put into a face from which its
distinction had been evicted, a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted
house, to plant in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense,
uncertain 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 bodily frame
had been so well lined with this sense, and with various earlier memories of
his family, that their own special Swann had become to my people a
complete and living creature; so that even now I have the feeling of leaving
some one 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 childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like his successor
than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were
a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a
marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) 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.
And yet one day, when my grandmother had gone to ask some favour of
a lady whom she had known at the Sacré Coeur (and with whom, because
of our caste theory, she had not cared to keep up any degree of intimacy in
spite of several common interests), the Marquise de Villeparisis, of the
famous house of Bouillon, this lady had said to her:
"I think you know M. Swann very well; he is a great friend of my
nephews, the des Laumes."
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 a most distinguished man, the finest 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, saying
to Mamma:
"Sévigné would not have said 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 that remark about Swann had been, not to raise him in
my great-aunt's estimation, but to lower Mme. de Villeparisis. It 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 her
duty in becoming aware of Swann's existence and in allowing members of
her family to associate with him. "How should she know Swann? A lady
who, you always made out, was related to Marshal MacMahon!" This view
of Swann's social atmosphere which prevailed in my family seemed to be

confirmed later on by his marriage with a woman of the worst class, you
might almost say a 'fast' woman, whom, to do him justice, he never
attempted to introduce to us, for he continued to come to us alone, though
he came more and more seldom; but from whom they thought they could
establish, on the assumption that he had found her there, the circle,
unknown to them, in which he ordinarily moved.
But on one occasion my grandfather read in a newspaper that M. Swann
was one of the most faithful attendants at the Sunday luncheons given by
the Duc de X——, whose father and uncle had been among our most
prominent statesmen in the reign of Louis Philippe. Now my grandfather
was curious to learn all the little details which might help him to take a
mental share in the private lives of men like Mole, the Duc Pasquier, or the
Duc de Broglie. He was delighted to find that Swann associated with people
who had known them. My great-aunt, however, 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,' was condemned to utter degradation in her eyes. It seemed
to her that such a one abdicated all claim to enjoy the fruits of those friendly
relations with people of good position which prudent parents cultivate and
store up for their children's benefit, for my great-aunt had actually ceased to
'see' the son of a lawyer we had known 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 read that queens have sometimes shewn 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. On the other hand, 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 ambition, who for that reason were incapable of taking the least
interest in what might be called the 'pinchbeck' things of life, even when
they had an historic value, or, generally speaking, in anything that was not
directly associated with some object aesthetically precious. So complete
was their negation of interest in anything which seemed directly or
indirectly a part of our everyday life that their sense of hearing—which had
gradually come to understand its own 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 the topic dear to
themselves—would leave its receptive channels unemployed, so effectively
that they were actually becoming atrophied. So that if my grandfather
wished to attract the attention of the two sisters, he would have to make use
of some such alarm signals as mad-doctors adopt in dealing with their
distracted patients; as by beating several times on a glass with the blade of a
knife, fixing them at the same time with a sharp word and a compelling
glance, violent methods which the said doctors 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 them a 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 have always told you," said my grandmother, "that he had plenty
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 trivial,
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, I should hate
to see my name printed like that, as large as life, in the paper, and I
shouldn't feel at 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
managing to induce my father to consent to speak to Swann, not of his wife,
but of his daughter, 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 Swann's arrival gave rise
to an unhappy foreboding was myself. And that 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 did not, at that time, have dinner with the
family: I came out to the garden after dinner, and at nine I said good night
and went to bed. But on these evenings I used to dine earlier than the others,
and to come in afterwards and sit at table until eight o'clock, when it was
understood that I must go upstairs; that frail and precious kiss which
Mamma used always to leave upon my lips when I was in bed and just
going to sleep I had to take with me from the dining-room to my own, and
to keep 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
evaporate; and just on those very evenings when I must needs take most
pains to receive it with due formality, I had to snatch it, to seize it instantly
and in public, without even having the time or being properly free to apply
to what I was doing the punctiliousness which madmen use who compel
themselves to exclude all other thoughts from their minds while they are
shutting a door, so that when the sickness of uncertainty sweeps over them
again they can triumphantly face and overcome it with the recollection of
the precise moment in which the door was shut.
We were all in the garden when the double peal of the gate-bell sounded
shyly. Everyone knew that it must be Swann, and yet they looked at one
another inquiringly and sent my grandmother scouting.
"See that you thank him intelligibly for the wine," my grandfather
warned his two sisters-in-law; "you know how good it is, and it is a huge
case."

"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 to-morrow."
My mother fancied that a word from her would wipe out all the
unpleasantness which my family had contrived to make Swann feel 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 go out of reach of me
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 would come up, later, to kiss me.
"Now, M. Swann," she said, "do tell me about your daughter; I am sure
she shews a taste already for nice 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 the quest, but
managed to extract from the restriction itself a further refinement of
thought, as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the
discovery of their finest lines.
"We can talk about her again when we are by ourselves," she said, or
rather whispered to Swann. "It is only a mother who can understand. I am
sure that hers would agree with me."
And so we all sat down round the iron table. I should have liked not to
think of the hours of anguish which I should have to spend, that evening,
alone in my room, without the possibility of going to sleep: I tried to
convince myself that they were of no importance, really, 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 other 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 quaintness, by which I
might have been distracted or beguiled. As a surgical patient, by means of a
local anaesthetic, can look on with a clear consciousness while an operation
is being performed upon him and yet feel nothing, I could repeat to myself
some favourite lines, or watch my grandfather attempting to talk to Swann
about the Duc d'Audriffet-Pasquier, without being able to kindle any

emotion from one or amusement from the other. Hardly had my grandfather
begun to question Swann about that orator when one of my grandmother's
sisters, in whose ears the question echoed like a solemn but untimely
silence which her natural politeness bade her interrupt, addressed the other
with:
"Just fancy, Flora, I met a young Swedish governess to-day who told me
some most interesting things about the co-operative movement in
Scandinavia. We really must have her to dine here one evening."
"To be sure!" said her sister Flora, "but I haven't wasted my time either. I
met such a clever old gentleman at M. Vinteuil's who knows Maubant quite
well, and Maubant has told him every little thing about how he gets up his
parts. It is the most interesting thing I ever heard. He is a neighbour of M.
Vinteuil's, and I never knew; and he is so nice besides."
"M. Vinteuil is not the only one who has nice neighbours," cried my aunt
Céline in a voice which seemed loud because she was so timid, and seemed
forced because she had been planning the little speech for so long; darting,
as she spoke, what she called a 'significant glance' at Swann. And my aunt
Flora, who realised that this veiled utterance was Céline's way of thanking
Swann intelligibly for the Asti, looked at him with a blend of congratulation
and irony, either just, because she wished to underline her sister's little
epigram, or because she envied Swann his having inspired it, or merely
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 upon 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 co-operative movement among the
ladies of Sweden or in the 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.
"I say!" exclaimed Swann to my grandfather, "what I was going to tell
you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me just

now, for in some respects there has been very little change. I came across a
passage in Saint-Simon this morning which would have amused you. It is in
the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one of the best, little
more in fact than a journal, but at least it is a journal wonderfully well
written, which fairly distinguishes it from the devastating journalism that
we feel bound to read in these days, morning, noon and night."
"I do not agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the
papers very pleasant indeed!" my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that
she had read the note about his Corot in the Figaro.
"Yes," aunt Céline went one better. "When they write about things or
people in whom we are interested."
"I don't deny it," answered Swann in some bewilderment. "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. Suppose 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 Pensées?" 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, shewing that contempt for the
things of this world which some men of the world like to affect, "we should
read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the
Princesse de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should
arrive at the right proportion between 'information' and 'publicity.'" But at
once regretting that he had allowed himself to speak, even in jest, of serious
matters, he added ironically: "We are having a most entertaining
conversation; I cannot think why we climb to these lofty summits," and
then, turning to my grandfather: "Well, Saint-Simon tells how Maulevrier
had had the audacity to offer his hand to his sons. You remember how he
says of Maulevrier, 'Never did I find in that coarse bottle anything 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. Céline
began to laugh.

Swann was puzzled, but went on: "'I cannot say whether it was his
ignorance or a trap,' writes Saint-Simon; 'he wished to give his hand to my
children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.'"
My grandfather was already in ecstasies over "ignorance or a trap," but
Miss Céline—the name of Saint-Simon, a 'man of letters,' having arrested
the complete paralysis of her sense of hearing—had grown angry.
"What! You admire that, do you? Well, it is clever enough! But what is
the point of it? Does he mean that one man isn't as good as another? What
difference can it make whether he is a duke or a groom so long as he is
intelligent and good? He had a fine way of bringing up his children, your
Saint-Simon, if he didn't teach them to shake hands with all honest men.
Really and truly, it's abominable. And you dare to quote it!"
And my grandfather, utterly depressed, realising how futile it would be
for him, 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!

Good, that is, very good."
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 give her in
public the series of kisses that she would have had 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 stealthy in execution, everything that my own
efforts could put into it: would look out very carefully first the exact spot on
her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts that I
might be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole
of the minute Mamma would allow 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 to-night, 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 are dining late to-night."
And my father, who was less scrupulous than my grandmother or mother
in observing the letter of a treaty, went on: "Yes, run along; to bed with
you."
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 quite 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 her
kiss, given my heart leave to accompany me forth. That hateful staircase, up
which I always passed with such dismay, gave out a smell of varnish which
had to some extent absorbed, made definite and fixed the special quality of
sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even more cruel 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 maddening
toothache and are conscious of it only as a little girl whom we attempt, time
after time, to pull out of the water, or as a line of Molière 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 precise 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 as I breathed in—a far more
poisonous thing than any moral penetration—the peculiar smell of the
varnish upon 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
red 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 Françoise, 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 message to my mother when there was
a stranger in the room would appear flatly inconceivable, just as it would be
for the door-keeper of a theatre to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage.
For 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, if one could judge it by the sudden obstinacy
which she would put into her refusal to carry out certain of our instructions,
seemed to have foreseen such social complications and refinements of
fashion as nothing in Françoise's surroundings 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, just as there is in those
manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly
days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the
Miracle of Theophilus or the Quatre Fils Aymon.
In this particular instance, the article of her code which made it highly
improbable that—barring an outbreak of fire—Françoise would go down
and disturb Mamma when M. Swann was there for so unimportant a person
as myself was one embodying the respect she shewed 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 gentle tones in which she would utter it, and which
irritated me more than usual this evening when the sacred character in
which she invested the dinner-party might have the effect of making her
decline to disturb its ceremonial. But to give myself one chance of success I
lied without hesitation, telling her that it was not in the least myself who
had wanted to write to Mamma, but Mamma who, on saying good night to
me, had begged me not to forget to send her an answer about something she
had asked me to find, and that she would certainly be very angry if this note
were not taken to her. I think that Françoise disbelieved me, for, like those
primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own, she could

immediately detect, by signs imperceptible by the rest of us, the truth or
falsehood of anything that we might wish to conceal from her. She studied
the envelope for five minutes as though an examination of the paper itself
and the look of my handwriting could enlighten her as to the nature of the
contents, or tell her to which article of her code she ought to refer the
matter. Then she went out with an air of resignation which seemed to imply:
"What a dreadful thing for parents to have a child like this!"
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 to-morrow that I had lost
my mother, for my little line was going—to annoy her, no doubt, and
doubly so because this contrivance would make me ridiculous in Swann's
eyes—but was going all the same to admit me, invisibly and by stealth, into
the same room as herself, was going to whisper from me into her ear; for
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 mischievous and of a mortal sadness
because Mamma was tasting of them and 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 gushing 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 was binding
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
himself; to him, that anguish which lies in knowing that the creature one
adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot
follow—to him that anguish came through Love, to which it is in a sense
predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted; but when, as had
befallen me, such an anguish 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 disposal of one sentiment to-day, of

another to-morrow, of filial piety or affection for a comrade. And the joy
with which I first bound myself apprentice, when Françoise returned to tell
me that my letter would be delivered; Swann, too, had known well that false
joy which a friend can give us, or some relative of the woman we love,
when on his arrival at the house or theatre where she is to be found, for
some ball or party or 'first-night' at which he is to meet her, he sees us
wandering outside, desperately awaiting some opportunity of
communicating with her. He recognises us, greets us familiarly, and asks
what we are doing there. And when we invent a story of having some urgent
message to give to his relative or friend, he assures us that nothing could be
more simple, takes us in at the door, and promises to send her down to us in
five minutes. How much we love him—as at that moment I loved Françoise
—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 whom we love. If we are to judge of them by 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
torturing hours into which she had gone to taste of unknown pleasures—
behold, a breach in the wall, and we are through it. Behold, one of the
moments whose series will go to make up their sum, a moment as genuine
as the rest, if not actually more important to ourself because our mistress is
more intensely a part of it; we picture it to ourselves, we possess it, we
intervene upon it, almost we have created it: namely, the moment in which
he goes to tell her that we are waiting there below. And very probably the
other moments of the party will not be essentially different, will contain
nothing else so exquisite or so well able 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 control a woman who is annoyed to find herself
pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often,
the kind friend comes down again alone.
My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my self-
respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she had asked
me to let her know the result of my search for something or other) made

Françoise tell me, in so many words "There is no answer"—words I have so
often, since then, heard the hall-porters in 'mansions' and the flunkeys in
gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to some poor girl, who replies in
bewilderment: "What! he's said nothing? It's not possible. You did give him
my letter, didn't you? Very well, I shall wait a little longer." And just as she
invariably protests that she does not need the extra gas which the porter
offers to light for her, and sits on there, hearing nothing further, except an
occasional remark on the weather which the porter exchanges with a
messenger whom he will send off suddenly, when he notices the time, to put
some customer's wine on the ice; so, having declined Françoise's offer to
make me some tea or to stay beside me, I let her go off again to the
servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the
voices of my family who were drinking their coffee in the garden.
But after a few seconds I realised that, by writing that line 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, and had decided to kiss her at all costs,
even with the certainty of being in disgrace with her for long afterwards,
when she herself came up to bed. The tranquillity which followed my
anguish made me extremely alert, 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;
hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things
outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the
moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the
extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its
substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer,
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 shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with utmost
delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene, and yet was

not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined. Exposed upon this surface of
silence, which absorbed nothing from 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 performed by the orchestra
of the Conservatoire that, although one does not lose a single note, one
thinks all the same that they are being played somewhere outside, a long
way from the concert hall, so that all the old subscribers, and 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 Trévise.
I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which none
could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my parents'
hands; consequences far graver, indeed, than a stranger would have
imagined, and such as (he would have thought) could follow only some
really shameful fault. But in the system of education which they had given
me faults were not classified in the same order as in that of other children,
and I had been taught to place at the head of the list (doubtless because
there was no other class of faults from which I needed to be more carefully
protected) those in which I can now distinguish the common feature that
one succumbs to them by yielding to a nervous impulse. But such words as
these last had never been uttered in my hearing; no one had yet accounted
for my temptations in a way which might have led me to believe that there
was some excuse for my giving in to them, or that I was actually incapable
of holding out against them. Yet I could easily recognise this class of
transgressions by the anguish of mind which preceded, as well as by the
rigour of the punishment which followed them; and I knew that what I had
just done was in the same category as certain other sins for which I had
been severely chastised, though infinitely more serious than they. When I
went out to meet my mother as she herself came up to bed, and when she
saw that I had remained up so as to say good night to her again in the
passage, I should not be allowed to stay in the house a day longer, I should
be packed off to school next morning; so much was certain. Very good: had
I been obliged, the next moment, to hurl myself out of the window, I should
still have preferred such a fate. For what I wanted now was Mamma, and to

say good night to her. I had gone too far along the road which led to the
realisation of this desire to be able to retrace my steps.
I could hear my parents' footsteps as they went with Swann; and, when
the rattle of the gate assured me that he had really gone, I crept to the
window. Mamma was asking my father if he had thought the lobster good,
and whether M. Swann had had some of the coffee-and-pistachio ice. "I
thought it rather so-so," she was saying; "next time we shall have to try
another flavour."
"I can't tell you," said my great-aunt, "what a change I find in Swann. He
is quite antiquated!" She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann always
in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to find him
suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him. And the others
too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive,
scandalous senescence, meet only in a celibate, in one of that class for
whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow must be longer
than for other men, since for such a one it is void of promise, and from its
dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any subsequent partition
among his offspring.
"I fancy he has a lot of trouble with that wretched wife of his, who 'lives'
with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all Combray knows. It's the talk of
the town."
My mother observed that, in spite of this, he had looked much less
unhappy of late. "And he doesn't nearly so often do that trick of his, so like
his father, of wiping his eyes and passing his hand across his forehead. I
think myself that in his heart of hearts he doesn't love his wife any more."
"Why, of course he doesn't," answered my grandfather. "He wrote me a
letter about it, ages ago, to which I took care to pay no attention, but it left
no doubt as to his feelings, let alone his love for his wife. Hullo! you two;
you never thanked him for the Asti!" he went on, turning to his sisters-in-
law.
"What! we never thanked him? I think, between you and me, that I put it
to him quite neatly," replied my aunt Flora.
"Yes, you managed it very well; I admired you for it," said my aunt
Céline.
"But you did it very prettily, too."

"Yes; I liked my expression about 'nice neighbours.'"
"What! Do you call that thanking him?" shouted my grandfather. "I heard
that all right, but devil take me if I guessed it was meant for Swann. You
may be quite sure he never noticed it."
"Come, come; Swann is not a fool. I am positive he appreciated the
compliment. You didn't expect me to tell him the number of bottles, or to
guess what he paid for them."
My father and mother were left alone and sat down for a moment; then
my father said: "Well, shall we go up to bed?"
"As you wish, dear, though I don't feel in the least like sleeping. I don't
know why; it can't be the coffee-ice—it wasn't strong enough to keep me
awake like this. But I see a light in the servants' hall: poor Françoise has
been sitting up for me, so I will get her to unhook me while you go and
undress."
My mother opened the latticed door which led from the hall to the
staircase. Presently I heard her coming upstairs to close her window. I went
quietly into the passage; my heart was beating so violently that I could
hardly move, but at least it was throbbing no longer with anxiety, but with
terror and with joy. I saw in the well of the stair a light coming upwards,
from Mamma's candle. Then I saw Mamma herself: 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, for that matter, I used to go for days on
end without being spoken to, for far less 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 even anger, were
relatively puerile.
A word from her then would have implied the false calm in which one
converses with 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, in a voice half-stifled by her

anger: "Run away at once. Don't let your father see you standing there like a
crazy jane!"
But I begged her again to "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 hold out, would give in to me, 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 am 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 my mother and grandmother, because he paid no heed to 'Principles,'
and because in his sight there were no such things as 'Rights of Man.' 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 and
so consecrated to my use 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 then again,
simply because he was devoid of principles (in my grandmother's sense), so
he could not, properly speaking, be called inexorable. He looked at me for a
moment with an air of annoyance and surprise, 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 like sleep,
so stay in his room for a little. I don't need anything."
"But dear," my mother answered timidly, "whether or not I feel like sleep
is not the point; we must not make the child accustomed..."
"There's no question of making him accustomed," said my 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 Françoise to make up the
big one for you, and stay beside him for the rest of the night. I'm off to bed,
anyhow; I'm not nervous like you. Good night."
It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my
sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring to
move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt,

crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere in which, since
he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up his head, 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 structures 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 difficult of comprehension. It is a long time, too, since my father has
been able to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such
hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly 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. Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only
because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I
hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned
during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to
have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent
evening air.
Mamma spent that night in my room: when I had just committed a sin so
deadly that I was waiting to be banished from the household, my parents
gave me a far greater concession than I should ever have won as the reward
of a good action. Even at the moment when it manifested itself in this
crowning mercy, my father's conduct towards me was still somewhat
arbitrary, and regardless of my deserts, as was characteristic of him and due
to 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
strictness, when he sent me off to bed, deserved that title less, really, than
my mother's or grandmother's attitude, for his nature, which in some
respects differed more than theirs from my own, had probably prevented
him from guessing, until then, how wretched I was every evening, a thing
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.
As for my father, whose affection for me was of another kind, I doubt if he
would have shewn so much 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 all night in my room, and it seemed that she did not wish to
mar by recrimination those hours, so different from anything that I had had
a right to expect; for when Françoise (who guessed that something
extraordinary must have happened when she saw Mamma sitting by my
side, holding my hand and letting me cry unchecked) said to her: "But,
Madame, what is little Master crying for?" she replied: "Why, Françoise, he
doesn't know himself: it is 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 fault for which I must be punished, but as an
involuntary evil which had been officially recognised a nervous condition
for which I was in no way responsible: I had the consolation that I need no
longer mingle apprehensive scruples with the bitterness of my tears; I could
weep henceforward without sin. I felt no small degree of pride, either, in
Françoise'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, to
emancipation from tears. I ought then 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 step down from the ideal she had
formed for me, and that for the first time she, with all her courage, had to
confess herself beaten. It struck me that if I had just scored a victory it was
over her; that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have
succeeded, in relaxing her will, in altering her judgment; that this evening
opened a new era, must 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; you
mustn't sleep here." But I was conscious of the practical wisdom, of what
would be called nowadays 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 pleasure of her
company, and not to disturb my father again. Certainly my mother's
beautiful features seemed to shine again with youth that evening, as she sat
gently holding my hands and trying to check my tears; but, just for that
reason, it seemed to me that this should not have happened; her anger
would have been less difficult to endure than this new kindness which my
childhood had not known; I felt that I had with an impious and secret finger

traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and made the first white hair shew upon
her head. This thought redoubled my sobs, and then I saw that Mamma,
who had never allowed herself to go to any length of tenderness with me,
was suddenly overcome by my tears and had to struggle to keep back her
own. Then, as she saw that I had noticed this, she said to me, with a smile:
"Why, my little buttercup, my little canary-boy, 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 is
nothing new for you then."
I was only too delighted, and Mamma went to find a parcel of books in
which I could not distinguish, through the paper in which it was wrapped,
any more than its squareness and size, but which, even at this first glimpse,
brief and obscure as it was, bade fair to eclipse already the paint-box of last
New Year's Day and the silkworms of the year before. It contained La Mare
au Diable, François le Champi, La Petite Fadette, and Les Maîtres
Sonneurs. My grandmother, as I learned afterwards, had at first chosen
Mussel's poems, a volume of Rousseau, and Indiana; for while she
considered light reading as unwholesome as sweets and cakes, she did not
reflect that the strong breath of genius must have upon the very soul of a
child an influence at once more dangerous and less quickening than those of
fresh air and country breezes upon his body. But when my father had
seemed almost to regard her as insane 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 fear of my not having
my present in time (it was a burning hot day, and she had come home so
unwell that the doctor had warned my mother not to allow her again to tire
herself in that way), and had there fallen back upon the four pastoral novels
of George Sand.
"My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not allow myself to give the
child anything that was not well written."
The truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase
anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived, and, above all,
that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our

pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth. Even
when she had to make some one 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 of its own,
she 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 their commercial
banality, at least to minimise it, to substitute for the bulk of it what was art
still, to introduce, as it might be, several 'thicknesses' of art; instead of
photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of
Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not
made pictures of them, and preferred to give 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 prevented from reproducing
directly the masterpieces or the beauties of nature, and had there been
replaced by a great artist, he resumed his odious position when it came to
reproducing 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 shew us a
masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day, as Morghen's
print of the 'Cenacolo' of Leonardo before it was spoiled by restoration. 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 have since
derived from ordinary photographs. We could no longer keep count in the
family (when my great-aunt tried to frame 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 recipient. 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 supplied a material
need, since it did so in a manner to which we are no longer accustomed,
was as charming to her as one of 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. In precisely the same way the pastoral
novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were
regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture, full of expressions that have
fallen out of use and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in
country dialects. And my grandmother had bought them in preference to
other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a
gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a
pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible
journeys through the realms of time.
Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen François le Champi, whose
reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it a distinct personality in my
eyes and a mysterious attraction. I had not then read any real novels. I had
heard it said that George Sand was a typical novelist. That prepared me in
advance to imagine that François le Champi contained something
inexpressibly delicious. The course of the narrative, where it tended 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 form' in novels, seemed to me then distinctive—for to me a
new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an
individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself
—an intoxicating whiff of the peculiar essence of François le Champi.
Beneath the everyday incidents, the commonplace thoughts and hackneyed
words, I could hear, or overhear, an intonation, a rhythmic utterance fine
and strange. The 'action' began: to me it seemed all the more obscure
because in those days, when I read to myself, I used often, while I turned
the pages, to dream of something quite different. And to the gaps which this
habit made in my knowledge of the story more were added 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 birth and

growth of love can explain, seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery,
the key to which (as I could readily believe) lay in that strange and
pleasant-sounding name of Champi, which draped the boy who bore it, I
knew not why, in its own bright colour, purpurate and charming. If my
mother was not a faithful reader, she was, none the less, admirable when
reading a work in which she found the note of true feeling by the respectful
simplicity of her interpretation and by the sound of her sweet and gentle
voice. It was the same in her daily 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 joy which might have
distressed some mother who had long ago 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, in the same way, above all other qualities in
literature; taking pains to banish from her voice any weakness or affectation
which might have blocked its channel for that powerful stream of language,
she supplied all the natural tenderness, all the lavish sweetness which they
demanded to phrases which seemed to have been composed for her voice,
and which were all, so to speak, within her compass. She came to them with
the tone that they required, with the cordial accent which existed before
they were, which dictated them, but which is not to be found in the words
themselves, and by these means she smoothed away, as she read on, any
harshness there might be or discordance in the tenses of verbs, endowing
the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in
generosity, all the melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence
that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now
hastening, now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them,
despite their difference of quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed
into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.
My agony 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
concession as had been granted me this evening to be anything but a rare
and casual exception. To-morrow night I should again be the victim of
anguish and Mamma would not stay by my side. But when these storms of
anguish grew calm I could no longer realise their existence; besides,
tomorrow evening was still a long way off; I reminded myself that I should
still have time to think about things, albeit that remission of time could
bring me no access of power, albeit the coming event was in no way
dependent upon the exercise of my will, and seemed not quite inevitable
only because it was still separated from me by this short interval.
***
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 a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate and
dissect from the front of a building the other parts of which remain plunged
in darkness: broad enough at its base, the little parlour, the dining-room, the
alluring shadows of the path along which would come M. Swann, the
unconscious author of my sufferings, the hall through which I would
journey to the first step of that staircase, so hard to climb, which
constituted, all by itself, the tapering 'elevation' of an 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 its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery
necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head 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 an
exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures
which that kind of memory shews us of the past 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 hazard in these matters, and a second hazard,
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 so effectively lost to us
until the day (which to many never 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 their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they
have overcome 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 intellect 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)
which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance
whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.
Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what
was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had
any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came 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 out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,'
which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a
pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the
prospect of a depressing 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,
and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my
whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were
taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual,
detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of
life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity
illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of
filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it
was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence

could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was
connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended
those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence
did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first,
a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the
potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth,
lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not
itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely with a gradual loss of
strength, the same testimony; which I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope
at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again and to find it there
presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down
my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But
how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part
of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the
dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will
avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with
something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and
substance, 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 of its existence,
but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a real state in whose
presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to
attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I
drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state, illumined by no
fresh light. I compel my mind to make one further effort, to follow and
recapture once again the fleeting sensation. And that nothing may interrupt
it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my
ears and inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next room.
And then, feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any
success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I
have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before
the supreme attempt. 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
embedded like an anchor 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, has tried to
follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much
confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection in which are
blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot
distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to
translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour,
the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special
circumstance is in question, of 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 that I feel nothing, it has
stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who
can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task, must
lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters
us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me
to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries
of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be pondered
over without effort or distress of mind.
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb
of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those
mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day
to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in
her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. 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 interval, 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 forms 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,
still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more
persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long
time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment,
amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost
impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in
her decoction of lime-flowers 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 the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the
little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it
for my parents (the isolated panel 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 was sent before luncheon, the streets along
which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine.
And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with
water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without
character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves
and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or
people, permanent 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 of its surroundings, taking their proper
shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from
my cup of tea.

COMBRAY
Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it
from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, 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 shepherd
gathers his sheep, the woolly grey backs of its flocking houses, which a
fragment 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 one
had, as soon as the sun began to go down, 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 quarter of my memory, painted in colours so different
from those in which the world is decked for me to-day, that in fact one and
all of them, and the church which towered above them in the Square, seem
to me now more unsubstantial than the projections of my magic-lantern;
while 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
Flesché, from whose windows in the pavement used to rise a smell of
cooking which rises still in my mind, now and then, in the same warm gusts
of comfort, would be to secure a contact with the unseen world more
marvellously supernatural than it would be to make Golo's acquaintance
and to chat with Geneviève de Brabant.
My grandfather's cousin—by courtesy my great-aunt—with whom we
used to stay, was the mother of that aunt Léonie who, since her husband's
(my uncle Octave's) death, had gradually declined to leave, first Combray,
then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed; and who

now never 'came down,' but lay perpetually in an indefinite condition of
grief, physical exhaustion, illness, obsessions, and religious observances.
Her own room looked out over the Rue Saint-Jacques, which ran a long
way further to end in the Grand-Pré (as distinct from the Petit-Pré, a green
space in the centre of the town where three streets met) and which,
monotonous and grey, with the three high steps of stone before almost every
one of its doors, seemed like a deep furrow cut by some sculptor of gothic
images in the very block of stone out of which he had fashioned a Calvary
or a Crib. My aunt's life was now practically confined to two adjoining
rooms, in one of which she would rest in the afternoon while they aired the
other. 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) fascinate our sense of smell with the
countless odours springing from their own special 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
coloured by circumstances as are those of the neighbouring countryside, but
already humanised, domesticated, confined, an exquisite, skilful, limpid
jelly, blending all the fruits of the season which have left the orchard for the
store-room, smells changing with the year, but plenishing, domestic smells,
which compensate for the sharpness of hoar frost with the sweet savour of
warm bread, smells lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving smells,
pious smells; rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety,
and in a prosiness which serves as a deep source of poetry to the stranger
who passes through their midst without having lived amongst them. The air
of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so
nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter them without a sort of greedy
enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter
holidays, when I could taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at
Combray: before I went in to wish my aunt good day I would be kept
waiting a little time in the outer room, where the sun, a wintry sun still, had
crept in to warm itself before the fire, lighted already between its two brick
sides and plastering all the room and everything in it with a smell of soot,
making the room like one of those great open hearths which one finds in the
country, or one of the canopied mantelpieces in old castles under which one
sits hoping that in the world outside it is raining or snowing, hoping almost
for a catastrophic deluge to add the romance of shelter and security to the

comfort of a snug retreat; I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk
and the stamped velvet armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted
antimacassar, while the fire, baking like a pie the appetising smells with
which the air of the room was thickly clotted, which the dewy 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 cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely
waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also
drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-
paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the
nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered
quilt.
In the next room I could hear my aunt talking quietly to herself. She
never spoke save in low tones, because she believed that there was
something broken in 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 other pains to which she was liable; 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 secret, 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 herself: "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 respected in our household vocabulary; in the
morning Françoise would not 'call' her, but would simply 'come to' her;
during the day, when my aunt wished to take a nap, we used to say just that
she wished to 'be quiet' or to 'rest'; and when in conversation she so far
forgot herself as to say "what made me wake up," or "I dreamed that," she
would flush and at once correct herself.
After waiting a minute, I would go in and kiss her; Françoise would be
making her tea; or, if my aunt were feeling 'upset,' 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 whose intervals the pale flowers opened, as though a painter had
arranged them there, grouping them in the most decorative poses. The
leaves, which had lost or altered their own appearance, assumed those
instead of the most incongruous things imaginable, as though the
transparent wings of flies or the blank sides of labels or the petals of roses
had been collected and pounded, or interwoven as birds weave the material
for their nests. A thousand trifling little details—the charming prodigality of
the chemist—details which would have been eliminated from an artificial
preparation, gave me, like a book in which one is astonished to read the
name of a person whom one knows, the pleasure of finding that these were
indeed real lime-blossoms, like those I had seen, when coming from the
train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered, but only because they were not
imitations but the very same blossoms, which had grown old. And as each
new character is merely a metamorphosis from something older, in these
little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but
beyond all else the rosy, moony, tender glow which lit up the blossoms
among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden roses
—marking, as the radiance 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 bloom'—shewed me that these were petals
which, before their flowering-time, the chemist's package had embalmed on
warm evenings of spring. That rosy candlelight 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
was able to dip in the boiling infusion, in which she would relish the savour
of dead or faded blossom, a little madeleine, of which she would hold out a
piece to me 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 pharmacy and as high altar, on
which, beneath a statue of Our Lady and a bottle of Vichy-Célestins, might
be found her service-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
was bounded by the window: she had the street beneath her eyes, and would
read in it from morning to night to divert the tedium of her life, like a

Persian prince, the daily but immemorial chronicles of Combray, which she
would discuss in detail afterwards with Françoise.
I would not have been five minutes with my aunt before she would send
me away in case I made her tired. She would hold out for me to kiss her sad
brow, pale and lifeless, 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, you must go away; go and get ready for mass; and if
you see Françoise downstairs, tell her not to stay too long amusing herself
with you; she must come up soon to see if I want anything."
Françoise, 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 inclined to desert my aunt during the months which we spent in
her house. There had been in my infancy, before we first went to Combray,
and when my aunt Léonie used still to spend the winter in Paris with her
mother, a time when I knew Françoise so little that on New Year's Day,
before going into my great-aunt's house, my mother put a five-franc piece in
my hand and said: "Now, be careful. Don't make any mistake. Wait until
you hear me say 'Good morning, Françoise,' and I touch your 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 cap as stiff and fragile as if
it had been made of spun sugar, the concentric waves of a smile of
anticipatory gratitude. It was Françoise, motionless 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 discern
in her features a disinterested love of all humanity, blended with a tender
respect for the 'upper classes' which raised to the most honourable quarter
of her heart the hope of receiving her due reward. Mamma pinched my arm
sharply and said in a loud voice: "Good morning, Françoise." At this signal
my fingers parted and I let fall the coin, which found a receptacle in a
confused but outstretched hand. But since we had begun to go to Combray
there was no one I knew better than Françoise. We were her favourites, and
in the first years at least, while she shewed the same consideration for us as
for my aunt, she enjoyed us with a keener relish, because we had, in
addition to our dignity as part of 'the family' (for she had for those invisible
bonds by which community of blood unites the members of a family as
much respect as any Greek tragedian), the fresh 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 good-looking, and what they were going to make of him, and whether
he took after his granny.
Later, when no one else was in the room, Mamma, who knew that
Françoise was still mourning for her parents, who had been dead for years,
would speak of them kindly, asking her endless little questions about them
and their lives.
She had guessed that Françoise was not over-fond of her son-in-law, and
that he spoiled the pleasure she found in visiting her daughter, as the two
could not talk so freely when he was there. And so one day, when Françoise
was going to their house, some miles from Combray, Mamma said to her,
with a smile: "Tell me, Françoise, if Julien has had to go away, and you
have Marguerite to yourself all day, you will be very sorry, but will make
the best of it, won't you?"
And Françoise answered, laughing: "Madame knows everything;
Madame is worse than the X-rays" (she pronounced 'x' with an affectation
of difficulty and with a smile in deprecation of her, an unlettered woman's,
daring to employ a scientific term) "they brought here for Mme. Octave,
which see what is in your heart"—and she went off, disturbed 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 pleasure of
feeling that her peasant existence, with its simple joys and sorrows, might
offer some interest, might be a source of grief or pleasure to some one other
than herself.
My aunt resigned herself to doing without Françoise to some extent
during our visits, knowing how much my mother appreciated the services of
so active and intelligent a maid, one who looked as smart at five o'clock in
the morning in her kitchen, under a cap whose stiff and dazzling frills
seemed to be made of porcelain, as when dressed for churchgoing; who did
everything in the right way, who toiled like a horse, whether she was well
or ill, but without noise, without the appearance of doing anything; the only
one of my aunt's maids who when Mamma asked for hot water or black
coffee would bring them actually boiling; she was one of those servants

who in a household seem least satisfactory, at first, to a stranger, doubtless
because they take no pains to make a conquest of him and shew him no
special attention, knowing very well that they have no real need of him, that
he will cease to be invited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed
from it; who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters
and mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not
look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability, which may
impress a stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter barrenness of
spirit in which no amount of training can produce the least trace of
individuality.
When Françoise, having seen that my parents had everything they
required, first went upstairs again to give my aunt her pepsin and to find out
from her what she would take for luncheon, very few mornings pased but
she was called upon to give an opinion, or to furnish an explanation, in
regard to some important event.
"Just fancy, Françoise, Mme. Goupil went by more than a quarter of an
hour late to fetch her sister: if she loses any more time on the way I should
not be at all surprised if she got in after the Elevation."
"Well, there'd be nothing wonderful in that," would be the answer. Or:
"Françoise, if you had come in five minutes ago, you would have seen
Mme. Imbert go past with some asparagus twice the size of what mother
Callot has: do try to find out from her cook where she got them. You know
you've been putting asparagus in all your sauces this spring; you might be
able to get some like these for our visitors."
"I shouldn't be surprised if they came from the Curé's," Françoise would
say, and:
"I'm sure you wouldn't, my poor Françoise," my aunt would reply, raising
her shoulders. "From the Curé's, indeed! You know quite well that he can
never grow anything but wretched little twigs of asparagus, not asparagus at
all. 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." Or:
"Françoise, didn't you hear that bell just now! It split my head."
"No, Mme. Octave."
"Ah, 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, dear; the poor little creature!" would come with a sigh from
Françoise, who could not hear of any calamity befalling a person unknown
to her, even in some distant part of the world, without beginning to lament.
Or:
"Françoise, for whom did they toll the passing-bell 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. Indeed, it is time the Lord called me
home too; I don't know what has become of my head since I lost my poor
Octave. But I am wasting your time, my good girl."
"Indeed no, Mme. Octave, my time is not so precious; whoever made our
time didn't sell it to us. I am just going to see that my fire hasn't gone out."
In this way Françoise and my aunt made a critical valuation between
them, in the course of these morning sessions, of the earliest happenings of
the day. But sometimes these happenings assumed so mysterious or so
alarming an air that my aunt felt she could not wait until it was time for
Françoise to come upstairs, and then a formidable and quadruple peal
would resound through the house.
"But, Mme. Octave, it is not time for your pepsin," Françoise would
begin. "Are you feeling faint?"
"No, thank you, Françoise," my aunt would reply, "that is to say, yes; for
you know well that there is very seldom a time when I don't feel faint; one
day I shall pass away like Mme. Rousseau, before I know where I am; but
that is not why I rang. Would you believe that I have just seen, as plainly as
I see you, Mme. Goupil with a little girl I didn't know at all. Run and get a
pennyworth of salt from Camus. It's not often that Théodore can't tell you
who a person is."
"But that must be M. Pupin's daughter," Françoise would say, preferring
to stick to an immediate explanation, since she had been perhaps twice
already into Camus's shop that morning.
"M. Pupin's daughter! Oh, that's a likely story, my poor Françoise. Do
you think I should not have recognised M. Pupin's daughter!"
"But I don't mean the big one, Mme. Octave; I mean the little girl, he one
who goes to school at Jouy. I seem to have seen her once already this

morning."
"Oh, if that's what it is!" my aunt would say, "she must have come over
for the holidays. Yes, that is it. No need to ask, she will have come over for
the holidays. But then we shall soon see Mme. Sazerat come along and ring
her sister's door-bell, for her luncheon. That will be it! I saw the boy from
Galopin's go by with a tart. You will see that the tart was for Mme. Goupil."
"Once Mme. Goupil has anyone in the house, Mme. Octave, you won't be
long in seeing all her folk going in to their luncheon there, for it's not so
early as it was," would be the answer, for Françoise, who was anxious to
retire downstairs to look after our own meal, was not sorry to leave my aunt
with the prospect of such a distraction.
"Oh! not before midday!" my aunt would reply in a tone of resignation,
darting an uneasy glance at the clock, but stealthily, so as not to let it be
seen that she, who had renounced all earthly joys, yet found a keen
satisfaction in learning that Mme. Goupil was expecting company to
luncheon, though, alas, she must wait a little more than an hour still before
enjoying the spectacle. "And it will come in the middle of my luncheon!"
she would murmur to herself. Her luncheon was such a distraction in itself
that she did not like any other to come at the same time. "At least, you will
not forget to give me my creamed eggs on one of the flat plates?" These
were the only plates which had pictures on them and my aunt used to amuse
herself at every meal by reading the description on whichever might have
been sent up to her. She would put on her spectacles and spell out: "Ali
Baba and the Forty Thieves," "Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp," and smile,
and say "Very good indeed."
"I may as well go across to Camus..." Françoise would hazard, seeing
that my aunt had no longer any intention of sending her there.
"No, no; it's not worth while now; it's certain to be the Pupin girl. My
poor Françoise, I am sorry to have made you come upstairs for nothing."
But it was not for nothing, as my aunt well knew, that she had rung for
Françoise, since at Combray a person whom one 'didn't know at all' was as
incredible a being as any mythological deity, and it was apt to be forgotten
that after each occasion on which there had appeared in the Rue du Saint-
Esprit or in the Square one of these bewildering phenomena, careful and
exhaustive researches had invariably reduced 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
discharged from the army, or the Abbé Perdreau's niece come home from
her convent, or the Curé's brother, a tax-collector at Châteaudun, who had
just retired on a pension or had come over to Combray for the holidays. On
first noticing them you have been impressed by the thought that there might
be in Combray people whom you 'didn't know at all,' simply because you
had failed to recognise or identify them at once. And yet long beforehand
Mme. Sauton and the Curé had given warning that they expected their
'strangers.' In the evening, when I came in and went upstairs to tell my aunt
the incidents of 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 grandfather didn't know at all!" she would exclaim. "That's a
likely story." None the less, she would be a little disturbed by the news, she
would wish to have the details correctly, 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 at all?"
"Why, of course I did," my grandfather would answer; "it was Prosper,
Mme. Bouilleboeuf's gardener's brother."
"Ah, well!" my aunt would say, calm again but slightly flushed still; "and
the boy told me that you had passed a man you didn't know at all!" After
which I would be warned to be more careful of what I said, and not 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 at all' she would think about it
incessantly, devoting to the solution of the incomprehensible problem all
her inductive talent and her leisure hours.
"That will be Mme. Sazerat's dog," Françoise would suggest, without any
real conviction, but in the hope of peace, and so that my aunt should not
'split her head.'
"As if I didn't know Mme. Sazerat's dog!"—for my aunt's critical mind
would not so easily admit any fresh fact.
"Ah, but that will be the new dog M. Galopin has brought her from
Lisieux."
"Oh, if that's what it is!"

"It seems, it's a most engaging animal," Françoise would go on, having
got the story from Théodore, "as clever as a Christian, always in a good
temper, always friendly, always everything that's nice. It's not often you see
an animal so well-behaved at that age. Mme. Octave, it's high time I left
you; I can't afford to stay here amusing myself; look, it's nearly ten o'clock
and my fire not lighted yet, and I've still to dress the asparagus."
"What, Françoise, more asparagus! It's a regular disease of asparagus you
have got this year: you will make our Parisians sick of it."
"No, no, Madame Octave, they like it well enough. They'll be coming
back from church soon as hungry as hunters, and they won't eat it out of the
back of their spoons, you'll see."
"Church! why, they must be there now; you'd better not lose any time. Go
and look after your luncheon."
While my aunt gossiped on in this way with Françoise I would have
accompanied my parents to mass. How I loved it: how clearly I can see it
still, our church at Combray! The old porch by which we went in, black,
and full of holes as a cullender, was worn out of shape and deeply furrowed
at the sides (as also was the holy water stoup to which it led us) just as if the
gentle grazing touch of the cloaks of peasant-women going into the church,
and of their fingers dipping into the water, had managed by agelong
repetition to acquire a destructive force, to impress itself on the stone, to
carve ruts in it like those made by cart-wheels upon stone gate-posts against
which they are driven every day. Its memorial stones, beneath which the
noble dust of the Abbots of Combray, who were buried there, furnished the
choir with a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer hard and
lifeless matter, for time had softened and sweetened them, and had made
them melt like honey and flow beyond their proper margins, either surging
out in a milky, frothing wave, washing from its place a florid gothic capital,
drowning the white violets of the marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their
limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh
touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing
together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately
scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant as on days when the sun
scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you might be certain of fine
weather in church. One of them was filled from top to bottom by a solitary
figure, like the king on a playing-card, who lived up there beneath his

canopy of stone, between earth and heaven; and in the blue light of its
slanting shadow, 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 shewing off all its rich
furnishings, seemed to have almost a habitable air, like the hall—all
sculptured stone and painted glass—of some mediaeval mansion), you
might see Mme. Sazerat kneel for an instant, laying down on the chair
beside her own a neatly corded parcel of little cakes which she had just
bought at the baker's and was taking home for her luncheon. In another, a
mountain of rosy snow, at whose foot a battle was being fought, seemed to
have frozen the window also, which it swelled and distorted with its cloudy
sleet, like a pane to which snowflakes have drifted and clung, but flakes
illumined by a sunrise—the same, doubtless, which purpled the reredos of
the altar with tints so fresh that they seemed rather to be thrown on it for a
moment 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 silvery antiquity sparkling with the
dust of centuries and shewing in its threadbare brilliance the very cords of
their lovely tapestry of glass. There was one among them which was a tall
panel composed of a hundred little rectangular windows, of blue
principally, like a great game of patience 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 vision had drawn across the window, whose
colours died away and were rekindled by turns, a rare and transient fire—
the next instant it had taken on all the iridescence of a peacock's tail, then
shook and wavered in a flaming and fantastic shower, distilled and dropping
from the groin of the dark and rocky vault down the moist walls, as though
it were along the bed of some rainbow grotto of sinuous stalactites that I
was following my parents, who marched before me, their prayer-books
clasped in their hands; a moment later the little lozenge windows had put on
the deep transparence, the unbreakable hardness of sapphires clustered on
some enormous breastplate; but beyond which 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 blue and gentle flood in which it washed
the masonry, as on the pavement of the Square or the straw of the market-
place; and even on our first Sundays, when we came down before Easter, it
would console me for the blackness and bareness of the earth outside by

making burst into blossom, as in some springtime in old history among the
heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded carpet of forget-me-nots in
glass.
Two tapestries of high warp represented the coronation of Esther (in
which tradition would have 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); their colours had melted into one
another, so as to add expression, relief, light to the pictures. A touch of red
over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the yellow on her
dress was spread with such unctuous plumpness as to have acquired a kind
of solidity, and stood boldly out from the receding atmosphere; while the
green of the trees, which was still bright in silk and wool among the lower
parts of the panel, but had quite 'gone' at the top, separated in a paler
scheme, above the dark trunks, the yellowing upper branches, tanned and
half-obliterated by the sharp though sidelong rays of an invisible sun. All
these things and, still more than these, 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 go forward into the church
when we were making our way to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley,
where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the
tangible proofs of the little people's supernatural passage—all these things
made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the
town; a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—
the name of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries with that
old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across
and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each
successive epoch from which the whole building had 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 groove was furrowed into one wall by the tower-stair; and
even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade which
pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide
him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a
countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger brother; rearing into the

sky above the Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis,
and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting down with its crypt into the
blackness of a Merovingian night, through which, guiding us with groping
finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat's
wing of stone, Théodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the
tomb of Sigebert's little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a
fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the
night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord,
the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and
with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried itself in
the stone, through which it had gently forced its way."
And then the apse of Combray: what am I to say of that? It was so coarse,
so devoid of artistic beauty, even of the religious spirit. From outside, since
the street crossing which it commanded was on a lower level, its great wall
was thrust upwards from a basement of unfaced ashlar, jagged with flints, in
all of 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, were I to recall all the glorious apses that I had seen, it would
never enter my mind to compare with any one of them the apse of Combray.
Only, one day, turning out of a little street in some country town, I came
upon three alley-ways that converged, and facing them an old wall, rubbed,
worn, crumbling, and unusually high; with windows pierced in it far
overhead and the same asymmetrical appearance as the apse of Combray.
And at that moment I did not say to myself, as at Chartres I might have
done or at Rheims, with what strength the religious feeling had been
expressed in its construction, but instinctively I exclaimed "The Church!"
The church! A dear, familiar friend; close pressed in the Rue Saint-
Hilaire, upon which its north door opened, by its two neighbours, Mme.
Loiseau's house and the pharmacy of M. Rapin, against which its walls
rested without interspace; a simple citizen of Combray, who might have had
her number in the street had the streets of Combray borne numbers, and at
whose door one felt that the postman ought to stop on his morning rounds,
before going into Mme. Loiseau's and after leaving M. Rapin's, there
existed, for all that, between the church and everything in Combray that
was not the church a clear line of demarcation which I have never
succeeded in eliminating from my mind. 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 stones towards
which they leaned, if my eyes could discern no interval, my mind preserved
the impression of an abyss.
From a long way off one could distinguish and identify the steeple of
Saint-Hilaire inscribing its unforgettable form upon a horizon beneath
which Combray had not yet appeared; when from the train which brought
us down from Paris at Easter-time my father caught sight of it, as it slipped
into every fold of the sky in turn, its little iron cock veering continually in
all directions, he would say: "Come, get your wraps together, we are there."
And on one of the longest walks we ever took from Combray there was a
spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on to an immense plain,
closed at the horizon by strips of forest over which rose and stood alone the
fine point of Saint-Hilaire's steeple, but so sharpened and so pink that it
seemed to be no more than sketched on the sky by the finger-nail of a
painter anxious to give to such a landscape, 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 make out the remains of the square tower, half in ruins,
which still stood by its side, though without rivalling it in height, one was
struck, first of all, by the tone, reddish and sombre, of its stones; and on a
misty morning in autumn one would have called it, to see it rising above the
violet thunder-cloud of the vineyards, a ruin of purple, almost the colour of
the wild vine.
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 and two, one pair
above another, with that right and original proportion in their spacing to
which not only human faces owe their beauty and dignity, it released, it let
fall at regular intervals flights of jackdaws which for a little while would
wheel and caw, as though the ancient stones which allowed them to sport
thus and never seemed to see them, becoming of a sudden uninhabitable
and discharging some infinitely disturbing element, had struck them and
driven them forth. Then after patterning everywhere the violet velvet of the
evening air, abruptly soothed, they would return and be absorbed in the

tower, deadly no longer but benignant, some perching here and there (not
seeming to move, but snapping, perhaps, and swallowing 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 meanness 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 one saw of the church served to distinguish the whole from any
other building by a kind of general feeling which pervaded it, but it was in
the steeple that the church seemed to display a consciousness of itself, to
affirm its individual and responsible existence. It was the steeple which
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
architecture, 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 which pleases me. If it could play
the piano, I am sure it would really play." And when she gazed on 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 outpouring 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 topmost pinnacles, which, at the point where
they entered that zone of sunlight and were softened and sweetened by it,
seemed to have mounted suddenly far higher, to have become truly remote,
like a song whose singer breaks into falsetto, an octave above the
accompanying air.
It was the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which shaped and crowned and
consecrated every occupation, every hour of the day, every point of 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 Sundays I saw
these, in the hot light of a summer morning, blaze like a black sun 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 Léonie 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 behind the blinds of the shop
into which Mamma would perhaps go on her way to mass, penetrating its
odour of unbleached calico, to purchase a handkerchief or something, of
which the draper himself would let her see what he had, bowing from the
waist: who, having made everything ready for shutting up, had just gone
into the back shop to put on his Sunday coat and to wash his hands, which it
was his habit, every few minutes and even on the saddest occasions, to rub
one against the other with an air of enterprise, cunning, and success.
And again, after mass, when we looked in to tell Théodore to bring a
larger loaf than usual because our cousins had taken advantage of the fine
weather to come over from Thiberzy for luncheon, we had in front of us the
steeple, which, baked and brown itself like a larger loaf still of 'holy bread,'
with flakes and sticky drops on it of sunlight, pricked its sharp point into the
blue sky. And in the evening, as 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 contrast so kindly, there at the close of day, that
I would imagine it as being laid, like a brown velvet cushion, against—as
being thrust into the pallid sky which had yielded beneath its pressure, had
sunk slightly so as to make room for it, and had correspondingly risen on
either side; while the cries of the birds wheeling to and fro about it seemed
to intensify its silence, to elongate its spire still further, and to invest it with
some quality beyond the power of words.
Even when our errands lay in places behind the church, from which it
could not be seen, the view seemed always to have been composed with
reference to the steeple, which would stand up, now here, now there, among
the houses, and was perhaps even more affecting when it appeared thus
without the church. And, indeed, there are many others which look best
when seen in this way, and I can call to mind vignettes of housetops with
surmounting steeples in quite another category of art than those formed by
the dreary streets of Combray. 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 them
from a 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 fronts, but in a material so different, so
precious, so beringed, so rosy, so polished, that it is at once seen to be no
more a part of them than would be a part of two pretty pebbles lying side by

side, between which it had been washed on the beach, the purple, crinkled
spire of some sea-shell spun out into a turret and gay with glossy colour.
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 second, and even a third layer of jumbled
roofs, street beyond street, a violet bell, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in
the finest 'prints' which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of
black; which is, in fact, nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and
which imparts to this view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi
views of Rome. But since into none of these little etchings, whatever the
taste 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 creature
without parallel, so none of them keeps in dependence on it a whole section
of my inmost life as does the memory of those aspects of the steeple of
Combray from the streets behind the church. Whether one saw it at five
o'clock when going 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 again, when one had to go in and ask for news of Mme.
Sazerat, one's eyes followed the line where it ran low again beyond the
farther, descending slope, and one knew that it would be the second turning
after the steeple; or yet again, if pressing further afield one went to the
station, one saw it obliquely, shewing in profile fresh angles and surfaces,
like a solid body surprised at some unknown point in its revolution; or, from
the banks of the Vivonne, the apse, drawn muscularly together and
heightened in perspective, seemed to spring upwards with the effort which
the steeple made to hurl its spire-point into the heart of heaven: it was
always to the steeple that one must return, always it which dominated
everything else, summing up the houses with an unexpected pinnacle,
raised before me like the Finger of God, Whose Body might have been
concealed below among the crowd of human bodies without fear of my
confounding It, for that reason, with them. And so even to-day in any large
provincial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know well, if a
passer-by who is 'putting me on the right road' shews me from afar, as a
point to aim at, some belfry of a hospital, or a 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 resemblance to that dear and
vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I

have not gone astray, would see me, to his astonishment, oblivious of the
walk that I had planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call,
standing still on the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless,
trying to remember, feeling deep within myself 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 uneasily than when, just now, I asked him
for a direction, I will seek my way again, I will turn a corner... but... the
goal is in my heart...
On our way home from mass we would often meet M. Legrandin, who,
detained in Paris by his professional duties as an engineer, could only
(except in the regular holiday seasons) visit his home 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, of which they make no use in the specialised work of
their profession, but by which their conversation profits. More 'literary' than
many 'men of letters' (we were not aware at this period that M. Legrandin
had a distinct reputation as a writer, and so were greatly astonished to find
that a well-known composer had set some verses of his to music), endowed
with a greater ease in execution 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 a fantastic indifference or a
sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious. Tall, with
a good figure, a fine, thoughtful face, drooping fair moustaches, a look of
disillusionment in his blue eyes, an almost exaggerated refinement 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
grandmother 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 Lavallière neckties, his short, straight, almost schoolboyish
coat. She was astonished, too, at the furious invective which he was always
launching at the aristocracy, at fashionable life, and
'snobbishness'—"undoubtedly," he would say, "the sin of which Saint Paul
is thinking when he speaks of the sin for which there is no forgiveness."
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 thought it in not very
good taste that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country
gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver himself of such
violent attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the Revolution for
not having guillotined them all.
"Well met, my friends!" he would say as he came towards 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 his own peculiar smile, gently ironical,
disillusioned and vague, "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."
When, on our reaching the house, my aunt would send to ask us whether
Mme. Goupil had indeed arrived late for mass, not one of us could inform
her. Instead, we increased her anxiety by telling her that there was a painter
at work in the church copying the window of Gilbert the Bad. Françoise
was at once dispatched to the grocer's, but returned empty-handed owing to
the absence of Théodore, whose dual profession of choirman, with a part in
the maintenance of the fabric, and of grocer's assistant gave him not only
relations with all sections of society, but an encyclopaedic knowledge of
their affairs.
"Ah!" my aunt would sigh, "I wish it were time for Eulalie to come. She
is really the only person who will be able to tell me."
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 from
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 Théodore a hand; the
rest of her time she spent in visiting sick persons like my aunt Léonie, to
whom she would relate everything that had occurred at mass or vespers.
She was not above adding occasional pocket-money to the little income
which was found for her by the family of her old employers by going from
time to time to look after the Curé'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 Léonie, who now saw hardly anyone else, except the
reverend Curé. My aunt had by degrees erased every other visitor's name
from her list, because they all committed the fatal error, in her eyes, of
falling 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,
consisted of those who advised her not to take so much care of 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 (her, who had had two dreadful sips of Vichy water on her stomach for
fourteen hours!) than all her medicine bottles and her bed. The other
category was composed of people who appeared to believe that she was
more seriously ill than she thought, in fact that she was as seriously ill as
she said. And so none of those whom she had allowed upstairs to her room,
after considerable hesitation and at Françoise's urgent request, and who in
the course of their visit had shewn how unworthy they were of the honour
which had been done them by venturing a timid: "Don't you think that if
you were just to stir out a little on really fine days...?" or who, on the other
hand, when she said to them: "I am very low, very low; nearing the end,
dear friends!" had replied: "Ah, yes, when one has no strength left! Still,
you may last a while yet"; each party alike might be certain that her doors
would never open to them again. And if Françoise was amused by the look
of consternation on my aunt's face whenever she saw, from her bed, any of
these people in the Rue du Saint-Esprit, who looked as if they were coming
to see her, or heard her own door-bell ring, she would laugh far more
heartily, as at a clever trick, at my aunt's devices (which never failed) for
having them sent away, and at their look of discomfiture when they had to
turn back without having seen her; and would be filled with secret
admiration for her mistress, whom she felt to be superior to all these other
people, inasmuch as she could and did contrive not to see them. In short,
my aunt stipulated, at one and the same time, that whoever came to see her
must approve of her way of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and
assure her of an ultimate recovery.

In all this Eulalie excelled. My aunt might say to her twenty times in a
minute: "The end is come at last, my poor Eulalie!", twenty times Eulalie
would retort with: "Knowing your illness as you do, Mme. Octave, you will
live to be a hundred, as Mme. Sazerin said to me only yesterday." For one
of Eulalie's most rooted beliefs, and one that the formidable list of
corrections which her experience must have compiled was powerless to
eradicate, was that Mme. Sazerat's name was really Mme. Sazerin.
"I do not ask to live to a hundred," my aunt would say, for she preferred
to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.
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 Sunday, 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 expectation, appetising enough to begin with, but at once changing
to the agony of a hunger too long unsatisfied if Eulalie were a minute late in
coming. For, if unduly prolonged, the rapture of waiting for Eulalie became
a torture, and my aunt would never cease from 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 than this visit, and the moment that our
luncheon was ended Françoise would become impatient for us to leave the
dining-room so that she might go upstairs to 'occupy' my aunt. But—and
this more than ever from the day on which fine weather 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 'holy
bread,' which too had come in, after church, in its familiar way; and we
would still be found seated in front of our Arabian Nights plates, weighed
down by the heat of the day, and even more by our heavy meal. For upon
the permanent foundation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, preserves, and biscuits,
whose appearance on the table she no longer announced to us, Françoise
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; and so effectively 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 march of the seasons and the incidents of human 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 fancy loaf, because
it was our turn to 'offer' the holy bread. And when all these had been eaten,
a work composed expressly for ourselves, but dedicated more particularly
to my father, who had a fondness for such things, a cream of chocolate,
inspired in the mind, created by the hand of Françoise, 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 have finished; I am not hungry," would at once have been
lowered to the level of the Philistines who, when an artist makes them a
present of one of his works, examine its weight and material, whereas what
is of value is the creator's intention and his signature. To have left even the
tiniest morsel in the dish would have shewn as much discourtesy as to rise
and leave a concert hall while the 'piece' was still being played, and 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 modelled upon
a background of crumbling stone the quick relief of its slender, allegorical
body; on the bench without a back, in the shade of a lilac-tree, in that little
corner of the garden which communicated, by a service door, with the Rue
du Saint-Esprit, and from whose neglected soil rose, in two stages, an
outcrop from the house itself and apparently 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 Françoise as a little temple of Venus. It
would be overflowing with the offerings of the milkman, the fruiterer, the

greengrocer, come sometimes from distant villages to dedicate here the
first-fruits of their fields. And its roof was always surmounted by the cooing
of a dove.
In earlier days I would not have lingered in the sacred grove which
surrounded this temple, for, before going upstairs to read, I would steal into
the little sitting-room which my uncle Adolphe, a brother of my grandfather
and an old soldier who had retired from the service as a major, used to
occupy on the ground floor, a room which, even when its opened windows
let in the heat, if not actually the rays of the sun which seldom penetrated so
far, would never fail to emit that vague and yet fresh odour, suggesting at
once an open-air and an old-fashioned kind of existence, which sets and
keeps the nostrils dreaming when one goes into a disused gun-room. But for
some years now I had not gone into my uncle Adolphe's room, since he no
longer came to Combray on account of a quarrel which had arisen between
him and my family, by my fault, and in the following circumstances: Once
or twice every month, in Paris, I used to be sent to pay him a visit, as he
was finishing his luncheon, wearing a plain alpaca coat, and waited upon by
his servant in a working-jacket of striped linen, 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 marchpane or a tangerine, and we would
cross a room in which no one ever sat, whose fire was never lighted, whose
walls were picked out 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 shewed, against a dark
background, a plump and rosy goddess driving a car, or standing upon a
globe, or wearing a star on her brow; pictures which were popular under the
Second Empire because there was thought to be something about them that
suggested Pompeii, which were then generally despised, and which now
people are beginning to collect again for one single and consistent reason
(despite any others which they may advance), namely, that they suggest the
Second Empire. And there I would stay with my uncle until his man came,
with a message from the coachman, to ask him at what time he would like
the carriage. My uncle would then be lost in meditation, while his
astonished servant stood there, not daring to disturb him by the least
movement, wondering and waiting for his answer, which never varied. For
in the end, after a supreme crisis of hesitation, my uncle would utter,

infallibly, the words: "A quarter past two," which the servant would echo
with amazement, but without disputing them: "A quarter past two! Very
good, sir... I will go and tell him...."
At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, of necessity,
since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and so incorrect was
the picture I drew for myself of the pleasures to be enjoyed there that I
almost believed that each of the spectators looked, as into a stereoscope,
upon a stage and scenery which existed for himself alone, though closely
resembling the thousand other spectacles presented to the rest of the
audience individually.
Every morning I would hasten to the Moriss column to see what new
plays it announced. Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than the
dreams with which these announcements filled my mind, dreams which
took their form from the inevitable associations of the words forming the
title of the play, and also from the colour of the bills, still damp and
wrinkled with paste, on which those words stood out. Nothing, unless it
were such strange titles as the Testament de César Girodot, or Oedipe-Roi,
inscribed not on the green bills of the Opéra-Comique, but on the wine-
coloured bills of the Comédie-Française, nothing seemed to me to differ
more profoundly from the sparkling white plume of the Diamants 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 those were all that I knew of
either), attempting to snatch from each a foretaste of the pleasure which it
offered me, and to compare this pleasure with that latent in the other title,
until in the end I had shewn myself such vivid, such compelling 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 play I should
prefer to see as if, at the dinner-table, they had obliged me to choose
between rice à l'Impératrice and the famous cream of chocolate.
All my conversations with my playfellows 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 I would arrange them in the order of
their talent in lists which I used to murmur to myself all day long: lists
which in the end became petrified in my brain and were a source of
annoyance to it, being irremovable.
And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in class, when the
master's head was turned, to communicate with some new friend, I would
always begin by asking him whether he had begun yet to go to theatres, and
if he agreed that our greatest actor was undoubtedly Got, our second
Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his judgment, Febvre came below Thiron, or
Delaunay below Coquelin, the sudden volatility which the name of
Coquelin, forsaking its stony rigidity, would engender in my mind, in which
it moved upwards to the second place, the rich vitality with which the name
of Delaunay would suddenly be furnished, to enable it to slip down to
fourth, would stimulate and fertilise my brain with a sense of budding and
blossoming life.
But if the thought of actors weighed so upon me, if the sight of Maubant,
coming out one afternoon from the Théâtre-Français, had plunged me in the
throes and sufferings of hopeless love, how much more did the name of a
'star,' blazing outside the doors of a theatre, how much more, seen through
the window of a brougham which passed me in the street, the hair over her
forehead abloom with roses, did the face of a woman who, I would think,
was perhaps an actress, leave with me a lasting disturbance, a futile and
painful effort to form a picture of her private life.
I classified, in order of talent, the most distinguished: Sarah Bernhardt,
Berma, Bartet, Madeleine Brohan, Jeanne Samary; but I was interested in
them all. Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and also ladies of
another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind. He used
to entertain them at his house. And if we went to see him on certain days
only, that was because on the other days ladies might come whom his
family could not very well have met. So we at least thought; as for my
uncle, his fatal readiness to pay pretty widows (who had perhaps never been
married) and countesses (whose high-sounding titles were probably no
more than noms de guerre) the compliment of presenting them to my
grandmother or even of presenting to them some of our family jewels, had
already embroiled him more than once with my grandfather. Often, if the
name of some actress were mentioned in conversation, I would hear my

father say, with a smile, to my mother: "One of your uncle's friends," and I
would think of the weary novitiate through which, perhaps for years on end,
a grown man, even a man of real importance, might have to pass, waiting
on the doorstep of some such lady, while she refused to answer his letters
and made her hall-porter drive him away; and imagine that my uncle was
able to dispense a little jackanapes like myself from all these sufferings by
introducing me in his own home to the actress, unapproachable by all the
world, but for him an intimate friend.
And so—on the pretext that some lesson, the hour of which had been
altered, now came at such an awkward time that it had already more than
once prevented me, and would continue to prevent me, from seeing my
uncle—one day, not one of the days which he set apart for our visits, I took
advantage of the fact that my parents had had luncheon earlier than usual; I
slipped out and, instead of going to read the playbills on their column, for
which purpose I was allowed to go out unaccompanied, I ran all the way to
his house. I noticed before his door a carriage and pair, with red carnations
on the horses' blinkers and in the coachman's buttonhole. As I climbed the
staircase I could hear laughter and a woman's voice, and, as soon as I had
rung, silence and the sound of shutting doors. The man-servant who let me
in appeared embarrassed, and said that my uncle was extremely busy and
probably could not see me; he went in, however, to announce my arrival,
and the same voice I had heard before said: "Oh, yes! Do let him come in;
just for a moment; it will be so amusing. Is that his photograph there, on
your desk? And his mother (your niece, isn't she?) beside it? The image of
her, isn't he? I should so like to see the little chap, just for a second."
I could hear my uncle grumbling and growing angry; finally the
manservant told me to come in.
On the table was the same plate of marchpanes that was always there; my
uncle wore the same alpaca coat as on other days; but opposite to him, in a
pink silk dress with a great necklace of pearls about her throat, sat a young
woman who was just finishing a tangerine. My uncertainty whether I ought
to address her as Madame or Mademoiselle made me blush, and not daring
to look too much in her direction, in case I should be obliged to speak to
her, I hurried across to kiss my uncle. She looked at me and smiled; my
uncle said "My nephew!" without telling her my name or telling me hers,
doubtless because, since his difficulties with my grandfather, he had

endeavoured as far as possible to avoid any association of his family with
this other class of acquaintance.
"How like his mother he is," said the lady.
"But you have never seen my niece, except in photographs," my uncle
broke in quickly, with a note of anger.
"I beg your pardon, dear friend, I passed her on the staircase last year
when you were so ill. It is true I only saw her for a moment, and your
staircase is rather dark; but I saw well enough to see how lovely she was.
This young gentleman has her beautiful eyes, and also this," she went on,
tracing a line with one finger across the lower part of her forehead. "Tell
me," she asked my uncle, "is your niece Mme.——; is her name the same
as yours?"
"He takes most after his father," muttered my uncle, who was no more
anxious to effect an introduction by proxy, in repeating Mamma's name
aloud, than to bring the two together in the flesh. "He's his father all over,
and also like my poor mother."
"I have not met his father, dear," said the lady in pink, bowing her head
slightly, "and I never saw your poor mother. You will remember it was just
after your great sorrow that we got to know one another."
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,
especially the daughter of one of our cousins, to whose house I went every
New Year's Day. Only better dressed; otherwise 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
believing that this was one of 'those women,' and certainly I should never
have believed her one of the 'smart ones' had I not seen the carriage and
pair, the pink dress, the pearly necklace, had I not been aware, too, that my
uncle knew only the very best of them. But I asked myself how the
millionaire who gave her her carriage and her flat and her jewels could find
any pleasure in flinging his money away upon a woman who had 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 its secrecy and

invisibility, like the plot of a novel, the hidden truth of a scandal which had
driven out of the home of her middle-class parents and dedicated to the
service of all mankind which had brought to the flowering-point of her
beauty, had raised to fame or notoriety this woman, the play of whose
features, the intonations of whose voice, like so many others I already
knew, made me regard her, in spite of myself, as a young lady of good
family, her who was no longer of a family at all.
We had gone by this time into the 'study,' and my uncle, who seemed a
trifle embarrassed by my presence, offered her a cigarette.
"No, thank you, dear friend," she said. "You know I only smoke the ones
the Grand Duke sends me. I tell him that they make you jealous." And she
drew from a case cigarettes covered with inscriptions in gold, in a foreign
language. "Why, yes," she began again suddenly. "Of course I 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 charming to me," she went on, modestly
and with feeling. But when I thought to myself what must actually have
been the rude greeting (which, she made out, had been so charming), I, who
knew my father's coldness and reserve, was shocked, as though at some
indelicacy on his part, at the contrast between the excessive recognition
bestowed on it and his never adequate geniality. It has since struck me as
one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle,
painstaking women that they devote all their generosity, all their talent, their
transferable dreams of sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never
seek to realise the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-
square frame of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the
fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched and
ill-polished lives of men. And just as this one filled the smoking-room,
where my uncle was entertaining her in his alpaca coat, with her charming
person, her dress of pink silk, her pearls, and the refinement suggested by
intimacy with a Grand Duke, so, in the same way, she had taken some
casual remark by my father, had worked it up delicately, given it a 'turn,' a
precious title, set in it the gem of a glance from her own eyes, a gem of the
first water, blended of humility and gratitude; and so had given it back
transformed into a jewel, a work of art, into something altogether charming.
"Look here, my boy, it is time you went away," said my uncle.

I rose; I could scarcely resist a 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 of her. My heart beat loud while I counted out 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. Blindly, hotly, madly, flinging aside all the reasons
I had just found to support such action, 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 went on, setting 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?"
I had not the least idea of what a 'blue' might be. I did not understand half
the words which the lady used, but my fear lest there should be concealed in
them some question which it would be impolite in me not to answer kept
me from withdrawing my close attention from them, and I was beginning to
feel extremely tired.
"No, no; it is impossible," said my uncle, shrugging his shoulders. "He is
kept busy at home all day; he has plenty of work to do. He brings back all
the prizes from his school," he added in a lower tone, so that I should not
hear this falsehood and interrupt with a contradiction. "You can't tell; he
may turn out a little Victor Hugo, a kind of Vaulabelle, don't you know."
"Oh, I love artistic people," replied the lady in pink; "there is no one like
them for understanding women. Them, and really nice men like yourself.
But please forgive my ignorance. Who, what is Vaulabelle? Is it those gilt
books in the little glass case in your drawing-room? You know you
promised to lend them to me; I will take great care of them."
My uncle, who hated lending people books, said nothing, and ushered me
out into the hall. Madly in love with the lady in pink, I covered my old
uncle's tobacco-stained cheeks with passionate kisses, and while he,
awkwardly enough, gave me to understand (without actually saying) that he
would rather I did not tell my parents about this visit, I assured him, with
tears in my eyes, that his kindness had made so strong an impression upon
me that some day I would most certainly find a way of expressing my
gratitude. So strong an impression had it made upon me that two hours
later, after a string of mysterious utterances which did not strike me as

giving my parents a sufficiently clear idea of the new importance with
which I had been invested, I found it simpler to let them have a full account,
omitting no detail, of the visit I had paid that afternoon. In doing this I had
no thought of causing my uncle any unpleasantness. How could I have
thought such a thing, since I did not wish it? And I could not suppose that
my parents would see any harm in a visit in which I myself saw none.
Every day of our lives does not some friend or other ask us to make his
apologies, without fail, to some woman to whom he has been prevented
from writing; and do not we forget to do so, feeling that this woman cannot
attach much importance to a silence which has none for ourselves? I
imagined, like everyone else, that the brains of other people were lifeless
and submissive receptacles with no power of specific reaction to any
stimulus which might be applied to them; and I had not the least doubt that
when I deposited in the minds of my parents the news of the acquaintance I
had made at my uncle's I should at the same time transmit to them the
kindly judgment I myself had based on the introduction. Unfortunately my
parents had recourse to principles entirely different from those which I
suggested they should adopt when they came to form their estimate of my
uncle's conduct. My father and grandfather had 'words' with him of a
violent order; as I learned indirectly. A few days later, passing my uncle in
the street as he drove by in an open carriage, Î felt at once all the grief, the
gratitude, the remorse which I should have liked to convey to him. Beside
the immensity of these emotions I considered that merely to raise my hat to
him would be incongruous and petty, and might make him think that I
regarded myself as bound to shew him no more than the commonest form
of courtesy. I decided to abstain from so inadequate a gesture, and turned
my head away. My uncle thought that, in doing so I was obeying my
parents' orders; he never forgave them; and though he did not die until
many years later, not one of us ever set eyes on him again.
And so I no longer used to go into the little sitting-room (now kept shut)
of my uncle Adolphe; instead, after hanging about on the outskirts of the
back-kitchen until Françoise appeared on its threshold and announced: "I
am going to let the kitchen-maid serve the coffee and take up the hot water;
it is time I went off to Mme. Octave," 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 institution to which an invariable set of
attributes assured a sort of fixity and continuity and identity throughout the

long series of transitory human shapes in which that personality was
incarnate; for we never found the same girl there two years running. In the
year in which we ate such quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose
duty it was to dress them was a poor sickly creature, some way 'gone' in
pregnancy when we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed
surprising that Françoise allowed her to run so many errands in the town
and to do so much work in the house, for she was beginning to find a
difficulty in bearing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger
every day, whose splendid outline could be detected through the folds of her
ample smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some
of the allegorical figures in his paintings, 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
Giotto's Charity?" And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled
and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical, squared
outlines of her cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins, so strong 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 in her body,
without appearing to understand what it meant, without any rendering in her
facial expression of all its beauty and spiritual significance, but carried as if
it were an ordinary and rather heavy burden, so it is without any apparent
suspicion of what she is about that the powerfully built housewife who is
portrayed in the Arena beneath the label 'Caritas,' and a reproduction of
whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray,
incarnates 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 tumbling all the treasures of the earth
at her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to
extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on 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 might hand up a
corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen to some one
who had called down to ask her for it from the ground-level above. The
'Invidia,' again, should have had some look on her face of envy. 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 are
strained and contorted, like a child's who is filling a balloon with his breath,
and that Envy, and we ourselves for that matter, when we look at her, since
all her attention and ours are concentrated on the action of her lips, have no
time, almost, to spare for envious thoughts.
Despite all the admiration that M. Swann might profess for these figures
of Giotto, it was a long time before I could find any pleasure in seeing in
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
uvula by a tumour in the tongue, or by the introduction of the operator's
instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular features were the
very same as those which adorned the faces of certain good and pious and
slightly withered ladies of Combray whom I used to see at mass, many of
whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces of Injustice. But in later
years I understood that the arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these
frescoes lay in the great part played in each of them by its symbols, while
the fact that these were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought
symbolised was nowhere expressed), but as real things, actually felt or
materially handled, added something more precise and more literal to their
meaning, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they
imparted. And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our
attention incessantly drawn to her belly by the load which filled it; and in
the same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony
of death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal,
intestinal 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, a side
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 much alive as the
pregnant servant-girl, while she herself appeared scarcely less allegorical
than they. And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack) of participation
by a person's soul in the significant marks of its own special virtue has,
apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which, if not strictly

psychological, may at least be called physiognomical. Later on, when, in
the course of my life, I have had occasion to meet with, in convents for
instance, literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally
had the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and slightly brutal air of a busy
surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness
at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, the face devoid
of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.
Then while the kitchen-maid—who, all unawares, made the superior
qualities of Françoise shine with added lustre, just as Error, by force of
contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth—took in coffee which (according to
Mamma) was nothing more than hot water, and then carried up to our
rooms hot water which was barely tepid, I would be lying stretched out on
my bed, a book in my hand, in my room which trembled with the effort to
defend its frail, transparent coolness against the afternoon sun, behind its
almost closed shutters through which, however, a reflection of the sunlight
had contrived to slip in on its golden wings, remaining motionless, between
glass and woodwork, in a corner, like a butterfly poised upon a flower. It
was hardly light enough for me to read, and my feeling 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 Françoise had assured that
my aunt was not 'resting' and that he might therefore make a noise), upon
some old packing-cases from which nothing would really be sent flying but
the dust, though the din of them, in the resonant atmosphere that
accompanies hot weather, seemed to scatter broadcast a rain of blood-red
stars; and from the flies who performed for my benefit, in their small
concert, as it might be the chamber music of summer; evoking heat and
light quite differently from an air of human music which, if you happen to
have heard it during a fine summer, will always bring that summer back to
your mind, the flies' music is bound to the season by a closer, a more vital
tie—born of 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 gives us a guarantee that they do really exist, that they are
close around us, immediately accessible.
This dim freshness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street
what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say, equally luminous, and
presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my
senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed in

fragments only; and so was quite in harmony with my state of repose,
which (thanks to the adventures related in my books, which had just excited
it) bore, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the
shock and animation of a torrent of activity and life.
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 outside. And as I did not wish to leave off my book, I would
go on with it in the garden, under the chestnut-tree, in a little sentry-box of
canvas and matting, in the farthest recesses 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, did not they form a similar sort of hiding-hole, in
the depths of which I felt that I could bury myself and remain invisible even
when I was looking at what went on outside? When I saw any external
object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and
it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from
ever coming directly in contact with the material form; for it would
volatilise itself in some way before I could touch it, just as an incandescent
body which is moved towards something wet never actually touches
moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by a zone of evaporation. Upon
the sort of screen, patterned with different states and impressions, which my
consciousness would quietly unfold while I was reading, and which ranged
from the most deeply hidden aspirations of my heart to the wholly external
view of the horizon spread out before my eyes at the foot of the garden,
what was from the first the most permanent and the most intimate part of
me, the lever whose incessant movements controlled all the rest, was my
belief in the philosophic richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and
my desire to appropriate these to myself, whatever the book might be. For
even if I had purchased it at Combray, having seen it outside Borange's,
whose grocery lay too far from our house for Françoise to be able to deal
there, as she did with Camus, but who enjoyed better custom as a stationer
and bookseller; even if I had seen it, tied with string to keep it in its place in
the mosaic of monthly parts and pamphlets which adorned either side of his
doorway, a doorway more mysterious, more teeming with suggestion than
that of a cathedral, I should have noticed and bought it there simply because
I had recognised it as a book which had been well spoken of, in my hearing,
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 a motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the
discovery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which
I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more
dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime.
These were the events which took place in the book I was reading. It is true
that the people concerned in them were not what Françoise would have
called 'real people.' But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes
of a 'real' person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental
picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist
lay in his understanding that, as the picture 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 a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is
to say, he remains opaque, offers 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
feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete
idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The
novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque
sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial
sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. 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,
while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath
and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that 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 of a more lasting impression 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 actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense

of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of
their development stops our perception of them. It is the same in life; the
heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from
reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain
natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish,
successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual
sensation of change.
Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than this human
element, would come the view, more or less projected before my eyes, of
the country in which the action of the story was taking place, which made a
far stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual landscape
which would meet my eyes when I raised them from my book. In this way,
for two consecutive summers I used to sit 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 an endless vista of
sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments of wood lay
mouldering in beds of watercress; and nearby, rambling and clustering
along low walls, purple flowers and red. 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 used to be quickened with the
freshness and coolness of running water; and whoever she might be, the
woman whose image I called to mind, purple flowers and red would at once
spring up on either side of her like complementary colours.
This was not only because an image of which we dream remains for ever
distinguished, is adorned and enriched by the association of colours not its
own which may happen to surround it in our mental picture; for the scenes
in the books I read were to me not merely scenery more vividly portrayed
by my imagination than any which Combray could spread before my eyes
but otherwise of the same kind. Because of the selection that the author had
made of them, because of the spirit of faith in which my mind would exceed
and anticipate his printed word, as it might be interpreting a revelation,
these scenes used to give me the impression—one which I hardly ever
derived from any place in which I might happen to be, and never from our
garden, that undistinguished product of the strictly conventional fantasy of
the gardener whom my grandmother so despised—of their being actually
part of Nature herself, and worthy to be studied and explored.

Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the
country it described, 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, surrounded 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 pass beyond it, to break out into
the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly, all around
us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from without, but the resonance
of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, endeared to us on
that account, the spiritual glamour which we ourselves have cast upon
them; we are disillusioned, and learn that they are in themselves barren and
devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of
certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering
array so as to influence and subjugate other human beings who, as we very
well know, are situated outside ourselves, where we can never reach them.
And so, if I always imagined the woman I loved as in a setting of whatever
places I most longed, at the time, to visit; if in my secret longings it was she
who attracted me to them, who opened to me the gate of an unknown world,
that 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 to-day as though I were cutting sections, at different
heights, in a jet of water, rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or
motion—were only drops in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all
the forces of my life.
And then, as I continue to trace the outward course of these impressions
from their close-packed intimate source in my consciousness, and before I
come to the horizon of reality which envelops them, I discover pleasures of
another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of tasting the good scent
on the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor; and, when an hour chimed
from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of watching what was already spent of the
afternoon fall drop by drop until I heard the last stroke which enabled me to
add up the total sum, after which the silence that followed seemed to herald
the beginning, in the blue sky above me, of that long part of the day still
allowed me for reading, until the good dinner which Françoise was even
now preparing should come to strengthen and refresh me after the strenuous
pursuit of its hero through the pages of my book. And, as each hour struck,
it would seem to me that a few seconds only had passed since the hour

before; the latest would inscribe itself, close to its predecessor, on the sky's
surface, and I would be unable to believe that sixty minutes could be
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 which had taken place had not
taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the
deepest slumber, had stopped 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 our Combray garden,
from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace incident of my
actual life, replacing them by a career of strange adventures and ambitions
in a land watered by living streams, you still recall those adventures and
ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you embody and preserve
them by virtue of having little by little drawn round and enclosed them
(while I went on with my book and the heat of the day declined) in the
gradual crystallisation, slowly altering in form and dappled with a pattern of
chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours.

Sometimes I would be torn from my book, in the middle of the afternoon,
by the gardener's daughter, who came running like a mad thing, overturning
an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a tooth, and screaming
out "They're coming, they're coming!" so that Françoise and I should run
too and not miss anything of the show. That was on days when the cavalry
stationed in Combray went out for some military exercise, 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 walks and were stared at in return, the gardener's daughter,
through the gap which there was between two houses far away in the
Avenue de la Gare, would have spied the glitter of helmets. The servants
then hurried in with their chairs, for when the troopers filed through the Rue
Sainte-Hildegarde they filled it from side to side, and their jostling horses
scraped against the walls of the houses, covering and drowning the
pavements like banks which present too narrow a channel to a river in
flood.
"Poor children," Françoise 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 go on, laying a hand over her
heart, where presumably she had felt the shock.
"A fine sight, isn't it, Mme. Françoise, all these young fellows not caring
two straws for their lives?" the gardener would ask, just to 'draw' her. And
he would not have spoken in vain.
"Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world is there that we
should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a
second time? Oh dear, oh dear; you're right all the same; it's quite true, 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 hang 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 to
the man.
The Rue Sainte-Hildegarde turned too sharply for us to be able to see
people approaching at any distance, and it was only through the gap
between those two houses in the Avenue de la Gare that we could still make
out fresh helmets racing along towards us, and flashing in the sunlight. The

gardener wanted to know whether there were still many to come, and he
was thirsty besides, with the sun beating down upon his head. So then,
suddenly, his daughter would leap out, as though from a beleaguered city,
would make a sortie, turn the street corner, and, having risked her life a
hundred times over, reappear and bring us, with a jug of liquorice-water, the
news that there were still at least a thousand of them, pouring along without
a break from the direction of Thiberzy and Méséglise. Françoise and the
gardener, having 'made up' their difference, would discuss the line to be
followed in case of war.
"Don't you see, Françoise," he would say. "Revolution would be better,
because then no one would need to join in unless he liked."
"Oh, yes, I can see that, certainly; it's more straightforward."
The gardener believed that, as soon as war was declared, they would stop
all the railways.
"Yes, to be sure; so that we sha'n't get away," said Françoise.
And the gardener would assent, with "Ay, they're the cunning ones," for
he would not allow that war was anything but a kind of trick which the state
attempted to play on the people, or that there was a man in the world who
would not run away from it if he had the chance to do so.
But Françoise 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 on the pavement, and the excitement caused by the
passage of the soldiers subside. Long after order had been restored, an
abnormal tide of humanity would continue to darken the streets of
Combray. And in front of every house, even of those where it was not, as a
rule, 'done,' the servants, and sometimes even the masters would sit and
stare, festooning their doorsteps 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 which a visit from Swann once made, and the
commentary which he then supplied to the course of my reading, which had
brought me to the work of an author quite new to me, called Bergotte, had
this definite result that for a long time afterwards it was not against a wall
gay with spikes of purple blossom, but on a wholly different background,

the porch of a gothic cathedral, that I would see outlined 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, for whom I had a strong admiration, a precious youth of the name
of Bloch. Hearing me confess my love of the Nuit d'Octobre, he had burst
out in a bray of laughter, like a bugle-call, and told me, by way of warning:
"You must conquer 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," he added graciously, "that he, and even the man Racine,
did, each of them, once in his life, compose a line which is not only fairly
rhythmical, but has also what is in my eyes the supreme merit of meaning
absolutely nothing. One is

La blanche Oloossone et la blanche Camire,

and the other

La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë."

They were submitted to my judgment, as evidence for the defence of the
two runagates, in an article by my very dear master Father Lecomte, who is
found pleasing in the sight of the immortal gods. By which token, here is a
book which I have not the time, just now, to read, a book recommended, it
would seem, by that colossal fellow. He regards, or so they tell me, its
author, one Bergotte, Esquire, as a subtle scribe, more subtle, indeed, than
any beast of the field; and, albeit he exhibits on occasion a critical pacifism,
a tenderness in suffering fools, for which it is impossible to account, and
hard to make allowance, still his word has weight with me as it were the
Delphic Oracle. Read you then this lyrical prose, and, if the Titanic master-
builder of rhythm who composed Bhagavat and the Lévrier de Magnus
speaks not falsely, then, by Apollo, you may taste, even you, my master, the
ambrosial joys of Olympus." It was in an ostensible vein of sarcasm that he
had asked me to call him, and that he himself called me, "my master." But,
as a matter of fact, we each derived a certain amount of satisfaction from
the mannerism, being still at the age in which one believes that one gives a
thing real existence by giving it a name.
Unfortunately I was not able to set at rest, by further talks with Bloch, in
which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts he had

engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from which I, if
you please, expected nothing less than the revelation of truth itself) were all
the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For, as it happened, Bloch was
not invited to the house again. At first, he had been well received there. It is
true that my grandfather made out that, whenever I formed a strong
attachment to any one of my friends and brought him home with me, that
friend was invariably a Jew; to which he would not have objected on
principle—indeed his own friend Swann was of Jewish extraction—had he
not found that the Jews whom I chose as friends were not usually of the best
type. And so I was hardly ever able to bring a new friend home without my
grandfather's humming the "O, God of our fathers" from La Juive, or else
"Israel, break thy chain," singing the tune alone, of course, to an "um-ti-
tum-ti-tum, tra-la"; but I used to be afraid of my friend's recognising the
sound, and so being able to reconstruct the words.
Before seeing them, merely on hearing their names, about which, as often
as not, there was nothing particularly Hebraic, he would divine not only the
Jewish origin of such of my friends as might indeed be of the chosen
people, but even some dark secret which was hidden in their family.
"And what do they call your friend who is coming this evening?"
"Dumont, grandpapa."
"Dumont! Oh, I'm frightened of Dumont."
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 obliged, unconsciously, by my grandfather's subtle
examination, to admit his origin, then my grandfather, to shew us that he
had no longer any doubts, would merely look at us, humming almost
inaudibly 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 towards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for
other reasons. He had begun by annoying my father, who, seeing him come
in 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 has been 'set fair.'"
Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am
absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely
apart from physical contingencies 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 is an imbecile."
Next, Bloch had displeased my grandmother because, after luncheon,
when she complained of not feeling very well, he had stifled a sob and
wiped the tears from his eyes.
"You cannot imagine that he is 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 he arrived an hour
and a half late for luncheon 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
reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the Malayan kriss, but I
am wholly and entirely without instruction in those infinitely more
pernicious (besides being quite bleakly 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 illness were genuine enough; but they knew, either
instinctively or from their own experience, that our early impulsive

emotions have but little influence over our later actions and the conduct of
our lives; and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty to our 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 preferred to
Bloch, as companions for myself, boys who would have given me no more
than it is proper, by all the laws of middle-class morality, for boys to give
one another, who would not unexpectedly send me a basket of fruit because
they happened, that morning, to have thought of me with affection, but who,
since they were incapable of inclining in my favour, by any single impulse
of their imagination and emotions, the exact balance of the duties and
claims of friendship, were as incapable of loading the scales to my
prejudice. Even the injuries we do them will not easily divert from the path
of their duty towards us those conventional natures of which my great-aunt
furnished a type: who, after quarrelling for years with a niece, to whom she
never spoke again, 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.
But I was fond of Bloch; my parents wished me to be happy; and the
insoluble problems which I set myself on such texts as the 'absolutely
meaningless' beauty of La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë tired me more and
made me more unwell than I should have been after further talks with him,
unwholesome as those talks might seem to my mother's mind. And he
would still have been received at Combray but for one thing. That same
night, after dinner, having informed me (a piece of news which had a great
influence on my later life, making it happier at one time and then more
unhappy) that no woman ever thought of anything but love, and that there
was not one of them whose resistance a man could not overcome, he had
gone on to assure me that he had heard it said on unimpeachable authority
that my great-aunt herself had led a 'gay' life in her younger days, and had
been notoriously 'kept.' I could not refrain from passing on so important a
piece of information to my parents; the next time Bloch called he was not
admitted, and afterwards, when I met him in the street, he greeted me with
extreme coldness.
But in the matter of Bergotte he had spoken truly.

For the first few days, like a tune which will be running in one's head and
maddening one soon enough, but of which one has not for the moment 'got
hold,' the things I was to love so passionately in Bergotte's style had not yet
caught my eye. 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 story alone, as in the first
dawn of love, when we go every day to meet a woman at some party or
entertainment by the charm of which we imagine it is that we are attracted.
Then I observed the rare, almost archaic phrases which he liked to employ
at certain points, where a hidden flow of harmony, a prelude contained and
concealed in the work itself would animate and elevate 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, splendid
torture 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 philosophy, new to me, by the use of
marvellous imagery, to the inspiration of which I would naturally have
ascribed that sound of harping which began to chime and echo in my ears,
an accompaniment to which that imagery added something ethereal and
sublime. 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 passage bore no comparison, a joy which I felt myself to
have experienced in some innermost chamber of my soul, deep, undivided,
vast, from which all obstructions 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 bursts of music, the same
idealist philosophy which had been present in the earlier passages without
my having taken them into account as the source of my pleasure, I now no
longer had the impression of being confronted by a particular passage in
one of Bergotte's works, which traced a purely bi-dimensional figure in
outline upon the surface of my mind, but rather of the 'ideal passage' of
Bergotte, common to every one of his books, and 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 by no means Bergotte's sole admirer; he was the favourite writer
also of a friend of my mother's, a highly literary 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 so universally acclimatised
that one finds it flowering everywhere throughout Europe and America, and
even in the tiniest villages, rare still in its refinement, but in that alone.
What my mother's friend, and, it would seem, what Dr. du Boulbon liked
above all in the writings of Bergotte was just what I liked, the same flow of
melody, the same old-fashioned phrases, and certain others, quite simple
and familiar, but so placed by him, in such prominence, 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 lengthy
prayer, would give a free outlet to that effluence which, in the earlier
volumes, remained buried beneath the form of his prose, discernible only in
a rippling of its surface, and perhaps even more delightful, more
harmonious when it was thus veiled from the eye, when the reader could
give no precise indication of where the murmur of the current began, or of
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 felt even
disappointed when he resumed the thread of his narrative. Whenever he
spoke of something whose beauty had until then remained hidden from me,
of pine-forests or of hailstorms, of Notre-Dame de Paris, of Athalie, or of
Phèdre, by some piece of imagery he would make their beauty explode and
drench me with its essence. And so, dimly realising that the universe
contained innumerable elements which my feeble senses would be
powerless to discern, did he not bring them within my reach, I wished that I
might have his opinion, some metaphor of his, upon everything in the
world, and especially upon such things as I might have an opportunity,
some day, of seeing for myself; and among such things, more particularly
still upon some of the historic buildings of France, upon certain views of
the sea, because the emphasis with which, in his books, he referred to these
shewed that he regarded 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 with gratitude and pride as though some
deity had, in his infinite 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 used often at night, when I was unable
to sleep, to write to my grandmother and mother, and so concisely and well
that his page had the appearance of a collection of mottoes for me to set at
the head of my letters. And so too, in later years, when I began to compose
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 equivalent of my sentences in Bergotte's. But it was only
then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I
myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly
reproduce what I seemed to have detected in my mind, and in my fear of
their not turning out 'true to life,' I had no time to ask myself whether what I
was writing would be pleasant to read! But indeed there was no kind of
language, no kind of ideas which I really liked, except these. My feverish
and unsatisfactory attempts were themselves a token of my love, a love
which brought me no pleasure, but was, for all that, intense and deep. 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, just as a cook who, once in a while, has no dinner
to prepare for other people, can then find time to gormandise himself. And
so, when I had found, one day, in a book by Bergotte, some joke about an
old family servant, to which his solemn and magnificent style added a great
deal of irony, but which was in principle what I had often said to my
grandmother about Françoise, and when, another time, I had discovered that
he thought 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 on our friend M. Legrandin (and, moreover, my remarks
on Françoise 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 without interest); then it was suddenly revealed to me that
my own humble existence and the Realms of Truth were less widely
separated than I had supposed, that at certain points they were actually in

contact; and in my new-found confidence and joy I 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 his children, and had never found any
consolation. And so I would read, or rather sing his sentences in my brain,
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 in the
world I cherished his philosophy, and had pledged myself to it in lifelong
devotion. It made me impatient to reach the age when I should be eligible to
attend the class at school called 'Philosophy.' I did not wish to learn or do
anything else there, but simply to exist and be guided entirely by the mind
of Bergotte, and, if I had been told then that the metaphysicians whom I was
actually to follow there resembled him in nothing, I should have been struck
down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity,
when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to
come.
One Sunday, while I was reading in the garden, I was interrupted by
Swann, who had come to call upon my parents.
"What are you reading? May I look? Why, it's Bergotte! Who has been
telling you about him?"
I replied that Bloch was responsible.
"Oh, yes, that boy I saw here once, who looks so like the Bellini portrait
of Mahomet II. It's an astonishing likeness; he has the same arched
eyebrows and hooked nose and prominent cheekbones. When his beard
comes he'll be Mahomet himself. Anyhow he has good taste, for Bergotte is
a charming creature." And seeing how much I seemed to admire Bergotte,
Swann, who never spoke at all about the people he knew, made an
exception in my favour and said: "I know him well; if you would like him
to write a few words on the title-page of your book I could ask him for
you."
I dared not accept such an offer, but bombarded Swann with questions
about his friend. "Can you tell me, please, who is his favourite actor?"
"Actor? No, I can't say. But I do know this: there's not a man on the stage
whom he thinks equal to Berma; he puts her above everyone. Have you
seen her?"

"No, sir, my parents do not allow me to go to the theatre."
"That is a pity. You should insist. Berma in Phèdre, in the Cid; well, she's
only an actress, if you like, but you know that I don't believe very much in
the 'hierarchy' of the arts." As he spoke I noticed, what had often struck me
before in his conversations with my grandmother's sisters, that whenever he
spoke of serious matters, whenever he used an expression which seemed to
imply a definite opinion upon some important subject, he would take care to
isolate, to sterilise it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as
though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was
anxious to disclaim any personal responsibility for it; as who should say
"the 'hierarchy,' don't you know, as silly people call it." But then, if it was so
absurd, why did he say the 'hierarchy'? A moment later he went on: "Her
acting will give you as noble an inspiration as any masterpiece of art in the
world, as—oh, I don't know—" and he began to laugh, "shall we say the
Queens of Chartres?" Until then I had supposed that his horror of having to
give a serious opinion was something Parisian and refined, in contrast to the
provincial dogmatism of my grandmother's sisters; and I had imagined also
that it was characteristic of the mental attitude towards life of the circle in
which Swann moved, where, by a natural reaction from the 'lyrical'
enthusiasms of earlier generations, an excessive importance was given to
small and precise facts, formerly regarded as vulgar, and anything in the
nature of 'phrase-making' was banned. But now I found myself slightly
shocked by this attitude which Swann invariably adopted when face to face
with generalities. He appeared unwilling to risk even having an opinion,
and to be at his ease only when he could furnish, with meticulous accuracy,
some precise but unimportant detail. But in so doing he did not take into
account that even here he was giving an opinion, holding a brief (as they
say) for something, that the accuracy of his details had an importance of its
own. I thought again of the dinner that night, when I had been so unhappy
because Mamma would not be coming up to my room, and when he had
dismissed the balls given by the Princesse de Léon as being of no
importance. And yet it was to just that sort of amusement that he was
devoting his life. For what other kind of existence did he reserve the duties
of saying in all seriousness what he thought about things, of formulating
judgments which he would not put between inverted commas; and when
would he cease to give himself up to occupations of which at the same time
he made out that they were absurd? I noticed, too, in the manner in which

Swann spoke to me of Bergotte, something which, to do him justice, was
not peculiar to himself, but was shared by all that writer's admirers at that
time, at least by my mother's friend and by Dr. du Boulbon. Like Swann,
they would say of Bergotte: "He has a charming mind, so individual, he has
a way of his own of saying things, which is a little far-fetched, but so
pleasant. You never need to look for his name on the title-page, you can tell
his work at once." But none of them had yet gone so far as to say "He is a
great writer, he has great talent." They did not even credit him with talent at
all. They did not speak, because they were not aware of it. We are very slow
in recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which
is labelled 'great talent' in our museum of general ideas. Simply because
that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to
what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm,
delicacy, strength; and then one day we add up the sum of these, and find
that it amounts simply to talent.
"Are there any books in which Bergotte has written about Berma?" I
asked M. Swann.
"I think he has, in that little essay on Racine, but it must be out of print.
Still, there has perhaps been a second impression. I will find out. Anyhow, I
can ask Bergotte himself all that you want to know next time he comes to
dine with us. He never misses a week, from one year's end to another. He is
my daughter's greatest friend. They go about together, and look at old towns
and cathedrals and castles."
As I was still completely ignorant of the different grades in the social
hierarchy, the fact that my father found it impossible for us to see anything
of Swann's wife and daughter had, for a long time, had the contrary effect
of making me imagine them as separated from us by an enormous gulf,
which greatly enhanced their dignity and importance in my eyes. I was
sorry that my mother did not dye her hair and redden her lips, as I had heard
our neighbour, Mme. Sazerat, say that Mme. Swann did, to gratify not her
husband but M. de Charlus; and I felt that, to her, we must be an object of
scorn, which distressed me particularly on account of the daughter, such a
pretty little girl, as I had heard, and one of whom I used often to dream,
always imagining her with the same features and appearance, which I
bestowed upon her quite arbitrarily, but with a charming effect. But from
this afternoon, when I had learned that Mlle. Swann was a creature living in

such rare and fortunate circumstances, bathed, as in her natural element, in
such a sea of privilege that, if she should ask her parents whether anyone
were coming to dinner, she would be answered in those two syllables,
radiant with celestial light, would hear the name of that golden guest who
was to her no more than an old friend of her family, Bergotte; that for her
the intimate conversation at table, corresponding to what my great-aunt's
conversation was for me, would be the words of Bergotte upon all those
subjects which he had not been able to take up in his writings, and on which
I would fain have heard him utter oracles; and that, above all, when she
went to visit other towns, he would be walking by her side, unrecognised
and glorious, like the gods who came down, of old, from heaven to dwell
among mortal men: then I realised both the rare worth of a creature such as
Mlle. Swann, and, at the same time, how coarse and ignorant I should
appear to her; and I felt so keenly how pleasant and yet how impossible it
would be for me to become her friend that I was filled at once with longing
and with despair. And usually, from this time forth, when I thought of her, I
would see her standing before the porch of a cathedral, explaining to me
what each of the statues meant, and, with a smile which was my highest
commendation, presenting me, as her friend, to Bergotte. And invariably the
charm of all the fancies which the thought of cathedrals used to inspire in
me, the charm of the hills and valleys of the Ile-de-France and of the plains
of Normandy, would radiate brightness and beauty over the picture I had
formed in my mind of Mlle. Swann; nothing more remained but to know
and to love her. Once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some
unknown existence to which that creature's love for ourselves can win us
admission, that is, of all the preliminary conditions which Love exacts, the
one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes him
generous or indifferent as to the rest. Even those women who pretend that
they judge a man by his exterior only, see in that exterior an emanation
from some special way of life. And that is why they fall in love with a
soldier or a fireman, whose uniform makes them less particular about his
face; they kiss and believe that beneath the crushing breastplate there beats
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 travel in foreign
countries and make the most gratifying conquests, and yet lack entirely that
regular and classic profile which would be indispensable, I dare say, in an
outside-broker.

While I was reading in the garden, a thing my great-aunt would never
have understood my doing save on a Sunday, that being the day on which it
was 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, "How you
can go on amusing yourself with a book; it isn't Sunday, you know!" putting
into the word 'amusing' an implication of childishness and waste of time),
my aunt Léonie would be gossiping with Françoise 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 Châteaudun. If she has far to go before vespers, she may get it
properly soaked."
"Very likely" (which meant also "very likely not") was the answer, for
Françoise did not wish definitely to exclude the possibility of a happier
alternative.
"There, now," went on my aunt, beating her brow, "that reminds me that I
never heard if she got to church this morning before the Elevation. I must
remember to ask Eulalie... Françoise, 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 keep on like this, it's been
too hot. And the sooner the better, for until the storm breaks my Vichy
water won't 'go down,'" she concluded, 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.
"Very likely."
"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 my stomach."
And falling precipitately upon a prayer-book bound in purple velvet, with
gilt clasps, out of which in her haste she let fall a shower of the little
pictures, each in a lace fringe of yellowish paper, which she used to mark
the places of the greater feasts of the church, my aunt, while she swallowed
her drops, began at full speed to mutter the words of the sacred text, its
meaning being slightly clouded in her brain by the uncertainty whether the
pepsin, when taken so long after the Vichy, would still be able to overtake it
and to 'send it down.' "Three o'clock! It's unbelievable how time flies."

A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed
by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were
being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an
order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable,
universal. It was the rain.
"There, Françoise, what did I tell you? How it's coming down! But I
think I heard the bell at the garden gate: go along and see who can be
outside in this weather."
Françoise went and returned. "It's Mme. Amédée" (my grandmother).
"She said she was going for a walk. It's raining hard, all the same."
"I'm not at all surprised," said my aunt, looking up towards the sky. "I've
always said that she was not in the least like other people. Well, I'm glad it's
she and not myself who's outside in all this."
"Mme. Amédée is always the exact opposite of the rest," said Françoise,
not unkindly, refraining until she should be alone with the other servants
from stating her belief that my grandmother was 'a bit off her head.'
"There's Benediction over! Eulalie will never come now," sighed my
aunt. "It will be the weather that's frightened her away."
"But it's not five o'clock yet, Mme. Octave, it's only half-past four."
"Only half-past four! And here am I, obliged to draw back the small
curtains, just to get a tiny streak of daylight. At half-past four! Only a week
before the Rogation-days. Ah, my poor Françoise, the dear Lord must be
sorely vexed with us. The world is going too far in these days. As my poor
Octave used to say, we have forgotten God too often, and He is taking
vengeance upon us."
A bright flush animated my aunt's cheeks; it was Eulalie. As ill luck
would have it, scarcely had she been admitted to the presence when
Françoise reappeared and, with a smile which was meant to indicate her full
participation in the pleasure which, she had no doubt, her tidings would
give my aunt, articulating each syllable so as to shew that, in spite of her
having to translate them into indirect speech, she was repeating, as a good
servant should, the very words which the new visitor had condescended to
use, said: "His reverence the Curé would be delighted, enchanted, if Mme.
Octave is not resting just now, and could see him. His reverence does not

wish to disturb Mme. Octave. His reverence is downstairs; I told him to go
into the parlour."
Had the truth been known, the Curé's visits gave my aunt no such ecstatic
pleasure as Françoise 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 what was felt by her invalid. The Curé (an
excellent man, with whom I am sorry now that I did not converse more
often, for, even if he cared nothing for the arts, he knew a great many
etymologies), being in the habit of shewing 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 explanations, which,
incidentally, never varied in the least degree. But when his visit
synchronized 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 had
the whole of her circle about her at one time. But she dared not send the
Curé 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, that a painter has set up his
easel in your church, and is copying one of the windows? Old as I am, I can
safely say that I have never even heard of such a thing in all my life! What
is the world coming to next, I wonder! And the ugliest thing in the whole
church, too."
"I will not go so far as to say that it is 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. The Lord knows, our porch is
dirty and out of date; still, it is of a majestic character; take, for instance, the
Esther tapestries, though personally I would not give a brass farthing for the
pair of them, but experts put them next after the ones at Sens. I can quite
see, too, that apart from certain details which are—well, a trifle realistic,
they shew 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 a floor in which there are not two slabs on the same level? And

yet they refuse to renew the floor 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 his Duchesse also, since she was a lady of the
Guermantes family, and married her cousin." (My grandmother, whose
steady refusal to take any interest in 'persons' had ended in her confusing all
their names and titles, whenever anyone mentioned the Duchesse de
Guermantes used to make out that she must be related to Mme. de
Villeparisis. The whole family would then burst out laughing; and she
would attempt to justify herself by harking back to some invitation to a
christening or funeral: "I feel sure that there was a Guermantes in it
somewhere." And for once I would side with the others, and against her,
refusing to admit that there could be any connection between her school-
friend and the descendant of Geneviève de Brabant.)
"Look at Roussainville," the Curé went on. "It is nothing more nowadays
than a parish of farmers, though in olden times the place must have had a
considerable importance from its trade in felt hats and clocks. (I am not
certain, by the way, of the etymology of Roussainville. I should dearly like
to think that the name was originally Rouville, from Radulfi villa,
analogous, don't you see, to Châteauroux, Castrum Radulfi, but we will talk
about that some other time.) Very well; the church there has superb
windows, almost all quite modern, including that most imposing 'Entry of
Louis-Philippe into Combray' which would be more in keeping, surely, at
Combray itself, and which is every bit as good, I understand, as the famous
windows at Chartres. Only yesterday I met Dr. Percepied's brother, who
goes in for these things, and he told me that he looked upon it as a most
beautiful piece of work. But, as I said to this artist, who, by the way, seems
to be a most civil fellow, and is a regular virtuoso, it appears, with his
brush; what on earth, I said to him, do you find so extraordinary in this
window, which is, if anything, a little dingier than the rest?"
"I am sure that if you were to ask his Lordship," 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, Mme. Octave," replied the Curé. "Why, it was
just 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 Geneviève 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? Very well, that is Saint Hilaire, who is also known, you will
remember, in certain parts of the country as Saint Illiers, Saint Hèlier, 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 Saints. 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 has become a
gentleman. Do you hear that, Eulalie, after you are dead they will make a
man of you!"
"Father will always have his 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
infirmity, he wielded the supreme power with all the arrogance of a man
who has not been subjected to discipline in his youth, so much so that,
whenever he saw a man in a town whose face he did not remember, he
would massacre the whole place, to the last inhabitant. Gilbert, wishing to
be avenged on Charles, caused the church at Combray to be burned down,
the original church, that was, which Théodebert, when he and his court left
the country residence he had near here, at Thiberzy (which is, of course,
Theodeberiacus), to go out and fight the Burgundians, had promised to
build over the tomb of Saint Hilaire if the Saint brought him victory.
Nothing remains of it now but the crypt, into which Théodore has probably
taken you, for Gilbert burned all the rest. Finally, he defeated the unlucky
Charles with the aid of William" which the Curé pronounced "Will'am" "the
Conqueror, which is why so many English still come to visit the place. But
he does not appear to have managed to win the affection of the people of
Combray, for they fell upon him as he was coming out from mass, and cut
off his head. Théodore has a little book, that he lends people, which tells
you the whole story.
"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

seven and ninety steps, just half the number they have in the famous
cathedral at Milan. It is quite tiring enough for the most active person,
especially as you have to go on your hands and knees, if you don't wish to
crack your skull, and you collect all the cobwebs off the staircase upon your
clothes. In any case you should be well wrapped up," he went on, without
noticing my aunt's fury at the mere suggestion that she could ever, possibly,
be capable of climbing into his belfry, "for there's a strong breeze there,
once you get to the top. Some people even assure me that they have felt the
chill of death up there. No matter, on Sundays there are always clubs and
societies, who come, some of them, long distances to admire our beautiful
panorama, and they always go home charmed. Wait now, next Sunday, if
the weather holds, you will be sure to find a lot of people there, for
Rogation-tide. You must admit, certainly, that the view from up there is like
a fairy-tale, with what you might call vistas along 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 are in the habit of seeing one without the other, as, for instance, the
course of the Vivonne and the ditches at Saint-Assise-lès-Combray, which
are separated, really, by a screen of tall trees; or, to take another example,
there are all the canals at Jouy-le-Vicomte, which is Gaudiacus vicecomitis,
as of course you know. Each time that I have been to Jouy I have seen a bit
of a canal in one place, and then I have turned a corner and seen another,
but when I saw the second I could no longer see the first. I tried in vain to
imagine how they lay by one another; it was no good. But, from the top of
Saint-Hilaire, it's quite another matter; the whole countryside is spread out
before you like a map. Only, you cannot make out the water; you would say
that there were great rifts in the town, slicing it up 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 here on
the top of Saint-Hilaire and down there at Jouy-le-Vicomte."
The Curé had so much exhausted my aunt that no sooner had he gone
than she was obliged to send away Eulalie also.
"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 shall not 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 each
temptation were the first, and with a look of displeasure which enlivened
my aunt and never offended her, for if it so happened that Eulalie, when she
took the money, looked a little less sulky than usual, my aunt would remark
afterwards, "I cannot think what has come over Eulalie; I gave her just the
trifle I always give, and she did not look at all pleased."
"I don't think she has very much to complain of, all the same," Françoise
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 a pampered and ungrateful darling the little coins slipped,
Sunday by Sunday, into Eulalie's hand, but so discreetly passed that
Françoise never managed to see them. It was not that she wanted to have for
herself 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 ennobled and glorified the maid in the eyes of
the world; and that she herself was conspicuous and worthy to be praised
throughout Combray, Jouy-le-Vicomte, and other cities of men, on account
of my aunt's many farms, her frequent and prolonged visits from the Curé,
and the astonishing number of bottles of Vichy water which she consumed.
Françoise was avaricious only for my aunt; had she had control over my
aunt's fortune (which would have more than satisfied her highest ambition)
she would have guarded it from the assaults of strangers with a maternal
ferocity. She would, however, have seen no great harm in what my aunt,
whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, had
she given only to those who were already rich. Perhaps she felt that such
persons, not being actually in need of my aunt's presents, could not be
suspected of simulating affection for her on that account. Besides, presents
offered to persons of great wealth and position, such as Mme. Sazerat, M.
Swann, M. Legrandin and Mme. Goupil, to persons of the 'same class' as
my aunt, and who would naturally 'mix with her,' seemed to Françoise to be
included among the ornamental customs of that strange and brilliant life led
by rich people, who hunted and shot, gave balls and paid visits, a life which
she would contemplate with an admiring smile. But it was by no means the
same thing if, for this princely exchange of courtesies, my aunt substituted
mere charity, if her beneficiaries were of the class which Françoise would

label "people like myself," or "people no better than myself," people whom
she despised even more if they did not address her always as "Mme.
Françoise," just to shew that they considered themselves to be 'not as good.'
And when she saw that, despite all her warnings, my aunt continued to do
exactly as she pleased, and to fling money away with both hands (or so, at
least, Françoise believed) on undeserving objects, she began to find that the
presents she herself received from my aunt were very tiny compared to the
imaginary riches squandered upon Eulalie, There was not, in the
neighbourhood of Combray, a farm of such prosperity and importance that
Françoise doubted Eulalie's ability to buy it, without thinking twice, out of
the capital which her visits to my aunt had 'brought in.' It must be added
that Eulalie had formed an exactly similar estimate of the vast and secret
hoards of Françoise. So, every Sunday, after Eulalie had gone, Françoise
would mercilessly prophesy her coming downfall. She hated Eulalie, but
was at the same time afraid of her, and so felt bound, when Eulalie was
there, to 'look pleasant.' But she would make up for that after the other's
departure; never, it is true, alluding to her by name, but hinting at her in
Sibylline oracles, or in utterances of a comprehensive character, like those
of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher, but so worded that their special application
could not escape my aunt. After peering out at the side of the curtain to see
whether Eulalie had shut the front-door behind her; "Flatterers know how to
make themselves welcome, and to gather up the crumbs; but have patience,
have patience; our God is a jealous God, and one fine day He will be
avenged upon them!" she would declaim, with the sidelong, insinuating
glance of Joash, thinking of Athaliah alone when he says that the

....prosperity
Of wicked men runs like a torrent past,
And soon is spent.

But on this memorable afternoon, when the Curé had come as well, and
by his interminable visit had drained my aunt's strength, Françoise followed
Eulalie from the room, saying: "Mme. Octave, I will leave you to rest; you
look utterly tired out."
And my aunt answered her not a word, breathing a sigh so faint that it
seemed it must prove her last, and lying there with closed eyes, as though
already dead. But hardly had Françoise arrived downstairs, when four peals
of a bell, pulled with the utmost violence, reverberated through the house,

and my aunt, sitting erect upon her bed, called out: "Has Eulalie gone yet?
Would you believe it; I forgot to ask her whether Mme. Goupil arrived in
church before the Elevation. Run after her, quick!"
But Françoise returned alone, having failed to overtake Eulalie. "It is
most provoking," said my aunt, shaking her head. "The one important thing
that I had to ask her."
In this way life went by for my aunt Léonie, always the same, in the
gentle uniformity 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 house, where every one of us, having learned the futility
of recommending any 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 Françoise to make sure that my aunt was not 'resting'—her 'little jog-
trot' was, none the less, brutally disturbed on one occasion in this same year.
Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened
unobserved by man, until it 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, Françoise 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 Françoise, though the distance was nothing, 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 breathing, in
what was almost distinguishable as a snore. I was just going to slip away
when something, probably the sound of my entry, interrupted her sleep, and
made it 'change speed,' as they say of motorcars nowadays, for the music of
her snore broke off 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 where she was lying, and I
stood there not knowing whether I ought to go forward or to retire; 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, a pious act of 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: "The
Lord be praised! We have nothing to disturb us here but the kitchen-maid's
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
once again getting the mastery, and did not leave her the strength to reach it;
she fell asleep, calm and contented, and I crept out of the room on tiptoe,
without either her or anyone's else ever knowing, from that day to this, what
I had seen and heard.
When I say that, apart from such rare happenings as this confinement, my
aunt's 'little jog-trot' never underwent any variation, I do not include those
variations which, repeated at regular intervals and in identical form, did no
more, really, than print a sort of uniform pattern upon the greater uniformity
of her life. So, for instance, every Saturday, as Françoise had to go in the
afternoon to market at Roussainville-le-Pin, the whole household would
have to have luncheon an 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 so well 'routined' to it, as
Françoise would say, that if, on a Saturday, she had had to wait for her
luncheon until the regular hour, it would have 'upset' her as much as if she
had had, on an ordinary day, to put her luncheon forward to its Saturday
time. Incidentally this acceleration of luncheon gave Saturday, for all of us,
an individual character, kindly and rather attractive. At the moment when,
ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time
sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the
endives make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour
of an omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical
Saturday was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost
civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind
of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for
pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator
pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary
cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind. At daybreak, 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 good-humoredly,

cordially, patriotically, "Hurry up; there's no time to be lost; don't forget, it's
Saturday!" while my aunt, gossiping with Françoise, 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, some one
absent-mindedly pulled out a watch and said, "I say, an hour-and-a-half still
before luncheon," everyone else would be in ecstasies over being able to
retort at once: "Why, what are you thinking about? Have you for-gotten that
it's Saturday?" And a quarter of an hour later we would still be laughing,
and reminding ourselves to go up and tell aunt Léonie about this absurd
mistake, to amuse her. The very face of the sky appeared to undergo a
change. After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze
an hour longer in the zenith, and when some one, thinking that we were late
in starting for our walk, said, "What, only two o'clock!" feeling the heavy
throb go by him of the twin strokes from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire (which
as a rule passed no one at that hour upon the highways, 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 so
slipped unaccompanied into the vacant sky, where only a few loitering
clouds remained to greet them) the whole family would respond in chorus:
"Why, you're forgetting; we had luncheon an hour earlier; you know very
well it's Saturday."
The surprise of a 'barbarian' (for so we termed everyone who was not
acquainted with Saturday's special customs) who had called at eleven
o'clock to speak to my father, and had found us at table, was an event which
used to cause Françoise as much merriment as, perhaps, anything that had
ever happened in her life. And if she found it amusing that the nonplussed
visitor should not have known, beforehand, that we had our luncheon an
hour earlier on Saturday, it was still more irresistibly funny that my father
himself (fully as she sympathised, from the bottom of her heart, with the
rigid chauvinism which prompted him) should never have dreamed that the
barbarian could fail to be aware of so simple a matter, and so had replied,
with no further enlightenment of the other's surprise at seeing us already in
the dining-room: "You see, it's Saturday." On reaching this point in the
story, Françoise would pause to wipe the tears of 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 as well. There was more than that,
the first time you told it."
My great-aunt herself would lay aside her work, 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 on 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 untidiness of young people, which seems to be
encouraged in 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 these 'Month of Mary' services that I can remember having
first fallen in love with hawthorn-blossom. The hawthorn was not merely in
the church, for there, 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 it was playing a part, it thrust in among the tapers and the sacred
vessels its rows of branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal
scheme of decoration; and they were made more lovely still by the
scalloped outline of the dark leaves, over which were scattered in profusion,
as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though
I dared not look at them save through my fingers, I could feel that the
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 bedizening, its bunch of
stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white
mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere
inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift and
thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance from her
contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and alive.
M. Vinteuil had come in with his daughter and had sat down beside us.
He belonged to a good family, and had once been music-master to my
grandmother's sisters; so that when, after losing his wife and inheriting

some property, he had retired to the neighbourhood of Combray, we used
often to invite him to our house. But with his intense prudishness he had
given up coming, so as not to be obliged to meet Swann, who had made
what he called "a most unsuitable marriage, as seems to be the fashion in
these days." My mother, on hearing that he 'composed,' told him by way of
a compliment 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 to so fine a point, always putting
himself in their place, that he was afraid of boring them, or of appearing
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 on a site actually hollowed out from a
steep hill covered with shrubs, among which I took cover, I had found
myself on a level with his drawing-room, upstairs, and only a few feet away
from its window. When a servant came in to tell him that my parents had
arrived, I had seen M. Vinteuil run to the piano and lay out a sheet of music
so as to catch the eye. But as soon as they entered the room he had snatched
it away and hidden 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 of his playing, he had
hurriedly protested: "I cannot think who put that on the piano; it is not the
proper place for it at all," and had turned the conversation aside to other
topics, simply because those 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 often be caught flitting across the face, dusted all
over with freckles, of this otherwise stolid child. When she had spoken, she
would at once take her own words in the sense in which her audience must
have heard them, she would be alarmed at the possibility of a
misunderstanding, and one would see, in clear outline, as though in a
transparency, beneath the mannish face of the 'good sort' that she was, the
finer features of a young woman in tears.

When, before turning to leave the church, I made a genuflection before
the altar, I felt suddenly, as I rose again, a bitter-sweet fragrance of almonds
steal towards me from the hawthorn-blossom, and I then noticed that on the
flowers themselves were little spots of a creamier colour, in which I
imagined that this fragrance must lie concealed, as the taste of an almond
cake lay in the burned parts, or the sweetness of Mlle. Vinteuil's cheeks
beneath their freckles. Despite the heavy, motionless silence of the
hawthorns, these gusts of fragrance came to me like the murmuring of an
intense vitality, with which the whole altar was quivering like a roadside
hedge 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.
Outside the church we would stand talking for a moment with M.
Vinteuil, in the porch. Boys would be chevying one another in the Square,
and he would interfere, taking the side of the little ones and lecturing the
big. If his daughter said, in her thick, comfortable voice, how glad she had
been to see us, immediately it would seem as though some elder and more
sensitive sister, latent in her, had blushed at this thoughtless, schoolboyish
utterance, which had, perhaps, 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, then, instead of taking us home at once,
my father, in his thirst for personal distinction, 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, which began to stride on its long legs of stone 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 would be 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
Christendom, of which Combray, to me, represented the farthest 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, had scattered its broken staircases of white marble,
its fountains of water and gates temptingly ajar. Its beams had swept away
the telegraph office. All that was left of it was a column, half 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 consolation which I could obtain only at the
price of great suffering and exhaustion, and not worthy of the effort. From
gates far apart the watchdogs, awakened by our steps in the silence, would
set up an antiphonal barking, as I still hear them bark, at times, in the
evenings, and it is in their custody (when the public gardens of Combray
were constructed on its site) that the Boulevard de la Gare must have taken
refuge, for wherever I may be, as soon as they begin their alternate
challenge and acceptance, I can see it again with all 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?" Utterly worn out 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 it had slipped,
with his latchkey, from his waistcoat pocket, he would point out to us, when
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 await
us, to greet us at the end of our wanderings over paths unknown. My
mother would murmur admiringly "You really are wonderful!" And from
that instant I had not 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. Custom came to take me in her
arms, carried me all the way up to my bed, and laid me down there like a
little child.
Although Saturday, by beginning an hour earlier, and by depriving her of
the services of Françoise, 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 even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal
hours in which one thirsts for something different from what one has, when

those people 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, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for
some emotion (even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which prosperity
has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by
some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when the will,
which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue its impulse, to
renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled desires, and
consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins into the hands of
circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel. Of course, since my aunt's
strength, which was completely drained by the slightest exertion, returned
but drop by drop into the pool of her repose, the reservoir was very slow in
filling, and months would go by before she reached that surplus which other
people use up in their daily activities, but which she had no idea—and
could never decide how to employ. And I have no doubt that then—just as a
desire to have her potatoes served with béchamel sauce, for a change,
would be formed, ultimately, from the pleasure she found in the daily
reappearance of those mashed potatoes of which she was never 'tired'—she
would extract from the accumulation of those monotonous days (on which
she so much depended) a keen expectation of some domestic cataclysm,
instantaneous in its happening, 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 stimulus. She was genuinely fond of us; she would have
enjoyed the long 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, a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one 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 nothing of
this sort had ever occurred, though indeed she must often have pondered the
success of such a manoeuvre as she lay alone absorbed in her interminable
games of patience (and though it must have plunged her in despair from the
first moment of its realisation, from the first of those little unforeseen facts,
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, physical death, so terribly different from the logical abstraction of its
possibility) she would fall back from time to time, to add an interest to her
life, upon imagining other, minor catastrophes, which she would follow up
with passion. She would beguile herself with a sudden suspicion that
Françoise 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 Françoise's awkward apologies, 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 pushed awry and
exposing the baldness of her brows. Françoise must often, from the next
room, have heard these mordant sarcasms levelled at herself, the mere
framing of which in words would not have relieved my aunt's feelings
sufficiently, had they been allowed to remain in a purely immaterial form,
without the degree of substance and reality which she added to them by
murmuring 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 in
Eulalie her doubts of Françoise's integrity and her determination to be rid of
her, and on another day she would confide in Françoise her suspicions of
the disloyalty of Eulalie, to whom the front-door would very soon be closed
for good. A few days more, and, disgusted with her latest confidant, she
would again be 'as thick as thieves' with the traitor, while, before the next
performance, the two would once more have changed their parts. But the
suspicions which Eulalie might occasionally breed in her were no more than
a fire of straw, which must soon subside for lack of fuel, since Eulalie was
not living with her in the house. It was a very different matter when the
suspect was Françoise, of whose presence under the same roof as herself
my aunt was perpetually conscious, while for fear of catching cold, were

she to leave her bed, she would never dare go downstairs to the kitchen to
see for herself whether there was, indeed, any foundation for her suspicions.
And so on by degrees, until her mind had no other occupation than to
attempt, at every hour of the day, to discover what was being done, what
was being concealed from her by Françoise. She would detect the most
furtive movement of Françoise's features, something contradictory in what
she was saying, some desire which she appeared to be screening. And she
would shew her that she was unmasked, by, a single word, which made
Françoise turn pale, and which my aunt seemed to find a cruel satisfaction
in driving into her unhappy servant's heart. And the very next Sunday a
disclosure by Eulalie—like one of those discoveries which suddenly open
up an unsuspected field for exploration to some new science which has
hitherto followed only the beaten paths—proved to my aunt that her own
worst suspicions fell a long way short of the appalling truth. "But Françoise
ought to know that," said Eulalie, "now that you have given her a carriage."
"Now that I have given her a carriage!" gasped my aunt.
"Oh, but I didn't know; I only thought so; I saw her go by yesterday in
her open coach, as proud as Artaban, on her way to Roussainville market. I
supposed that it must be Mme. Octave who had given it to her."
So on by degrees, until Françoise and my aunt, the quarry and the hunter,
could never cease from trying to forestall each other's devices. My mother
was afraid lest Françoise should develop a genuine hatred of my aunt, who
was doing everything in her power to annoy her. However that might be,
Françoise had come, more and more, to pay an infinitely scrupulous
attention to my aunt's least word and gesture. When she had to ask her for
anything she would hesitate, first, for a long time, making up her mind how
best to begin. 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 in this way—whereas an artist
who had been reading memoirs of the seventeenth century, and wished to
bring himself nearer to the great Louis, would consider that he was making
progress in that direction when he constructed a pedigree that traced his
own descent from some historic family, or when he engaged in
correspondence with one of the reigning Sovereigns of Europe, and so
would shut his eyes to the mistake he was making in seeking to establish a
similarity by an exact and therefore lifeless copy of mere outward forms—a

middle-aged lady in a small country town, by doing no more than yield
whole-hearted obedience to her own irresistible eccentricities, and to a spirit
of mischief engendered by the utter idleness of her existence, could see,
without ever having given a thought to Louis XIV, the most trivial
occupations of her daily life, her morning toilet, her luncheon, her afternoon
nap, assume, by virtue of their despotic singularity, something of the
interest that was to be found in what Saint-Simon used to call the
'machinery' of life at Versailles; and was able, too, to persuade herself that
her silence, a shade of good humour or of arrogance on her features would
provide Françoise with matter for a mental commentary as tense with
passion and terror, as did the silence, the good humour or the arrogance of
the King when a courtier, or even his greatest nobles, had presented a
petition to him, at the turning of an avenue, at Versailles.
One Sunday, when my aunt had received simultaneous visits from the
Curé and from Eulalie, and had been left alone, afterwards, to rest, the
whole family went upstairs to bid her good night, and Mamma ventured to
condole with her on the unlucky coincidence that always brought both
visitors to her door at the same time.
"I hear that things went wrong again to-day, Léonie," she said kindly,
"you have had all your friends here at once."
And my great-aunt interrupted with: "Too many good things..." for, since
her daughter's illness, she felt herself in duty bound to revive her as far as
possible by always drawing her attention to the brighter side of things. But
my father had begun to speak.
"I should like to take advantage," he said, "of the whole family's being
here together, to tell you a story, so as not to have to begin all over again to
each of you separately. I am afraid we are in M. Legrandin's bad books; he
would hardly say 'How d'ye do' to me this morning."
I did not wait to hear the end of my father's story, for I had been with him
myself after mass when we had passed M. Legrandin; instead, I went
downstairs to the kitchen to ask for the bill of fare for our dinner, which was
of fresh interest to me daily, like the news in a paper, and excited me as
might the programme of a coming festivity.
As M. Legrandin had passed close by us on our way from church,
walking by the side of a lady, the owner of a country house in the
neighbourhood, whom we knew only by sight, my father had saluted him in

a manner at once friendly and reserved, without stopping in his walk; M.
Legrandin had barely acknowledged the courtesy, and then with an air of
surprise, as though he had not recognised us, and 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, in proportion to your doll-like dimensions.
Now, the lady who was walking with Legrandin was a model of virtue,
known and highly respected; there could be no question of his being out for
amorous adventure, and annoyed at being detected; and my father asked
himself how he could possibly have displeased our friend.
"I should be all the more sorry to feel that he was angry with us," he said,
"because among all those people in their Sunday clothes there is something
about him, with his little cut-away coat and his soft neckties, so little
'dressed-up,' so genuinely simple; an air of innocence, almost, which is
really attractive."
But the vote of the family council was unanimous, that my father had
imagined the whole thing, or that Legrandin, at the moment in question, had
been preoccupied in thinking about something else. Anyhow, my father's
fears were dissipated no later than the following evening. As we returned
from a long walk we saw, near the Pont-Vieux, Legrandin himself, who, on
account of the holidays, was spending a few days more in Combray. He
came up to us with outstretched hand: "Do you know, master book-lover,"
he asked me, "this line of Paul Desjardins?

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

Is not 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 the most
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 young friend; and then,
even when the time comes, which is coming now for me, when the woods
are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself,

as I am doing, by looking up to the sky." He took a cigarette from his
pocket and stood for a long time, his eyes fixed on the horizon. "Goodbye,
friends!" he suddenly exclaimed, and left us.
At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was
for dinner, its preparation would already have begun, and Françoise, a
colonel with all the forces of nature for her subalterns, as in the fairy-tales
where giants hire themselves out as scullions, would be stirring 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 potter's 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, and included an entire
collection 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 fascinated me would be the asparagus, tinged with
ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in
mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white
feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness
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, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible 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 as the fairies in
Shakespeare's Dream) at transforming my humble chamber into a bower of
aromatic perfume.
Poor Giotto's Charity, as Swann had named her, charged by Françoise
with the task of preparing them for the table, would have them lying beside
her in a basket; sitting 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 would be finely and separately
outlined, star by star, as in Giotto's fresco are the flowers banded about the
brows, or patterning the basket of his Virtue at Padua. And, meanwhile,
Françoise 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 sweet savour of her merits, and which, while she was serving
them to us at table, would make the quality of kindness predominate 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 more than the proper perfume of one of her many virtues.
But the day on which, while my father took counsel with his family upon
our strange meeting with Legrandin, I went down to the kitchen, 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; Françoise, being
without assistance, had fallen into arrears. When I went in, I saw her in the
back-kitchen which opened on to the courtyard, in process of killing a
chicken; by its desperate and quite natural resistance, which Françoise,
beside herself with rage as she attempted to slit its throat beneath the ear,
accompanied with shrill cries of "Filthy creature! Filthy creature!" it made
the saintly kindness 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 Françoise mopped up its streaming
blood, in which, however, she did not let her rancour drown, 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 Françoise. But who would have
baked me such hot rolls, boiled 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 Léonie knew (though I
was still in ignorance of this) that Françoise, who, for her own daughter or
for her nephews, would have given her life without a murmur, shewed a
singular implacability in her dealings with the rest of the world. In spite of
which my aunt still retained her, for, while conscious of her cruelty, she
could appreciate her services. I began gradually to realise that Françoise's
kindness, her compunction, the sum total of her virtues concealed many of
these back-kitchen tragedies, just as history reveals to us that the reigns of
the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in
the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed. I had
taken note of the fact 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 which flowed from
her in torrents when she read of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her,
in a newspaper, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a
more accurate 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 Françoise, who, quite
unmoved, declared that all the outcry was mere malingering, that the girl
wanted to 'play the mistress' in the house. 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, where we would find the measures of 'first aid' to be
adopted. My mother sent Françoise to fetch the book, warning her not to let
the marker drop out. An hour elapsed, and Françoise had not returned; my
mother, supposing that she had gone back to bed, grew vexed, and told me
to go myself to the bookcase and fetch the volume. I did so, and there found
Françoise 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 type of illness with which she was
not familiar. At each painful symptom mentioned by the writer she would
exclaim: "Oh, oh, Holy Virgin, is it possible that God wishes any wretched
human 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 which she very well knew, having
been moved to it often enough by the perusal of newspapers; nor any other
pleasure of the same kind in her sense of weariness and irritation at being
pulled 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 had nothing to offer but ill-tempered mutterings, mingled
with bitter sarcasm, saying, when she thought that we had gone out of
earshot: "Well, she need never have done what she must have done to bring
all this about! She found that pleasant enough, I dare say! She had better not
put on any airs now. All the same, he must have been a god-forsaken young
man to go after that. Dear, dear, it's just as they used to say in my poor
mother's country:

Snaps 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 ill also, instead of going to bed, to see whether
he had everything that he wanted, covering ten miles on foot before
daybreak so as to be in time to begin her work, this same love for her own
people, and her desire to establish the future greatness of her house on a
solid foundation reacted, in her policy with regard to the other servants, in
one unvarying maxim, which was never to let any of them set foot in my
aunt's room; indeed she shewed 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, observed by Fabre, 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 functions)
depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will
furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry,
incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder:
in the same way Françoise had adopted, to minister to her permanent and
unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable to any other
servant, a series of crafty and pitiless stratagems. Many years later we
discovered that, if we had been fed on asparagus day after day throughout
that whole season, it was because the smell of the plants gave the poor
kitchen-maid, who had to prepare them, such violent attacks of asthma that
she was finally obliged to leave my aunt's 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 father 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 (all those, in fact, who a moment ago, when I arrived a
little late, had been sitting motionless, their eyes fixed on their prayer-
books; who, I might even have thought, had not seen me come in, had not

their feet moved slightly to push away the little kneeling-desk which was
preventing me from getting to my chair) began in loud voices to discuss
with us all manner of utterly mundane topics, as though we were already
outside in the Square, we saw, standing on the sun-baked steps of the porch,
dominating the many-coloured tumult of the market, Legrandin himself,
whom the husband of the lady we had seen with him, on the previous
occasion, was just going to introduce to the wife of another large landed
proprietor of the district. Legrandin's face shewed an extraordinary zeal and
animation; he made a profound bow, with a subsidiary backward movement
which brought his spine sharply up into a position behind its starting-point,
a gesture in which he must have been trained by the husband of his sister,
Mme. de Cambremer. This rapid recovery caused a sort of tense muscular
wave to ripple over Legrandin's hips, which I had not supposed to be so
fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly
carnal fluency, with not the least hint in it of spiritual significance, this
wave lashed to a fury by the wind of an assiduity, an obsequiousness of the
basest sort, awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin
altogether different from the one whom we knew. The lady gave him some
message for her coachman, and while he was stepping down to her carriage
the impression of joy, timid and devout, which the introduction had stamped
there, still lingered on his face. Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled,
then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than
usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in
the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he abandoned
himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he were the
lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness. Meanwhile we were
coming out through the porch; we were passing close beside him; he was
too well bred to turn his head away; but he fixed his eyes, which had
suddenly changed to those of a seer, lost in the profundity of his vision, on
so distant a point of the horizon that he could not see us, and so had not to
acknowledge our presence. His face emerged, still with an air of innocence,
from his straight and pliant coat, which looked as though conscious of
having been led astray, in spite of itself, and plunged into surroundings of a
detested splendour. And a spotted necktie, stirred by the breezes of the
Square, continued to float in front of Legrandin, like the standard of his
proud isolation, of his noble independence. Just as we reached the house my
mother discovered that we had forgotten the 'Saint-Honoré,' 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
was escorting to her carriage. He brushed past us, 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 as it did
not involve the least movement of his facial muscles, managed to pass quite
unperceived by the lady; but, striving to compensate by the intensity of his
feelings for the somewhat restricted field in which they had to find
expression, he made that blue chink, which was set apart for us, sparkle
with all the animation of cordiality, which went far beyond mere
playfulness, and almost touched the border-line of roguery; he subtilised the
refinements of good-fellowship into a wink of connivance, a hint, a hidden
meaning, a secret understanding, all the mysteries of complicity in a plot,
and finally exalted his assurances of friendship to the level of protestations
of affection, even of a declaration of love, lighting up for us, and for us
alone, with a secret and languid flame invisible by the great lady upon his
other side, 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 go again, come and let me breathe from the far
country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of spring among
which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with the primrose, with
the canon's beard, with the gold-cup; 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 embalm with their fragrance 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 the lily, apparel fit for Solomon,
and with the many-coloured enamel of the pansies, but come, above all,
with the spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of winter, wafting apart,
for the two butterflies' sake, that have waited outside all morning, 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 at church there, quite simply dressed,
and all that; he hardly looks like a man of fashion." She added that; in any
event, even if, at the worst, he had been intentionally rude, it was far better
for us to pretend that we had noticed nothing. And indeed my father
himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the attitude which
Legrandin had adopted, may still have held in reserve a final uncertainty as
to its true meaning. It was like every attitude or action which reveals a
man's deep and hidden character; they bear no relation to what he has
previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit's
evidence, 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
incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not
been the victims of a hallucination; with the result that such attitudes, and
these alone are of importance 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, claims that there is no remedy but silence and shadow. And see you
this, my boy, there comes in all lives a time, towards which you still have
far to go, when the weary eyes can endure 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 could hear what M. Legrandin was saying; like everything that he said,
it sounded attractive; but I was disturbed 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 summoned up all my
courage and said to him: "Tell me, sir, do you, by any chance, know the
lady—the ladies of Guermantes?" and I felt glad because, in pronouncing
the name, I had secured a sort of power over it, by the mere act of drawing
it up out of my dreams and giving it an objective existence in the world of
spoken things.
But, at the sound of the word Guermantes, I saw in the middle of each of
our friend's blue eyes a little brown dimple appear, as though they had been

stabbed by some invisible pin-point, while the rest of his pupils, reacting
from the shock, received and secreted the azure overflow. His fringed
eyelids darkened, and drooped. His mouth, which had been stiffened and
seared with bitter lines, was the first to recover, and smiled, while his eyes
still seemed full of pain, like the eyes of a good-looking martyr whose body
bristles with arrows.
"No, I do not know them," he said, but instead of uttering so simple a
piece of information, a reply in which there was so little that could astonish
me, in the natural and conversational tone which would have befitted it, he
recited it with a separate stress upon each word, leaning forward, bowing
his head, with at once the vehemence which a man gives, so as 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 with the emphasis of a man who, finding himself unable to
keep silence about what is to him a painful situation, chooses to proclaim it
aloud, so as to convince his hearers that the confession he is making is one
that causes him no embarrassment, but is easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that
the situation in question, in this case the absence of relations with the
Guermantes family, might very well have been not forced upon, but actually
designed by Legrandin himself, might arise from some family tradition,
some moral principle or mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking
their society.
"No," he resumed, explaining by his words the tone in which they were
uttered. "No, I do not know them; I have never wished to know them; I
have always made a point of preserving complete independence; at heart, as
you know, I am a bit of a Radical. People are always coming to me about it,
telling me I am 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, books—two or three, pictures—rather
more, perhaps, and the light of the moon when the fresh breeze of youth
(such as yours) wafts to my nostrils the scent of gardens whose flowers my
old eyes are not sharp enough, now, to distinguish."
I did not understand very clearly why, in order to refrain from going to
the houses of people whom one did not know, it should be necessary to
cling to one's independence, nor how that could give one the appearance of

a savage or a bear. But what I did understand was this, that Legrandin was
not altogether truthful when he said that he cared only for churches,
moonlight, and youth; he cared also, he cared a very great deal, for people
who lived in country houses, and would be so much afraid, when in their
company, of incurring their displeasure that he would never dare to let them
see that he numbered, as well, among his friends middle-class people, the
families of solicitors and stockbrokers, preferring, if the truth must be
known, that it should be revealed in his absence, when he was out of
earshot, that judgment should go against him (if so it must) by default: in a
word, he was a snob. Of course he would never have admitted all or any of
this in the poetical language which my family and I so much admired. And
if I asked him, "Do you know the Guermantes family?" Legrandin the talker
would reply, "No, I have never cared to know them." But unfortunately the
talker was now subordinated to another Legrandin, whom he kept carefully
hidden in his breast, whom he would never consciously exhibit, because
this other could tell stories about our own Legrandin and about his
snobbishness which would have ruined his reputation for ever; and this
other Legrandin had replied to me already in that wounded look, that
stiffened smile, the undue gravity of his tone in uttering those few words, in
the thousand arrows by which our own Legrandin had instantaneously been
stabbed and sickened, like a Saint Sebastian of snobbery:
"Oh, how you hurt me! No, I do not know the Guermantes family. Do not
remind me of the great sorrow of my life." And since this other, this
irrepressible, dominant, despotic Legrandin, if he lacked our Legrandin's
charming vocabulary, shewed an infinitely greater promptness in expressing
himself, by means of what are called 'reflexes,' it followed that, when
Legrandin the talker attempted to silence him, he would already have
spoken, and it would be useless for our friend to deplore the bad impression
which the revelations of his alter ego must have caused, since he could do
no more now than endeavour to mitigate them.
This was 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 was one also, since it is only with the passions of others
that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to find out about our
own can be no more than what other people have shewn us. Upon ourselves
they react but indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our
actual, primary motives other, secondary motives, less stark and therefore

more decent. Never had Legrandin's snobbishness impelled him to make a
habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it would set his imagination to
make that duchess appear, in Legrandin's eyes, endowed with all the graces.
He would be drawn towards the duchess, assuring himself the while that he
was yielding to the attractions of her mind, and her other virtues, which the
vile race of snobs could never understand. 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 activities of Legrandin and their primary cause.
At home, meanwhile, we had no longer any illusions as to M. Legrandin,
and our relations with him had become much more distant. Mamma would
be greatly delighted whenever she caught him red-handed in the sin, 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, in so detached a spirit;
and when there was some talk, one year, of sending me to spend the long
summer holidays at Balbec with my grandmother, he said: "I must, most
certainly, tell Legrandin that you are going to Balbec, to see whether he will
offer you an introduction 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, to taste the salt breezes, and that
one should not know anyone in the place, because calls and parties and
excursions were so much time stolen from what belonged, by rights, to 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 all afternoon
to entertain her. But Mamma laughed her fears to scorn, for she herself felt
that the danger was not so threatening, and that Legrandin would shew no
undue anxiety to make us acquainted with his sister. And, 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. "Especially a

blue which is far more floral than atmospheric, a cineraria blue, which it is
surprising to see in the sky. And that little pink cloud there, has it not just
the tint of some flower, a carnation or hydrangea? Nowhere, perhaps,
except on the shores of the English Channel, where Normandy merges into
Brittany, have I been able to find such copious examples of what you might
call a vegetable kingdom in the clouds. Down there, close to Balbec, among
all those places which are still so uncivilised, there is a little bay,
charmingly quiet, where the sunsets of the Auge Valley, those red-and-gold
sunsets (which, all the same, I am very far from despising) seem
commonplace and insignificant; for in that moist and gentle atmosphere
these heavenly flower-beds will break into blossom, in a few moments, in
the evenings, incomparably lovely, and often lasting for hours before they
fade. Others shed their leaves at once, and then it is more beautiful still to
see the sky strewn with the scattering of their innumerable petals,
sulphurous yellow and rosy red. In that bay, which they call the Opal Bay,
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 a victim to the perils of the sea. Balbec! the oldest bone in
the geological 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, beneath 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, down there, to be able to step out at once into regions
so primitive and so entrancing."
"Indeed! And do you know anyone at Balbec?" inquired my father. "This
young man is just going to spend a couple of months 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 turn aside his gaze, and so
concentrated it 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 it had been a ball of glass, and to be
seeing, at the moment, a long way beyond and behind it, a brightly coloured

cloud, which provided him with a mental alibi, and would enable him to
establish the theory that, just when he was being asked whether he knew
anyone at Balbec, he had been thinking of something else, and so had not
heard the question. As a rule these tactics make the questioner proceed to
ask, "Why, what are you thinking about?" But my father, inquisitive,
annoyed, and cruel, repeated: "Have you friends, then, in that
neighbourhood, that you know Balbec so well?"
In a final and desperate effort the smiling gaze of Legrandin struggled to
the extreme limits of its tenderness, vagueness, candour, and distraction;
then feeling, no doubt, that there was nothing left for it now but to answer,
he said to us: "I have friends all the world over, wherever there are
companies of trees, stricken but not defeated, which have come together to
offer a common supplication, with pathetic obstinacy, to an inclement sky
which has no mercy upon them."
"That is not quite what I meant," interrupted my father, obstinate as a tree
and 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 down
there, at the ends of the earth, whether you knew any of the people."
"There as elsewhere, I know everyone and I know no one," replied
Legrandin, who was by no means ready yet to surrender; "places I know
well, people very slightly. But, down there, the places themselves seem to
me just like people, rare and wonderful people, of a delicate quality which
would have been corrupted and ruined by the gift of life. Perhaps it is a
castle which you encounter upon the cliff's edge; standing there by the
roadside, where it has halted to contemplate its sorrows before an evening
sky, still rosy, through which a golden moon is climbing; while the fishing-
boats, homeward bound, creasing the watered silk of the Channel, hoist its
pennant at their mastheads and carry its colours. Or perhaps it is a simple
dwelling-house that stands alone, ugly, if anything, timid-seeming 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 infinite 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 inclined to melancholy, for a
heart already predisposed to receive its impressions. Climates that breathe
amorous secrets and futile regrets may agree with an old and disillusioned

man like myself; but they must always prove fatal to a temperament which
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 unbroken, a heart for whose wounds there is no longer anything
to compensate. But at your age, my boy, those waters are contra-
indicated.... Good night to you, neighbours," he added, 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 Balbec before you are fifty!" he called out to me, "and
even then it must depend on the state of the heart."
My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him, and tortured
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 an honourable occupation, M.
Legrandin, had we insisted further, would in the end have constructed a
whole system of ethics, and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy,
sooner than admit to us that, within a mile of Balbec, his own sister was
living in her own house; sooner than find himself obliged to offer 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 certain—that in no
circumstances whatsoever would we have dreamed of making use of it.
***
We used always to return from our walks in good time to pay aunt Léonie
a visit before dinner. In the first weeks of our Combray holidays, 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 western sky from the windows of the house
and a band of purple at the foot of the Calvary, which was mirrored further
on in the pond; a fiery glow which, accompanied often by a cold that
burned and stung, 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 I had found in my walk, with the
sensual pleasures 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 Léonie its rays, sinking until they touched
and lay along her window-sill, would there be caught and held by the large
inner curtains and the bands which tied them back to the wall, and split and
scattered and filtered; and then, at last, would fall upon and inlay with tiny
flakes of gold the lemonwood of her chest-of-drawers, illuminating the
room in their passage with the same delicate, slanting, shadowed beams that
fall among the boles of forest trees. But on some days, though very rarely,
the chest-of-drawers would long since have shed its momentary
adornments, there would no longer, as we turned into the Rue du Saint-
Esprit, be any reflection from the western sky burning along the line of
window-panes; the pond beneath the Calvary would have lost its fiery glow,
sometimes indeed had changed already to an opalescent pallor, while a long
ribbon of moonlight, bent and broken and broadened by every ripple upon
the water's surface, would be lying across it, from end to end. Then, as we
drew near the house, we would make out a figure standing upon the
doorstep, and Mamma would say to me: "Good heavens! There is Françoise
looking out for us; your aunt must be anxious; that means we are late."
And without wasting time by stopping to take off our 'things' we would
fly upstairs to my aunt Léonie's room to reassure her, to prove to her by our
bodily presence that all her gloomy imaginings were false, that, on the
contrary, nothing had happened to us, but that we had gone the 'Guermantes
way,' and, good lord, when one took that walk, my aunt knew well enough
that one could never say at what time one would be home.
"There, Françoise," my aunt would say, "didn't I tell you that they must
have gone the Guermantes way? Good gracious! They must be hungry! And
your nice leg of mutton will be quite dried up now, after all the hours it's
been waiting. What a time to come in! Well, and so you went the
Guermantes way?"
"But, Leonie, I supposed you knew," Mamma would answer. "I thought
that Françoise had seen us go out by the little gate, through the kitchen-
garden."
For there were, in the environs of Combray, two 'ways' which we used to
take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually
leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen:
the way towards Méséglise-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 Méséglise-la-Vineuse, to tell the truth,
I never knew anything more than the way there, and the strange people who
would come over on Sundays to take the air in Combray, people whom, this
time, neither my aunt nor any of us would 'know at all,' and whom we
would therefore assume to be 'people who must have come over from
Méséglise.' As for Guermantes, I was to know it well enough one day, but
that day had still to come; and, during the whole of my boyhood, if
Méséglise was to me something as inaccessible as the horizon, which
remained hidden from sight, however far one went, by the folds of a
country which no longer bore the least resemblance to the country round
Combray; Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than the ultimate
goal, ideal rather than real, of the 'Guermantes way,' a sort of abstract
geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator. And so to 'take the
Guermantes way' in order to get to Méséglise, or vice versa, would have
seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to turn to the east in order to
reach the west. Since my father used always to speak of the 'Méséglise 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 belongs only to the figments of the mind; the smallest
detail of either of them appeared to me as a precious thing, which exhibited
the special excellence of the whole, while, immediately beside them, in the
first stages of our walk, before we had reached the sacred soil of one or the
other, the purely material roads, at definite points on which they were set
down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal scenery of a river, were no
more worth the trouble of looking at them than, to a keen playgoer and
lover of dramatic art, are the little streets which may happen to run past the
walls of a theatre. But, above all, I set between them, far more distinctly
than the mere distance in miles and yards and inches which 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 distances of the mind
which time serves only to lengthen, which separate things irremediably
from one another, keeping them for ever upon 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 'Méséglise way' one time and the 'Guermantes way' another, shut
them up, so to speak, far apart and unaware of each other's existence, in the

sealed vessels—between which there could be no communication—of
separate afternoons.
When we had decided to go the 'Méséglise way' we would start (without
undue haste, and even if the sky 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, by 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 Théodore,
from Françoise, 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. Out of the fresh little
green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised inquisitively over the fence of
the park their plumes of white or purple blossom, which glowed, even in the
shade, with the sunlight in which they had been bathed. Some of them, half-
concealed by the little tiled house, called the Archers' Lodge, in which
Swann's keeper lived, overtopped its gothic gable with their rosy 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, we would, instead of taking the
road which ran beside its boundary and then climbed straight up to the open
fields, choose another way, which led in the same direction, but
circuitously, and brought us out rather too far from home.
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 purple chandeliers, their tiny balls of
blossom, but in many places among their foliage where, only a week before,
they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, these were now

spent and shrivelled and discoloured, a hollow scum, dry and scentless. 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 opportunity to tell us, once again, the story of that walk.
In front of us a path bordered with nasturtiums rose in the full glare of the
sun towards the house. But to our right the park stretched away into the
distance, on level ground. Overshadowed by the tall trees which stood close
around it, an 'ornamental water' had been constructed by Swann's parents
but, even in his most artificial creations, nature is the material upon which
man has to work; certain spots will persist in remaining surrounded by the
vassals of their own especial sovereignty, and will raise their immemorial
standards among all the 'laid-out' scenery of a park, just as they would have
done far from any human interference, in a solitude which must everywhere
return to engulf them, springing up out of the necessities of their exposed
position, and superimposing itself upon the work of man's hands. And so it
was that, at the foot of the path which led down to this artificial lake, there
might be seen, in its two tiers woven of trailing forget-me-nots below and of
periwinkle flowers above, the natural, delicate, blue garland which binds
the luminous, shadowed brows of water-nymphs; while the iris, its swords
sweeping every way in regal profusion, stretched out over agrimony and
water-growing king-cups the lilied sceptres, tattered glories of yellow and
purple, of the kingdom of the lake.
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 so 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 permitted me, a matter of indifference to
myself, seemed however to invest the property, in my grandfather's and
father's eyes, with a fresh and transient charm, and (like an entirely
cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering) to make the day
extraordinarily propitious for a walk in this direction; 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 escape, 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
line whose float was bobbing in the water, I made a great effort to keep my

father and grandfather looking in another direction, away from this sign that
she might, after all, be in residence. Still, as Swann had told us that he
ought not, really, 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. Somewhere in one of the tall trees,
making a stage in its height, an invisible bird, desperately attempting to
make the day seem shorter, was exploring with a long, continuous 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
would have said, it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had
been trying to make pass more quickly. The sunlight fell so implacably
from a fixed sky that one was naturally inclined to slip away out of the
reach of its attentions, and even the slumbering water, whose repose was
perpetually being invaded by the insects that swarmed above its surface,
while it dreamed, 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 a mirrored
firmament; now almost vertical, it seemed on the point of plunging down
out of sight, and I had begun to ask myself 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 after my father and grandfather, who were calling me, and
were surprised that I had not followed them along the little path, climbing
up hill towards the open fields, into which they had already turned. I found
the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-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
underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the ground, as though it had
shone in upon them through a window; the scent that swept out over me
from them was as rich, and 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 air of
inattention, fine, radiating 'nerves' in the flamboyant style of architecture,
like those which, in church, framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the
perpendicular tracery of the windows, but here spread out into pools of
fleshy white, like strawberry-beds in spring. How simple and rustic, in
comparison with these, would seem the dog-roses which, in a few weeks'

time, would be climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun,
dressed in the smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be
undone and scattered by the first breath of wind.
But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to
marshal before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose in
order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb myself
in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the light-
heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals of
music; they offered me an indefinite continuation of the same charm, in an
inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it any more
deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in
succession without coming any nearer to their secret. I turned away from
them for a moment so as to be able to return to them with renewed strength.
My eyes followed up the slope which, outside the hedge, rose steeply to the
fields, a poppy that had strayed and been lost by its fellows, or a few
cornflowers that had fallen lazily behind, and decorated the ground here and
there with their flowers like the border of a tapestry, in which may be seen
at intervals hints of the rustic theme which appears triumphant in the panel
itself; infrequent still, spaced apart as the scattered houses which warn us
that we are approaching a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse of
waving corn beneath 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 as does a wayfarer's when he perceives, upon some low-lying
ground, an old and broken boat which is being caulked and made
seaworthy, and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of it, "The
Sea!"
And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood before them as one
stands before those masterpieces of painting 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 shape my fingers into a frame, so as to
have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes; the sentiment which they
aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free
itself, to float across and become one with the flowers. They themselves
offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to
satisfy this mysterious longing. And then, inspiring me with that rapture
which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite painter quite different from

any of those that we already know, or, better still, when some one has taken
us and set us down in front of a picture of which we have hitherto seen no
more than a pencilled sketch, or when a piece of music which we have
heard played over on the piano bursts out again in our ears with all the
splendour and fullness of an orchestra, my grandfather called me to him,
and, pointing to the hedge of Tansonville, said: "You are fond of hawthorns;
just look at this pink one; isn't it pretty?"
And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were 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 appointed by any capricious accident, as secular holidays are
appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for such
observances, 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
undecorated, 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, to the 'plain,' 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. And 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 strawberries. And
these flowers had chosen precisely the colour of some edible and delicious
thing, or of some exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival,
which colours, 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 have not been selected by the dressmaker. And, indeed, I had
felt at once, as I had felt before the white blossom, but now still more
marvelling, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human
construction, 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 burying the bush in 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

jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on
the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in
colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink
marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-
blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree, which,
wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and
blossom in pink flowers alone. Taking its place in the hedge, but as different
from the rest as a young girl in holiday attire among a crowd of dowdy
women in everyday clothes, who are staying at home, equipped and ready
for the 'Month of Mary,' of which it seemed already to form a part, it shone
and smiled in its cool, rosy garments, a Catholic bush indeed, and altogether
delightful.
The hedge allowed us 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 on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted green,
coiling across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over the flowers
whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan of
infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops. Suddenly I stood still, unable to
move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our eyes
to take it in, but involves 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 trowel in her hand, was looking at
us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles. Her black
eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know, and indeed have never
since learned how to reduce to its objective elements any strong impression,
since I had not, as they say, enough 'power of observation' to isolate the
sense 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 meeting her—I should not have been, as I was, especially
enamoured of their imagined blue.
I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger
from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out,
petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain 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
father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her, by making
me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously appealing 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
grandfather and father, and doubtless the impression she formed of them
was that we were all absurd people, for she turned away with an indifferent
and contemptuous air, withdrew herself 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, had overtaken and passed me, she allowed her eyes
to wander, over the space that lay between us, in my direction, without any
particular expression, without appearing to have seen me, but with an
intensity, a half-hidden smile which I was unable to interpret, according to
the instruction I had received in the ways of good breeding, save as a mark
of infinite disgust; 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 beyond 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 trowel, she
made off without turning to look again in my direction, with an air of
obedience, inscrutable and sly.
And so was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me like
a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her
whom its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality, whereas, a
moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen. 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, which it set
apart and isolated from all other air, with the mystery of the life of her
whom its syllables designated to the happy creatures that lived and walked
and travelled in her company; unfolding through the arch of the pink
hawthorn, which opened at the height of my shoulder, the quintessence of

their familiarity—so exquisitely painful to myself—with her, and with all
that unknown world of her existence, into which I should never penetrate.
For a moment (while we moved away, and my grandfather murmured:
"Poor Swann, what a life they are leading him; fancy sending him away so
that she can be left alone with her Charlus—for that was Charlus: 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 replying, by exhibiting her to me as
being obliged to yield obedience to some one else, as not being indeed
superior to the whole world, calmed my sufferings 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 was
endeavouring to rise to Gilberte's level, or to draw her down to its own. I
loved her; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult
her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me. I knew
her to be 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 are hideous, grotesque;
you are utterly disgusting!" However, I walked away, carrying with me,
then and for ever 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, and a skin freckled with tiny pink marks, who held a trowel in her
hand, and smiled as she directed towards me a long and subtle and
inexpressive stare. And already the charm with which her name, like a
cloud of incense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn through
which she and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to conquer, to
cover, to embalm, to beautify everything with which it had any association:
her grandparents, whom my own had been so unspeakably fortunate as to
know, the glorious profession of a stockholder, even the melancholy
neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysées, where she lived in Paris.
"Léonie," said my grandfather on our return, "I wish we had had you with
us this afternoon. You would never have known Tansonville. If I had had
the courage I would have cut you a branch of that pink hawthorn you used
to like so much." And so my grandfather told her the story of our walk,
either just to amuse her, or perhaps because there was still some hope that
she might be stimulated to rise from her bed and to go out of doors. For in
earlier days she had been very fond of Tansonville, and, moreover, Swann's

visits had been the last that she had continued to receive, at a time when she
had already closed her doors to all the world. And just as, when he called, in
these later days, to inquire for her (and she was still the only person in our
household whom he would ask to see), she would send down to say that she
was tired at the moment and resting, but that she would be happy to see him
another time, so, this evening, she said to my grandfather, "Yes, some day
when the weather is fine I shall go for a drive as far as the gate of the park."
And in saying this she was quite sincere. She would have liked to see
Swann and Tansonville again; but the mere wish to do so sufficed for all
that remained of her strength, which its fulfilment would have more than
exhausted. Sometimes a spell of fine weather made her a little more
energetic, she would rise and put on her clothes; but before she had reached
the outer room she would be 'tired' again, and would insist on returning to
her bed. The process which had begun in her—and in her a little earlier only
than it must come to all of us—was the great and general renunciation
which old age makes in preparation for death, the chrysalis stage of life,
which may be observed wherever life has been unduly prolonged; even in
old lovers who have lived for one another with the utmost intensity of
passion, and in old friends bound by the closest ties of mental 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 well that
they will communicate no more in this world. My aunt must have been
perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would
never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to
be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to
our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable; namely, that such a
seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her
strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every
action, every movement 'tiring' to her if not actually painful, gave to
inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing
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 Léonie 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 pause for breath; so stifling 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 burdened 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 which I had stored up in the sound of that
word Swann, I found again as soon as it was uttered. And then it occurred 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 that steep
little hillside close to Tansonville, bidding a long farewell to my hawthorns,
clasping their sharp branches to my bosom, and (like a princess in a tragedy,
oppressed by the weight of all her senseless jewellery) with no gratitude
towards the officious hand which had, in curling those ringlets, been at
pains to collect all 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
Méséglise walk. They were perpetually crossed, as though by invisible
streams of traffic, 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 find it running again through my
clothing, and setting me running in its wake. One always had the wind for
companion when one went the 'Méséglise way,' on that swelling plain
which stretched, mile beyond mile, without any disturbance of its gentle
contour. I knew that Mlle. Swann used often to go and spend a few days at
Laon, and, for all that it was many miles away, the distance was obviated by
the absence of any intervening obstacle; when, on hot afternoons, I would
see 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 settling down, 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 had passed by
her also, that there was some message from her in what it was whispering to
me, without my being able to understand it, and I would catch and kiss it as
it passed. On my left was a village called Champieu (Campus Pagani,
according to the Curé). On my right I could see across the cornfields the
two crocketed, rustic spires of Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as
tapering, scaly, plated, honeycombed, yellowed, and roughened as two ears
of wheat.
At regular intervals, among the inimitable ornamentation of their leaves,
which can be mistaken for those of no other fruit-tree, the apple-trees were
exposing their broad petals of white satin, or hanging in shy bunches their
unopened, blushing buds. It was while going the 'Méséglise 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 would
see my father slash through with his stick without ever making them swerve
from their straight path.
Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little
cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to
'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary clothes to watch
the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps 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 she is cut out sharply against the sky, in the form of a silver sickle,
some work as unsophisticated and as incomplete as were, at that date, 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
pictures as they would continue to admire when their minds were developed
and mature. No doubt they regarded aesthetic values as material objects
which an unclouded vision could not fail to discern, without needing to
have their equivalent in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in
one's heart.
It was along the 'Méséglise 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
extraordinary 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 that people never fail to arouse
admiration of their normal qualities in the relatives of anyone with whom
they are in physical intercourse. Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly
decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of
unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent
in the eyes of all beholders. 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 Curé 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
vocation 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 believed, 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 outspoken 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 penetrate to the
sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered
those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them; they can aim at them
continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and
an avalanche of miseries and maladies coming, one after another, without
interruption into 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 precisely 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
Combray, 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 almost arrogant 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 friendly benevolence, the outward signs of
which serve to enhance and gratify the self-esteem of the bestower because
he feels that they are all the more precious to him upon whom they are
bestowed, 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
for his cause that he felt it would perhaps be better to make no use of it, so
as to have the wholly Platonic satisfaction of keeping it in reserve.
"What a charming man!" he said to us, after Swann had gone, with the
same enthusiasm and veneration which make clever and pretty women of
the middle classes fall victims to the physical and intellectual charms of a
duchess, even though she be ugly and a fool. "What a charming man! What
a pity that he should have made such a deplorable marriage!"
And then, so strong an element of hypocrisy is there in even the most
sincere of men, who cast off, while they are talking to anyone, the opinion
they actually hold of him and will express when he is no longer there, my
family joined with M. Vinteuil in deploring Swann's marriage, invoking
principles and conventions which (all the more because they invoked them
in common with him, as though we were all thorough good fellows of the
same sort) they appeared to suggest were in no way infringed at
Montjouvain. M. Vinteuil did not send his daughter to visit Swann, an
omission which Swann was the first to regret. For constantly, after meeting
M. Vinteuil, he would remember that he had been meaning for a long time
to ask him about some one of the same name as himself, one of his
relatives, Swann supposed. And on this occasion he determined that he
would not forget what he had to say to him when M. Vinteuil should appear
with his daughter at Tansonville.
Since the 'Méséglise 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 Méséglise shewed an
unduly high rainfall, and we would never lose sight of the fringe of
Roussainville 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, but whose edge the sun gilded in return. The brightness, though
not the light of day, would then be shut off from a landscape in which all
life appeared to be suspended, while the little village of Roussainville
carved in relief upon the sky the white mass of its gables, with a startling
precision of detail. A gust of wind blew from its perch a rook, which floated

away and settled in the distance, while beneath a paling sky the woods on
the horizon assumed a deeper tone of blue, as though they were painted in
one of those cameos which you still find decorating the walls of old houses.
But on other days would begin to fall the rain, of which we had had due
warning from the little barometer-figure which the spectacle-maker hung
out in his doorway. Its drops, like migrating birds which fly off in a body at
a given moment, would come down out of the sky in close marching order.
They would never drift apart, would make no movement at random in their
rapid course, but each one, keeping in its place, would draw after it the drop
which was following, and the sky would be as greatly darkened as by the
swallows flying south. 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 the rain was playing a game, now, among the branches, and,
even when it was almost dry again underfoot, a stray drop or two, lingering
in the hollow of a leaf, would run down and hang glistening from the point
of it until suddenly it splashed plump upon our upturned faces from the
whole height of the tree.
Often, too, we would hurry for shelter, tumbling in among all its stony
saints and patriarchs, into the porch of Saint-André-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 Françoise. The sculptor had
also recorded certain anecdotes of Aristotle and Virgil, precisely as
Françoise in her kitchen would break into speech about Saint Louis as
though she herself had known him, generally in order to depreciate, by
contrast with him, my grandparents, whom she considered less 'righteous.'
One could see that the ideas which the mediaeval artist and the mediaeval
peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of
classical and of early Christian history, ideas 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, degraded,
unrecognisable, and alive. Another Combray person whom I could discern
also, potential and typified, in the gothic sculptures of Saint-André-des-
Champs was young Théodore, the assistant in Camus's shop. And, indeed,
Françoise herself was well aware that she had in him a countryman and
contemporary, for when my aunt was too ill for Françoise 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 Théodore. 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-André-des-Champs, and
particularly in the feelings of respect due, in Françoise 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, the same air of
préraphaélite simplicity and zeal which the little angels in the bas-reliefs
wear, who throng, with tapers in their hands, about the deathbed of Our
Lady, as though those carved faces of stone, naked and grey like trees in
winter, were, like them, asleep only, storing up life and waiting to flower
again in countless plebeian faces, reverend and cunning as the face of
Théodore, and glowing with the ruddy brilliance of ripe apples.
There, too, not fastened to the wall 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 which
swelled out inside her draperies like a cluster of ripe grapes inside a bag, the
narrow forehead, short and stubborn nose, deep-set eyes, and strong, thick-
skinned, courageous expression of the country-women of those parts. This
similarity, which imparted to the statue itself 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—as when the leaves of a climbing plant have grown up
beside leaves carved in stone—seemed intended by fate to allow 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, Roussainville, 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 innumerable spears
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 rays of
uneven length, like the rays of a monstrance upon an altar.
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,
resembled 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 expressed by
the permanent, underlying fine weather; a very different thing from the fluid
and unstable 'fine weather' of winter, its very opposite, in fact; for has it not
(firmly established in the soil, on which it has taken solid form in dense
masses of foliage over which the rain may pour in torrents without
weakening the resistance offered by their real and lasting happiness)
hoisted, to keep them flying throughout the season, in the village streets, on
the walls of the houses and in their gardens, its silken banners, violet and
white. Sitting in the little parlour, where I would pass the time until dinner
with a book, I might hear the water dripping from our chestnut-trees, but I
would know that the shower would only glaze and brighten the greenness of
their thick, crumpled leaves, and that they themselves had undertaken to
remain there, like pledges of summer, all through the rainy night, to assure
me of the fine weather's continuing; it might rain as it pleased, but to-
morrow, over the white fence of Tansonville, there would surge and flow,
numerous as ever, a sea of little heart-shaped leaves; and without the least
anxiety I could watch the poplar in the Rue des Perchamps praying for
mercy, bowing in desperation before the storm; without the least anxiety I
could hear, at the far end of the garden, the last peals of thunder growling
among our lilac-trees.
If the weather was bad all morning, my family would abandon the idea of
a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the habit of
going out by myself on such days, and walking towards Méséglise-la-
Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to Combray to settle the
division of my aunt Léonie's estate; for she had died at last, leaving both
parties among her neighbours triumphant in the fact of her demise—those
who had insisted that her mode of life was enfeebling and must ultimately
kill her, and, equally, those who had always maintained that she suffered
from some disease not imaginary, but organic, by the visible proof of which
the most sceptical would be obliged to own themselves convinced, once she
had succumbed to it; causing no intense grief to any save one of her
survivors, but to that one a grief savage in its violence. During the long

fortnight of my aunt's last illness Françoise never went out of her room for
an instant, never took off her clothes, allowed no one else to do anything for
my aunt, 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 Françoise had lived of
my aunt's harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had developed in her a
sentiment which we had mistaken for hatred, and which was really
veneration and love. Her true mistress, whose decisions it had been
impossible to foresee, from whose stratagems it had been so hard to escape,
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 Françoise 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 'Méséglise way,' wrapped up in a huge Highland plaid which
protected me from the rain, and which I was all the more ready to throw
over my shoulders because I felt that the stripes of its gaudy tartan
scandalised Françoise, 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. I am sure that in a
book—and to that extent my feelings were closely akin to those of
Françoise—such a conception of mourning, in the manner of the Chanson
de Roland and of the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, would have
seemed most attractive. But the moment that Françoise herself approached,
some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her angry, and I would
avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I regretted my aunt's
death because she had been a good woman in spite of her absurdities, but
not in the least because she was my aunt; that she might easily have been
my aunt and yet have been so odious that her death would not have caused
me a moment's sorrow; statements which, in a book, would have struck me
as merely fatuous.

And if Françoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused
reflections 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 cannot speak her own
language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Françoise, 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 obliged 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 morning 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, was now obliged,
like a spinning-top wound and let go, to spend this in every direction. The
walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees of Roussainville wood, the
bushes against which Montjouvain leaned its back, all must bear the blows
of my walking-stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, blows
and shouts being indeed no more than expressions of the confused ideas
which exhilarated me, and which, not being developed to the point at which
they might rest exposed to the light of day, rather than submit to a slow and
difficult course of elucidation, found it easier and more pleasant to drift into
an immediate outlet. And so it is that the bulk of what appear to be the
emotional renderings of our inmost sensations do no more than relieve us of
the burden of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us in an
indistinct form which does not teach us how it should be interpreted. When
I attempt to reckon up all that I owe to the 'Méséglise 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 put up a brisk fight, as I came to
the edge of the Montjouvain pond, and reached a little hut, roofed with tiles,

in which M. Vinteuil's gardener kept his tools, the sun shone out again, and
its golden rays, washed clean by the shower, blazed once more in the sky,
on the trees, on the wall of the hut, and on the still wet tiles of the roof,
which had a chicken perching upon its ridge. The wind pulled out sideways
the wild grass that grew in the wall, and the chicken's downy feathers, both
of which things let themselves float upon the wind's breath to their full
extent, with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless matter. The
tiled roof cast upon the pond, whose reflections were now clear again in the
sunlight, a square of pink marble, the like of which I had never observed
before. And, seeing upon the water, where it reflected the wall, a pallid
smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my enthusiasm,
brandishing my furled umbrella: "Damn, damn, damn, damn!" 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 enjoyment.
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
received my umbrella in his face, and who replied without any cordiality 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, by a pre-
established order. Later on I discovered that, whenever I had read for too
long and was in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I would be
burning to say something would at that moment have finished indulging
himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted nothing now but to be
left to read undisturbed. And if I had been thinking with affection of my
parents, and forming the most sensible and proper plans for giving them
pleasure, 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, just as I flung myself upon them with a kiss.
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 wild
grass in 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, created in
them by 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, unknown, and propitious breeze. But if this desire that a woman
should appear added for me something more exalting than the charms of
nature, they in their turn enlarged what I might, in the woman's charm, have
found too much restricted. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was
hers also, and that, as for the spirit of those horizons, of the village of
Roussainville, of the books which I was reading that year, it was her kiss
which would make me master of them all; and, my imagination drawing
strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through
all the realms of my imagination, my desire had no longer any bounds.
Moreover—just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature, the
normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas of
things set on one side, 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 which my desire evoked seemed to be not any one
example of the general type of 'woman,' but a necessary and natural product
of the soil. For at that time everything which 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 Méséglise or Roussainville, for a fisher-girl from
Balbec, just as I had a desire for Balbec and Méséglise. The pleasure which
those girls were empowered to give me would have seemed less genuine, I
should have had no faith in it any longer, if I had been at liberty to modify
its conditions as I chose. To meet in Paris a fisher-girl from Balbec or a
peasant-girl from Méséglise 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 which she
was about to give me all those other pleasures in the thick of 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 never saw save dappled with the shadows of their leaves, was to me
herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the rest, and one whose
structure would enable me to approach more closely than in them to the
intimate savour of the land from which she had sprung. I could believe this
all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she would bring
that savour to my senses were themselves of a particular kind, yielding a
pleasure which I could never derive from any but herself) 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 reduced it to a general idea
which makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of
a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist,
isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with
which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness
which, in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of
oneself, but only how to escape from oneself. Obscurely awaited, immanent
and concealed, it rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it
makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender glance,
in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything
else, a sort of transport of gratitude for the kindness of heart of our
companion and for her touching predilection of ourselves, which we
measure by the benefits, by 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 scruples of a traveller setting forth for unknown climes, 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, I believed, might lead me to my death, even—until passion
spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering currant
which, creeping in through the window, tumbled all about my body. In vain
I called upon it now. In vain I compressed 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-

André-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 would I concentrate my attention, as though to force up out
of it the creatures which it must conceal, upon that sterile soil, that stale and
outworn land; and it was no longer in lightness of heart, but with sullen
anger that I aimed blows at the trees of Roussainville wood, from among
which no more living creatures made their appearance 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 obliged 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.
And it is perhaps from another impression which I received at
Montjouvain, some years later, an impression which at that time was
without meaning, that there arose, long afterwards, my idea of that cruel
side of human passion called 'sadism.' We shall see, in due course, that for
quite another reason the memory of this impression was to play an
important part in my life. It was during a spell of very hot weather; my
parents, who had been obliged to go away for the whole day, had told me
that I might stay out as late as I pleased; and having gone as far as the
Montjouvain pond, where I enjoyed seeing again the reflection of the tiled
roof of the hut, I had lain down in the shade and gone to sleep among the
bushes on the steep slope that rose up behind the house, just where I had
waited for my parents, years before, one day when they had gone to call on

M. Vinteuil. It was almost dark when I awoke, and I wished to rise and go
away, but I saw Mlle. Vinteuil (or thought, at least, that I recognised her, for
I had not seen her often at Combray, and then only when she was still a
child, whereas she was now growing into a young woman), who probably
had just come in, standing in front of me, and only a few feet away from
me, in that room in which her father had entertained mine, and which she
had now made into a little sitting-room for herself. The window was partly
open; the lamp was lighted; I could watch her every movement without her
being able to see me; but, had I gone away, I must have made a rustling
sound among the bushes, she would have heard me, and might have thought
that I had been hiding there in order to spy upon her.
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, also, of that other
and still more cruel renunciation to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that
of seeing the girl happily settled, with an honest and respectable future;
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 different in its bitterness, 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 for his
daughter, and now he has died for her, 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 indicate that it was a desire to
sleep, and that alone, which had made her lie down there. Despite the rude
and hectoring familiarity with which she treated her companion I could
recognise in her the obsequious and reticent advances, the abrupt scruples
and restraints which 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 am hot."
"But it's too dreadful! People will see us," Mlle. Vinteuil answered. And
then she guessed, probably, that her friend would think that she had uttered
these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words,
which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from prudence,
would let her friend be the first to speak. And so, although I could not see
her face clearly enough, I am sure that the expression 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 the instinctive generosity of her nature, a courtesy beyond her
control, she refrained from uttering the studied words which, she had felt,
were indispensable for the full realisation of her desire. And perpetually, in
the depths of her being, a shy and suppliant maiden would kneel before that

other element, the old campaigner, battered but triumphant, would intercede
with him and oblige him to retire.
"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 affectionate 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. In her sensitive and
scrupulous heart she was ignorant what words ought to flow, spontaneously,
from her lips, so as to produce the scene for which her eager senses
clamoured. She reached out as far as she could across the limitations of her
true character to find the language appropriate to a vicious young woman
such as she longed to be thought, but the words which, she imagined, such a
young woman might have uttered with sincerity sounded unreal in her own
mouth. And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained
tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and
audacity of speech; while she kept on interrupting herself with: "You're sure
you aren't cold? You aren't too hot? You don't want to sit and read by
yourself?...
"Your ladyship's thoughts seem to be rather 'warm' this evening," she
concluded, doubtless repeating a phrase which she had heard used, on some
earlier occasion, by her friend.
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 ran away; and then
they began to chase one another about the room, scrambling over the
furniture, their wide sleeves fluttering like wings, clucking and crowing like
a pair of amorous fowls. At last Mlle. Vinteuil fell down exhausted upon the
sofa, where she was screened from me by the stooping body of her friend.
But 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, of
course, in common use in their ritual observances, was subjected to daily
profanation, for the friend replied in words which were evidently a liturgical
response: "Let him stay there. He can't trouble us any longer. D'you think
he'd start whining, d'you think he'd pack you out of the house if he could
see you now, with the window open, the ugly old monkey?"
To which Mlle. Vinteuil replied, "Oh, please!"—a gentle reproach 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
used to curb 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 criminal attitude towards life which she was
endeavouring to adopt. But she could not resist the attraction of being
treated with affection by a woman who had just shewn herself so
implacable towards the defenceless dead; she sprang on to the knees of her
friend and held out a chaste brow to be kissed; precisely as a daughter
would have done to her mother, feeling with exquisite joy that they would
thus, between them, inflict the last turn of the screw of cruelty, in robbing
M. Vinteuil, as though they were actually rifling his tomb, of the sacred
rights of fatherhood. 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 that old horror?" she said,
taking up the photograph. She murmured in Mlle. Vinteuil's ear something
that I could not distinguish.
"Oh! You would never dare."
"Not dare to spit on it? On that?" shouted the friend with deliberate
brutality.

I heard no more, for Mlle. Vinteuil, who now seemed weary, awkward,
preoccupied, sincere, and rather sad, came back 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 endured 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 daughter'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 strong and so
consistent that it would have been hard to find it exhibited in such
completeness save in what is nowadays called a '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 leading her friend on to spit
upon the portrait of a father who has lived and died for nothing and no one
but herself; and when we find in real life a desire for melodramatic effect, it
is generally the 'sadic' instinct that is responsible for it. It is possible that,
without being in the least inclined towards 'sadism,' a girl might have shewn
the same outrageous cruelty as Mlle. Vinteuil in desecrating the memory
and defying the wishes of her dead father, but she would not have given
them deliberate 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 herself; and as for virtue, respect for
the dead, filial obedience, since she would never have practised the cult of
these things, she would take no impious delight in their profanation.
'Sadists' of Mlle. Vinteuil's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so
virtuous by nature, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something
bad, a privilege reserved for the wicked. And when they allow themselves
for a moment to enjoy it they endeavour to impersonate, to assume all the
outward appearance of wicked people, for themselves and their partners in
guilt, so as 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 understand 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;
what she really desecrated, what she corrupted into ministering to her
pleasures, but what 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 some trinket
to be kept in the family, those little friendly movements and inclinations
which set up between the viciousness of Mlle. Vinteuil 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
courtesies 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 pleasure 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
those kisses on her brow, those smiles, those glances; all feigned, perhaps,
but akin in their base and vicious mode of expression to those which would
have been discernible on the face of a creature formed not out of kindness
and long-suffering, but out of self-indulgence and cruelty. She was able to
delude herself for a moment into believing that she was indeed amusing
herself in the way in which, with so unnatural an accomplice, a girl might
amuse herself who really did experience that savage antipathy towards her
father's memory. Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a
state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit,
had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and
women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which,
whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of
cruelty.

If the 'Méséglise 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 Françoise, in desperation that not a drop was falling upon
the 'poor crops,' gazing up at the sky and seeing there only a little white
cloud floating here and there upon its calm, azure surface, groaned aloud
and exclaimed: "You would say they were nothing more nor less than 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, rattling all over the place, and think no
more of where it is 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 luncheon, through the little garden gate which dropped us
into the Rue des Perchamps, narrow and bent at a sharp angle, dotted with
grass-plots over 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-loft
and an eighteenth-century altar, traces of a Norman choir, restore the whole
church to the state in which it probably was in the twelfth century) I leave
not a stone of the modern edifice standing, I 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 Flesché, 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 listening to the bells, for it was so
charming there 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 morning, after the
sermon, if the weather was fine, I would run there to see (amid all the
disorder that prevails on the morning of a great festival, the gorgeous
preparations for which make the everyday household utensils that they have
not contrived to banish seem more sordid than ever) the river flowing past,
sky-blue already between banks still black and bare, its only companions a
clump of daffodils, come out before their time, a few primroses, the first in
flower, while here and there burned the blue flame of a violet, its stem bent
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 overhung in summer
by the bluish foliage of a hazel, under 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 surplice, 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 surface 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 in their playtime, or with lesson-
books to be conned; emblems of a past that had sunk down and well-nigh
vanished under the earth, that lay by the water's edge now, like an idler
taking the air, yet giving me strong food for thought, making the name of
Combray connote to me not the little town of to-day only, but an historic
city vastly different, seizing and holding 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 consummate 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 gilded expanse, until it had
acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of absolute,
unproductive 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 pronounce their charming name—a name fit for the Prince in some
French fairy-tale; colonists, perhaps, in some far distant century from Asia,
but naturalised now for ever in the village, well 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, as do some of our
old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the
golden East.
I would amuse myself by watching the glass jars which the boys used to
lower into the Vivonne, to catch minnows, and which, filled by the current

of the stream, in which they themselves also were enclosed, at once
'containers' whose transparent sides were like solidified water and 'contents'
plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing crystal, suggested an
image of coolness more delicious and more provoking than the same water
in the same jars would have done, standing upon a table laid for dinner, by
shewing it as perpetually in flight between the impalpable water, in which
my hands could not arrest it, and the insoluble glass, in which my palate
could not enjoy it. I decided that I would come there again with a line and
catch fish; I begged for and obtained a morsel of bread from our luncheon
basket; and threw into the Vivonne pellets which had the power, it seemed,
to bring about a chemical precipitation, for the water at once grew solid
round about 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 unfortunately grown, would never leave at rest for a
moment, so that, like a ferry-boat mechanically 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 be straightened out,
lengthened, strained 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 Léonie, who present without modification,
year after year, the spectacle of their odd and unaccountable habits, which
they always 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,
fatal daily round. Such as these was the water-lily, and also like one of those
wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity,
aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have inquired of 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 at this point 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 that was almost violet, suggesting a floor of
Japanese cloisonné. Here and there, on the surface, floated, blushing like a
strawberry, the scarlet heart of a lily set in a ring of white petals.
Beyond these the flowers were more frequent, but 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 though
after the dreary stripping of the decorations used in some Watteau festival,
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 farther
again, were others, pressed close together in a floating garden-bed, as
though pansies had flown out of a garden like butterflies and were hovering
with blue and burnished wings over the transparent shadowiness of this
watery border; this skiey border also, for it set beneath the flowers a soil of
a colour more precious, more moving than their own; and both in the
afternoon, when it sparkled beneath the lilies in the kaleidoscope of a
happiness silent, restless, and alert, and towards evening, when it was filled
like a distant heaven with the roseate dreams of the setting sun, incessantly
changing and ever remaining in harmony, about the more permanent colour
of the flowers themselves, with the utmost profundity, evanescence, and
mystery—with a quiet suggestion of infinity; afternoon or evening, it
seemed to have set them flowering in the heart of the sky.
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,
shewing 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 a lazy cloud streamed out to its full length. Now and then, crushed by
the burden of idleness, a carp would heave up out of the water, with an
anxious gasp. It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards we
would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on the
grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint, but solid still and
metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had melted not at all
in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed to traverse, but, broken
piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all their sonorous strokes,
throbbed as it brushed 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
submissive 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
proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, I knew that they were
real personages who did actually exist, but whenever I thought about them I
pictured them to myself either in tapestry, as was the 'Coronation of Esther'
which hung in our church, or else in changing, rainbow colours, as was
Gilbert the Bad in his window, where he passed from cabbage green, when I
was dipping 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
Geneviève 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 orange 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 was in its turn 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 hot 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 illustrating, no doubt, in themselves
that strange and pious melancholy which was peculiar to Combray;
proprietors of the town, though not of any particular house there; dwelling,
presumably, out of doors, 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 'other side' in dull black lacquer, if I raised my
eyes to look for him, when I was going to Camus's for a packet of salt.
And then it happened that, going the 'Guermantes way,' I passed
occasionally by a row of well-watered little gardens, over whose hedges
rose clusters of dark blossom. I would stop before them, hoping to gain
some precious addition to my experience, for I seemed to have before my
eyes a fragment of that riverside 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
intersected by a hundred bubbling watercourses, that Guermantes, changing
its form 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. I used to dream that Mme. de Guermantes, taking a
sudden capricious fancy for myself, invited me there, that all day long she
stood fishing for trout by my side. And when evening came, holding my
hand in her own, as we passed by the little gardens of her vassals, she
would point out to me the flowers that leaned their red and purple spikes

along the tops of the low walls, and would teach me all their names. She
would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I meant to compose.
And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished, some day, to become a
writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write.
But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some
subjects to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite
value, my mind would stop like a clock, I would see before me vacuity,
nothing, would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that,
perhaps, a malady of the brain was hindering its development. Sometimes I
would depend upon my father's arranging everything for me. He was so
powerful, in such favour with the people who 'really counted,' that he made
it possible for us to transgress laws which Françoise had taught me to
regard as more ineluctable than the laws of life and death, as when we were
allowed to postpone for a year the compulsory repainting of the walls of our
house, alone among all the houses in that part of Paris, or when he obtained
permission from the Minister for Mme. Sazerat's son, who had been ordered
to some watering-place, to take his degree two months before the proper
time, among the candidates whose surnames began with 'A,' instead of
having to wait his turn as an 'S.' If I had fallen seriously ill, if I had been
captured by brigands, convinced that my father's understanding with the
supreme powers was too complete, that his letters of introduction to the
Almighty were too irresistible for my illness or captivity to turn out
anything but vain illusions, in which there was no danger actually
threatening me, I should have awaited with perfect composure the
inevitable hour of my return to comfortable realities, of my deliverance
from bondage or restoration to health. Perhaps this want of talent, this black
cavity which gaped in my mind when I ransacked it for the theme of my
future writings, was itself no more, either, than an unsubstantial illusion,
and would be brought to an end by the intervention of my father, who
would arrange with the Government and with Providence that I should be
the first writer of my day. But at other times, while my parents were
growing impatient at seeing me loiter behind instead of following them, my
actual life, instead of seeming an artificial creation by my father, and one
which he could modify as he chose, appeared, on the contrary, to be
comprised in a larger reality which had not been created for my benefit,
from whose judgments there was no appeal, in the heart of which I was
bound, helpless, without friend or ally, and beyond which no further

possibilities lay concealed. It was evident to me then that I existed in the
same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die like
them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those
who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renounced
literature for ever, despite the encouragements that had been given me by
Bloch. This intimate, spontaneous feeling, this sense of the nullity of my
intellect, prevailed against all the flattering speeches that might be lavished
upon me, as a wicked man, when everyone is loud in the praise of his good
deeds, is gnawed by the secret remorse of conscience.
One day my mother said: "You are always talking about Mme. de
Guermantes. Well, Dr. Percepied did a great deal for her when she was ill,
four years ago, and so she is coming to Combray for his daughter's
wedding. You will be able to see her in church." It was from Dr. Percepied,
as it happened, that I had heard most about Mme. de Guermantes, and he
had even shewn us the number of an illustrated paper in which she was
depicted in the costume which she had worn at a fancy dress ball given by
the Princesse de Léon.
Suddenly, during the nuptial mass, the beadle, by moving to one side,
enabled me to see, sitting in a chapel, a lady with fair hair and a large nose,
piercing blue eyes, a billowy scarf of mauve silk, glossy and new and
brilliant, and a little spot at the corner of her nose. And because on the
surface of her face, which was red, as though she had been very warm, I
could make out, diluted and barely perceptible, details which resembled the
portrait that had been shewn 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 describing 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 its flat tombstones, 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 I taken into account 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 this lady in her creative principle, in the molecules of her physical
composition, 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. "It is, it must be Mme. de Guermantes, and no one
else!" 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 this one had not been, like
the others, formed arbitrarily by myself, but had sprung into sight 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 imbibe the orange tint of a sonorous syllable, but which was
so real that everything, even to the fiery little spot at the corner of her nose,
gave an assurance of her subjection to the laws of life, as in a
transformation 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 of limelight from a lantern.
Meanwhile I was endeavouring to apply to this image, which the
prominent nose, the piercing eyes pinned down and fixed in my field of
vision (perhaps because it was they that had first struck it, that had made the
first impression on its surface, before I had had time to wonder whether the
woman who thus appeared before me might possibly be Mme. de
Guermantes), to this fresh and unchanging image the idea: "It is Mme. de
Guermantes"; but I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and
the image, as though they were two discs moving in separate planes, with a
space between. But this Mme. de Guermantes of whom I had so often
dreamed, now that I could see that she had a real existence independent of
myself, acquired a fresh increase of power over my imagination, which,

paralysed for a moment by contact with a reality so different from anything
that it had expected, began to react and to say within me: "Great and
glorious before the days of Charlemagne, the Guermantes had the right of
life and death over their vassals; the Duchesse de Guermantes descends
from Geneviève de Brabant. She does not know, nor would she consent to
know, any of the people who are here to-day."
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 lingered here and wandered there,
rose to the capitals of the pillars, and even rested 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 she approved
or condemned the vagrancy of her eyes in the careless detachment of her
heart.
I felt it to be important that she should not leave the church before I had
been able to look long enough upon her, reminding myself that for years
past I had regarded the sight of her as a thing eminently to be desired, and I
kept my eyes fixed on her, as though by gazing at her I should be able to
carry away and incorporate, to store up, for later reference, in myself the
memory of that prominent nose, those red cheeks, of all those details which
struck me as so much precious, authentic, unparalleled information with
regard to her face. And now that, whenever I brought my mind to bear upon
that face—and especially, perhaps, in my determination, that form of the
instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in
ourselves, not to admit that I had been in any way deceived—I found only
beauty there; setting her once again (since they were one and the same
person, this lady who sat before me and that Duchesse de Guermantes
whom, until then, I had been used to conjure into an imagined shape) apart
from and above that common run of humanity with which the sight, pure
and simple, of her in the flesh had made me for a moment confound her, 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
unfinished sketch: "How lovely she is! What true nobility! it is indeed a
proud Guermantes, the descendant of Geneviève 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 to-day, 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, hot 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
supremacy so loud that she must, in return, feel for them a genuine, pitying
sympathy, and whom she might count on impressing even more forcibly by
virtue of her simplicity and natural charm. And then, too, since she could
not bring into play the deliberate glances, charged with a definite meaning,
which one directs, in a crowd, towards people whom one knows, but must
allow her vague thoughts to escape continually from her eyes in a flood of
blue light which she was powerless to control, she was anxious not to
distress in any way, not to seem to be despising those humbler mortals over
whom that current flowed, by whom it was everywhere arrested. I can see
again to-day, above her mauve scarf, silky and buoyant, 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,
the almost timid smile 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 imagine
that she cannot ever be ours, it is enough, also, sometimes that she looks on
us kindly, as Mme. de Guermantes did then, while we think of her as almost
ours already. Her eyes waxed blue as a periwinkle flower, wholly beyond
my reach, 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, along which Mme. de Guermantes smilingly
advanced, and covered its woollen texture with a nap of rosy velvet, a
bloom of light, giving it that sort of tenderness, of solemn sweetness in the
pomp of a joyful celebration, which characterises certain pages of
Lohengrin, certain paintings by Carpaccio, and makes us understand how
Baudelaire was able to apply to the sound of the trumpet the epithet
'delicious.'
How often, after that day, in the course of my walks along the
'Guermantes way,' and with what an intensified 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 apart from all those literary preoccupations, and
without definite attachment to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of
sunlight reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop
still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also
because they appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see,
something which they invited me to approach and seize from them, but
which, despite all my efforts, I never managed to discover. As I felt that the
mysterious object was to be found in them, I would stand there in front of
them, motionless, gazing, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my
mind beyond the thing seen or smelt. And if I had then to hasten after my
grandfather, to proceed on my way, I would still seek to recover my sense
of 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 teeming, ready to open, to yield up

to me the secret treasure of which they were themselves no more than the
outer coverings. 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 suggesting 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 concerned myself no longer with the mystery that lay hidden in a
form or a perfume, quite at ease in my mind, since I was taking it home
with me, protected by its visible and tangible covering, 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, buried in a
couch of grass which kept them cool and fresh. Once in the house again 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 stone from the
surface of which the sunlight was reflected, a roof, the sound of a bell, the
smell of fallen leaves, a confused mass of different images, under which
must have perished long ago the reality of which I used to have some
foreboding, but which I never had the energy to discover and bring to light.
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 ascertaining and noting the shape of their spires, the changes of aspect,
the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not penetrating to the
full depth 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 astonished when, a few minutes later, we drew
up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for the
pleasure 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
wished only to keep in reserve in my brain those converging lines, moving
in the sunshine, 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 vanished for
ever, in a great medley of trees and roofs and scents and sounds which I had
noticed and set apart on account of the obscure sense of pleasure which they
gave me, but without ever exploring them more fully. 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 surface, as though they had been a sort of rind, were stripped apart; a
little of what they had concealed from me became apparent; an idea came
into my mind which had not existed for me a moment earlier, framed itself
in words in my head; and the pleasure with which the first sight of them,

just now, had filled me was so much enhanced that, overpowered by a sort
of intoxication, I could no longer think of anything but them. 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 shewed themselves for the last time, and so I saw them
no more.
Without admitting to myself that what lay buried within the steeples of
Martinville must be something analogous to a charming phrase, since it was
in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to me, I
borrowed a pencil and some paper from the Doctor, and composed, in spite
of the jolting of the carriage, to appease my conscience and to satisfy my
enthusiasm, the following little fragment, which I have since discovered,
and now reproduce, with only a slight revision here and there.

Alone, rising from the level of the plain, and seemingly lost in that
expanse of open country, climbed to the sky the twin steeples of
Martinville. Presently we saw three: springing into position confronting
them by a daring volt, a third, a dilatory steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, was
come to join them. The minutes passed, we were moving rapidly, and yet
the three steeples were always a long way ahead of us, like three birds
perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in the sunlight. Then
the steeple of Vieuxvicq withdrew, took its proper distance, and the steeples
of Martinville remained alone, gilded by the light of the setting sun, which,
even at that distance, I could see playing and smiling upon their sloped
sides. We had been so long in approaching them that I was thinking of the
time that must still elapse before we could reach them when, of a sudden,
the carriage, having turned a corner, set us down at their feet; and they had
flung themselves so abruptly in our path that we had barely time to stop
before being dashed against the porch of the church.
We resumed our course; we had left Martinville some little time, and the
village, after accompanying us for a few seconds, had already disappeared,
when, lingering alone on the horizon to watch our flight, its steeples and
that of Vieuxvicq waved once again, in token of farewell, their sun-bathed
pinnacles. Sometimes one would withdraw, so that the other two might
watch us for a moment still; then the road changed direction, they veered in
the light like three golden pivots, and vanished from my gaze. But, a little

later, when we were already close to Combray, the sun having set
meanwhile, I caught sight of them for the last time, far away, and seeming
no more now than three flowers painted upon the sky above the low line of
fields. They made me think, too, of three maidens in a legend, abandoned in
a solitary place over which night had begun to fall; and while we drew
away from them at a gallop, I could see them timidly seeking their way,
and, after some awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes,
drawing close to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing
more, now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and
resigned, and so vanishing in the night.

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 lighted 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 totally distinct from that
other zone, in which I had been bounding for joy a moment earlier, just as

sometimes in the sky 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 absorbed, 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! Shuddering with emotion, I could not take my
agonised eyes from my mother's face, which was not to 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
myself, in one state what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the other.
So the 'Méséglise 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 unconscious; 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 served as environment to their apparition lingers
around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air; and,
certainly, when they were slowly scrutinised by this humble passer-by, by
this dreaming child—as the face of a king is scrutinised by a petitioner lost

in the crowd—that scrap 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
strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a little while, the dog-
roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps followed by no echo, upon
a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side of a waterplant by the current, and
formed only to burst—my exaltation of mind has borne them with it, and
has succeeded in making them traverse all these successive years, while all
around them the one-trodden ways have vanished, while those who
thronged those ways, and even the memory of those who thronged those
trodden ways, 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 isle of
Delos, and I am unable to say from what place, from what time—perhaps,
quite simply, from which of my dreams—it comes. But it is pre-eminently
as the deepest layer of my mental soil, as firm sites on which I still may
build, that I regard the Méséglise and Guermantes 'ways.' It is because I
used to think of certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along
them, that the things, the people which they taught me to know, and these
alone, I still take seriously, still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith
which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape in the
memory alone, the flowers that people shew me nowadays for the first time
never seem to me to be true flowers. The 'Méséglise 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 have
constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I fain would
pass my life, in which my only requirements are that I may go out fishing,
drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find
hidden among the cornfields—as Saint-André-des-Champs lay hidden—an
old church, monumental, rustic, and yellow like a mill-stone; and the
cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may happen, when I go
walking, 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 'Guermantes 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 awakened 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 at the
moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I
used to receive, in her kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without
scruple or reservation, unburdened by any liability save to myself) 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 upon whose surface, when it is
polished by the sun to the mirroring radiance of a lake, are outlined the
leaves of the apple-trees; that whole landscape whose individuality
sometimes, at night, in my dreams, binds me with a power that is almost
fantastic, 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 Méséglise and
Guermantes '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 aftermath 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
resounding sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of
the storm, it is along the 'Méséglise way' that my fancy strays alone in
ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible
and persistent lilac-trees.

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, following one after
another, were condensed into a single substance, but had not so far
coalesced that I could not discern between the three strata, between my
oldest, my instinctive memories, those others, inspired more recently by a
taste or 'perfume,' and those which were actually the memories of another,
from whom I had acquired them at second hand—no fissures, indeed, no
geological faults, but at least those veins, those streaks of colour which in
certain rocks, in certain marbles, 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
architect 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, when 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 fixed 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; the well of the courtyard would be
enthroned on 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 of which I had caught
glimpses from the whirlpool of awakening; put to flight by that pale sign
traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted forefinger of day.

SWANN IN LOVE
To admit you to the 'little nucleus,' the 'little group,' the 'little clan' at the
Verdurins', one condition sufficed, but that one was indispensable; you must
give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose articles was that the young
pianist, whom Mme. Verdurin had taken under her patronage that year, and
of whom she said "Really, it oughtn't to be allowed, to play Wagner as well
as that!" left both Planté and Rubinstein 'sitting'; while Dr. Cottard was a
more brilliant diagnostician than Potain. Each 'new recruit' whom the
Verdurins failed to persuade that the evenings spent by other people, in
other houses than theirs, were as dull as ditch-water, saw himself banished
forthwith. Women being in this respect more rebellious than men, more
reluctant to lay aside all worldly curiosity and the desire to find out for
themselves whether other drawing-rooms might not sometimes be as
entertaining, and the Verdurins feeling, moreover, that this critical spirit and
this demon of frivolity might, by their contagion, prove fatal to the
orthodoxy of the little church, they had been obliged to expel, one after
another, all those of the 'faithful' who were of the female sex.
Apart from the doctor's young wife, they were reduced almost
exclusively that season (for all that Mme. Verdurin herself was a thoroughly
'good' woman, and came of a respectable middle-class family, excessively
rich and wholly undistinguished, with which she had gradually and of her
own accord severed all connection) to a young woman almost of a 'certain
class,' a Mme. de Crécy, whom Mme. Verdurin called by her Christian
name, Odette, and pronounced a 'love,' and to the pianist's aunt, who looked
as though she had, at one period, 'answered the bell': ladies quite ignorant of
the world, who in their social simplicity were so easily led to believe that
the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse de Guermantes were obliged to
pay large sums of money to other poor wretches, in order to have anyone at
their dinner-parties, that if somebody had offered to procure them an
invitation to the house of either of those great dames, the old doorkeeper
and the woman of 'easy virtue' would have contemptuously declined.
The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your 'place laid' there.
There was never any programme for the evening's entertainment. The

young pianist would play, but only if he felt inclined, for no one was forced
to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say: "We're all friends here.
Liberty Hall, you know!"
If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries, or the Prelude
to Tristan, Mme. Verdurin would protest, not that the music was displeasing
to her, but, on the contrary, that it made too violent an impression. "Then
you want me to have one of my headaches? You know quite well, it's the
same every time he plays that. I know what I'm in for. Tomorrow, when I
want to get up—nothing doing!" If he was not going to play they talked,
and one of the friends—usually the painter who was in favour there that
year—would "spin," as M. Verdurin put it, "a damned funny yarn that made
'em all split with laughter," and especially Mme. Verdurin, for whom—so
strong was her habit of taking literally the figurative accounts of her
emotions—Dr. Cottard, who was then just starting in general practice,
would "really have to come one day and set her jaw, which she had
dislocated with laughing too much."
Evening dress was barred, because you were all 'good pals,' and didn't
want to look like the 'boring people' who were to be avoided like the
plague, and only asked to the big evenings, which were given as seldom as
possible, and then only if it would amuse the painter or make the musician
better known. The rest of the time you were quite happy playing charades
and having supper in fancy dress, and there was no need to mingle any
strange element with the little 'clan.'
But just as the 'good pals' came to take a more and more prominent place
in Mme. Verdurin's life, so the 'bores,' the 'nuisances' grew to include
everybody and everything that kept her friends away from her, that made
them sometimes plead 'previous engagements,' the mother of one, the
professional duties of another, the 'little place in the country' of a third. If
Dr. Cottard felt bound to say good night as soon as they rose from table, so
as to go back to some patient who was seriously ill; "I don't know," Mme.
Verdurin would say, "I'm sure it will do him far more good if you don't go
disturbing him again this evening; he will have a good night without you;
to-morrow morning you can go round early and you will find him cured."
From the beginning of December it would make her quite ill to think that
the 'faithful' might fail her on Christmas and New Year's Days. The pianist's

aunt insisted that he must accompany her, on the latter, to a family dinner at
her mother's.
"You don't suppose she'll die, your mother," exclaimed Mme. Verdurin
bitterly, "if you don't have dinner with her on New Year's Day, like people
in the provinces!"
Her uneasiness was kindled again in Holy Week: "Now you, Doctor,
you're a sensible, broad-minded man; you'll come, of course, on Good
Friday, just like any other day?" she said to Cottard in the first year of the
little 'nucleus,' in a loud and confident voice, as though there could be no
doubt of his answer. But she trembled as she waited for it, for if he did not
come she might find herself condemned to dine alone.
"I shall come on Good Friday—to say good-bye to you, for we are going
to spend the holidays in Auvergne."
"In Auvergne? To be eaten by fleas and all sorts of creatures! A fine lot of
good that will do you!" And after a solemn pause: "If you had only told us,
we would have tried to get up a party, and all gone there together,
comfortably."
And so, too, if one of the 'faithful' had a friend, or one of the ladies a
young man, who was liable, now and then, to make them miss an evening,
the Verdurins, who were not in the least afraid of a woman's having a lover,
provided that she had him in their company, loved him in their company
and did not prefer him to their company, would say: "Very well, then, bring
your friend along." And he would be put to the test, to see whether he was
willing to have no secrets from Mme. Verdurin, whether he was susceptible
of being enrolled in the 'little clan.' If he failed to pass, the faithful one who
had introduced him would be taken on one side, and would be tactfully
assisted to quarrel with the friend or mistress. But if the test proved
satisfactory, the newcomer would in turn be numbered among the 'faithful.'
And so when, in the course of this same year, the courtesan told M.
Verdurin that she had made the acquaintance of such a charming gentleman,
M. Swann, and hinted that he would very much like to be allowed to come,
M. Verdurin carried the request at once to his wife. He never formed an
opinion on any subject until she had formed hers, his special duty being to
carry out her wishes and those of the 'faithful' generally, which he did with
boundless ingenuity.

"My dear, Mme. de Crécy has something to say to you. She would like to
bring one of her friends here, a M. Swann. What do you say?"
"Why, as if anybody could refuse anything to a little piece of perfection
like that. Be quiet; no one asked your opinion. I tell you that you are a piece
of perfection."
"Just as you like," replied Odette, in an affected tone, and then went on:
"You know I'm not fishing for compliments."
"Very well; bring your friend, if he's nice."
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
aristocracy, 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 bestowed 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 circumstances. 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-fourths of the
mental ingenuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast
ever since the world began by people whose importance they have served
only to diminish, 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 attracted him
instinctively, and without reason, were the direct opposite of those that he
admired in the women painted or sculptured by his favourite masters. Depth
of character, or a melancholy expression on a woman's face would freeze
his senses, which would, however, immediately melt at the sight of healthy,
abundant, rosy human 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 cheat 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 solid structure
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 discard as valueless, 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, when it was too late, he would laugh
at himself for it, for there was in his nature, redeemed by many rare
refinements, an element of clownishness. Then he belonged to that class of
intelligent men who have led a life of idleness, and who seek consolation
and, perhaps, an excuse in the idea, which their idleness offers to their
intelligence, of objects as worthy of their interest as any that could be
attained by art or learning, the idea 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, notably 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, to whom he was bound by such close ties, that Swann
compelled with so much cynicism to serve him as panders. All his friends
were accustomed to receive, from time to time, letters which called on them
for a word of recommendation or introduction, with a diplomatic adroitness
which, persisting throughout all his successive 'affairs' and using different
pretexts, revealed more glaringly than the clumsiest indiscretion, a
permanent trait in his character and an unvarying 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 considering, 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 mentioned
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.
Occasionally a couple of my grandparents' acquaintance, who had been
complaining for some time that they never saw Swann now, would
announce with satisfaction, and perhaps with a slight inclination to make
my grandparents envious of them, that he had suddenly become as
charming as he could possibly be, and was never out of their house. My
grandfather would not care to shatter their pleasant illusion, but would look
at my grandmother, as he hummed the air of:

What is this mystery?
I cannot understand it;

or of:

Vision fugitive...;
In matters such as this
'Tis best to close one's eyes.

A few months later, if my grandfather asked Swann's new friend "What
about Swann? Do you still see as much of him as ever?" the other's face
would lengthen: "Never mention his name to me again!"
"But I thought that you were such friends..."
He had been intimate in this way for several months with some cousins
of my grandmother, dining almost every evening at their house. Suddenly,
and without any warning, he ceased to appear. They supposed him to be ill,
and the lady of the house was going to send to inquire for him when, in her
kitchen, she found a letter in his hand, which her cook had left by accident
in the housekeeping book. In this he announced that he was leaving Paris
and would not be able to come to the house again. The cook had been his
mistress, and at the moment of breaking off relations she was the only one
of the household whom he had thought it necessary to inform.

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 particular 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 evening, after a slight 'wave' imparted to
his stiffly brushed red locks had tempered with a certain softness 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 of
which he had grown weary, but whose substance, pervaded and warmly
coloured by the flickering light which he had slipped into its midst, seemed
to him beautiful and rare, now that he had incorporated in it a fresh love.
But while each of these attachments, each of these flirtations had been
the realisation, more or less complete, of a dream born of the sight of a face
or a form 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 Crécy 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 name
some, and each will name different examples, who are the converse of the
type which our senses demand. To give him any pleasure her profile was
too sharp, her skin too delicate, her cheek-bones too prominent, her features
too tightly drawn. Her eyes were fine, but so large that they seemed to be
bending beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always
made her appear unwell or in an ill humour. 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 imagined him
to be "so comfortable with his tea and his books"; although she had not
concealed 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 feminine beauty must play the larger part in its
procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical order,
without any foundation in desire. At this time of life a man 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 his passive and
astonished heart. We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by
suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest.
Since we possess its hymn, engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no
need of any woman to repeat the opening lines, potent with the admiration
which her beauty inspires, for us to remember all that follows. And if she
begin in the middle, where it sings of our existing, henceforward, 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 first pause in her voice.
Odette de Crécy 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 expressive 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 more prominent
than it actually was, because her forehead and the upper part of her cheeks,
a single 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) for the corset, jetting forwards in an arch, as
though over an imaginary stomach, and ending in a sharp point, beneath
which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, gave a woman, that year,
the appearance of being composed of different sections badly fitted
together; to such an extent did the frills, the flounces, the inner bodice
follow, in complete independence, controlled only by the fancy of their
designer or the rigidity of their material, the line which led them to the
knots of ribbon, falls of lace, fringes of vertically hanging jet, or carried
them along the bust, but nowhere attached themselves to the living creature,
who, according as the architecture of their 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 in which she had looked at him then,
fixing upon him her fearful and imploring gaze, 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 abandoned
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 gone on, with

that self-satisfied air which a smart woman adopts when she insists that her
one desire is to give herself up, without fear of soiling her fingers, to some
unclean task, such as cooking the dinner, with her "hands right in the dish
itself." "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."
He had sought an excuse in his fear of forming new friendships, which he
gallantly described as his fear of a hopeless passion. "You are afraid of
falling in love? How funny that is, when I go about seeking nothing else,
and would give my soul just to find a little love somewhere!" she had said,
so naturally and with such an air of conviction that he had been genuinely
touched. "Some woman must have made you suffer. And you think that the
rest are all like her. She can't have understood you: you are so utterly
different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about you when I first saw
you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody else."
"And then, besides, there's yourself——" he had continued, "I know
what women are; you must have a whole heap of things to do, and never
any time to spare."
"I? Why, I have never anything to do. I am always free, and I always will
be free if you want me. At whatever hour of the day or night it may suit you
to see me, just send for me, and I shall be only too delighted to come. Will
you do that? Do you know what I should really like—to introduce you to
Mme. Verdurin, where I go every evening. Just fancy my finding you there,
and thinking that it was a little for my sake that you had gone."
No doubt, in thus remembering their conversations, in thinking about her
thus when he was alone, he did no more than call her image into being
among those of countless other women in his romantic dreams; but if,
thanks to some accidental circumstance (or even perhaps without that
assistance, for the circumstance which presents itself at the moment when a
mental state, hitherto latent, makes itself felt, may well have had no
influence whatsoever upon that state), the image of Odette de Crécy came
to absorb the whole of his dreams, if from those dreams the memory of her

could no longer be eliminated, then her bodily imperfections would no
longer be of the least importance, nor would the conformity of her body,
more or less than any other, to the requirements of Swann's taste; since,
having become the body of her whom he loved, it must henceforth be the
only one capable of causing him joy or anguish.
It so happened that my grandfather had known—which was more than
could be said of any other actual acquaintance—the family of these
Verdurins. But he had entirely severed his connection with what he called
"young Verdurin," taking a general view of him as one who had fallen—
though without losing hold of his millions—among the riff-raff of Bohemia.
One day he received a letter from Swann asking whether my grandfather
could put him in touch with the Verdurins. "On guard! on guard!" he
exclaimed as he read it, "I am not at all surprised; Swann was bound to
finish up like this. A nice lot of people! I cannot do what he asks, because,
in the first place, I no longer know the gentleman in question. Besides, there
must be a woman in it somewhere, and I don't mix myself up in such
matters. Ah, well, we shall see some fun if Swann begins running after the
little Verdurins."
And on my grandfather's refusal to act as sponsor, it was Odette herself
who had taken Swann to the house.
The Verdurins had had dining with them, on the day when Swann made
his first appearance, Dr. and Mme. Cottard, the young pianist and his aunt,
and the painter then in favour, while these were joined, in the course of the
evening, by several more of the 'faithful.'
Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply
to any observation, 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 prepared to
face the alternative, he never dared to allow this smile a definite expression
on his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering
uncertainty, in which you might decipher 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 indeed in life generally,
than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by,

carriages, and anything that occurred with a malicious smile which
absolved his subsequent 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 so to complete his
education.
So it was that, following the advice given him by a wise mother on his
first coming up to the capital from his provincial home, he would never let
pass either a figure of speech or a proper name that was new to him without
an effort to secure the fullest information upon it.
As regards figures of speech, he was insatiable in his thirst for
knowledge, for often imagining them to have a more definite meaning than
was actually the case, he would want to know what, exactly, was intended
by those which he most frequently heard used: 'devilish pretty,' 'blue blood,'
'a cat and dog life,' 'a day of reckoning,' 'a queen of fashion, 'to give a free
hand,' 'to be at a deadlock,' and so forth; and in what particular
circumstances he himself might make use of them in conversation. Failing
these, he would adorn it with puns and other 'plays upon words' which he
had learned by rote. As for the names of strangers which were uttered in his
hearing, he used merely to repeat them to himself in a questioning tone,
which, he thought, would suffice to furnish him with explanations for which
he would not ostensibly seek.
As the critical faculty, on the universal application of which he prided
himself, was, in reality, completely lacking, that refinement of good
breeding which consists in assuring some one whom you are obliging in
any way, without expecting to be believed, that it is really yourself that is
obliged to him, was wasted on Cottard, who took everything that he heard
in its literal sense. However blind she may have been to his faults, Mme.
Verdurin was genuinely annoyed, though she still continued to regard him
as brilliantly clever, when, after she had invited him to see and hear Sarah
Bernhardt from a stage box, and had said politely: "It is very good of you to
have come, Doctor, especially as I'm sure you must often have heard Sarah
Bernhardt; and besides, I'm afraid we're rather too near the stage," the
Doctor, who had come into the box with a smile which waited before

settling upon or vanishing from his face until some one in authority should
enlighten him as to the merits of the spectacle, replied: "To be sure, we are
far too near the stage, and one is getting sick of Sarah Bernhardt. But you
expressed a wish that I should come. For me, your wish is a command. I am
only too glad to be able to do you this little service. What would one not do
to please you, you are so good." And he went on, "Sarah Bernhardt; that's
what they call the Voice of God, ain't it? You see, often, too, that she 'sets
the boards on fire.' That's an odd expression, ain't it?" in the hope of an
enlightening commentary, which, however, was not forthcoming.
"D'you know," Mme. Verdurin had said to her husband, "I believe we are
going the wrong way to work when we depreciate anything we offer the
Doctor. He is a scientist who lives quite apart from our everyday existence;
he knows nothing himself of what things are worth, and he accepts
everything that we say as gospel."
"I never dared to mention it," M. Verdurin had answered, "but I've
noticed the same thing myself." And on the following New Year's Day,
instead of sending Dr. Cottard a ruby that cost three thousand francs, and
pretending that it was a mere trifle, M. Verdurin bought an artificial stone
for three hundred, and let it be understood that it was something almost
impossible to match.
When Mme. Verdurin had announced that they were to see M. Swann
that evening; "Swann!" the Doctor had exclaimed in a tone rendered brutal
by his astonishment, for the smallest piece of news would always take
utterly unawares this man who imagined himself to be perpetually in
readiness for anything. And seeing that no one answered him, "Swann! Who
on earth is Swann?" he shouted, in a frenzy of anxiety which subsided as
soon as Mme. Verdurin had explained, "Why, Odette's friend, whom she
told us about."
"Ah, good, good; that's all right, then," answered the Doctor, at once
mollified. As for the painter, he was overjoyed at the prospect of Swann's
appearing at the Verdurins', because he supposed him to be in love with
Odette, and was always ready to assist at lovers' meetings. "Nothing amuses
me more than match-making," he confided to Cottard; "I have been
tremendously successful, even with women!"
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 the movement that is required
without any clumsy participation by the rest of his body. The simple and
elementary gestures used by a man of the world when he courteously holds
out his hand to the unknown youth who is being introduced to him, and
when he bows discreetly before the Ambassador to whom he is being
introduced, had gradually pervaded, without his being conscious of it, the
whole of Swann's social deportment, 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 mercenary 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 palaeography,
his large fortune, and the distinguished family to which he belonged. When
he spoke, his words came with a confusion which was delightful to hear
because one felt that it indicated not so much a defect in his 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 did not manage 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 request, 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 was
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, those sounds and syllables of which
she felt positive. Swann supposed himself entitled to poke a little mild fun
at her in conversation with M. Verdurin, who, however, was not at all
amused.

"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."
"Wait a moment," said M. Verdurin, "now, this will surprise you; she
writes quite delightfully. You have never heard her nephew play? It is
admirable; eh, Doctor? Would you like me to ask him to play something, M.
Swann?"
"I should count myself most fortunate..." Swann was beginning, a trifle
pompously, when the Doctor broke in derisively. Having once heard it said,
and never having forgotten that in general conversation emphasis and the
use of formal expressions were out of date, whenever he heard a solemn
word used seriously, as the word 'fortunate' had been used just now by
Swann, he at once assumed that the speaker was being deliberately
pedantic. And if, moreover, the same word happened to occur, also, in what
he called an old 'tag' or 'saw,' however common it might still be in current
usage, the Doctor jumped to the conclusion that the whole thing was a joke,
and interrupted with the remaining words of the quotation, which he
seemed to charge the speaker with having intended to introduce at that
point, although in reality it had never entered his mind.
"Most fortunate for France!" he recited wickedly, shooting up both arms
with great vigour. 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 peevishly, like a spoiled child.
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 suggested 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 was never
successful, 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 her spirited part in the conversation
of the 'faithful,' and would revel in all their fun; but, since the accident to
her jaw, she had abandoned the effort involved in real hilarity, and had
substituted a kind of symbolical dumb-show which signified, without
endangering or even fatiguing her in any way, that she was 'laughing until
she cried.' At the least witticism aimed by any of the circle against a 'bore,'
or against a former member of the circle 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 easily amused 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 engulfed it, and prevented
her from seeing anything at all, she would appear to be struggling to
suppress, to eradicate a laugh which, were she to give way to it, must
inevitably leave her inanimate. So, stupefied with the gaiety of the 'faithful,'
drunken with comradeship, 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 fellow-feeling.
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."
This little scene, which was re-enacted as often as the young pianist sat
down to play, never failed to delight the audience, as though each of them
were witnessing it for the first time, as a proof of the seductive originality
of the 'Mistress' as she was styled, and of the acute sensitiveness of her
musical 'ear.' Those nearest to her would attract the attention of the rest,
who were smoking or playing cards at the other end of the room, by their
cries of 'Hear, hear!' which, as in Parliamentary debates, shewed that
something worth listening to was being said. And next day they would
commiserate with those who had been prevented from coming that evening,
and would assure them that the 'little scene' had never been so amusingly
done.
"Well, all right, then," said M. Verdurin, "he can play just the andante."
"Just the andante! How you do go on," cried his wife. "As if it weren't
'just the andante' that breaks every bone in my body. The 'Master' is really
too priceless! Just as though, 'in the Ninth,' he said 'we need only have the
finale,' or 'just the overture' of the Meistersinger."
The Doctor, however, urged Mme. Verdurin to let the pianist play, not
because he supposed her to be malingering when she spoke of the
distressing effects that music always had upon her, for he recognised the
existence of certain neurasthenic states—but from his habit, common to
many doctors, of at once relaxing the strict letter of a prescription as soon as
it appeared to jeopardise, what seemed to him far more important, the
success of some social gathering at which he was present, and of which the
patient whom he had urged for once to forget her dyspepsia or headache
formed an essential factor.
"You won't be ill this time, you'll find," he told her, seeking at the same
time to subdue her mind by the magnetism of his gaze. "And, if you are ill,
we will cure you."
"Will you, really?" Mme. Verdurin spoke as though, with so great a
favour in store for her, there was nothing for it but to capitulate. Perhaps,
too, by dint of saying that she was going to be ill, she had worked herself
into a state in which she forgot, occasionally, that it was all only a 'little
scene,' and regarded things, quite sincerely, from an invalid's point of view.

For it may often be remarked that invalids grow weary of having the
frequency of their attacks depend always on their own prudence in avoiding
them, and like to let themselves think that they are free to do everything that
they most enjoy doing, although they are always ill after doing it, provided
only that they place themselves in the hands of a higher authority which,
without putting them to the least inconvenience, can and will, by uttering a
word or by administering a tabloid, set them once again upon their feet.
Odette had gone to sit on a tapestry-covered sofa near the piano, saying
to Mme. Verdurin, "I have my own little corner, haven't I?"
And Mme. Verdurin, seeing Swann by himself upon a chair, made him
get up. "You're not at all comfortable there; go along and sit by Odette; you
can make room for M. Swann there, can't you, Odette?"
"What charming Beauvais!" said Swann, stopping to admire the sofa
before he sat down on it, and wishing to be polite.
"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 combine amusement with instruction when you
look at them;—I can promise you a delightful time, I assure you. Just look
at the little border 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 design! Doesn't it make
your mouth water, this 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 laughing 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 surface? No, no, not
with your whole hand like that; feel them properly!"
"If Mme. Verdurin is going to start playing about with her bronzes," said
the painter, "we shan't get any music to-night."

"Be quiet, you wretch! And yet we poor women," she went on, "are
forbidden pleasures far less voluptuous than this. There is no flesh in the
world as soft as these. 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 in the ear; 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 shewed 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 narrow ribbon of the violin-part,
delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole, he had suddenly
perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound,
the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking
everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and
charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given 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 collect, to treasure in his
memory the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just been
played, and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of
certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of
dilating our 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 irreducible into any other kind. An
impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, an
impression sine materia. Presumably the notes which we hear at such
moments tend to spread out before our eyes, over surfaces greater or
smaller according to their pitch and volume; to trace arabesque designs, 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 following, or even
simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this indefinite
perception would continue to smother in its molten liquidity the motifs
which now and then 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;—
if our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm
foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, did not, by fashioning for us
facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast
them with those that follow. And so, hardly had the delicious sensation,
which Swann had experienced, died away, before his memory had furnished
him with an immediate transcript, summary, it is true, and provisional, but
one on which he had kept his eyes fixed while the playing continued, so
effectively that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no
longer uncapturable. He was able to picture to himself its extent, its
symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the strength of its expression; he had
before him that definite object which 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 an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, of whose
existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that
nothing but this phrase 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 here, there, everywhere,
towards a state of happiness noble, unintelligible, yet clearly indicated. And
then, suddenly having reached a certain point from which he was prepared
to follow it, after pausing for a moment, abruptly it changed its direction,
and in a fresh movement, more rapid, multiform, melancholy, incessant,
sweet, it bore him off with it towards a vista of joys unknown. 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 was
once more at home he needed it, he was like a man into whose life a
woman, whom he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new

form of beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of
perception, without his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again
whom he loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her
name.
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 believe, 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 conversation 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 shewing 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 confirmed 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—and better late than never—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 over to him, to see whether he
might not, perhaps, discover his phrase among them, the presence of one of
those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, but 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, almost, indeed, of the power 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 procure a copy, and finally had forgotten the
quest. He had indeed, in the course of the next few days, encountered
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
evening 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,
still, before his eyes the forms that it had traced in outline, he was quite
incapable of humming over to them the air. And so, at last, he ceased to
think of it.
But to-night, at Mme. Verdurin's, scarcely had the little pianist begun to
play when, suddenly, after a high note held on through two whole bars,
Swann saw it approaching, stealing forth from underneath that resonance,
which was prolonged and stretched out over it, like a curtain of sound, to
veil the mystery of its birth—and recognised, secret, whispering, articulate,
the airy and fragrant phrase that he had loved. And it was so peculiarly
itself, it had so personal a charm, which nothing else could have replaced,
that Swann felt as though he had met, in a friend's drawing-room, a woman
whom he had seen and admired, once, in the street, and had despaired of
ever seeing her again. Finally the phrase withdrew and vanished, pointing,
directing, diligent among the wandering currents of its fragrance, leaving
upon Swann's features a 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
movement 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.
And so, when the pianist had finished, Swann crossed the room and
thanked him with a vivacity which delighted Mme. Verdurin.

"Isn't he charming?" she asked Swann, "doesn't he just understand it, his
sonata, the little wretch? You never dreamed, did you, that a piano could be
made to express all that? Upon my word, there's everything in it except the
piano! I'm caught out every time I hear it; I think I'm listening to an
orchestra. Though it's better, really, than an orchestra, more complete."
The young pianist bent over her as he answered, smiling and underlining
each of his words as though he were making an epigram: "You are most
generous to me."
And while Mme. Verdurin was saying to her husband, "Run and fetch
him a glass of orangeade; it's well earned!" Swann began to tell Odette how
he had fallen in love with that little phrase. When their hostess, who was a
little way off, called out, "Well! It looks to me as though some one was
saying nice things to you, Odette!" she replied, "Yes, very nice," and he
found her simplicity delightful. Then he asked for some information about
this Vinteuil; what else he had done, and at what period in his life he had
composed the sonata;—what meaning the little phrase could have had for
him, that was what Swann wanted most to know.
But none of these people who professed to admire this musician (when
Swann had said that the sonata was really charming Mme. Verdurin had
exclaimed, "I quite believe it! Charming, indeed! But you don't dare to
confess that you don't know Vinteuil's sonata; you have no right not to
know it!"—and the painter had gone on with, "Ah, yes, it's a very fine bit of
work, isn't it? Not, of course, if you want something 'obvious,' something
'popular,' but, I mean to say, it makes a very great impression on us
artists."), none of them seemed ever to have asked himself these questions,
for none of them was able to reply.
Even to one or two particular remarks made by Swann on his favourite
phrase, "D'you know, that's a funny thing; I had never noticed it; I may as
well tell you that I don't much care about peering at things through a
microscope, and pricking myself on pin-points of difference; no; we don't
waste time splitting hairs in this house; why not? well, it's not a habit of
ours, that's all," Mme. Verdurin replied, while Dr. Cottard gazed at her with
open-mouthed admiration, and yearned to be able to follow her as she
skipped lightly from one stepping-stone to another of her stock of ready-
made phrases. Both he, however, and Mme. Cottard, with a kind of
common sense which is shared by many people of humble origin, would